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The Myth of Chinese Capitalism by Dexter Roberts
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The Myth of Chinese Capitalism

The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World

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Narrator Joe Barrett

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Length 8 hours 19 minutes
Language English
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The untold story of how restrictive policies are preventing China from becoming the world's largest economy

Dexter Roberts lived in Beijing for two decades working as a reporter on economics, business and politics for Bloomberg Businessweek. In The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, Roberts explores the reality behind today's financially-ascendant China and pulls the curtain back on how the Chinese manufacturing machine is actually powered.

He focuses on two places: the village of Binghuacun in the province of Guizhou, one of China's poorest regions that sends the highest proportion of its youth away to become migrants; and Dongguan, China's most infamous factory town located in Guangdong, home to both the largest number of migrant workers and the country's biggest manufacturing base.

Within these two towns and the people that move between them, Roberts focuses on the story of the Mo family, former farmers-turned-migrant-workers who are struggling to make a living in a fast-changing country that relegates one-half of its people to second-class status via household registration, land tenure policies and inequality in education and health care systems.

Dexter Roberts is a writer, speaker, and analyst on China economics, business, and politics. Previously he served as reporter and China bureau chief for Bloomberg Businessweek and was based in Beijing for more than two decades. He has interviewed numerous Chinese and foreign company CEOs, as well as senior government officials, and has reported from all of China's provinces and regions including Tibet and Xinjiang, as well as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mongolia, and North Korea.

Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, "This moving book comes across like a concerto . . . with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration." Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.

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Reviews

"Tenacious reporting that seeks to expose the murky underside of the Chinese miracle . . . [Roberts] has been following the main characters who people this book for nearly 20 years, which is a sort of perseverance that few other writers can match." -Financial Times Expand reviews