This book should become a bestseller because it hints at what is beyond the “too big to fail” scale, even though that is not the subject of the book. This is not a technical book. It is not a collection of statistical reports, nor a bundle of theoretical models and their simulations. It is, however, a collection of carefully written, deeply articulate observations by 19 authors, almost all of whom are Chinese sociologists.

The five parts and 17 chapters of the book have dry factual titles, such as “The Internet Communication and the Issue of Civil Society,” “Studies on Mobile Phone Uses in Beijing,” and “The [Information and Communications Technologies, ICTs] and Migrant Workers in Southern China.” Nevertheless, almost every page brings the reader deeper into the upbeat context of a social scale that the West vaguely conceives as some eventual globalization. The reader here cannot escape perceiving these realities from an immutable human-scale perspective. This book will help Westerners see China as globalization in a microcosm, and that perspective suggests that we should prepare ourselves accordingly. There is no clash of civilizations. There is only the shift into a much-larger-than-conceivable social scale.

We first get a sense for living within a real global-scale system. Human-scale reality is the perspective of living in China. Each individual is simply a member of many groups and networks within a very much larger organizational manifold. By analogy, just as it would be absurd to use an environmental disaster as a basis for criticizing the Earth, likewise observations of ongoing problems in the Chinese context simply do not rise to the level of criticizing China. (If you miss this, then you will never “get” this book.)

The shift of perspective resonates from every page. Westerners should already have begun to understand this, at least in light of Schumpeter’s remark that democracy died with the introduction of the civil service. Specifically, Schumpeter predicted that the momentum of government activity would become adiabatic (that is, no longer requiring outside input), regardless of how discontinuous the ideational function of elected leadership replacement becomes. China is now far beyond Schumpeter’s observation. Groups of individuals mobilizing resources to deal with an environmental situation do not consider strategies for changing the laws of nature. Similarly, the populace of China, enabled by instant ICT services, resembles the simultaneous formation of uncountable neural network microfilaments in a highly viscous ocean of human efforts. That does not suggest any change of tidal patterns or ocean currents. Rather, while ICT filaments simply cause numerous changes in the very local social change viscosity, any larger-scale aggregate society shift effects occur on a much longer time scale, if at all.

Furthermore, standard Western ICT topics are simply absent from this report from China--not because they are specifically politically incorrect (though some may be), but because they are insignificant in the context of the human-scale China being reported. Blatantly missing topics include spam, user profiling, targeted advertising, global positioning system (GPS) tracking, texting while driving, Internet addiction, pornography, online gambling, Ponzi schemes, chain letters, viral marketing, virus filters, user-developed apps, Internet startups, telecommuting, ICT economics, ICT-enabled banking, paperless ICT transition systems, and ICT abuse by children. Other topics, like the peculiar issue of privacy, occur only by example, albeit many times, in this book. Particularly, there seems to be no such thing as privacy as we expect it, because anonymity seems to border on social deviance in China, which defines responsibility in terms of a large set of innate multi-parametric specifications that each sane (mature) individual must continuously accommodate. Furthermore, the reader must constantly expand his sensitivities to construct concepts from dispersed examples, because that is a fundamental aspect of expression for discussing larger social consensus issues, a format foreign to the sensitivities of small-scale-oriented Western students.

Alternately stated, this book reports what most people should already know, because most people live in China. For the rest of us, growing up with quasi-independent metrics of critical mass and economy of scale, this report shifts our perception into (not above) higher trans-dimensionality, a quantum leap forward from our Western social networking anarchy-autonomy. For all of us, the longstanding logistics problem, to create a transparent organization of knowledge, has evaporated. It has been silently sublimated behind the peculiar stealth of ICT search engines. Pedagogy, which has always varied between historical models and instant contemporary organizations of knowledge models, now must spawn an independent program for growth. Otherwise, formal education is about to lapse comatose. Enter social networking in China, a vantage worthy of contemplation as a global-ICT-reality early-approximation template. Evolutionary epistemology accelerates, and we are about to enter the dynamic post-nondeterministic-polynomial-time (NP) complete topology of the Chinese mind. This is not just a must-read; it is a must-read and assimilate.