"Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn bring to their book all the authority and insight of the fourteen years they spent covering Asia. They depict a continent poised to reassume the role it ceded five hundred years ago as the "center of the world." They muster convincing evidence that China may soon overtake the United States as the world's largest economy, that India is awakening from its long hibernation, that Japan is developing future consumer technologies that will benefit millions of people.". "Thunder from the East shows that the rise of Asia paradoxically has been accelerated by the financial crisis that began to tear through the lives of multitudes in the East in 1997. The authors make clear that, by radically undermining the cronyism and the suffocating regulations that had long fettered Asian economies, the crisis liberated energies and creativity that had until then been immobilized.". "Thunder from the East is a brilliant guide to a region that is now in a position to wrest economic, diplomatic, and military power from the West in the coming decades. It offers an account of a continent that is fast becoming the focus of the world's attention."--BOOK JACKET.