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China After Mao
- The Rise of a Superpower
- Narrated by: Daniel York Loh
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
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China After Mao
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Publisher's Summary
A SPECTATOR AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR
From the Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of Mao's Great Famine, a timely and compelling account of China in the wake of Chairman Mao
In China After Mao, award-winning historian Frank Dikötter explores how the People’s Republic of China was transformed from a backwater economy in the 1970s into the world superpower of today. His account is the first to be based on hundreds of previously unseen archival documents, from the secret minutes of top party meetings to confidential bank reports. Unfolding with great narrative sweep, this riveting, richly detailed chronicle recasts our understanding of an era that both the regime and foreign admirers celebrate as an economic miracle.
In charting four decades of so-called ‘Reform and Opening Up’ and China’s emergence as a world power, Dikötter tells a fascinating tale of contradictions and illusions, of shadow banking, anti-corruption drives and extreme state wealth standing alongside everyday poverty. He examines China’s approach to the 2008 financial crash, the country’s increasing hostility towards perceived Western interference and its development into a thoroughly entrenched dictatorship – one equipped with a sprawling security apparatus and the most sophisticated surveillance system in the world. Ultimately, the book concludes, the communist party’s goal was never to join the democratic sphere, but to resist it – and then defeat it.
Critic Reviews
A pulsating account that makes clear how important it is to look beneath the surface when it comes to any period or region in history – but above all to China. (Peter Frankopan)
A revolutionary book... Breaking with the bland orthodoxy peddled in some of our finest universities, Dikötter says that China today is a Leviathan where a party, fascist in all but name, controls society … Dikötter marshals a daunting array of statistics and documents... Historians such as Dikötter are there to warn. (Michael Sheridan)
With China After Mao, Dikötter has told the story of the years after Mao’s death in 1976 until the arrival of President Xi... Dikötter, who writes with considerable verve, blasts several holes in the notion that a Marxist-Leninist system can ever bring real reform. The new dictator’s reign will not end well, any more than that of his hero. Poor China – a great civilisation suffering under Communist rule. (Chris Patten)
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What listeners say about China After Mao
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Leo
- 01-01-2024
The Fall and Rise again of a Totalitarianism 2.0
Right after Mao, everything was changing to the better, until 1989, and the economy continued the same way till 2012.
But why people in power is willing to go back to Mao which means disaster for the nation and its people?
This book provides very reliable details of what happened, and some good hints and analyses.
Then why Mao 2.0 is successful after so heavy prices a nation had paid, or why the nation had not learnt the lesson (Tragedy of Liberation, The Great Famine, The Great Cultural Revolution)?. I am looking forward to a sequel for this one.
By the way, when listening to this book, sometimes Orwell came up from time to time and I felt quite relevant:
For a totalitarian regime, "Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
The object of power is power.
Power is not over things, but over men.
Power is inflicting humiliation. is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. "
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Naoise McDonagh
- 21-10-2023
An engaging jaunt through China's economic rise
This audio book provides a highly informed account of the Party's difficult path towards market liberalization, while maintaining political discipline within a one Party Communist state.
Dikotter, like a small number of other Chinese scholars understands the real journey the Party embarked - not economic liberalization, rather economic modernization in which markets were kept under the Party's heel.
Whenever economic freedoms seemed too much, and implied political reform, the Party has engage Leninist political reform to cage capitalism within Party machinery. Dikotter draws this history out brilliantly. A must read for China watchers.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Tracee
- 23-07-2023
Another excellent piece of work
Excellent work. Well researched as always. I appreciate that this did not cover much COVID-19 information despite just being released. It touched on it briefly but was not a major part. Look forward to many more books by Dikötter.
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