A brilliant and powerful account ...This excellent book is horrific but essential reading for all who want to understand the darkness that lies at the heart of one of the world's most important revolutions An informative, detailed history that to some extent boils down to a repetitive cycle of reform and repression, expansion and mismanagement (which isn't the book's fault, it can't help that its subject is repetitive). I lost count of the times the author repeated the point that local governments or state industries could go into heedless debt confident in the fact that the state would be obliged to bail them out no matter what, for instance. Reading things like this I find interesting compared to the prevailing narrative that China's out to eat everyone's lunch and is going to take the United States' place as the preeminent world power -- every time I read anything that actually describes the inner workings of the Chinese economy in detail the degree to which it comes across as a house of cards is striking.

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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…. Rund 1/3 des Bandes nimmt der Anhang ein, mit Quellen, Register, Fotos, Verzeichnis der Archive eine wahre Fundgrube. The reason? China must first be freed from the communist system before it has a chance to truly flourish. A communist system is simply not good and the economy will never be able to flourish properly under such a system.

A revolutionary book . . . 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 . . . Historians such as Dikötter are there to warn 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. There are a number of problems with a tag line like “the most powerful man in the world,” the subtitle of this biography of Xi Jinping by German journalists Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges, its publication shrewdly timed for the imminent confirmation of its subject’s third term in office, expected at next month’s party congress. For one thing, it begs more questions than it answers; it invites comparisons that can be deceptive, and it takes the display of power at face value. The reader would be wise to approach such claims with a degree of caution. Zhao Ziyang seen supporting Tiananmen protests, supporting thesis that popular discontent only poses a real threat if used for intra-elite conflict

China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower | Hoover

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.

MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based Dutch historian, has previously published a trilogy of books charting Chinese history since the coming to power of the Communist Party in 1949. These include Mao’s Great Famine, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2011. The book “China after Mao: The Rise of a Superpower” traces the rise of China as a superpower in the post-Mao era. It is the third major work by Frank Dikotter, a Dutch academic based in Hong Kong. Earlier, he had authored influential works like The Discourse of Race in Modern China and the award-winning People’s Trilogy. Dikotter is currently Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. 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 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.

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

The epilogue has some of the best writing in the whole book, following are some direct quotations from it: 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.

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. MyHoover delivers a personalized experience at Hoover.org. In a few easy steps, create an account and receive the most recent analysis from Hoover fellows tailored to your specific policy interests. This book is a definitive guide of what's happening in contemporary China. It will be a difficult read for pro-CCP admirers and the like. 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.” 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.