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

The reviewer, Prof G Venkat Raman, has a PhD from Peking University, and is Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, IIM Indore) 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. 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. Xi Jinping inspects a guard of honour in Moscow, June 2019. Photograph: Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images

China After Mao by Frank Dikötter — the grand deception

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. The country was still struggling badly in the early 1990s when Deng made his famous “southern tour” and it later sailed dangerously close to the wind after both the 1998 Asian economic crisis and the global one in 2008 – the latter a point that is largely absent from most appraisals of that particular event.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.