Chen's Made in China

What does China actually look like from the inside -- through the eyes of real people living it?

Chen's Made in China is a rare and extraordinary work: part history, part memoir, part business chronicle, told through the intertwined lives of an American entrepreneur and his Chinese friends across more than eighty years of one of the most dramatic national transformations in human history.

Bob Jackson first traveled to China in 1989 as a manufacturer looking for suppliers. What he found was something far more profound -- a nation of more than a billion people quietly rebuilding from generations of war, famine, occupation, and revolution, and a friend in Chen Xiaoping whose family story stretches from 1930s Shanghai under Japanese occupation through the Cultural Revolution, the birth of Chinese capitalism, and the rise of the modern Chinese middle class.

Structured as a novel but grounded in decades of firsthand experience, the book takes readers from New Jersey farm country to Beijing apartments, from commune-era Fuzhou to the factory floors of booming coastal cities. It is a story about what capitalism actually looks like when it starts from nothing, what friendship looks like across vast cultural distance, and what China looks like when you stop reading the headlines and start listening to the people.

For anyone who does business with China, studies it, or simply wants to understand it -- this book is the one they've been waiting for.