The aim was to maximise profit, enrich management and shareholders, and circumscribe worker militancy. Outside the US, as the Cold War raged, management consultants were willing foot soldiers in the global battle for capitalism.

Bogdanich and Forsythe’s​ book is a damning account of the way McKinsey has made workplaces unsafe, ditched consumer protections, disembowelled regulatory agencies, ravaged health and social care organisations, plundered public institutions, hugely reduced workforces and increased worker exploitation.

This has sparked a new wave of attention on China’s labor politics since the pandemic and provoked some response among overseas Chinese communities, though less prominent for now than the global diaspora mobilization in solidarity with the protester in Beijing’s Sitong Bridge last month. It provides a telling background to the broader social uprising in China sparked by the COVID-19 lockdowns.