My Take | Chinese economists deserve credit for ‘rise of a superpower’
- Latest book from HKU historian takes Beijing’s radical price liberalisation of 1988 to task, but at least the nation’s leaders learned from their mistake
China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower by Frank Dikötter, Bloomsbury
“He must be unbalanced/There was something he said that I might have challenged.” – Mr Apollinax, T.S. Eliot
Fans and China-bashers will rejoice with yet another well-documented book by Frank Dikötter, his latest assault on the credibility, legacy and legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party state. The famed historian from the University of Hong Kong has dedicated his career to debunking Chinese communist mythology and propaganda, and exposing its iniquities and cruelties.
However, after finishing his latest book, I wonder if the subtitle, “The rise of a superpower”, wasn’t a sales pitch his publisher tagged on. Covering Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” in the late 1970s to the end of the Hu Jintao period of rule, it has been, on Dikötter’s telling, a long story of mistakes, mishaps, disasters, cynical power struggles, self-defeating policies, and naked greed and corruption. But if that was all, you have to ask how China managed to become “a superpower”, and not having self-destructed already!
Two meta-narratives
These days, everyone has a story to tell about China. But there seems to be two meta-narratives most widely shared. One has it that revolutionary ideology died with Mao Zedong. From the late 1970s, Deng set aside Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy to reform and open up China into something like state capitalism or authoritarian capitalism. The command economy gradually gave way to market reforms, all the while, though, the state regulated and guided those reforms.