This period of Chinese history was also the most recent manifestation of the century-old battle between liberal ideas and authoritarianism in China, covering as it does the explosion of ideas that followed the death of Mao, manifest in Democracy Wall (1978), the lurching policy reforms of the 1980s, and the democracy movement and its violent suppression in 1989. I honestly didn’t realize how superficial my own limited knowledge of China was (and I consider myself fairly well read) but Author Frank Dikotter is a leader in this and delivers a brilliant book. Further currency devaluations became the mainstay of the export trade but created inflation and raised interest rates.

China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower is a non-fiction book by Frank Dikötter, a Dutch historian. As the early reformer Zhao Ziyang – later disgraced for his opposition to the Tiananmen massacre – put it: “We are setting up special economic zones, not political zones. Damit schlägt er einen Bogen von Mao und Deng, die nichts von Wirtschaft verstanden, bis Xi Jinping, der als „Vorsitzender von Allem“ (The Economist) das Konzept des Feindes von außen mit umfassender Kontrolle der Bevölkerung verbindet. It’s absolutely a book university students and adults around the world should be reading and studying.A crackdown sent over 35,000 to jail, continuing through 2001 when 40 million Christians were persecuted, their leaders sent to labor camps.

The book describes the intrigues that occurred among rivals until the emergence of Deng Xioping who moved China forward and outward at least for a while into the Capitalistic world. As this magisterial book makes clear, the communist party's goal was never to join the democratic world, but to resist it--and ultimately defeat it. The author's views and accounts of what is now regarded by a great many people as an "economic miracle" and the great 'lifting out of poverty' of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens seem to offer a more sober and balanced account to this 'miracle'.

The topic of the this book is the governance of China in the post-Mao era, and it contains a great many observations but, for loss of a better word, misses the coherence of earlier Frank Dikötter works (on the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution). Peasants fell victim to runaway inflation and became migrant construction and factory workers living in shanties on the edges of provincial capitals.