China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower

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You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. The content was excellent. Interesting, clear, and engaging= 4.5 stars. The author was knowledgeable and wrote clearly for a general but interested audience. The question remains whether Xi and his minions can manage the complexities of a modern economy while continuing to command the means of production, financing and resources that make it run. Reading this book makes me think the answer is a strong no. That begs the question, what happens to China's economy when the bills come due, and what ripples does that cause for the larger world economy? The scandal that followed – the arrest of Bo and his wife, her trial for the murder of a British businessman, the rumours of an attempted coup d’etat and the subsequent purges – were the foundational events of Xi’s final steps to power. Xi has conducted repeated purges ever since, under the guise of the longest anti-corruption campaign in history, consolidating power in his own hands by setting up a series of “leading small groups” which he heads, and writing his “thought” into the constitution of the party and the country, while tearing up Deng Xiaoping’s constitutional safeguards against a recurrence of the kind of personality cult and dictatorship perpetrated by Mao Zedong. As the authors point out, Xi does not talk much about Mao but he studiously imitates him. He has built an ideological apparatus that criminalises dissenting views of history and seeks to fuse the idea of the party, the country, the state and the person of Xi into one unchallengeable monolith

CHINA AFTER MAO | Kirkus Reviews CHINA AFTER MAO | Kirkus Reviews

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Thus, an alternate proposal to the above-mentioned economic-political reform link hypothesis, and different from the overall tenor of the book’s argument, would be the following. The error of the hypothesis consists in the time window assumed for the transition; evidence of deep transformational historical change of the kind we might predict should not be evaluated in the short term. Dikötter’s case is that China’s opening up and reform period was structurally limited and that these limits are undermining the benefits the model can deliver: after 40 years of opening up, he points out, China had one million resident foreigners, a smaller proportion to population than North Korea at 0.07%. In China, he argues, the state is rich and the people are poor, banks squander money and have created massive debt mountains, and as the scholar Xiang Songzuo of China’s Renmin University put it in 2019: “China’s economy is all built on speculation and everything is over-leveraged.” China's alliance with US after losing Vietnam War due to misconception that Soviet Union was the world's pre-eminent power, how would the world be different if China knew USSR was close to collapse? Implication for today that Russia doesn't need to align too closely with China as long as US has major weaknesses.

Economically, the author paints a bleak picture. The 36 years of the “open and reform” era is a succession of economic crises and countermeasures, which lead to new crises. China’s economic boom, according to the author, is chronically inefficient and fueled by over-investment, over-leveraging, and over-capacity. Official statistics are not trustable, and economic calamity is never far away. This defies the conventional belief that China has a long-term strategy for economic development, including education, significant spending on research and development, and large-scale infrastructure building. As a summary of events in China since 1976, it probably does the job, although I can’t definitively say so since I’m a layperson. I will note that it reads more as summary-with-an-opinion than cutting analysis, although that’s not necessarily bad. Presumably the access to long-restricted archives gives it an edge over other, similar texts? Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? China After Mao” is based on declassified Chinese Government archive and some recounts from notable figures such as Li Rui, a high-ranking official-turned-dissident. The book chapters divide the 36 years of coverage into two-year or longer periods and tell how China emerged from the near-collapse of the Cultural Revolution to become a global economic superpower. Probably due to the availability of supporting material, the book was more detailed about the earlier years (including a recount of high-ranking officials plotting the arrest of the “Gang of Four”) and cursory about the later years after 2000. As a person who lived through some of the transitions and has kept a close watch afterward, I value the book’s chronological approach. The book helps me to rise above the notable events and see a larger-scale trend. These were the years shaped by Deng’s policy of opening China to global capitalism that produced four decades of spectacular economic growth, years that have been lazily described as the China “miracle”. Those years also gave rise to the misperception that past performance would necessarily determine the future: that China would inevitably overtake the US to become the world’s biggest economy and that would fulfil China’s destiny to become the world’s next superpower.

China After Mao, The Rise of a Superpower by Frank Dikotter China After Mao, The Rise of a Superpower by Frank Dikotter

Frank Dikotter, long time Chair of Humanities at Hong Kong University, has continued to hold on to his faculty position despite his books being banned in the People’s Republic. He sees this as fortunate since he is unknown on the mainland and still has access to the archives. In the preface to this late 2022 work he notes that regional archives for the Mao years (1949-1976) were opened in 1996 under Jiang Zemin and then closed in 2012 under Xi Jinping, but post Mao era files (1977-2002) became available. By the period of ‘Reform and Opening Up’ begun by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 the Party had become a system where industry, large enterprises, land, natural and financial resources were all controlled by the state. Systemic corruption and inefficiency had made the fiscal deficits and their mounting debts unsustainable. I am hoping Dikötter is planning to follow up this trilogy with another volume, this time focussing on the age of Xi Jinping who, from the looks of it, has Mao-like aspirations.I am not prepared to give Beijing a mulligan for human rights abuses, the abrogation of the rule of law in Hong Kong and in whatever vestigial forms it existed on the mainland, growing militaristic nationalism, cooking the books on economic growth, etc. But nor am I prepared to underestimate the regime's abilities. Every piece of information,” Dikötter writes, “is unreliable, partial or distorted. Where China is concerned,” he concludes, “we don’t even know what we don’t know.” A fourth great book on China from Dikötter. The modern period is probably less interesting to me than the Cultural Revolution, Great Famine, and Civil War, mainly because I am already more familiar with the events especially post-Tiananmen from at least the Western observer side and watching the news/doing business with Chinese companies/etc., but it was still interesting to learn how local vs. national government works, incentive structures, etc. I wish the book continued through to Covid and beyond, but it pretty much ends around 2018; hopefully there will be a fifth book coming in a few years. But if upon completing chapter 8 readers get the idea that in the coming years the Chinese economy and political system face collapse after teetering on the brink of irremediable crisis, they are in for a rude awakening. A close reading of chapter 9 and the first section of chapter 10 prompts us to study the relevant comparisons worldwide. For example, we might want to study the early signs of a possible degradation of some of the core institutions of United States democracy and that country’s declining economic vitality (accelerating indebtedness, for example to China). For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.