summary of this book : By Rosa Songtanin

China has been exploitative to imperial culture and Confucian notions of civil identity based on networks of relationships.  Cold war forced China to choose sides between United States and Soviet Union. In 1949, however, China allied itself with the Soviet Union.

Mao Zedong led the Communist Party of China to victory against the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War and was the leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from its establishment in 1949.  Mao was a great leader and had the ability in ideology, politics, agriculture and social reform. He spent his life fighting to change the type of society that the Confucian legacy had produced.  But Mao’s practice of throwing purged leaders and elite into prison or subjecting them to beatings and torture was a mistake to China development.

China gained benefits from its close relationship with the Soviet Union before 1958.  They promised a modest amount of Financial Aid and dispatched many engineering and technology advance.  But Mao foreseen that Soviet perfidy and the costs it imposed on China.(War & taking advantage on resources) When Mao had won nationwide victory and accomplished the road to power.   Therefore, Mao has been trying to encourage China to become self-reliant.

To become a self-support state, Mao implemented many strategies to grow economic development as well as maintain political power that would change substantially the social, economic, and political lives of China’ peasants and urban residents.  For example, in early spring 1951, the land reform campaign aimed to classify all peasants into another class and knock the landlords out of the system.  This new law would replace the old rural elites with a communist power structure in the countryside.

In January 1958, Mao Zedong launched, Great Leap Forward, a plan focusing on heavy industry that was advocated by others in the party. Under this economic program, the relatively small agricultural collectives which had been formed to date were rapidly merged into far larger people’s communes, and many of the peasants ordered to work on massive infrastructure projects and the small-scale production of iron and steel. The Great Leap failed because of flaws in its basic politics and in the inherent dynamics of China’s political system. It ended in catastrophe as it triggered a widespread famine that resulted in millions of premature deaths.  Mao also demonstrated his commitment to China’s transformation on Cultural Revolution.  He made many changes in various policy areas.  But this movement was incapable of uniting Chinese.

As anticipated after Mao’s death in 1956, there was a power struggle for control of China. Between the Gang of Four, (one of the leader is Mao’s wife)who wanted to continue the policy of revolutionary mass mobilization.  And the latter group, led by Chairman Hua Guofeng, advocated a return to central planning along the Soviet model, whereas the reformers, led by Deng Xiaoping, wanted to overhaul the Chinese economy based on market-oriented policies and to de-emphasize the role of Maoist ideology in determining economic and political policy.

The imperial Chinese and the Soviet system both relied on centralized control and bureaucratic administration.  After revolution, China has developed a more efficient, transparent, and dynamic political system.  The political organization structure comprised of Center (Party Congress), province(31 province level bodies – power from Central not province itself), city(full power – head by mayors, city governments), county(full power), township(people’s communes), unit and urban community(Government’s places of work).

Since 1978, when Deng Xiaoping acquired power in the CCP(Chinese Communist party), he tried to establish a new set of norms to govern relations among the top power elite. This change allowed capitalists to join the CCP.   Economic reforms in China have finally given the people of China an opportunity to choose a job they want.  However, these reforms brought many problems to the overall system such as self-interest, corruption, uncontrollable rapid economic growth.

The strategic vision of china’s leader recognized that China should utilize its relatively cheap labor force in the international division of labor.  After it entered WTO in 200, China sudden became one of the major trading countries in the world.

The last two chapters of this book talk about the effect of the Reform to Chinese society. For example, China has developed a middle class more than 300 million as Chinese people enter urban labor force.  So, the Chinese lifestyle has changed greatly since 1978.  Moreover, the reform era has dramatically reduced the political source of inequality. Class labels were removed.  However, after the reform, the increasing differentiation of Chinese by wealth raise and get-rich-quick caused many corruption problems. 

China’s leaders were aware about increasingly dynamic change in society.  They want the party to continue to hold the country together and guide it through a period of rapid economic and social change.

In sum, The Chinese reforms have not reached their end point.  Many of the issue involve increasing democracy within CCP itself.  Now that China has developed a large economy. The question is how China maintain the sustain growth and compelling moral framework?

review ???????

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