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.

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. When you actually look at the data China's GDP per capita is equivalent to Bulgaria - it's economic progress is not 'miraculous' at all, it's just par for the course for a member of the WTO.

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.

But, China After Mao provides an important corrective to the conventional view of China’s rise through reform. That idea is not yet dead, but it seems less robust than it did: the economy is performing poorly and is beset by profound long-term problems that include demographics, debt and a deflating property sector. Bei Dikötter werden die Privatunternehmen dagegen fast nur als Opfer staatlicher Repression dargestellt. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. I found the author's writing style far easier to read than some of his previous (equally illuminating) works, although such is the breadth of the 'sweep' over the last (almost) 50 years that the cascades of economic developments, policies, 'tricks', changes and corrective measures threatens at various places to 'overwhelm' the reader.Xi Jinping does offer useful insights into the biography and the ascent to power of China’s president, Communist party general secretary and chairman of the military commission: that he is the son of a prominent party figure and therefore a red princeling, that he was promoted to the position of mayor of Shanghai after the incumbent – chiefly memorable for his tally of 11 mistresses – was arrested for corruption; that he was head of the organisation committee of the 2008 Olympics, spending three times the budget of the Athens Games, previously the most expensive in history. A historian at the pinnacle of his field, Dikötter challenges much of what we think we know about how this happened. He challenges the idea that China would have been on a long straight road to unprecedented economic success after Mao's death.