Corporate outsourcing has bitterly divided advocates and critics of free trade; the transfer of jobs overseas to cheaper locations has had a profound effect on dislocated employees and their communities, and, increasingly, it is the high–skill, white–collar positions that are feeling the impact. In Fast Boat to China, Andrew Ross looks at the controversial issue of offshore outsourcing to China—specifically that of white-collar jobs at U.S. global manufacturing and high-tech companies. Having spent a year talking with skilled local employees and their foreign managers in Taiwan, in Shanghai, and in the far west of China, Ross reports on China’s workforce, where employees, for the first time, are emulating a corporate mentality of job–hopping as a way of life. Ross looks as well at the effects of foreign investment on China’s (newly capitalist) economy and at how multinational companies such as GM, GE, Philips, Lucent, IBM, and...