A crackdown on enemies of Xi began, journalists expelled, a million Uyghurs detained in labor camps. Yet household consumption could not be increased much further, for one very simple reason: most of the wealth flowed to the state, not to the people. From internationally renowned historian Frank Dikötter, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, a myth-shattering history of China from the death of Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping.

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.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. Membership in the WTO required a transparent legal system, a convertible currency, removal of trade barriers, protection of intellectual property rights and other business practices foreign to the PRC. Attempts by Margaret Thatcher to bolster the confidence of British subjects living in the crown colony after the 1997 handover were met with hostility and threats by Deng and Li. I don't mind a book being critical of post-Mao China as there are plenty of reasons to have issues with China.

In a fascinating tale spanning five decades, he examines the country's economic transformation alongside the regime's determined suppression of dissent, its increasing hostility towards the West and its development into a thoroughly entrenched dictatorship led by Xi Jinping – one equipped with a sprawling security apparatus and the most sophisticated surveillance system in the world. Cases proliferated of stolen chemical and pharmaceutical formulas and led to the counterfeiting of household appliances, office equipment, industrial and agricultural machinery in a wild east of trade. 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. In wirtschaftlicher Hinsicht entspricht dem die ungeheure Dynamik der Privatwirtschaft, ohne die Chinas Wirtschaftswachstum und Exportboom nicht möglich gewesen wären.A crackdown sent over 35,000 to jail, continuing through 2001 when 40 million Christians were persecuted, their leaders sent to labor camps. Celebrity dissidents, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, support for the Dalai Lama led to a vast network of surveillance cameras and police stretching from Shanghai to Chongqing. Xi has conducted repeated purges ever since, under the guise of the longest anti-corruption campaign in history, consolidating power in his own hands by setting up a series of “leading small groups” which he heads, and writing his “thought” into the constitution of the party and the country, while tearing up Deng Xiaoping’s constitutional safeguards against a recurrence of the kind of personality cult and dictatorship perpetrated by Mao Zedong. The great boom was predictably followed by a retrenchment and austerity as banks were left holding up to 40% bad debts lent out to all sorts of scam artists, often petty officials in the government, banks and military. A year after China won its 2002 bid for the Olympics a virus began to spread from a market in Guangdong, mirroring the pandemic 17 years later in its official obfuscation and refusal to inform the WHO.

Frank Dikötters Standardwerk zur Entwicklung Chinas seit Mao (1893–1976) umfasst die Zeit von 1976 (dem beginnenden Aufstieg Dengs) bis zum Beginn der Corona-Pandemie 2019/20. Frank Dikotter is the author of a dozen books that have changed the way we look at the history of modern China, including Mao's Great Famine, winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2011. A new campaign gave Party membership to private business owners, eliciting admiration from Western liberals, but really only embedded leftist ideologues into enterprise. I honestly didn’t realize how superficial my own limited knowledge of China was (and I consider myself fairly well read) but Author Frank Dikotter is a leader in this and delivers a brilliant book.Dabei kann man eine ähnlich kritische Haltung zu China einnehmen wie Dikötter und muss nicht einer naiven Chinabegeisterung verfallen oder China auf dem Weg zu einer Demokratie sehen. Further currency devaluations became the mainstay of the export trade but created inflation and higher loan interest. On the surface, this makes the claim that Xi is the most powerful man in the world quite compelling. I'm talking myself into changing my review to three stars - but I'll leave it at four (with some regrets obviously).

The reason is simple: the leaders knew that the economy would collapse immediately, according to Dikötter. 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 . But, China After Mao provides an important corrective to the conventional view of China’s rise through reform.

Further currency devaluations became the mainstay of the export trade but created inflation and raised interest rates. For example, in the 1980s, he notes all the problems the nation had with finance and debt relief and currency exchanges and all of these things. In China After Mao, award-winning historian Frank Dikoetter explores how the People’s Republic of China was transformed from a backwater economy in the 1970s into the world superpower of today. The solution was to merge the failing state enterprises and offer shares listed in Hong Kong and New York. One of the most insightful and nuanced looks at the complex rise of China since the Second World War .