Chaos theory
ROBERT BICKERS finds troubling but insightful reading in a new political history of China, from the economic travails of the 1970s to the dominance of today’s Asian powerhouse
When I arrived in China for the first time in summer 1985, I was astonished at what I found. “People people people dust dust dust,” I wrote in a letter home. Compared with Taiwan – a foodie paradise – there seemed to be nowhere to eat; worse, often there seemed to be nothing to eat. I had gone from one China, which worked, to another, which did not.
The new book by Frank Dikötter, who also first arrived in 1985, is a sequel to his three previous volumes chronicling the history of the People’s Republic of China since its establishment in 1949. In it, he outlines the trajectory of China’s politics after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. And he explores the “demented” economy – as described by a British diplomat then – that we both encountered in 1985, now widely assumed to have been consigned to history.
The conventional narrative runs thus. Once a sequence of post-Mao political manoeuvres had played out, the aged but pragmatic Communist Party veteran Deng Xiaoping assumed a paramount position that he retained until his death in 1997. As long as the cat catches mice, Deng would say, it does not matter if it is black or white: if capitalist practices help reconstruct China’s socialist economy and society, then so be it. Deng unleashed a set of reforms that transformed a country devastated by the ultra-leftist policies of the Mao era, and opened China up to foreign trade and investment. These “reform and opening up” policies were continued by his successors, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Despite the occasional glitch, China’s rulers steadily worked towards rationalising and modernising the state.
Dikötter does not accept this narrative. In his telling, there was ultimately very little rationality in what unfolded, because a truly rational set of policies would have led to the dismantling of the position and power of the Chinese Communist Party. In 2022, the Party seems never to have been stronger and – with the new technologies available to it – never more pervasive in the everyday lives of China’s 1.4 billion inhabitants. When “glitches” did occur – popular protests such as the 1989 demonstrations across the country – they were brutally suppressed. In Beijing that year, tanks and automatic weapons were used by the People’s Liberation Army to murder thousands of Chinese citizens. That has not been repeated – not because it could not be but, rather, because the party-state has mostly used other tools of repression.
Despite Dikötter’s commitment to presenting a “people’s history” in much of his work, a consistent and textured account of what this all meant for China’s citizens is largely absent here. China After Mao instead provides an account of the twists and turns of China’s politics – particularly its economic policies – and their impact from the mid-1970s to 2012, with an epilogue that sketches the main developments of the past decade. It is a complex story, and the focus on economic policy and its impact does not always make easy reading. But the conclusions are clear, if bleak. In China today there is more than enough to eat – but the economy remains demented, and the Party retains control.
The brutal suppression of earlier protests has not been repeated – not because it could not be, but because the party-state mostly uses other tools of repression