China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower

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A blow-by-blow account … An important corrective to the conventional view of China's rise.”-- Financial Times 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. The author takes us on a journey from the time after Mao's influence, in particular the influences of Deng Xiaoping and I would add Jiang Zemin. What and I would say most Western media have never portrayed is the propaganda plied by the CCP. The CCP as the author would assert, would say one thing to the world and censor those words to the people of the country. They of course, had their own double-speak for their own countryfolk. In Dikötters umfassendem Werk finde ich die Darstellung der 80er-Jahre besonders gelungen, weil sich das Wissen über China im Westen damals meist auf wenige persönliche Kontakte und die Berichte von Auslandskorrespondenten beschränkte. In dem man im Wortsinn aus der Geschichte lernt, lassen sich Gehörtes und Erlebtes einordnen, wenn man als Leser verfolgt, wie sich Werte und Einstellungen chinesischer Bürger seit den 80ern eher gefestigt als verändert haben. Die generationenalte Weisheit z. B., dass „Chinesen Banken nicht trauen“, wird durch Dikötters Analyse begreifbar – und ihre Gültigkeit bis heute.

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Deng’s plan was to exercise political control of the foreign owned companies, in effect to use capitalism against the capitalists, encouraging even greater foreign investment and economic development and demonstrating superiority of the socialist system. Pudong, a large area of marshes across the Huangpu River in Shanghai was promoted to become a new financial center to rival Hong Kong. Foreign investors soon found themselves mired in a sea of red tape as they began to take advantage of the concessions. Everyone from Siemens to Matsushita and Ford got on board including the former opium dealer Jardine Matheson. In a short time every major city on the coast was offering preferential policies to foreign firms. Real estate development leapfrogged each year prior as domestic investors registered foreign shell companies. 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?Het is duidelijk dat het grootste probleem, om een bloeiende economische markt te krijgen, het communistische systeem is. Economie kan niet floreren onder het communisme. Het boek is dus tevens een soort van pleidooi tegen het Chinese politieke systeem. Maar zal het ooit een echte democratie kunnen worden? De Chinese regering doet er alles aan om dit tegen te houden, zo worden demonstraties van studenten over de jaren heen steeds de kop ingedrukt, is er geen persvrijheid, etc…. As a side note, the audio version of the book thoroughly butchers Chinese names, and I had a hard time recognizing even the most prominent figures based on the narrator’s pronunciation. In the absence of a bilingual reader, simple pronunciation training and practicing a dozen Chinese names could go a long way to improve the quality of this audiobook. I would have liked a little more focus on HK (and Taiwan), maybe Macau and the rest of PRD, and some other specific topics, as well as the business/scientific issues of specific joint ventures and infrastructure projects, but this was a high-level overview. The first quarter of the book is basically the road to Tienanmen massacre. If you ever wanted to fully understand why would any country send hundreds of tanks against its own people, this is the book to read - the context here is deep, well researched and shows how the massacre shaped modern China. 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.

China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower – The Irish Times China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower – The Irish Times

Xi Jinping inspects a guard of honour in Moscow, June 2019. Photograph: Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images While many of China’s western supporters believed that growing prosperity would bring growing demands for political freedom and participation, Xi believes that the separation of powers, judicial autonomy and freedom of speech represent a mortal threat to the party, and that once China’s people are materially better off, they will agree with the party’s claim that China’s socialism is superior to western capitalism. As the early reformer Zhao Ziyang – later disgraced for his opposition to the Tiananmen massacre – put it: “We are setting up special economic zones, not political zones. We must uphold socialism and resist capitalism.”

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Unfortunately, very little is written about Xi Jinping whose own influence now is considered on par with Mao. Nevertheless, you will get the idea, very little change is in store for China save for the CCP's and Xi's grip on power. However, Dikotter has woven a compelling narrative regarding how each leader in the reforms era has been ruthless in asserting the party’s dominant position, notwithstanding the price they had to pay. If one takes into consideration Deng’s ruthless purging of Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, Jiang Zemin’s ‘three represents’ theory and its adept interpretation followed by Hu Jintao’s pronouncements regarding the unquestionable supremacy of the party, Xi Jinping’s policy of party first is more of a continuity rather than an aberration. What does Dikötter’s history tell us about power in China and how it is wielded? As a serious historian, he starts by pointing out how little we know, referencing China analyst James Palmer’s 2018 essay in Foreign Policy, catchily entitled: Nobody knows anything about China, including the Chinese government . He cites the dilemma of the Chinese prime minister, Li Keqiang, who described China’s figures for domestic output as “manmade and therefore unreliable” and was reduced to triangulating the figures with measurements of electricity usage, to try to arrive at a more accurate guess. Essential reading for anyone who wants to know what has shaped today's China and what the Chinese Communist Party's choices mean for the rest of the world' New Statesman Books of the Year This book is a clear, well-written recounting of the leadership changes of the Chinese Communist Party since the death of Mao. His narrative documents the fits and starts of the CCP leadership as they try to balance a modern economy but keep control of the means of production. None of it has gone particularly well in Dikotter's analysis.

China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower - Goodreads

There is a narrative out there that China's regime has lifted 800 million people out of poverty since Mao's death, through "reform and opening up," the rise of the private sector, urbanization, and good old fashioned economic growth. This is my main message that I take with me: according to Dikötter the 'age of China' does not exist and will never come. China is not in the good shape everyone thinks it is. He challenges the idea that China would have been on a long straight road to unprecedented economic success after Mao's death. He even states that China never really took the path of economic liberalization after 1989. The reason is simple: the leaders knew that the economy would collapse immediately, according to Dikötter. He also comes to the surprising conclusion that even after all the reforms, China is not that different from forty years ago. Rising debts, overcapacity at state-owned enterprises, decades of neglect of the countryside. According to him, China is therefore at a dead end. The book, I feel, has failed to do justice to post-Mao China on at least two counts. First, there has been no mention of China’s promotion of private players as ‘national champions’ in the tech domain. Since 2013 the Chinese Government’s ‘Mass Innovation and Mass Entrepreneurship’ policy has led to the emergence of tech players, such as Alibaba and Tencent. However, Dikotter does not talk about the impact of the emergence of these influential private players in an authoritarian party-state like China. Second, given that the book was published in 2022, the author has not done justice to the coverage of the Xi Jinping era. An insider’s account of the rampant misconduct within the Trump administration, including the tumult surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.A special economic zone in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, was blessed by Deng during a 1984 visit, becoming a center of foreign investment and technology. Cheap labor imported from the hinterland fled to the bright lights and higher pay across the bay. To counter the exodus free trade areas were established where local authorities made the decisions on foreign trade and provided better working conditions. While industry didn’t take hold import/export business did and opportunities in coming computer technology were taken. Sixteen new free zones were created with the provision they wouldn’t be run or funded by Beijing. Cases proliferated of stolen chemical and pharmaceutical formulas and led to the counterfeiting of household appliances, office equipment, industrial and agricultural machinery in a wild east of trade. Rund 1/3 des Bandes nimmt der Anhang ein, mit Quellen, Register, Fotos, Verzeichnis der Archive eine wahre Fundgrube. 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.”