China's Leaders

Author: David Shambaugh
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509546529
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China over 70 years ago, five paramount leaders have shaped the fates and fortunes of the nation and the ruling Chinese Communist Party: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. Under their leaderships, China has undergone an extraordinary transformation from an undeveloped and insular country to a comprehensive world power. In this definitive study, renowned Sinologist David Shambaugh offers a refreshing account of China’s dramatic post-revolutionary history through the prism of those who ruled it. Exploring the persona, formative socialization, psychology, and professional experiences of each leader, Shambaugh shows how their differing leadership styles and tactics of rule shaped China domestically and internationally: Mao was a populist tyrant, Deng a pragmatic Leninist, Jiang a bureaucratic politician, Hu a technocratic apparatchik, and Xi a modern emperor. Covering the full scope of these leaders’ personalities and power, this is an illuminating guide to China’s modern history and understanding how China has become the superpower of today.

Mao's China and After

Author: Maurice Meisner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684856352
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 614

Book Description
Presents a revised account of the revolution of 1966-1969 - Examines the social and political consequences of the upheaval - Deng Xiaoping - Democracy movement - Tienamnen Incident - Mao Zedong - The hundred flowers - Great Leap Forward.

China After Mao

Author: Frank Dikötter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1526634333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 518

Book Description
_______________ A SPECTATOR AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A revolutionary book' Sunday Times '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, TLS 'Essential reading for anyone who wants to know what has shaped today's China and what the Chinese Communist Party's choices mean for the rest of the world' New Statesman Books 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. Praise for Frank Dikötter and the People's Trilogy: 'Harrowing and brilliant' Ben Macintyre 'The historian of China' Spectator 'One of the few books that anyone who wants to understand the twentieth century simply must read' New Statesman 'The seminal English language work on the subject' Sunday Times 'Gripping and masterful' - Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Souls of China

Author: Ian Johnson
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 1101870052
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Book Description
From the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist: a revelatory portrait of religion in China today, its history, the spiritual traditions of its Eastern and Western faiths, and the ways in which it is influencing China's future. Following a century of violent antireligious campaigns, China is now awash with new temples, churches, and mosques as well as cults, sects, and politicians trying to harness religion for their own ends. Driving this explosion of faith is uncertainty over what it means to be Chinese, and how to live an ethical life in a country that discarded traditional morality a century ago and is still searching for new guideposts. Ian Johnson lived for extended periods with underground church members, rural Daoists, and Buddhist pilgrims. He has distilled these experiences into a cycle of festivals, births, deaths, detentions, and struggle a great awakening of faith that is shaping the soul of the world s newest superpower. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout).

China After Mao

Author: Heung Shing Liu
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description

China Under Mao

Author: Andrew G. Walder
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674286707
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

Book Description
China’s Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long period of guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the Chinese revolution was just beginning. China Under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist revolutionary state from 1949 to 1976—an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong. “Walder convincingly shows that the effect of Maoist inequalities still distorts China today...[It] will be a mind-opening book for many (and is a depressing reminder for others).” —Jonathan Mirsky, The Spectator “Andrew Walder’s account of Mao’s time in power is detailed, sophisticated and powerful...Walder takes on many pieces of conventional wisdom about Mao’s China and pulls them apart...What was it that led so much of China’s population to follow Mao’s orders, in effect to launch a civil war against his own party? There is still much more to understand about the bond between Mao and the wider population. As we try to understand that bond, there will be few better guides than Andrew Walder’s book. Sober, measured, meticulous in every deadly detail, it is an essential assessment of one of the world’s most important revolutions.” —Rana Mitter, Times Literary Supplement

Coming Alive

Author: Roger Garside
Publisher: Berkley Books
ISBN: 9780451620873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Book Description

Mao's China

Author: Maurice J. Meisner
Publisher: New York : Free Press
ISBN: 9780029208106
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description

Afterlives of Chinese Communism

Author: Christian Sorace
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1760462497
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Book Description
Afterlives of Chinese Communism comprises essays from over fifty world- renowned scholars in the China field, from various disciplines and continents. It provides an indispensable guide for understanding how the Mao era continues to shape Chinese politics today. Each chapter discusses a concept or practice from the Mao period, what it attempted to do, and what has become of it since. The authors respond to the legacy of Maoism from numerous perspectives to consider what lessons Chinese communism can offer today, and whether there is a future for the egalitarian politics that it once promised.

Mao's Great Famine

Author: Frank Dikötter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 080277928X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Book Description
Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize An unprecedented, groundbreaking history of China's Great Famine that recasts the era of Mao Zedong and the history of the People's Republic of China. "Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up to and overtake Britain in less than 15 years The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives." So opens Frank Dikötter's riveting, magnificently detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented because access to Communist Party archives has long been restricted to all but the most trusted historians. A new archive law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that "fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era." Dikötter makes clear, as nobody has before, that far from being the program that would lift the country among the world's superpowers and prove the power of Communism, as Mao imagined, the Great Leap Forward transformed the country in the other direction. It became the site not only of "one of the most deadly mass killings of human history,"--at least 45 million people were worked, starved, or beaten to death--but also of "the greatest demolition of real estate in human history," as up to one-third of all housing was turned into rubble). The experiment was a catastrophe for the natural world as well, as the land was savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments. In a powerful mesghing of exhaustive research in Chinese archives and narrative drive, Dikötter for the first time links up what happened in the corridors of power-the vicious backstabbing and bullying tactics that took place among party leaders-with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. His magisterial account recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.