Mao's Invisible Hand
edited by Sebastian Heilmann, Elizabeth Perry
Harvard
This book attempts to answer one of the great puzzles of international politics. Twenty years after the demise of communism in the Soviet Union and Europe, how has the party remained in power in China and delivered three decades of remarkable growth?
How has it maintained the Leninist one-party state it inherited from its elder brother, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and avoided political reform, while developing a dynamic and entrepreneurial economy at the same time?
Since the military crackdown in spring 1989, many scholars and politicians in the West have confidently predicted the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), saying that economic reform would inevitably lead to political reform and that one was impossible without the other. But they have been proved spectacularly wrong. The government today has more than US$3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, the largest military in East Asia and an internal security apparatus able to snuff out 'the Jasmine revolution' in ways that Hosni Mubarak and Zine el Abidine Ben Ali must deeply envy.
This book - subtitled The Political Foundations of Adaptive Government in China - presents some answers to the puzzle. Its editors are China specialists at Trier and Harvard universities and it contains essays by nine contributors.
The book argues that the CCP has avoided the mistakes of the Soviet and eastern European communist parties - where bureaucratic conservatism and entrenched interests blocked reforms - by its adaptability and willingness to try new things. This flexibility, the book argues, is in part a result of the three decades of struggle before the CCP took power.