In the Red

If you want to understand what makes China tick, ask the businessmen who spend their days immersed in its primordial soup of capitalism and corruption. Their war stories have spawned a booming genre of non-fiction, in which the latest entrant is James McGregor's One Billion Customers. McGregor, who went to the mainland as a journalist but changed tracks in 1994 to become the China head of Dow Jones, dispenses his wisdom through case studiesmostly of how things can go wrong. The story of an investment bank created by Morgan Stanley and the China Construction Bank, for example, shows how a...