Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal

Arriving in Beijing in 1998, Ethan Gutmann rapidly made his way into the expatriate community of American entrepreneurs seeking riches in the New China. In this well-catered equivalent of a corporate boot camp, Gutmann was indoctrinated in the creed that China’s growth presented untapped opportunities for profit. As he worked his way into comfortable positions at a Chinese television documentary company and at a public affairs firm leading U.S. politicians on choreographed tours of the New China, he became an insider. What he discovered in the company meetings, cocktail parties and after-hours expat haunts made him uneasy. Motorola reps bragged of routinely bribing Chinese officials for market access; Asia Global Crossing executives burned through company expense accounts while racking up massive losses for the corporation; PR consultants provided svelte Mongolian prostitutes and five-star hotel suites for home office delegations. In Beijing’s expat fast lane, success was measured not only in market share, but also in the ability to pay off favours by lobbying for Chinese interests in Washington. Treating the New China as a combination El Dorado and Lotus Land, American businessmen allowed themselves to be drawn into a hallucinatory Orientalist dream world of easy money and moral complicity. Gutmann too felt the seductions; and at one level, Losing the New China is a trip log of a personal journey with unexpected twists and turns. But even more, it is a carefully documented report on a commercial world without ethical landmarks where acts have unintended consequences. Gutmann shows how massive American investment generated prosperity – but also a feverish new nationalism in China’s universities, dot.coms and entrepreneurial centers. He witnessed an eruption of anti-Americanism even as U.S. companies executed wholesale transfer of sophisticated technologies to the Chinese market. With the help of companies like Cisco, Yahoo! And Sun Microsystems, for instance, Chinese authorities, used this technology to monitor, sanitize and ultimately isolate the Chinese Web, creating the world’s greatest Big Brother Internet. After there years in Beijing, Ethan Gutmann returned home, bringing with him a fascinating story of strangers in a strange land. Losing the New China tells how and why U.S. corporations helped replace the Goddess of Democracy that once stood in Tiananmen Square with the Gods of Mammon and Mars that dominate China today.