China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower

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One of the few books that anyone who wants to understand the twentieth century simply must read' New Statesman 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? 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.

China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower | Hoover

Let me briefly highlight these continuities in three significant aspects. First, each generation of leaders in the post-Mao era, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping, has been uncompromising whenever the centrality of the party-state has been questioned. Continuity of the party’s numero uno status, irrespective of the leader in charge, has been an inherent and integral part of domestic governance. China watchers have been harping on the growing dominance of the party under the current leader, Xi Jinping. From the Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of Mao's Great Famine, a timely and compelling account of China in the wake of Chairman Mao Powerful ... Bold and startling ... Dikötter must be admired for the manner in which he puts a human scale on the enormous barbarities of the communist takeover of China. We cannot begin to understand modern China without being aware of the blood-drenched tale Dikötter so ably relatesI 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. Just bear in mind that if you don't have a serious depth of interest in Chinese economics and society in the 70s and 80s and want a rather general introduction to history and politics of the period you should rather look somewhere else. 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.

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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. Frank Dikotter, long time Chair of Humanities at Hong Kong University, has continued to hold on to his faculty position despite his books being banned in the People’s Republic. He sees this as fortunate since he is unknown on the mainland and still has access to the archives. In the preface to this late 2022 work he notes that regional archives for the Mao years (1949-1976) were opened in 1996 under Jiang Zemin and then closed in 2012 under Xi Jinping, but post Mao era files (1977-2002) became available. By the period of ‘Reform and Opening Up’ begun by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 the Party had become a system where industry, large enterprises, land, natural and financial resources were all controlled by the state. Systemic corruption and inefficiency had made the fiscal deficits and their mounting debts unsustainable.Dikötter was given access to Chinese archives that were previously not open to foreign researchers. The period from 1976 untill now is often painted as a 'golden age' in present-day China. It is the time of the Chinese economic "growth miracle": the economy often grew by more than ten percent per year, and rushed closer and closer to that of the United States. This rosy vision has also been largely adopted abroad, according to Dikötter, without first really looking carefully at whether that image is correct. Because ... is this really correct? I am hoping Dikötter is planning to follow up this trilogy with another volume, this time focussing on the age of Xi Jinping who, from the looks of it, has Mao-like aspirations. 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.

China After Mao by Frank Xi Jinping by Aust and Geiges; China After Mao by Frank

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. There are degrees of ignorance, nevertheless, and Dikötter is one of today’s major historians of China: he has been mining Chinese primary sources for decades – party records, provincial budgets and, when available, official records. For this volume, he draws on 600 documents from municipal and provincial archives, as well as conventional sources such as Chinese news media. 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.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.