China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower

Product Information

Today, as Dikötter concludes, the party faces the intractable challenge of addressing a range of longstanding structural issues of its own making, without giving up its monopoly over power and its control over the means of production. By the late 2000’s China had linked Shanghai to Central Asia with a network of oil and gas pipelines and became the world’s largest cotton producer and purchaser. Zhao was ousted and replaced with Jiang Zemin, who waged propaganda campaigns to route out foreign collaborators plotting to defeat socialism and poison the body politic with western spiritual pollution.

Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui was allowed to speak at Cornell, where he asked for recognition and fighter jets, causing a diplomatic dust up and provoking mainland military exercises over the island.Some things were new to me though, I hadn’t known there were so many popular protests in the 80’s culminating in the 1989 student protests on Tiananmen Square.

Reversion to a mercantile past asserted itself in cities, black markets multiplying beyond Beijing’s control, to the point where local industries competed for raw materials with the state. A next campaign gave Party membership to private business owners, eliciting admiration from Western liberals, but really only embedded leftist ideologues in enterprise. Drawing on hundreds of previously unseen archival documents, award-winning historian Frank Dikötter recasts our understanding of an era that both the regime and foreign admirers alike celebrate as an economic miracle. I think all systems have their own problems, and the Chinese one has a large share of problems indeed. For this volume, he draws on 600 documents from municipal and provincial archives, as well as conventional sources such as Chinese news media.In 2012 Xi Jinping would become Chinese leader and inaugurate the Belt and Road Initiative connecting South and Southeast Asia, Africa and Mideast with maritime ports, interest deferred loans and graft to politicians playing key roles in securing long term leases. 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. A special thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing and Author Frank Dikotter for my ARC of “China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower” for an unbiased, honest review. Amazingly China has emerged as a challenge to the US and the West despite its criminal leadership and idiotic economic policies. This is for sure a book who have read Dikotter’s previous three books and I look forward to a possible next book as well.