For Richer, for poorer.

• Author: Hernandez Alende, Andres
• Position: Rese

Cuentos chinos by Andres Oppenheimer Random House US$13.95

Andres Oppenheimer, the The Miami Herald journalist best-known for his columns on Latin American issues, expands his repertoire to several emerging-market countries, among them China, Ireland, the Czech Republic, and Poland, in a quest to answer an difficult question: Why do some countries break free from economic stagnation while others do not?

To see how people actually go from being poor to being rich,

Oppenheimer visited several Latin American countries, interviewing presidents and public officials as well as ordinary people on the street. His conclusions contradict established schools of thought deeply rooted in the Latin American political psyche.

For example, he dismisses the accepted dichotomy of the division between leftist and rightist governments and substitutes it with a new concept: Some countries work to attract foreign investment, and others insist on moving away from foreign capital.

In China, Oppenheimer interviewed the director of the Latin American section of the Academy of Sciences, while sitting beneath a red communist flag. The official, who had just written a book on the difference between Chinese and Latin American economic development, says he's astonished to hear that on the other side of the ocean people still discuss dependency theory, in other words, that they continue to blame the United States for economic inequalities south of the Rio Grande. The Chinese official is very quick to point out that China, run by the communist party, realized 20 years ago that the nation's future was solely in the hands of its citizens, and that the ability to escape poverty depended on China alone. There was no other country to blame if China itself didn't achieve its goals. Communist ideology today is used mainly to keep the party in power, while China the country is undergoing an enormous capitalist revolution, one that has spurred growth rates of more than 10%.

According to Oppenheimer, Asia's robust economic growth didn't require the iron grip of a dictatorship. Ireland, the...