How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

Mrs. Chua pounds home the point that "Market Dominant Minorities" are a significant factor, often the dominant players, in developing countries. The situation differs from continent to continent. Ethnic Chinese dominate many Southeast Asian economies, basically everything from Burma eastward. Overseas Indians and a few local tribes are the entrepreneurs of East Africa and Lebanese share West Africa with the locals. Former colonials, of course, retain important roles in South Africa, Zimbabwe and a few other countries.
The notion of "Market Dominant Minorities" plays out somewhat differently in Europe, especially the newly capitalistic Russia. There, in less than a generation, long suppressed Jews, representing something like 1% of the population, have become the tycoons. Latin America, mixture that it is of European, Native American and African bloodlines, is a different situation. Nonetheless as Mrs. Chua points out, the elites have a decidedly white cast.
And why is this a dangerous situation? Because democracy puts the majority in control. Rule of law is not sufficient to prevent them from expropriating the wealth of the minorities. Or worse -- killing and looting, such as the Chinese minority suffered in Indonesia, whites have suffered in Zimbabwe, and Tutsis suffered at the hands of Hutus in Rwanda. She expands her thesis to explain that the USA dominates the world economy much as Chinese and others dominate certain nations, and that 9-11 was an expression of the rage and frustration of countries that find themselves unable to compete with the US.
Miss Chua cites Thomas Friedman, "The Lexus and the Olive Tree", to refute his optimism, and Samuel Huntington and Thomas Sowell as supporting authors. Still, in the end she finds no reason why certain minorities always seem to wind up on top.
I think that the Chinese Mrs. Chua is being modest and disingenuous. I would suggest that she read the black Mr. Sowell more deeply. There are significant differences among peoples. At a minimum they are, as Mr. Sowell suggests in "Race and Culture," cultural. Other authors, among them Lynn and VanHansen in "IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Arthur Jensen in "The g Factor", and Murray and Herrenstein in "The Bell Curve" see significant differences in average intelligence among peoples, with Jews and Chinese like the Chua-Rubenfelds likely to be at the top of the heap.
Folks in academia shy away from this conclusion. MIT's Steven Pinker dances around it in his excellent "The Blank Slate." Stanford's Luigi Cavalli-Sforza lays out a wealth of excellent research on human evolution in "Genes, Peoples and Languages" but declines to follow where it might lead. Jared Diamond makes a powerful case in "Guns, Germs and Steel" that accidents of geography gave Asians and Europeans a tremendous cultural endowment, but declines to consider that evolution might have favored intelligence these among peoples with a richer material culture to manage. And now Mrs. Chua feigns having no notion of what might be special about her own people that makes them bubble to the top in situation after situation, with or without education, connections, or seed capital, and despite formidable obstacles.
For only one reason would I endorse her reticence. If some peoples turn out to be smarter than others there isn't much we can do about it. One might twist Christ's words to say, "the smart will always be with you." Moreover, they will always be a minority. As savants from Malthus to Herbert Spencer have remarked, the smart and the rich don't seem to be terribly fertile. Maybe they have found something more fun than sex?
Her most trenchant observation, that the rich should find ways to buy off the poor, is probably the best wisdom in the book. It happens in the US. Our government redistributes wealth in any number of ways. Rich folks from Carnegie through Rockefeller, Gates and Soros, well fixed unto the third generation, have given away vast sums. More than democracy, then, the U.S. needs to export a philosophy of philanthropy and even welfare.
One further observation. Large numbers of Jews, Chinese and other smart folks in the United States are, like Mrs. Chua herself, sufficiently confident of their material survival that they eschew crass lucre for the pursuit of ideas. She left Wall Street to write this trenchant book. I hope that her example inspires others.

The basic argument here is simple. Globalization exported to non-western countries enriches minorities, forcing the majority to commit acts of genocide and therefore creating chaos. So basically the argument would be that if it weren't for globalization then the semi-fascist majorities would remain in power, dictatorships would be rampant, but at least their would be `order' and no `chaos'. This book is basically one long trilogy blaming the hard working victim who happens to prosper because of liberalized markets.
In most of the countries examined, from Russia to Rwanda to Indonesia, their were minorities who took advantage of the equality granted them under new laws and liberalized markets to branch out of the jobs forced upon them by tradition and in some cases did disproportionately well. According to this account the Chinese of Indonesia deserved to be attacked in race riots. Why? Because they dared to become middle class, and not be servants. And yet the book describes them as "suppressed indigenous majority.". Which indigenous majority? The Muslims who attacked Chinese owned businesses were new arrivals, since only a few hundred years ago their weren't Muslims in Indonesia, but their were Chinese. So basically this book is just one giant excuse for genocide, blaming the west because our evil ideas of `equality of minorities' dared to allow the yoke to be taken off the heads of such disparate groups as the Jews of Russia or the Indians of Burma. Apparently western ideas like `freedom of religion' created chaos and forced the majorities in countries like Lebanon to commit genocide, and here we have a whole litany of excuses as to why the majority Hutu had to go and slaughter their neighbors. Basically the reasoning is simple: how dare minorities ever break out of their ghettos and become independent, because if they do then they have to be crushed, and the excuse can be that they became western. The reality is that the Tutsi of Rwanda never became western and neither did the Chinese, rather they simply became economically successful, and to the majority who were racist, that meant they had to trampled.
This book blames the west where it should be blaming the cultures that produced such ethnic and religious discrimination. In the end this book leaves no real compromise, arguing that apparently the world would be better off if these cultures were allowed to just commit genocide, suppress religious and ethnic minorities and have rampant totalitarian dictatorships.
Seth J. Frantzman

This book claimes that market economy and democracy under the name of globalization accelerates ethnic conflicts. There are many books which contend globalization widens economical gaps between the rich and the poor, it is quite interesting that the book relates globalization with political devide and ethnic hatred as well. Such a view also helps understand why the U.S. promoting Americanized globalization is the target of ethnic hatred.

This book is an excellent overview of how in many countries, a racial minority can dominate economically. Unfortunately, Amy Chua just doesn't get the connection between the observation made and what causes it. In reading this book, every page was a vindication of two primary principles: some races are more intelligent than others and they do better economically. Also, group evolutionary strategies dictates that some highly ethnocentric races will establish racial boundaries, form working coalitions with kin, and consolidate wealth based on kinship relationships. Chua does admit that class struggle does not account for ethnic conflict and dominance.
One other thing that jumped out at me was her belittling of anything Caucasian. She seems to have a special hatred for Whites, while giving all other races a pass - she appears to be highly Anglophobic.

This book is successful in
o developing a powerful thesis about the dangers of too rapid advance of markets and democracy in the developing world
This thesis is supported by
o a factual, extensive, and highly interesting review of major sources of ethnic conflict in many developing countries
The book goes on to draw extremely important foreign policy conclusions that are of enormous importance now, as the United States attempts to deal with the reconstruction of both the political and economic institutions in Iraq (and potentially other Middle Eastern Countries.
It is essential that the U.S. foreign policy community become familiar with Professor Chua's ideas and analysis.

It sounds as if she is pandering to the anticapitalist left, saying capitalism is unpopular, which it is, and that to be politically acceptable it must be taxed, regulated, and redistributed, which is true.
And indeed she is pandering to the left. But the basic fact that she reports is that the average voter in the world, when he sees the wealth created by capitalism and free markets, concludes from his zero sum prejudices that some terrible crime has been committed, and lashes out to destroy those responsible and the wealth that they have created. What she is saying is not that free markets are wicked, but rather that since the rape of free markets is inevitable, we had best bite our tongues and pretend to enjoy it. Her report lacks the self righteous certainty that this destruction is a good thing, and that those greedy exploiters of the masses had it coming to them. In some important ways, this is a deeply pro capitalist book. Rather than saying that the wise and virtuous anti capitalists should be victorious and the evil capitalsts deserve to have the wealth they create dissipated and destroyed, she instead despairs that the anti capitalists: the evil, the stupid, the unproductive, the destructive, the hateful and hate filled, are apt to be victorious under democracy. She supports the anticapitalists like a rape victim kissing her rapist.

if you have any sort of interest dealing with world economics and it influences on culture and ethnic hatred, this book is for you..... gives great examples, and the author does not shy away from lending her personal experiences. overall, well-written and keeps u interested through-out the whole book....the only downfall is some information tends to be repetitive....but still, its thought provoking

This book is amazingly clear and well-written (in fact its main weakness is that it is TOO clear, to the point of being mildly repetitive), which is why is amazes me that so many of the reviews here seem to either miss the point or misunderstand it altogether.
Chua DOES NOT blame free markets and democracy for all the evils of the world.
She DOES NOT attempt to propose some 'magic bullet' solution - she is simply providing analysis in attempt to further the discussion.
She DOES NOT claim that wealth redistribution programs are the ONLY reason for the relative success of the Western democracies - ethnic homogeneity is also a major factor, as are situational idiosyncrasies.
If you attempt to view this book as a narrow-minded attempt to shove the complex tangled peg of the world into a smooth round hole, you will have misunderstood it. Obviously, any book with an explanatory scope of this magnitude needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Her principle thesis is extremely powerful, but it does not explain everything since the big bang! In all the low-star reviews I have read, the criticisms have been completely misguided - do not base your opinion of this book on those reviews.
What Chua is trying to show is that - for better or worse - the policies we push onto the developing world far too often result in unintended consequences. We are pushing an extreme ideology onto the world - an ideology we don't practice ourselves and in fact NEVER HAVE IN OUR HISTORY.
Capitalism is about increasing returns - wealth begets more wealth. A small group of wealthy can raise the level for all people, which is generally hunkey-dorey.
This book builds on the concepts of path-dependence, lock-in, increasing returns in socioeconomic networks - all ideas that have been around for years now (see Brian Arthur and the Sante Fe people) but very few, especially in mainstream 'neoclassical' economics, seem to admit these things are real.
I am actually impressed with how even-handed and balanced this book is, with respect to liberal/conservative ideology. She comes off as slightly conservative(in other words, in favor of market 'liberalization') and definitely pro-market. She is NOT some leftist red commie. And the fact that Thomas Sowell - the high priest of conservate economics himself - gave this book an excellent review should be a tip-off to people on the right, who would dismiss this as some leftist rant.
This is an excellent, provocative book, and should be read and understood by many more people than it probably will be, which is unfortunate...

World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy

Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

By

Henry Idemudia Osazuwa

Saint Mary's University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus

Fall 2005, MBA 604A

Instructor: Professor David OPP

The end of the second world war brought on its heel a new world outlook on which new possibilities in commerce and industry found root and global cooperation became the needed strategy not only to give impetus to mutual trade but to expand the values of civilization, enrich the experience of human dignity, and fan the embers of global peace.

Global cooperation redefined territorial sovereignty and eliminated integrative barriers to find platform for itself, using free market democracy, amongst others as index. The impact however, has unquestionably remained controversial, generating postulation of fervent persuasion on both sides of the divide.

The book under review "World on Fire" (2003) seem to represent a side of the divide, with poor commentary on the impact of global cooperation pursued with shoddy propagation of free market democracy to developing and post Communist Countries resulting unwittingly in catastrophic polarization between economic power and political influence.

The author of "World on Fire" is Amy Chua (2003). Chua is a Professor of law and lectures at Yale law school; she is also a regular commentator on globalization. Chua is a Chinese descent American citizen with her parental family root located in the Philippines. Her multi-national background combined with her high-level career involvement gives her a unique perspective that has comprised the work of this book.

The author seem to challenge the claim to global peace and human dignity in the face of ethnic clashes making rounds through corners of the world exacerbated by adoption of free market democracy. The catalog of ethnic clashes will seem to trump the hope and promise that resulted from the end of the Second World War and recently from disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Berlin wall that shared basic ideological values is the foundation for global peace, increased global wealth, and enhanced values of human dignity.

However, the author does not seem to doubt the impact of shared basic ideological values but sounds critical of fee market democracy as the indicia to offer social possibilities and economic viability because of the apparent double standard in application.

Free market democracy is a concept of the west and within that political hemisphere; the concept yielded enviable and positive results whereas the introduction of the same concept in developing and post communist Countries proved anarchical.

In the author's view, the difference in outcome speak to the manner of implementation; implementation in the west took cognizance of the socio-political complexities of the time using limited electoral suffrage as a veritable tool to leverage market democracy and consolidate political influence and economic power. Further, consolidation of these two elements created stability within the polity of each Country in the West.

Propagators of free market democracy to developing and post- communist Countries omit to draw from the historical experience of the west and fail to see the strategic importance in consolidating competing elements of economy and politics as they introduce "free market and universal suffrage at the same time" (7). The consequence of the uncanny omission in most part is less than desirable because of the potential threat such consequences have to globalization.

The author used her family experience to portray the injurious proportion of this consequence as she recollected her auntie's gruesome murder in the hands of a Filipino driver. The holistic impact of this sardonic consequence is not lost on the reader as the author revisit ethnic pogrom in Rwanda, Serbian uprising, Indonesia crisis, Nigeria civil war etc. (6) and identifies issues of market dominant minority and power controlling majority as always central to each of the crisis.

The author successfully depicted defect in simultaneous implementation of free market and universal suffrage against the backdrop of unequal social exchange first, between developed and developing Countries and between wealthy minority and impoverished majority in the same Country. However, her solution to this problem is not clear. The closest inference in the book is a system of disenfranchisement.

Disenfranchisement may have worked in U.S. and other Western Countries but it will have no support and basis today. U.S. adopted disenfranchisement when the social and legal norm supported it. We are in a different era now, social and legal norm have changed. International charters and Municipal instruments enshrine principles of equality and human dignity so that suggestion of disenfranchisement will not only be disharmonious with social realities but will also be imperceptible in view of the author's concern for global peace, economic wellbeing, and human dignity.

Selective recognition of inalienable right and discriminatory application of equity and justice undermine values of human dignity and peace. Moreover, prescription of disenfranchisement solely in the interest of economic hegemony is imperialistic and against the grain of globalization.

Therefore, to the extent that the author may have suggested disenfranchisement as a prescriptive remedy, she lost her perspective of a more general course with global relevance and became narrow minded.

Chua A, (2003) World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, New York: Doubleday.

If I understand Chua's argument, her primary assertion is that "free market democracy" is the principal cause of "ethnic instability and violence throughout the non-Western world." Regrettably, at least in this book, she offers no credible evidence to support that assertion. Indeed, current circumstances in most of the countries to which she devotes her attention in this book (i.e. Bahrain, Burma, Chile, Russia, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe) suggest that quite the opposite is true. A free market democracy by nature cannot exist without a political structure which grants and protects common rights for everyone. Moreover, a free market democracy is by nature unrestrained by protectionist trade policies. I share Chua's concern for ethnic instability and violence throughout much of the world but are they not the result of decades (if not centuries) of totalitarian corruption and inefficiencies? I find it curious that Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, seems to attach so little importance to rule of law. In its absence, ethnic hatred and social instability are inevitable. Rather than enflaming them, a free market democracy offers perhaps the best means by which to alleviate them.

Francis Fukuyama famously announced at the end of the Cold War that humanity had reached "the end of history." Unfortunately, he forgot to tell history not to bother coming to work anymore.
Easy as it is to make fun of Fukuyama, where exactly did he go wrong?
Fukuyama's conception was formed by his expensive miseducation in the works of Hegel and other 19th Century German philosophers. History consists of the struggle to determine the proper ideology. Now there are no plausible alternatives to capitalist democracy. History, therefore, must be finished.
Lenin held a more realistic theory of what history is about: not ideology, but "Who? Whom?" (You can insert your own transitive verb between the two words.) History continues because the struggle to determine who will be the who rather than the whom will never end.
Amy Chua's readable and eye-opening new book "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability" documents just how pervasive ethnic inequality is around the world-and how much that drives the traumas we read about every day.
Chua builds upon Thomas Sowell's concept of the "middle-man minority"-the often-persecuted immigrant ethnic group with a talent for retailing and banking, such as Jews, Armenians, Chinese, Gujarati Indians, Lebanese Christians, etc. She broadens that idea to include other relatively well-off groups, such as un-entrepreneurial hereditary landowners, like the Tutsis of Rwanda and the Iberian-descended whites of much of Latin America. She lumps them all together under the useful term "market-dominant minorities."
Chua begs off explaining why economic inequality exists between hereditary groups. So let me offer a general explanation.
Creating wealth is difficult. People who have wealth tend to pass down their property, their genes, and their techniques for preserving and multiplying wealth to their descendents, rather than to strangers.
In countries without a reliable system of equal justice under the law, clannishness is particularly rational. Businessmen must depend upon their extended families for protection and enforcement of contracts. So they are particularly loath to do serious business with people to whom they have no ties of blood or marriage and who would thus be more likely to stiff them on a deal.
"Globalization," or economic liberalization, tends to make the poor majorities slightly richer and the "market dominant minorities" vastly richer. Sometimes the masses find this an acceptable tradeoff. But sometimes it drives them into a fury.
Often, the minority's post-globalization riches are honestly earned, but not always. American-backed privatization schemes in Russia and Mexico put huge government enterprises into the hands of the most economically nimble and politically well-connected operators at give-away prices.
Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, is herself the progeny of a market dominant minority: the Chinese of the Philippines. Chinese-speakers make up only 1% or 2% of the Philippines' population. But they own the majority of the country's business assets. They seclude themselves in a luxurious world fenced off from the indigenous majority, whom they hold in contempt and wouldn't dream of marrying.
Not surprisingly, the impoverished natives aren't crazy about the rich newcomers. Chua's beloved aunt in Manila was brutally murdered by her chauffeur. The unmotivated cops made little effort to find him.
It's definitely nicer to belong to the minority than to the majority in these countries. But Chua makes clear that, to Americans used to our norms of congeniality and social equality, it would be an awfully depressing way to live.
A grimmer example: Indonesia. The Chinese made up 3% of its vast population, yet owned the great majority of all businesses. The dictator Suharto, whose family had lucrative ties to the Chinese community, fell in 1998. Democratization set off a vicious pogrom against the Chinese, many of whom fled to Chinese-majority Singapore. The government expropriated $58 billion in assets.
Not surprisingly, the native Indonesians proved inept at running the businesses nationalized from the Chinese, and the economy collapsed.
All of which leads to a disquieting conclusion: it can be contradictory for America to demand that other countries simultaneously free their economies and democratize their politics.
We are seeing this in Venezuela right now. The dark-skinned, democratically-elected Hugo Chavez is at war with the fair-skinned rich, who want the national oil company privatized. The Bush Administration ludicrously endorsed the white elite's coup against Chavez last spring as a "victory for democracy," only to be embarrassed when the majority rose up and reinstalled him.
That property rights and one man-one vote democracy don't always mix well would not have surprised Aristotle, Edmund Burke, or Alexander Hamilton. Yet many Americans who call themselves conservatives have forgotten this.
One reason: we are one of the fairly small number of lucky countries with "market dominant majorities." We can have our cake (capitalism) and eat it too (democracy) because our majority group is economically quite competent.
This raises obvious questions about the long term impact of our immigration policy, which, with all the brilliant people in the world to choose among, manages to bring in huge numbers of people who have never seen the inside of a high school.

What is so interesting about the base assumption underlying Amy Chua's entire approach here is how fundamentally it undercuts the base assumption underlying her parenting beliefs and approach ("Tiger Mom" and all that)! That is, the base premise that fired her treatment of her children - on the surface (only) cruel and uncaring - was her belief in her children's ability and strength: they "can get the grades" and "they are not so fragile" that they cannot be expected to attain to higher standards. It is on that basis that she drove her children to do better than they (initially) wanted. She assumes the polar opposite with foreign nations - that they are unable. That is, when it comes to "export" of economic success through the market and political success through democracy, she simply assumes that these nations are unable to resist the forces of envy and hatred; an assumption seemingly benign in light of the difficulties in Iraq, but not so benign in light of the recent "Arab Spring." It is not that Chua is inorrect in spotting real difficulties and challenges attending the export; she is absolutely right - democratic capitalism presents challenge and needs a social/moral/economic system that suits it. But, she is simply too quick to assume that others will always break under the challenge. She should view these foreign nations more like... well, Chinese children!
Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--and Why They Fall

Provocative thesis, reasonably good evidence, sobering conclusion. Good read for a book club as it produces lots of argument. However, the text is repetitive and overly labored. The book could be one-half its length with the same results.

The problems with Amy Chua's very interesting and original book are that 1. Even if most of the material is true, it fails so offer a solution (i.e. you cannot reverse democracy unless you substitute it by some kind of dictatorship, and then you would have most of Ms. Chua's readers crying foul too!)...And 2. that readers might take Ms. Chua's book too seriously and come to the conclusion, as Ms. Chua does herself (analyzing the Venezuelan case, for instance), that if you are dealing with a third world political crisis, it must necessarily be of ethnical nature, and democracy must have been imposed by "the west".
The Venezuelan case has nothing to do with ethnic wars. This country is a veritable melting pot and most presidents, since 1959, have been of mixed race as most Venezuelans are, anyway. President Hugo Chavez has appealed to the gullibility and ignorance of the concerned citizens of other countries (including America's black caucus) to portray his country's popular uprising against his inept and corrupt government, as a coup orchestrated by the white oligarchies...These white oligarchies, for Ms. Chua's information, all but disappeared in Venezuela after more than a century of civil wars during the 19th century...Oil provided later a fast track for people of all origins (and skin hues) into high degree education and opportunities (this land of opportunity stopped being so about 20 years ago due to a smothering statism that has arrived to its final crisis with Mr. Chavez)...Globalization, on the contrary, is what keeps the majority opposition alive and kicking in spite of the enormous resources (and the support of the army) at the disposal of this president in a country where the wealthiest entity, by far, is the State.
Ms. Chua does not seem to realize that the only way to better democracy is...more democracy!

It explains why things are the way they are throughout the world. The author describes how markets and democracy are not meant to be implemented at the same time in certain nations and regions. She approves the implentation of one of the above systems at a time.

This book is silly. Just plain silly. It's like it was written by a 17-year-old. It's the kind of book that makes me sorry that I'm the kind of person who insists on finishing every book I start, since Chua has wasted irretrievable hours of my life.

I read a great number of books about politics and current events and, while there is a great deal of mediocrity out there, this book is in a class of its own. It's just silly.

Chua siezes on a paradigm and then bends everything to fit it, despite her protests that she is carefully avoiding such reductionism.

The book could have been boiled down to a monograph of about 10 pages; for what we have here, really, is just another Washington Post essay -- and not a very insightful one.

For a much better treatment of the same ideas (er, same IDEA, that is, her Ahabian fetish with "market-dominant minorities"), I would instead recommend Niall Ferguson's "Colossus," which covers all of the same territory, although in a much more substantial and well-researched fashion.

I have just seen Amy Chua on Booknotes tonight (C-SPAN) and I don't know if I should feel amused or disappointed. Her premise that rapid democratization in under-developed countries leads inevitably to social strife and violence, because the poor seize the opportunity to get back at the rich, is ridiculously infantile. There is a vast body of research that pretty much proves that democracy as such, has nothing to do with the violence. Under any system, one might expect tremendous income inequalities to causes social instability. The poor, with few alternatives, might be expected to rely on violence to equalize wealth. And conversely, the rich might be expected to rely on violence to retain their place. This has been the case since the beginning of time. Look at the French revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, look at the numerous rebellions against the English crown (by the Scots, Irish etc). The simple fact is that democracy or no democracy, wide inequalities and prolonged monopoly of wealth within a tiny percentage of the population, would always result in bloodshed. To lump together Russia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda and the Philippines is to demonstrate a careless understanding of the particularities of the socio-political conditions of these diverse places. The reason the White minority in Zimbabwe is resented by the Black majority has nothing to do with the fact that the Whites tend to be affluent and the Blacks less so. It has everything to do with history. It just happens that when the British came to town more than 100 years ago, they slaughtered hundreds of thousand of people, took their land, put the survivors into reservations on less fertile land etc. Gee, no wonder Black Zimbabweans might be a little resentful. In fact, when Black Zimbabwean took up arms to combat the Whites in what was then Rhodesia, economics have very little to do with it. It was about liberation and self-determination. To compare Zimbabwe and Malaysia is purely farcical. I am sorry, but I find most of the author arguments lacking in scientific rigor.

Amy Chua collected facts but not once does she show a cause and effect to anything. Every case of ethnic hatred in her book assigned to globalization existed before it and sadly will exist after globalization is over. On the other hand like the rest of the modern alliance of the right and left for anti-Semitism she spreads it tick and with no shame. She maybe excused of her misinformation or avoidance of the truth because of ignorance, But then she needs to educate herself on subjects she is far from being an authority on.

This is nothing more than belly-aching about how globalization caused the death of Chua's grandmother. This is a poorly organized work that attempts to claim that ethnic violence in Asia is a recent creation of American style capitalism. Perhaps Chua forgot many thousands of years of ethnic violence in Asia (and elsewhere) that arose before the advent of globalization. For Chua globalization is the cause for this violence, but in my book globalization is simply an excuse.

An interesting thesis, that is very valid, except a central conclusion (as stated in the editor review);
"Western capitalism wisely implemented redistributive mechanisms to offset potential ethnic hostilities, a practice that has not accompanied the political and economic transitions in the developing world. "
is not accurate. It is not redistributive policies that have enabled western free market/democratic nations to thrive (redistribution was non-existant to minimal for much of the U.S./European histories), thus placating minorities. It is the fact that in the Western nations the thriving economic ethnic groups ARE the majority, not the minority.
How to transfer this to nations where it is an ethnic minority that succeeds is unknown, but redistribution has been shown not to elevate lower classes

Almost every line was ill-informed. This messianic diatribe should not be considered non-fiction. It is dangerous, misleading, and badly written. I found myself writing comments next to every line since everything I was reading was incorrect. I never throw away books and this one went right in the trash.