Book review of Billions of Entrepreneurs

Overview
As what it says on the book cover, Tarun Khanna discusses how China and India are reshaping their futures in Billions of Entrepreneurs.
In this book, author talked about most of difference and similarities but more focused on the China and India’s complementary strengths.
The author went over deep historic ties between China and India, including trade ties, and intellectual and cultural exchanges, and then talked about the “mutualism” situation for China and India. He pointed that both two countries have complementary strengths. one nation can provide what the other lacks.

Compared to ‘The Post-American World’
In Fareed Zakaria’s book, The Post-American World, he describes his view and vision of the world. He describes the post-American world not as the decline of America, but as the rise of “the rest”. Zakaria argues that China and India will soon rival the United States.
In ‘Billions of Entrepreneurs’, Tarun Khanna describes more detail about the companies which has high industry positions in China and India rather than simply heap praise after praise on both countries.

Main points of chapters
The whole book highlights a different realm, from medicine, to entertainment, to science and finance.
The writer began the book by illustrating the ways in which China and India are both alike and different. Then he went on to list a number of historical similarities including national unifications that happened around the same time and historically significant political changes in the middle of the 20th century. He explored the two political revolutions of both countries in that time: China’s 1949 Communist revolution and India’s 1947 independence and Nehru.
After he talked about the different attitudes of both governments for the foreign investors, the chapters started to focus on the on particular companies in each country and their strategies.
All the chapters express one main idea, one is that mutualism is the most reasonable approach for both countries, and collaborations among enterprises in China and India show encouraging signs of increasing mutualism.

Weakness
In Khanna’s book, some main idea is very clearly positioned early on in his book. He mentioned that “entrepreneurship in developing countries occurs in far more encompassing and far-reaching ways that in more developed settings.” But later on I did not see it very thoroughly developed in his book.
There are always some interesting perspectives in each chapter (such as what I mentioned above), but expiations for these perspectives are very limited and surface.

What I have learned?
From the book I have learned what these similarities and differences, strengths and weaknesses, mean in the context of economics, trade, investment and development are.
Also this book helps me understand hard and soft power of both countries. China tries to secure regions of long-term resource interests. At the same time, India’s private sector has leveraged its success in its knowledge economy to gain global economic relevance.

What is fresh in the book?
The expiation about the positions of currency of both countries affects each other is a new view for me to see the relation between China and India.

My opinion for the relationship between in India and China
From what i have seen, the only reason I could see Chinese would conflict with Indian is the McMahon Line.(I and hemanth talked this before) It’s just a historic political problem. India and China has thousand years culture connection. China focus on manufacturing and India focus on IT, the main public opinion in China is that manufacturing may bring a lot of benefits now, but it doesn’t have a very good future, some high tech industry are what we need.
So, in the next 20 years, India could be a very sample to China, with the development of folk economy, the non-governmental cooperation will be more and more usual.
And for both governments, Pakistan is the key, now China is 80% on Pakistan side. Because of ideology problem, though things has changed a lot in China, for chinese government, the country like India which has strong power and is very very closed to west world, it could be and will be very good friend but also competitor.

Recommendation
"Billions of Entrepreneurs" is a book worth reading, it not just a book about entrepreneurship but rather about a broad range of cultural, social, historical and economic subjects involving and contrasting China and India.
Like many novels on bookstore shelves today, The Billions of Entrepreneurs targets the niche market for books about the glorious rise of modern East Asia.
For those unfamiliar with globalization or the economic boom in countries like China and India, The Billions of Entrepreneurs adequately details the most important events these two countries have encountered. The Billions of Entrepreneurs makes for interesting reading, but should not be taken as doctrine.