China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower

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Another significant event is the Internet boom in the late 1990s. Not only it gave birth to some prominent private companies such as Sina and Baidu, but also it changed the social lives of everybody in China. Through online news, blogs, and microblogs, ordinary Chinese people follow world events, share their life stories, and participate in social movements. The thriving of the Internet is accompanied by ever-increasing Government regulation and censorship. The cat-and-mouse game between censorship and evasion profoundly shaped the Chinese online culture and the relationship between the Government and the mass. 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. Similarly, the issue of anti-corruption under Xi Jinping has been highlighted as an extraordinary policy. Dikotter has provided very forceful evidence of how Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao have made anti-corruption an integral part of their tenure as the party’s helmsman during their respective eras. The seventeenth party Congress report presented by Hu Jintao (just before Xi Jinping took over the party’s leadership) highlighted the issue of anti-corruption. Third, the policy of consolidating SOEs to make them ‘national champions.’ From Jiang Zemin (and Zhu Rongji) to Xi Jinping, a select group of SOEs has always been identified to turn them into world beaters. The idea of ‘going global’ has been given a new dimension with Xi’s policy of engineering mega-mergers of SOEs and turning them into world beaters. In this regard, the priority of SOEs seems to be more of a continuity rather than a radical departure of the Xi era from the previous ones. The reviewer, Prof G Venkat Raman, has a PhD from Peking University, and is Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, IIM Indore) The main question that this study of China after Mao revolves around is an examination of a seemingly plausible and widely accepted hypothesis: that an implementation of free market methods will lay the foundation, inevitably, for democratic political reform.

CHINA AFTER MAO: The Rise of a Superpower | By Frank Dikötter CHINA AFTER MAO: The Rise of a Superpower | By Frank Dikötter

A blow-by-blow account … An important corrective to the conventional view of China's rise.”-- Financial Times Der Autor begann 1985 in Tianjin sein Sinologiestudium, als es im gesamten Land weniger als 20 000 Privatfahrzeuge gab. 10 Jahre später nutzt er die Phase der erstmaligen Öffnung von Archiven zur Recherche. Seine Archivstudien in gut einem Dutzend Archiven, sowie Presseartikel und unveröffentlichte Erinnerungen von Zeitzeugen vermitteln ein kenntnisreiches China-Bild mit Focus auf die Wirtschaft des autoritär von der Kommunistischen Partei regierten Staates. How propaganda is instilled from childhood to adulthood is glaring. External sources are prohibited. Everything tightly controlled by the state from economy, to media to education. How the people of China are so pliant is the micro-surveillance and constant attention paid to deviance, no matter how minute. Warum die Privatwirtschaft punktuellen staatlichen Maßnahmen stets überlegen war, warum es ohne Rechtsstaatlichkeit keinen Markt und ohne politische Reformen keine Marktreformen geben kann, legt Dikötter pointiert, humorvoll und kritisch dar. Allerdings schwächelt er im letzen Kapitel mit der Einschätzung, dass das Corona-Virus China von der restlichen Welt entfremdet hätte. Es war nicht das Virus, sondern das Verhalten eines Staates, der aus den Fehlern während des SARS-Ausbruchs 2002 offenbar nichts gelernt hatte. Second book of Dikotter's I've read. After devouring this one, believe I'll put the rest of them on my "to read" list.

On the surface, this makes the claim that Xi is the most powerful man in the world quite compelling. But for an understanding of the getting, exercising and holding of power in the People’s Republic of China, historian Frank Dikötter has few rivals. His latest volume, China After Mao: the Rise of a Superpower is a clear-eyed and detailed account of the period between Mao’s death in 1976 and 2012, the year of Xi’s arrival in the top job. 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. 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.

China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower | Hoover

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. China na Mao is een zeer gedetailleerd werk en als lezer is het soms moeilijk je hoofd erbij te houden. De auteur heeft duidelijk een grote kennis van het land en goochelt met termen die vooral economen bekend in de oren zullen klinken. Anderzijds zullen zij het dan weer moeilijk hebben met de geschiedenis van China die ook niet nader verklaard wordt. Het is dus een ingewikkeld werk voor lezers die zowel geïnteresseerd zijn in China, als in economie, en er bovendien reeds heel wat vanaf weten. Hierdoor is het boek zeker niet zo toegankelijk voor het bredere publiek, wat wel jammer is, gezien het interessante thema. Er zijn ook wel wat haperingen, zo stopt hij zijn relaas bij Xi Jin Ping, wie ook wel heel wat hervormingen doorgevoerd heeft die een impact hebben gehad. Hierdoor lijkt Dikötter zijn betoog niet volledig. De bronnen zijn ook eenzijdig, zo haalt hij zijn informatie niet uit verschillende soorten bronnen halen. This period of Chinese history was also the most recent manifestation of the century-old battle between liberal ideas and authoritarianism in China, covering as it does the explosion of ideas that followed the death of Mao, manifest in Democracy Wall (1978), the lurching policy reforms of the 1980s, and the democracy movement and its violent suppression in 1989.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.

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

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).

An insider’s account of the rampant misconduct within the Trump administration, including the tumult surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Xi Jinping inspects a guard of honour in Moscow, June 2019. Photograph: Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images 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. 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? Zhao was ousted and replaced with Jiang Zemin, who waged propaganda campaigns to root out the foreign collaborators plotting to defeat socialism and poison the body politic with western spiritual pollution. Lei Feng, fictional Mao era model soldier and socialist, was wheeled out of mothballs to appear on television, in movies, study groups and symposiums. The 150th anniversary of the Opium War provided an opportunity to denounce a ‘Century of Humiliation’ China endured at the hands of imperialists. United Front established a network of domestic and international celebrities and spokespersons to win over hearts and minds and to promote acceptance of the Chinese Communist Party. Thousands fled from Hong Kong, considered by Beijing a hotbed of foreign subversion, trying to escape the rapidly approaching return to the mainland.

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Although I'm firmly in Dikotter's camp on economic matters, he goes pretty far, essentially asserting that Chinese growth is almost 100% illusory (because fueled by unsustainable debt and under complete state control).

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.” Nothing will reveal the downfall of the CCP other than the collapse of the economy. Every other aspect of life is dominated by the CCP as the author asserts.