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Comment by yuy910616 | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like an incredible book. I will certainly check it out. It fits well with my experience of China well - a place where Guanxi (關係）trumps all else. People fear it, hate it, but also aspire it. It's also interesting that how unlikely this book is. I've been in the West for more than 20 years, but I don't plan on speaking ill of China at all. Kudos to the author.

Another book that I really enjoy that seem to be of the same ilk: confession of an economic hitman

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I am not sure the comparison to Confessions of an Economic Hitman are positive. To me, that book was such unsubstantiated garbage that I left it in the airport where I bought it. It didn’t even make it to the plane.

The fact he wrote other 4 books with "new" confessions speaks volumes about his credibility. Peddler of nonsense.

I also want to add the book is currently has 20 ratings on Amazon and 4.9 stars - I'm curious if a large flood of of negative reviews quickly get posted haha, since it is now on both the Economist and Hackernews, which I think China closely monitors.

I won’t be surprised at all to see a number of suspicious negative reviews.

I live in Hong Kong. Many media outlets are closed monitored and relentlessly attacked with fake comments by the state apparatchiks. It's easy to spot, given:

1) Pervasive use of whataboutism; 2) Similar arguments in all comments, with a change or two in order or synonymous; 3) Use of Mandarin idioms translated to English, like "double confirm"; 4) Use of Mandarin sentence order translated to English, like "The USA last year in February in Afghanistan did ...".

It's become a bit of game for me. I wish I enough knowledge of NLP to make this into a model and open source it as a wumao detector.

Monitoring the Economist makes sense, but I’d be surprised if Hacker News is closely monitored as well.

I'm not so sure. He is very likely to be aware of HN:

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/xi-jinpings-book...

I suspect the Economist has far broader readership and influence than HN, but I like the idea of him browsing these threads like the rest of us.

(President Xi, if you’re reading I’d love to see a comment from you as a “long-time lurker”. Or, even better, wow us by announcing an AI advancement here with a “Show HN” post.)

Confessions of an Economic Hitman was an eye opener for me.

I was recommended this by my Econ professor and it left a lasting impression on me

Funny - I read it for a history class. The book Banana was also quite interesting.

There's nothing special about Guanxi, it literally means "networking" of well-connected people. Unless I am missing something?

Since China is a low-trust society, networking is far more important than in high-trust societies like most of the West (or Japan, for that matter).

This is not unique to China, of course, but it does mean business, politics and even seemingly mundane things like healthcare and schools operate quite differently to what you might expect.

Yep, this is exactly it. It's not that networking is unique, is that such connection is often used to replace things like law, justice, or a simple queue.

In my own experience, where I went to kindergarten was an outcome of who my grandma knew. Similarly, when I was sick and needed to see a doctor, I had to know someone who knew someone...

Yes - it's similar in the west. But to say they're the same would be like saying 100M dash and marathon is the same sport.

> like healthcare and schools operate quite differently

I'd argue the reason you don't see much Guanxi in the America is because the best healthcare or school are already run by the private sector.

> It's also interesting that how unlikely this book is.

"No Wall Too High" by Xu Hongci is another unlikely excellent story of a man escaping from communist China. He's imprisoned multiple times and ends up escaping to eventually marry a woman from Mongolia. Then in the Deng era he settles again in Shanghai and publishes his story in Chinese. Later this manuscript was discovered via his surviving wife, translated to English and published in 2017.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HMNETEA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

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