The New Chinese Empire - Softcover

Terrill, Ross

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0868407585 ISBN 13: 9780868407586

Publisher: University of New South Wales Press, 2003

Synopsis

A new society and economy has blossomed in post-Mao China, but an old state holds it back. The Chinese dynastic state’s blend of idealism and realism, attachment to doctrine, paternalism, and obsession with unity has continued to shadow revolutionary China’.  This book addresses the question central to China today: Is the People’s Republic of China, whose politics is a hybrid of Chinese imperial tradition and Western Marxism, willing to become a modern nation or does it insist on remaining an empire?

About this title

About the Author:

Ross Terrill is an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard. He has written several books on China, including Mao: A Biography, which has been translated into seven languages, Madame Mao, and China in our Time. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From Publishers Weekly:

Experienced China-watcher Terrill (Mao: A Biography) has viewed with a skeptical eye China's emergence as a major player in the international community. In this rather one-sided view of China's future, he implores the West not to pursue a policy of na‹ve engagement with the People's Republic, citing what he considers to be the dangerous state-centered legacy of the nation's dynastic past. Of principal concern to Terrill is China's continued territorial control over the culturally alien border regions of Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. This imperial expansionism is driven in part by what Terrill identifies as an arrogant sense of entitlement in the minds of China's leaders, coupled with a military capability that he overstates to buttress his provocative conclusion: that China is a "misfit" in the international system and is what Terrill calls a "semiterrorist outfit." The author also argues that if malcontented minorities on China's periphery don't tear apart the Communist regime, then a faltering Chinese economy will. Communist repression limits what Terrill crudely describes as the "Chinese genius for business" and the people's "industriousness," and, he expects, will bring about a powerful backlash against the state. One symptom of the coming collapse identified by Terrill relates to a yawning gap in income among workers and the fact that 1% of Chinese owns 40% of the country's wealth. This is alarming, but hardly foreshadows the country's collapse when one considers the size of the economic gap in the U.S. Maps.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of New South Wales Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0868407585
• ISBN 13: 9780868407586
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288