A superpower at ground level
A new history of modern China offers an alternative view on its meteoric economic rise.
CHINA AFTER MAO: The rise of a superpower, by Frank Dikötter (Bloomsbury, $36.99)
Frank Dikötter, a historian of modern China, has a relatively simple method for research. He travels to local and provincial archives to seek access to papers. In Beijing, his request might be referred up the Chinese bureaucracy, eventually ending in a no. But in local archives, he is granted access more often than not.
So Dikötter, the Dutch-born professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong, builds his books often from the ground up, rather than top down. In his award-winning Mao’s Great Famine, he arrived at a very different – and much higher – figure of the number of Chinese who starved to death in the 1950s (45 million) by counting from local sources, rather than relying on records in the capital.
His latest book, China after Mao, is mostly concerned with political power and the economic development of China – and it has the same strengths. It is as much about provincial leaders trying to develop their areas like there was no tomorrow as it is about the rulers in Beijing trying to impose control.
His conclusion is that China’s rise was not well planned nor strategic. It was chaotic. “China resembles a tanker that looks impressively ship-shape from a distance, with the captain and his lieutenants standing proudly on the bridge, while below deck sailors are desperately pumping water and plugging holes to keep the vessel afloat.”
There is no doubt that the rise of China is remarkable, one of the most significant changes in modern history. When the Great Helmsman died in 1976, China’s standard of living was lower than when he took power in 1949. When Dikötter brings his account to a close in 2012, China is challenging the US as a global superpower and the world’s economic powerhouse.
According to Dikötter, the Communist
Party decided from the late 1970s to devolve some power to local officials hoping for a kickstart to the moribund economy. What they got were fiefdoms. Deng Xiaoping allowed special economic zones to sprout to attract investment. Factories, new building projects and infrastructure-building mushroomed, regardless of whether China needed them or not. The result was massive overproduction. One year, China produced 36 million TV sets; it needed 15 million.
It was paid for by debt. Local party officials pressured China’s banks to loan more for even more projects, knowing Beijing would never allow a bank to fail and risk business failures that led to unemployment and protests. Dikötter even quotes a local official saying that if you forgot your wallet it was easier to get money out on loan from a bank than go home. Ministers fretted, often powerlessly, about the extraordinary build-up of local debt – it rivalled total economic output. To this day, China has huge local debt.
China entered the World Trade Organisation in 2001 and the system went bang. The oversupply could be exported around the world. Out flowed surplus goods, in flowed foreign funds.
But while China got richer, it never became more democratic. Western leaders hoped China would reform its politics as the economy boomed and a middle class grew. Dikötter argues CCP leaders were determined that would never happen. Deng announced that China needed to use “capitalist tools in socialist hands” and the party put more power into its hands, putting cadres into businesses, rather than less. Laced through the book are instances of the CCP telling the West what it wanted to hear but internally declaring China would never deviate from Marxist-Leninism.
Sometimes the book is not easy reading – explaining communist economics does not make for a summer beach-read. Equally, the chapter on Tiananmen Square is a master class of history writing. As events spiral towards tragedy, Dikötter’s writing has the sombre drum beat of unfolding doom.
One of the features of the book is Dikötter’s decision to give as much prominence to Jiang Zemin, the former leader who died last November, as Deng Xiaoping. There is a current Chinese saying that Mao unified China, Deng made it rich and Xi is making it powerful. Dikötter thinks Jiang’s policies shaped modern China – the emphasis on big state-owned enterprises with CCP comrades at their top, and his order they should “go out” to the world and compete.
At times, Dikötter has been accused of being overly negative about modern China, a historian for the prosecution against the CCP. And there is no doubt he is firm in his views that the party was never going to reform and that the economic growth of China was remarkable but not part of a visionary plan. But Western views of
China have recently gone through a change, from optimism about reform to pessimism about Chinese competition. Dikötter’s
China after Mao is like a distillation of that change. ▮