Growing China

It's common knowledge that China has the fastest-growing economy in the world. What is not common knowledge is exactly how Western companies can gain a foothold and increase their profits by doing business inside this next great superpower. Now, respected business journalist Ted Plafker has written a fully detailed, yet user-friendly, handbook on how individuals and companies can succeed in this challenging and often confusing environment.

From a talented emerging writer comes a brave, honest, unforgettable memoir about mental illness, which breaks the silence and shatters the taboos to give hope to all those struggling to find their way through. One day Sophie Hardcastle realised the joy she’d always known had disappeared. She was constantly tired, with no energy, no motivation and no sense of enjoyment for surfing, friends, conversations, movies, parties, family - for anything. Her hours became empty.

The American Dream is close to being replaced by a living nightmare. Key commodities that are essential to our daily lives and that are widely believed to be abundant are running critically short. Even worse, the Chinese are doing what they can to monopolize the world's dwindling resources. The U.S. is now largely dependent on our greatest economic rival for rare earth elements as well as a host of other minerals - all of which are absolutely essential to the development of alternative energies....

A snobbish French executive arrives in Shanghai with his expensive shoes and ties, expecting a short career-boosting posting before returning to Paris. Instead, he ends up deep in China's manure-soaked fields, buying and selling vegetables, all because he has convinced himself that he can single-handedly drag Chinese agriculture into the 21st century. It didn't work out as he planned. The Lettuce Diaries is a revealing and humorous memoir of entrepreneurship, doubling as a primer on doing business in China, and explaining things the French executive only learned the hard way.

Nine-year-old Ling is very comfortable in her life; her parents are both dedicated surgeons in the best hospital in Wuhan. But when Comrade Li, one of Mao's political officers, moves into a room in their apartment, Ling begins to witness the gradual disintegration of her world. In an atmosphere of increasing mistrust, Ling fears for the safety of her neighbors and, soon, for herself and family.

In a small village called Yellow Stone, below the mountains of southeastern China, Sisi is a model sister, daughter, and student. She brews tea for her grandfather in the morning, leads recitations at school as class monitor, and helps care for her youngest brother, Da. But when students are selected during a school ceremony to join the prestigious Red Guard, Sisi is passed over. Worse, she is shamed for her family’s past - they are former landowners who have no place in the new Communist order.

Gupta and Wang explain how many MNCs view China and India solely from the lens of off-shoring and cost-reduction, and focusing their marketing strategies on only the top 5-10% of the population. This is a missed opportunity. China and India are the only two countries that constitute four realities that are strategically crucial for the global enterprise.

Is it too much to ask for an ordinary, boring life? Bai Jian is a typical Chinese boy growing up in a big city. But his life is far from typical: his mother abandoned him when he was a baby, and his father, Hei Jian, is always out of work, always fighting with his long parade of girlfriends, always getting the two of them involved in some harebrained scheme.

This is the captivating story of Xiaomei Martell, who was born in one of China’s most remote regions just two years before Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. The youngest of four daughters her name means ‘Little Sister’ her family had no money or connections, yet they raised her with a thirst for knowledge and a love of food, ranging from the Lion’s Head meatballs her Uncle Deng cooked to the ‘phoenix feet’ that apparently cured wrinkles, by way of hundred-year-old eggs.

Pimpa conoce a Gian-Gin, un perrito pequinés que la invita a viajar a China en un velero. Cuando llega, conoce a Baobao, un panda muy simpático que la lleva de excursión por la tierra de los dragones. Pimpa hace nuevos amigos, como el conejo Tu y el caballo Ma, con quienes recorre lugares increíbles. Juntos cruzan el río Amarillo y la Gran Muralla para llegar hasta un árbol muy especial donde los espera el gato Mao... Pimpa es una perrita muy alegre con manchas rojas.

It’s been five years since the Dragon Realm fell into the Human Realm and both populations are now living side by side. But dangerous magical creatures are threatening to disrupt the peace and it’s up to a new group of heart-bonded humans and dragons to protect the world – the Dragon Force. Under the watchful eye of seventeen-year-old Billy Chan, Lance Lo, his younger sister Zoe and new friends enrol at Camp Claw to learn all the skills they need to become protectors. But when Camp Claw is mysteriously attacked, it’s up to the latest recruits to prove they’ve got what it takes to save the day.

Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is almost seven. They are strangers to her. When she is born in 1973, her parents hand her over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains. Aged two, and suffering from malnutrition on a diet of yam leaves, they leave Xiaolu with her illiterate grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea.