This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel.

The Chinese Miracle. The book is Wild Ride, a short history of the opening and closing of the Chinese economy.

First, the opening part, there's been an international banking crisis, and the way that the Beijing Chinese

Communist Party responds to it, as Anne says, in their tasseled loafers, is to host cash on the

population, and that creates opportunities. The opportunities, however, look like the creation of a golem monster.

And this is Anne's vision, Anne's metaphor. It works. But what we have is a change of opinion of the Chinese people.

No longer, as Anne writes, or do you want a home in a car and access to cigarettes, which at one point were understood to be keeping your lungs healthy?

But you want to be rich. You want to grab the brass ring. Was this going on all across the country or just the coastal cities, the big cities, Anne?

I think everybody had this idea that they could grab some of this cash that was raining

down on China.

Everybody heard about the companies that were listing on international markets and all of the

private investment.

And so people wanted to, you know, people in the, in the countryside

moved to the cities. They weren't allowed to bring their families, but, you know, men and women

would move to the big cities and try to get a bit of this. Yes, and they got a lot of it.

We have the creation of what I came to first understand was something strange called ghost cities. Now,

Anne gives us details about what was going on with this enormous amounts of cash. There were

three Hong Kongs built, two Manhattans, there was a little Paris, and there was a red square,

complete with an Orthodox church that nobody would ever

worship in. It was only for background pictures. Probably my favorite is a Manhattan that includes

the Javits Center. The people who built the Javis Center, have they ever been there? It's really a windy barn.

It's not something to emulate.

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