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. China After Mao” is based on declassified Chinese Government archive and some recounts from notable figures such as Li Rui, a high-ranking official-turned-dissident. The book chapters divide the 36 years of coverage into two-year or longer periods and tell how China emerged from the near-collapse of the Cultural Revolution to become a global economic superpower. Probably due to the availability of supporting material, the book was more detailed about the earlier years (including a recount of high-ranking officials plotting the arrest of the “Gang of Four”) and cursory about the later years after 2000. As a person who lived through some of the transitions and has kept a close watch afterward, I value the book’s chronological approach. The book helps me to rise above the notable events and see a larger-scale trend. The recently concluded twentieth party Congress has evinced an unprecedented interest in China. The emergence of China in the post-WTO accession era and its complex political and economic structure in the name of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ has been an enigma to even those who have a keen interest in current political developments. 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. 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 After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower: Frank Dikötter

I did enjoy the chapter on Deng Xiaoping though, that was very well done and dare I say the party intringue chapter was rather entertaining. 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 pulsating account that makes clear how important it is to look beneath the surface when it comes to any period or region in history – but above all to China' Peter Frankopan, TLS 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

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.” 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. 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. The question remains whether Xi and his minions can manage the complexities of a modern economy while continuing to command the means of production, financing and resources that make it run. Reading this book makes me think the answer is a strong no. That begs the question, what happens to China's economy when the bills come due, and what ripples does that cause for the larger world economy? 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

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

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.If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. 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. 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.

China After Mao by Frank Dikötter — the grand deception

A central theme of the first three chapters is that paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping (1978–1989), representing the “opening up” initiative, is not deserving of his reputation in China and abroad as a pathfinding reformer. In particular, chapter 5 on Tiananmen in 1989, and then chapters 6 and 7 on the relatively attenuated rate of growth during the early period of reform, should temper the positive assessment of these years. While per capita GDP marked a steady progress from 1976 to 2001, China’s ranking internationally actually dropped seven points, from 123rd to 130th (234). The limited and highly constrained application of free market mechanisms—China basically remained a planned command economy—accounts in large part for the unevenness of mobility nationwide. As the author argues, top-down control by the same Communist Party that had perfected the dictatorial system from 1949 to 1976 held up progress economically and nullified any advance in political opening. The purge of Mao’s inner circle, following the tyrant’s death, amounted to a strictly surface-level show-trial outcome. Frank Dikötter is a Dutch historian specialized in modern China. He is currently a professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong. Dikötter is known for his research on the Maoist era and his books, including "Mao's Great Famine," which won the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. “China After Mao” is Dikötter’s recapture of Chinese history between Mao’s death in 1976 and Xi Jinping’s throning in 2012. Contrary to the prevailing narrative of the “China miracle,” Dikötter describes China’s journey as a tyrannic ruler class stumbling through economic development and globalization. Dikötter’s work is hailed as a correction of the popular view, presenting a different story based on solid evidence. However, “China After Mao” is not a complete recount and should be considered together with other works. 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 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. 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.

A blow-by-blow account of the uneven, reactive and sometimes chaotic course of economic policies . . . An important corrective' Financial Times