The Chinese - Hardcover

Becker, Jasper

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 071955439X ISBN 13: 9780719554391

Publisher: John Murray Publishers Ltd, 2000

Synopsis

China enters the 21st century as the world's largest surviving empire, a vast bureaucratic dictatorship with close to 1.3 billion people drawn from 56 different races. This text provides a general introduction to the Chinese, taking the reader on a journey from the poorest, those living in remote mountainous regions, to the most powerful families in the capital. In between it looks at how workers in state-owned enterprises and the new capitalists are navigating the transition from a planned to a market economy, and at who are the winners and losers in the scramble to make this new consumer market yield golden profits.

About this title

About the Author

Jasper Becker was the resident correspondent in China for the Manchester Guardian from 1985 to 1990. He has since reported on Chinese affairs for BBC television, as well as for the Economist and the Spectator, and is now Beijing Bureau Chief for the South China Morning Post. His Hungry Ghosts was the winner of the Dutch PIOOM award for human rights.

From Publishers Weekly

In this ambitious work, Becker, a veteran chronicler of China (Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine), explores the impact that a quarter-century of economic reform has had upon the Chinese people. In a wise attempt to avoid generalizationsDall too easy to use when writing of a population of 1.25 billion peopleDBecker reports on how the various sectors of Chinese society have fared. He is after contrast, not continuity, conundrums rather than convenient answers, and he succeeds admirably. While entrepreneurs in China's coastal cities grow wealthy, he explains, millions of peasants in the hinterland remain mired in the deepest poverty. While privileged Communist Party members parlay their positions into lucrative business deals, countless numbers of laid-off state industrial workers fear for the future. Farming communities battle, usually unsuccessfully, against corrupt local officials who are taxing them into ruin; intellectuals battle with themselves over whether to ally with the regime or defy it. And over it all preside the elite few at the very top of the Party, aloof, out of touch, and determined to remain in power by any means necessary. Becker's stories, and the wealth of data and historical references he also provides, support his contention that, while the market may have made China richer, it has not necessarily made it a fairer or more just society; there may be more losers than winners in China's race toward wealth. (Dec. 8)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: John Murray Publishers Ltd
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 071955439X
• ISBN 13: 9780719554391
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 475