Dikötter's highly-readable primer provides a valuable corrective ... Helps puncture the image of China's inexorable economic rise 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. 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? The main question that this study of China after Mao revolves around is an examination of a seemingly plausible and widely accepted hypothesis: that an implementation of free market methods will lay the foundation, inevitably, for democratic political reform.

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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. Dikötter delivers an excellent, highly critical description of China's spectacular expansion that emphasizes banking, industrial policy, trade, and currency … a richly informative, disquieting history.

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Every piece of information,’ Dikötter writes, ‘is unreliable, partial or distorted. Where China is concerned,’ he concludes, ‘we don’t even know what we don’t know’ This book is a clear, well-written recounting of the leadership changes of the Chinese Communist Party since the death of Mao. His narrative documents the fits and starts of the CCP leadership as they try to balance a modern economy but keep control of the means of production. None of it has gone particularly well in Dikotter's analysis. 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. I don't know I found it too dry, certainly harder to read than his People's Trilogy which was absolutely fantastic. 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.

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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 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. 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. 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 worldJust 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. 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 relates A blow-by-blow account … An important corrective to the conventional view of China's rise.”-- Financial Times

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In een uitgebreide inleiding geeft de auteur toelichting over hoe hij toegang kreeg tot Chinese archieven die normaal gezien ontoegankelijk zijn voor buitenlanders. Hierbij heeft hij de toon voor de rest van zijn relaas gelegd. China probeert internationaal aan te tonen dat ze sinds 1976 in een ‘Golden Age’ zitten. Hiermee beweren ze dat hun economie jaarlijks een grote groei maakt. Er zijn zelfs jaren waarin ze 10% groei zouden hebben gehad. Dit beeld werd wereldwijd aanvaard zonder het een keer goed onder de loep te nemen en dit is nu wat Frank Dikötter met dit boek probeert te doen. Hij zal het beeld dat we hebben van China, als grote economische reus in twijfel trekken. Hij zal nog een stapje verder gaan, door aan te tonen dat het land, ondanks zijn vele hervormingen eigenlijk nog niet veel verder staat dan veertig jaar geleden. Bovendien heeft China nog steeds vele schulden, overproductie in de fabrieken die staatseigendom zijn, het platteland wordt nog steeds verwaarloosd, etc… . Het lijkt wel alsof het land maar niet leert uit zijn voorgaande fouten. The book “China after Mao: The Rise of a Superpower” traces the rise of China as a superpower in the post-Mao era. It is the third major work by Frank Dikotter, a Dutch academic based in Hong Kong. Earlier, he had authored influential works like The Discourse of Race in Modern China and the award-winning People’s Trilogy. Dikotter is currently Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. An insider’s account of the rampant misconduct within the Trump administration, including the tumult surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. While many of China’s western supporters believed that growing prosperity would bring growing demands for political freedom and participation, Xi believes that the separation of powers, judicial autonomy and freedom of speech represent a mortal threat to the party, and that once China’s people are materially better off, they will agree with the party’s claim that China’s socialism is superior to western capitalism. As the early reformer Zhao Ziyang – later disgraced for his opposition to the Tiananmen massacre – put it: “We are setting up special economic zones, not political zones. We must uphold socialism and resist capitalism.” If there is something to criticize, it would be the human stories, which are the highlight of Frank Dikotter's masterpiece trilogy about Mao's China. We see those here and there, but reading about the economic mismanagement only hints at the struggles the common people had to put up with while their hapless idiotic overlords were busy exploiting the country.What does Dikötter’s history tell us about power in China and how it is wielded? As a serious historian, he starts by pointing out how little we know, referencing China analyst James Palmer’s 2018 essay in Foreign Policy, catchily entitled: Nobody knows anything about China, including the Chinese government . He cites the dilemma of the Chinese prime minister, Li Keqiang, who described China’s figures for domestic output as “manmade and therefore unreliable” and was reduced to triangulating the figures with measurements of electricity usage, to try to arrive at a more accurate guess. Der Autor begann 1985 in Tianjin sein Sinologiestudium, als es im gesamten Land weniger als 20 000 Privatfahrzeuge gab. 10 Jahre später nutzt er die Phase der erstmaligen Öffnung von Archiven zur Recherche. Seine Archivstudien in gut einem Dutzend Archiven, sowie Presseartikel und unveröffentlichte Erinnerungen von Zeitzeugen vermitteln ein kenntnisreiches China-Bild mit Focus auf die Wirtschaft des autoritär von der Kommunistischen Partei regierten Staates. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window)