Month: May 2012

Peter Nolan: Is China Buying the World?

Published by podmeister

China is the world’s second biggest economy and its largest exporter. It possesses the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves and has 29 firms in the FT 500 list of the world’s largest companies. ‘China’s Rise’ preoccupies the global media, which carry regular articles suggesting that it is using its financial resources to ‘buy the world’. Is there any truth to this idea? Or is this just scaremongering by Western commentators who have little interest in a balanced presentation of China’s role in the global political economy? In this short book Peter Nolan – Professor of Chinese Management at the University of Cambridge and one of the leading international experts on China and the global economy – probes behind the media rhetoric and shows that the idea that China is buying the world is founded on misapprehensions. To listen to extracts from an interview with Peter Nolan about this book, click on the links below. To listen to the complete interview, click here. 1. Peter Nolan begins by discussing the prevailing discourse in Western media, which …

Merchants of Culture – new edition for a changing industry

Published by podmeister

When John Thompson‘s Merchants of Culture appeared in the summer of 2010, it was the first serious study of the publishing industry in many years. Thompson compared himself to an anthropologist studying his subjects in order to explain a field of human activity that strikes many outsiders as baffling and often irrational. The industry recognized itself in the portrait that Thompson drew. One reviewer said succinctly: “If you want to understand the publishing industry, read this book” and one New York Times bestselling author called it “a must-read for anyone hoping to become a published writer, or who already is one”. Now, some eighteen months later, comes a substantially revised paperback edition which takes into account the profound changes affecting the industry as print sales shrink and uncertainty grows over where power will reside in an electronic future in which the roles of publishers, authors and agents are set to change. To listen to the complete interview, click here. For my original interview from the summer of 2010, click here. And to listen to extracts …