Éric Meyer is a French journalist who has been living in Peking since 1987.. His book grows out of the numerous reports he wrote, , the visits he paid, the tours he made, the anecdotes he collected. The author’s main concern (epitomized by the title: Be rich but keep silent) is about the many processes of individual or collective enrichment, which spring all over China. The outcome is a very vivid and colourful description of “China in transition”. To anyone wishing to glance over what did happen to China these past twenty years, it is an easy to read and entertaining vade-mecum. Sinologists might be more circumspect. I will not insist upon every faulty Romanization as Caijin for Caijing (i.e. 财经, the influential economic and financial magazine, pp. 25-27) or Zhang Zimu for Zhang Yimu (i.e. 张艺谋, the famous Chinese director of films such as The Story of Qiu Ju, pp. 125, 219 & 402). I will be more dubious about some definitions. Could “fate” or “luck” be relevant translations for fengshui, 风水 (“Ici c’est la chance qui intervient, c’est-à-dire le fengshui…”, p. 35). Should hongbao, (红包, red envelops) be identified to “bribes” (“Cheng est convaincu d’avoir reçu 5 millions de dollars en « enveloppes rouges » (bakchichs)…”, p. 105)? If so, what about the “red envelops” given for example to children as New Year’s gift, or to employees as year-end bonus? Maybe even more significant is the understanding of the Chinese historical and factual background. It seems rather disputable to introduce Laozi,老子 as a potential advocate of Reaganomics just because a theory of non-intervention can be deduced with extraordinary ease from his idea of providential harmony (cf. the aphorism quoted by the author as epigraph of chapter two p. 41)*. Controversial as well is the presumption that Chinese people eyes money distrustfully for some supposedly Confucian, together with Buddhist, dogma then for a Communist one (cf. pp. 15-19). Such an assumption seems unduly “culturalist” when much of China was at the stage of subsistence economy and when trade was limited to those few items that could be saved from consumption. The current lure of the money is correlative with the increasing commoditization, i.e. the so-called “monetarization”, of the economy. Despite some flaws, this book is an evocative exploration of the profound changes overtaking China. It presents the non-specialist reader with the sounds and the smells of a country enduring the throes of a transition economy.

* The literally translation of this quotation reads as: “Its government is torpid, its people is guileless; its government is zealous, its people is at fault (qi zheng menmen, qi min chunchun; qi zheng chacha, qi min queque : 其政闷闷，其民淳淳；其政察察，其民缺缺).