Nearly 20 years ago, I read a best seller entitled “China Inc.: How the rise of the next superpower challenges American and the world.”  I was astonished by all the examples of how rapidly China’s economy was growing at that time.  The back cover noted that “China must build urban infrastructure equivalent to Houston’s every month… to absorb… three hundred million rural Chinese [who] will move to cities in the next fifteen years.” 

That started me on the path to reading more about China, and ultimately becoming an aficionado. As China has evolved over the last few decades, everything I’ve read has left me with the vague feeling that, as comedian Kathleen Madigan has put it, “We should all get Rosetta Stone and learn a little Chinese before they get here.”

China is a very difficult country to write about, in part because the government operates under what Michael Pillsbury called a “cloak of secrecy.” Pillsbury should know: he has served as a China expert in nine US presidential administrations.  In his book The Hundred Year Marathon he wrote that when you combine this secrecy with the vast cultural differences between East and West, one result is that “Americans have been wrong about China again and again, sometimes with profound consequences” (p. 4).  Pillsbury himself was one of them: “For decades, I played a sometimes prominent role in urging administrations of both parties to provide China with technological and military assistance…. [but] every one of the assumptions behind that [advice] was wrong – dangerously so” (p. 5).  So we must all take everything we read about China with a large grain of salt, including this blog.

My name is Jim Hassett, and I started this blog in 2019, around the time that I sold the consulting firm that I had founded 35 years earlier.  During my career, I earned a PhD in psychology at Harvard, and published 13 books and more than 100 articles in publications ranging from the New York Times Magazine to Bloomberg Law.  Almost every topic had been chosen to advance my career, whether or not I really cared much about the topic at the time.  All that changed after I retired, and I became an “independent researcher.” These days, I follow my interests wherever they lead, including this blog. 

In 2024, I started a webpage devoted to a second personal interest:  “Understanding US economic inequality, five minutes at a time.”  (InequalityIn5.com)

I hope you enjoy reading this blog at least half as much as I enjoy writing it. — Jim Hassett, jimhassett3@gmail.com.