China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower

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He examines China’s navigation of the 2008 financial crash, its increasing hostility towards perceived Western interference and its development into a thoroughly entrenched dictatorship with a sprawling security apparatus and the most sophisticated surveillance system in the world. Breaking with the bland orthodoxy peddled in some of our finest universities, Dikötter says that China today is a Leviathan where a party, fascist in all but name, controls society … Dikötter marshals a daunting array of statistics and documents .

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

For this volume, he draws on 600 documents from municipal and provincial archives, as well as conventional sources such as Chinese news media. The topic of the this book is the governance of China in the post-Mao era, and it contains a great many observations but, for loss of a better word, misses the coherence of earlier Frank Dikötter works (on the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution). There are many important events whose unfoldings and explanations are a little bit short and simplistic, not as nuanced as I like. A year after China won its 2002 bid for the Olympics a virus began to spread from a market in Guangdong, mirroring the pandemic 17 years later in official obfuscation and a refusal to inform the WHO.It is not terribly surprising that this new book by a fierce critic of the CCP continues in the same vein. 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. Dikötter, chair of the humanities department at the University of Hong Kong and author of multiple books about Mao and the Cultural Revolution, chronicles this period.

China After Mao by Frank Dikötter — the grand deception

Hu Jintao took charge of an atheism program designed to weed out anyone with religious beliefs from the Party and populace, and became leader of the People’s Republic. 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. This book deals with the economic history of China after Mao up to 2012, when Xi JinPing came to power. The CCP learned the value of hostage diplomacy for one single dissident as Japan ramped up Chinese investments by 40%. 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.

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. In turn, the political retrogression of the Xi Jinping extended term will be incapable of turning back the clock to the hecatomb of High Communism from 1949 to 1976, incapable as well of veering the country toward a Kim dynasty-type regime. China’s pivot to exports and its accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001 were the catalyst for the economic boom but, in Dikötter’s telling, the development has often been illusory, fuelled largely by investment, with China’s growth targets being dutifully met, often thanks to creative accounting.

China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower - Goodreads

Membership in the WTO required a transparent legal system, a convertible currency, removal of trade barriers, protection of intellectual property rights and other business practices foreign to the PRC.Four years after the Olympics, Xi was appointed general secretary of the Chinese Communist party after a most dramatic series of events, only briefly described here: the most visible and extraordinary manifestation of the power struggle within the party was the flight to the US consulate in Chengdu of Wang Lijun, head of security for Bo Xilai, then party secretary of the western megacity of Chongqing. These developments were met by hand wringing and lip service denouncing the decay of socialist principles and spread of bourgeois liberalism. It seems that even a partial adoption of the free market, its application hobbled by an unelected bureaucratic caste, is capable of providing significant improvements to people’s wellbeing. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. His books have changed the way historians view China, from the classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China to his award-winning People's Trilogy documenting the lives of ordinary people under Mao.