From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China

From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China

by Merle Goldman

Harvard University Press, $343

A veil tends to be drawn over change in China that can't be woven into the narrative of the emerging superpower. That story has it that the Chinese people, their government and foreign investors have traded the risks of political reform for the profits of a rapidly expanding economy and the implicit promise that prosperity eventually equals reform. But as recent events have shown in Taishi, Guangdong - where local villagers are reportedly trying to oust an allegedly corrupt party boss and his thugs - China's economy-first strategy isn't without its roadblocks and discontents.

With Beijing admitting that more than 3.6 million people took part in some 74,000 so- called mass incidents last year, and the recent annual Central Committee plenum ending on a resolution to harmonise society by narrowing the wealth gap, the release of Merle Goldman's From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China is, at the least, timely.

Goldman, a China scholar at Boston University and associate of the John K. Fairbank Centre for East Asian Research, wears her compendious reading in both Chinese and English lightly, producing a readable, deftly structured account of the intellectual tides - both within and without the establishment - that have washed through China since the 1978-79 Democracy Wall movement. The result gives the lie to the common conception of a China in which continued juggernaut growth is guaranteed by a hegemonic one-party state with a mission to provide stability uber alles.