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This book vividly describes how China´s rise in the early 2000s led to rising profits and declining labor income everywhere, ultimately resulting in the global financial crisis. Under Deng Xiaoping´s policy of ´reform and opening up´ in the 1980s, China quickly became the world´s factory floor...but powerful political leaders envisioned a world in which the market economy would be trapped within the confines of a planned economy. With China´s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001, almost a billion people joined the global workforce, driving down the real wages of blue- and white-collar workers in the US and Europe while also lowering interest rates, which fueled housing bubbles and destabilized the financial sector. This book explores China´s significant influence on western economies by focusing on the links between the labor market, corporate profits, and interest rates, using Arthur Lewis´s framework for economic growth with unlimited supplies of labor to argue that by 2010 the world economy - and political situations - had been set back almost one hundred years.

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1. The Chinese Birdcage 2. Western Triumphalism 3. China as the World´s Factory 4. Housing Bubbles across the Western Hemisphere 5. The Global Financial Crisis 6. The Economic Fallout 7. Unlimited Supplies of Labor 8. China´s Economic Development 9. Global Imbalances and Corporate Cash Piles 10. The Capitalist Surplus and the Shortfall in Demand 11. Piketty Reconsidered 12. What Lies Ahead?

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Heleen Mees was Adjunct Associate Professor at New York University´s Wagner Graduate School of Public Policy. She is a columnist for the Dutch daily De Volkskrant and she writes opinion articles for various international publications including Foreign Policy, The Financial Times, Project Syndicate, and NRC Handelsblad.

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