March 18, 2004
I bought this on impulse, from Amazon, after I saw the author's interview with Brian Lamb on a Booknotes rerun.

She was an insightful, generous, thinking human being, who, with vast education and training, has come up with a new and striking theorem about the current state of world politics.

I was so taken with her theory that I bought the book the very next morning, via our very Western computer methodology. Sitting in my living room, in my pajamas on a Sunday morning, I simply looked it up, ordered it, paid by credit card and had it delivered to my porch 3 days later.

Her thesis, market-dominant ethnic minorities and what that means for individiual countries, in particular the US, and her cogent, well-supported documentation seem so eminently sensible to me that I wish every world leader and State Dept. employee could read this book.

She says, in essence, that exporting laissez-faire capitalism and one-person/one-vote-democracy to the Third World, with no thought for long-term consequences, is actually causing the very things the US wishes to halt - namely vicious, murderous ethnic conflict and flourishing international terrorism.

The book starts luridly. The author learns that her aunt has been murdered. It was obvious that the chauffeur did it, but he disappeared into the wilds of Manila, and the police didn’t pursue the case.

The crime wasn’t abnormal. Chua’s aunt was one of many wealthy Chinese in the Philippines who get murdered in fits of ethnic hatred. Amy Chua explains it in the most clinical, even cold-blooded, manner she can muster. The Filipino economy is dominated by overseas Chinese. This happens throughout Southeast Asia, but in the Philippines relations seem especially poisonous; many Chinese express open contempt for Filipinos, and many live in walled-off compounds, having nothing to do with the society outside. Her aunt may have been a very nice person, but she was the enemy to many Filipinos.

Chua finds this pattern repeating itself worldwide. She discusses the morass of racial pathologies, felt but rarely expressed and often denied, in Latin America; the complicated history and status of what she calls “market-dominant ethnic minorities” in Africa; the economic aspects of the former Yugoslavia’s carnage; and the Jews of Russia, all in bitter detail.

All this is vivid and convincing, as far as it goes. She downplays, or declines to discuss, non-economic aspects of ethnic dominance and hatred. And there isn’t much history, except in the section about Latin America; if societies of the past had these divisions and got over them, we won’t learn about them here. Religious and cultural aspects of ethnic conflict are mentioned only in passing.

The last third of the book changes tone slightly. She attempts, with some but not total success, to define the United States as a global version of a market-dominant ethnic minority; the cultural and economic reach of the United States does elicit many of the same reactions that many West Africans feel for the Lebanese traders, yes, but transferring the metaphor from local to transnational conditions felt more syllogistic than I was quite comfortable with.

She does make some interesting and provocative points about global trade. It is no secret that the United States consistently advocates market liberalization and democracy, often advocating “reforms” (or imposing them through the World Bank or the IMF) that most citizens of the developed world would find distasteful at best were we to have to go through them ourselves. The catch is that, in the first blushes of market liberalization, the poor get poorer, at least for a while, and the rich always get richer. (Chua, whose writing can be fiery, is remarkably restrained here; she goes out of her way to avoid buzzwords or charged rhetoric, and doesn't mention the IMF any more than absolutely necessary; as if she acknowledges that those initials already carry too much baggage for polite discourse to continue once they have been uttered.) If a society has an increasing disparity of wealth and an already-tense inter-ethnic climate, the winners of any reasonably free election will be populists, often those who use bigotry most effectively to sway the masses. Seen in this light, Robert Mugabe, who has been written off as a madman by much of the West, is in fact a rational politician, fighting for job security by the most efficient means at his disposal. The same can be said for the neo-Cold War rhetoric from Vladimir Putin. (The way some right-wing rabblerousers in the United States have tried to brand illegal immigrants as a market-dominant minority of sorts -- people who “take our jobs” and “get all the government services” -- sounded eerily familiar after reading this.)

So, essentially, you can have market liberalization, or you can have democracy, but you can’t have both without at best a lot of trouble and at worst a great deal of slaughter (as in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto).

A powerfully reasoned and original book, and more involving than any book about economics has a right to be. ( )

Amy Chua has identified a wedge issue that's been previously under-analysed, if not unnoticed, and has driven in that wedge about as far as it will go. The issue? The fact, that in so many countries, especially developing ones, small ethnic minority groups controls a large proportions of those countries' economies. Her keystone examples are the 'overseas Chinese' in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and other SE Asian countries, but she ranges around the globe in identifying analagous situations.

This breadth is the strength of the book. Less satisfying are Chua's attempts -- or lack of them -- to explain why this pattern repeats itself over and over.

For an academic, Chua writes clearly, although this book would have benefited from more stringent editing. It's repetitive, and the constant academic-style hedging in Chua's prose is irritating, and could easily have been remedied.

Overall, recommended highly. ( )

When the Cold War ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, most Western political thinkers assumed that democracy and free markets had triumped, and that the future could only mean exporting these virtues to those 'developing world' countries that lack one or both of them. However as Amy Chua points out in this valuable book, in the real world virtues are not easily exportable (as Iraq is so bloodily proving) and worse still, combining two virtues doesn't always produce another: many times introducing democracy on top of a free market will result in wealth and happiness, but sometimes can lead instead to genocide.

Chua, a professor of international law at Harvard, explains how this happens: a free market may exacerbate rivalries between ethnic groups by enriching one group at the expense of others; if those others happen to be the majority, then democracy may offer them the opportunity to take power and exact bloody revenge against their exploiters. Chua didn't need to dig too far for evidence, merely to harvest it from newspaper headlines: massacres of Chinese in Indonesia in 1998; Mugabe's land-grabs in Zimbabwe; the hellish genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia.

This is a courageous book that goes firmly against the grain of both current US neo-conservative and leftist dogmas. Chua, perhaps emboldened by her own Philipino-Chinese descent, tackles matters of ethnic conflict with a robust pragmatism that wholly sidesteps all the pieties of political correctness. She concludes that such conflicts must not only be clearly acknowledged, but as far as possible defused before we can even think about trying to export democracy and free markets. ( )

Interesting study of the impact of globalisation on a world which continues to think in ethnic and cultural terms.