China After Mao by Frank Dikötter, 2022
Chinese Primer Zhou Enlai died in January 1976, and the Great Helmsman followed eight months later. After a brief tussle between factions, the Gang of Four was disbanded, and the era of China after Mao began. Putting it in extremely rough terms, the two principle actors after Mao were Deng Xiaoping, who was responsible new directions in economic development, although he was also responsible for China’s disastrous incursion into Viet Nam, and Xi Jinping, who was responsible for political reorientation and re-enforcement, although he was also responsible for the Belt and Road Initiative global-development program.
China After Mao presents China’s chronological development from 1976 to 2018 in two- to four-year chunks per chapter. The book brings up to date Dikötter’s sequence of books on China’s history from the Chinese Revolution in the mid-twentieth century to 2018. Analysis is primarily focused on economic development with secondary interest in social and political issues, which, given the log-jam at the top of the Chinese Communist Party, consists mainly of local economic subversion for personal gain and dissident protest respectively. Dikötter shows how Marxist-Leninst, Stalinist and Maoist fetishes, coupled with an ignorance of basic economics and an inability to learn from mistakes has given China a shaky boost to the upper reaches of world power.
The subtitle raises the question: in what sense is China a superpower? Apart from a chapter on the Tiananmen Square massacre and scattered mentions elsewhere, Dikötter doesn’t address China’s military, or its adventurism with respect to Taiwan or the Asian sphere. The rare discussions on foreign policy are at high and gauzy levels, and presented largely as idiomatic. That leaves economics, a reasonable path to soft power, but the book’s domestic focus tends to undercut China’s attempts at becoming important in world economics. There’s no discussion, for example, of the Belt and Road initiatives or the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), nor is the thinking behind such actions covered (the Belt and Road Initiative proper and the AIIB began towards the end of the period covered by the book).
Dikötter is content to point out how socialism with Chinese characteristics has failed the people. There’s nothing wrong with that thesis when taken as an assumption rather than a conclusion, but Dikötter leans toward the latter rather than the former. Perhaps, after writing books about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, that’s an unavoidable bias, but at this point in the timeline it’s also redundant (the only map of China in the book labels Russia as the Soviet Union). Yet facts, of a kind, remain: China did advance from the bottom to the top of the list of economically developed countries in a couple of decades. How did that happen? China After Mao only addresses the question indirectly when it’s not contradicting it directly.