China after Mao: The Rise of a Superpower
Frank Dikötter
Bloomsbury: 2022
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It is October 2037 and the Chinese Communist Party’s twenty-third Congress is set to open. The long line of electric Hongqi limousines parked outside a building in Zhongnanhai signals the high level of the meeting inside. For years, no senior leader has dared appear in a foreign car lest he be accused of ‘putting foreign technology ahead of Chinese science’. These men—and they are all men as no woman has yet risen this high—are gathered to assess a new document on the history of the Party after the recent death of the helmsman, Xi Jinping. His demise, at age eighty-four, has come after a decade of turmoil and violence. Economic stagnation that followed the War to Liberate Taiwan has ruptured the bubble economy that the Party has kept afloat for decades. Trade has been curtailed by embargoes; the economy has shrunk; the population withered despite all efforts to get people to have more children. The Lost Decade, as it is now being called, has brought home the realisation that China is stuck as a middle-income country that now devotes a vast share of its budget to surveilling and controlling its population. Beating down the flames of rural insurgencies and urban protests takes up all the energy of the leadership now that growth has faltered and the full effects of climate change are sapping the life of the country.

What assessment would be offered up of Xi’s twenty-five years in power? China’s rise had seemed inexorable until the invasion of Taiwan in 2025 resulted in a catastrophic loss of life and a profound shock to the economy, from which it had still not recovered. While Xi claimed that the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland was a historic triumph, the people living through a decade of stagflation and unemployment were no longer enthusiastic about the near total destruction of both the island and China’s economy. Beijing had never been very open to the world—more foreigners live in Luxembourg than China—but now it was a near pariah outside a handful of equally isolated states. It turned out that the world was less tolerant of illegal invasions after Vladimir Putin’s use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

• Tags: China, Frank Dikötter, Issue 29, Robert Templer