Superfusion: Zachary Karabell

Author Zachary Karabell discussed his new book Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World’s Prosperity Depends on It at the Jones Day offices in New York on November 12, 2009.

The emergence of China as an economic superpower is now widely recognized, but as Karabell reveals, that is only one aspect of the story. Over the past decade, the Chinese and U.S. economies have fused to become one integrated system. How China and the United States manage their relationship will determine whether the coming decades witness increased global prosperity or greater instability.

In Superfusion, Karabell traces twenty years of dynamic change in China that began when the suppression of the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. China’s leadership subsequently adopted a policy of aggressive economic reform and courted U.S. companies and expertise. Karabell charts how integral those and other U.S. corporations have been to China’s success, and how China has played a central role in their growth.

Accelerated by China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001, the U.S. and Chinese economies began to fuse without attracting much notice. Now, however, both countries find themselves in an unfamiliar and challenging position, one that has enhanced the global economy but has also presented new challenges.

Zachary Karabell was educated at Columbia, Oxford and Harvard, where he received his PhD. in 1996. He is the author of several books, including The Last Campaign, which won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Award, and Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, and Newsweek. He lives with his wife and two children in New York, where he is an executive vice president of a leading asset management firm.