With a potential billion customers at stake, it sometimes feels these days as if there are almost as many 'how-to' business books about China. We review one of the best.

The instinct is for Chinese HR managers to give jobs to their friends

James McGregor, former China bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal and the author of "One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China" (a Wall Street Journal book published by Free Press and Simon and Schuster) began his career in China in 1990, at the same time my diplomatic family was posted there.

This was a unique time in Chinese history to be living in Beijing. In that early post-Tiananmen era, China had pariah status and retreated from the global stage for a couple of years, only to emerge in 1992 to begin its rise to the economic juggernaut it is today.

McGregor lived in China during its transformation. He's watched it all unfold, reported on it, and even moved from living in a rundown foreign compound, where journalists and diplomats alike were kept isolated from ordinary Chinese people, into the fancy western joint venture housing estates that expatriates now inhabit.

McGregor's lofty overview as a Mandarin-speaking economic journalist would be reason enough to read his opinions about the business climate in China. But in 1994, he switched gears and became a businessman himself, notably heading Dow Jones operations in Beijing and heading up the American Chamber of Commerce there as well. Today, he runs a business development firm for Westerners trying to succeed in the fast-growing China market. In others words, his China bona fides are impeccable.

 More important is that McGregor knows how to tell a story well. "One Billion Customers" is a collection of instructive personal stories of both successes and failures.

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