The Chinese - Softcover

Jasper-becker

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0719565014 ISBN 13: 9780719565014

Publisher: John Murray, 2003

Synopsis

China has entered the 21st century as the world's last surviving empire, a vast bureaucratic dictatorship with close to 1.3 billion people drawn from 56 different races. The People's Republic of China, part Communist, part capitalist, is the heir to an imperial dynastic tradition that stretches back over more than 2000 years.;This book 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.;The catastrophic failure to engineer the most egalitarian society on earth has now opened the way to one of the most unequal.This book looks at rural China - the plight of barefoot doctors, hard-pressed rural teachers and migrant workers - against the backdrop of the urbanization of a billion peasants; and at how urban China, with its booming coastal cities and special economic zones in which millions slave in sweatshops, is being rebuilt. ;The new market economy is also driving the need for a new bureaucracy, smaller armed forces, a modern legal system, a freer intelligentsia and, ultimately, a different political system.;Having explained earlier attempts to modernize China, the book concludes by asking whether the world's oldest continuous civilization will succeed in the new century.

About this title

About the Author

Jasper Becker has been a resident correspondent in China for a decade and was Beijing Bureau Chief for the South China Morning Post. He is also the author of the award-winning Hungry Ghosts: China's Secret Famine and The Lost Country: Mongolia Revealed. He previously worked for the BBC World Service and the Guardian.

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
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0719565014
• ISBN 13: 9780719565014
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480