John D. Van Fleet
John D. Van Fleet serves as an advisor and adjunct faculty at the Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He writes a column on business and education in China for the China Economic Review.
Where There Are Asians There Are Rice Cookers: How National Went Global via Hong Kong by Yoshiko Nakano
JOHN D. VAN FLEET | 14 March 2010Many tales have been told about how, staring in the 1960s, the Japanese consumer brands conquered Western markets -- some of the histories have been written by the `winners' (e.g., Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony), some by the "losers" (Halberstam's 1986 The Reckoning, comparing Ford and Nissan, among them, having become a classic case of "I told you so", Toyota's recent bout of clay feet... [ more ]
The Long Road Back to China: The Burma Road Wartime Diaries by Carl Crow, Paul French (ed.)
JOHN D. VAN FLEET | 26 November 2009His life at risk, Carl Crow fled Shanghai in 1937, after 26 years of success in journalism and the advertising trade. Crow had written and published and spoken volumes against Japanese aggression in China, and when the invaders conquered Shanghai in August 1937, Crow became a wanted man.
JOHN D. VAN FLEET | 21 December 2008Among the blizzard of books related to China, autobiography has become a flurry of its own, with works ranging from the self-absorbed White Swans, to the gritty and compelling Red Dust, to the jaw-clenching horror of Life and Death in Shanghai and Born Red. With LIJIA ZHANG's... [ more ]
KFC in China, Secret Recipe for Success by Warren K. Liu
JOHN D. VAN FLEET | 12 November 2008WARREN K. LIU -- Taiwan born, USA raised, Harvard MBA -- returned to Asia in 1993 and worked for several multinationals in the region. From 1997 to early 2001, Liu served as vice president of business development for Tricon (now Yum!, owner of the KFC brand, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut and several others). In KFC IN CHINA, SECRET RECIPE FOR SUCCESS, Liu looks at the various aspects of KFC's... [ more ]
Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia by Joe Studwell
JOHN D. VAN FLEET | 01 October 2007This is a sad story. A story of abundant wealth diverted, of development opportunities deferred, of poverty unrelieved. JOE STUDWELL's ASIAN GODFATHERS: MONEY AND POWER IN HONG KONG AND SOUTHEAST ASIA challenges the mythos surrounding Li Ka Shing, Robert Kuok and a group of about 50 others, the economic kings of Southeast Asia he calls godfathers. Studwell is creating a pattern -- his 2000 work, The China Dream, challenged the China hoopla of the late 90s.
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Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China by Duncan Hewitt
JOHN D. VAN FLEET | 15 July 2007In 2001, Gordon Chang's highly publicized book dramatically proclaimed 'the coming collapse of China'. The country is still standing, but if it does collapse soon the cause may be the crushing weight of all the China-related books coming to press these days.
The Japan of the 1980s spawned a similar profusion of publications, as that country became an economic leader and a perceived threat to the West. A... [ more ]
Love and Revolution by Ping Lu, Nancy Du (trans.)
JOHN D. VAN FLEET | 24 December 2006If one can say, with apologies to Sartre, that fiction writers are condemned to the freedom of their own imaginations, then writers of historically-based fiction have their convictions softened by the confines of the historical facts. In LOVE AND REVOLUTION, noted Taiwanese author PING LU, NANCY DU (TRANS.) takes the final years of the lives of two key historical... [ more ]
