What the U.S. Can Learn from China: An Open-Minded Guide to Treating Our Greatest Competitor as Our Greatest Teacher by Ann Lee (review)

Ann Lee was a competent investment banker and manager of multimillion-dollar hedge funds on Wall Street. She represents the best in the rising Asian population in the U.S. today—goal oriented, well educated, accomplished, and perceptive.¹ Passionately concerned over what she saw as unethical investment of monies and the possible negative destiny of America, she blew the whistle in early 2000 to warn of the impending credit crisis that led to the financial meltdown in 2008. Her findings, however, were routinely ignored and dismissed, thus assuring her decision to leave Wall Street for academia.

Lee served as a visiting professor at Peking University and also as an economic advisor for many of China’s business leaders in 2008. She is a professor of finance and economics at New York University. In addition, she is a senior fellow at Demos, a research think tank (founded in 2000), on public policy for the common good in an interdependent world. Lee is an American Chinese whose family emigrated from Hong Kong in time for her to enter the second grade in the United States. She flourished within the ethos of a free America compounded with her upbringing in a Chinese family. She was educated at the University of California, Berkeley; Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs; and Harvard Business School.

In her book, Lee brings her wealth of knowledge and experience as a bicultural person to raise the important and timely question, “What can the United States learn from China?” Her “Open-Minded Guide” is for the United States to learn from a forever-learning China to recover America’s civility, nobility, and credibility as a conciliatory leader of the world. In turn, she wants to counteract the growing fears and resentment in the American populace, including leaders in Washington and in the U.S. media, and especially the superficial sound-bite reportage of television news. In a declining economy, Lee sees the tendency of resentfully unemployed Americans to use China as a scapegoat, as was the case with an economically ascendant Japan in the 1970s. In emphasizing the lessons from China, Lee in no way is glossing over the faults of the People’s Republic, which are many, but this is not, she asserts, the subject of her book.

In a full chapter on Confucian philosophy, she does not argue or debate, but simply accepts the fact that Confucian values are Chinese and East Asian virtues. These values include love of learning, hard work, and the discipline of self for the greater common good. For her, these are also lost values that Americans need to recover from their own tradition. “After thousands of years of Confucian education and upbringing,” Lee asserts, “it is safe to assume that China’s cultural fabric is heavily steeped in Confucian philosophy” (p. 27). She notes that a nation of more than a billion people can be mobilized to work toward national goals is due as much to the cultural DNA of its people as to the heavy guidance of a Communist Party. Observing that China is one the greatest importers of foreign books and magazines, well stocked in its bookstores and readily accessible to the public, Lee hopes the United States can do the same. Americans can learn more about nations and cultures other than their own, and she finds the general U.S. public somewhat ignorant of things Chinese or Asian.

The author is disquieted by the greed of Wall Street and equally so over the apparent dysfunction of a highly polarized U.S. government under the stranglehold of corporate and special interest money. The sole preoccupation of Republicans was to ensure that President Barack Obama served only one term. For either party, the heart of...