Zhangjiagang was an Orwellian ‘socialist utopia’. Before 1993, the bustling port city had been no more than a sleepy village of a few fishermen. After its remodelling, arrivals were greeted with perfectly formed homes and twinkling skyscrapers, boulevards ‘lined by fragrant camphor trees’ and expansive artificial lakes. It was ‘The Most Sanitational City in China’.

Today, the city feels like a contradiction. Built as part of a national campaign against concerns that market reform and economic growth had catalysed the moral decay of Chinese society, it seems somewhat ironic that a website promoting teaching opportunities in the city boasts American-themed bars, department stores, and Western-style pastries.

The city is symbolic of recent Chinese history scattered with internal paradoxes. Recounted in China after Mao: The Rise of a Superpower, historian Frank Dikötter examines how the People’s Republic surged from stifled economic growth into a dominant global superpower, under the spectacular illusion of ‘reform and opening up’ – a so-called ‘economic miracle’. The conventional story follows that China moved from an economy built on state ownership and central planning to one that allowed individual enterprise to thrive. On the surface, the results were dumbfounding; with annual GDP growth averaging at over nine per cent since 1978, China was dubbed ‘the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history’ by the World Bank. But some 600 files collected from a dozen provincial and municipal archives – including the secret diaries of Li Rui, Mao’s personal secretary for industrial affairs – reveal a more complex story. 

This isn’t to underestimate the transformation that China has undergone in the last four decades: an estimated 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty since 1978, adult literacy rates increased by 31% between 1982 and 2018, and it has become the largest U.S. merchandise trading partner. Amidst the spectacle of this boom, it doesn’t require too deep a dig to realise there are still challenges. Amidst stymied economic growth and a slumbering property market, the outgoing premier Li Keqiang said in 2020 that ‘there are still some 600 million people whose monthly income is barely 1,000 RMB ($US145)’. 

China is not the only major economy in which wealth disparity resides; between 1973 and 2014, the average salary of a full–time male worker in America went down by almost $3,000, while the median salary of a top CEO increased by 940.3% between 1978 and 2018. However, the figures that China chooses to share with the world do require a degree of scepticism, given that ‘nobody knows anything about China’. Dikötter’s latest endeavour provides an accessible entry point into the country’s recent history, revealing the truths which lie beneath China’s web of distortion; one of contradictory realities which time has found a way of uncovering.

‘Reform is China’s Second Revolution’ – Deng Xiaoping

Dikötter begins with the years following the ‘Great Leap Forward’, which had seen Chairman Mao reform China from an agrarian society into one collectivised economy. The subsequent famine – caused by the export of imaginary ‘surplus’ supplies – led to the starvation of 45 million people. Next ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ was propelled to front and centre in the Cultural Revolution, forcing friends and family to denounce one another to purge society of ‘Capitalist evils’. 

But Chinese people weren’t waiting to be lifted from poverty. As the socialist collectivised economy was preached as the ‘backbone of agriculture in China’, and Xiaoping ushered in an era of ‘reform and opening up’, underground factories thrived and stockpiles of reserves grew seemingly exponentially. The Communes collapsed and by 1979 several provinces consumed, bartered or sold 70% of their grain reserves on the black market. Farming contracts were transferred to villages, which in turn were handed to families. It was ‘privatisation in all but name’.

Some cities like Wenzhou benefited from a return to their mercantile past, ‘boasting more than 4,000 enterprises’. By 1983, they represented more than 40% of local businesses. And did Shenzhen’s construction achievements prove that special economic zones were “socialist” and not “capitalist” in nature? No: ‘the result was a flourishing black market as state units collaborated with independent enterprises to exploit the price system’ in a dual-price, state-open market.

China’s determination to maintain ‘double-digit growth’ meant that local branch managers of state banks lent more money to state enterprises. The drive to increase exports was catalysed by direct export subsidies, swap markets, export tax rebates and low-interest export loans. This transformed local economies and China became the newest actor on the world economic stage, having been responsible for less than 1% of global trade in 1978 but reaching 1.7% in 1988. However, inflation soared to 48% by the summer and the banks began to issue ‘I owe you’ notes of ‘very little value’. They were no longer able to top up and neatly tie the bow on the sac of debt gathered by local governments, officials and state enterprises – it bulged and tore at the seams. Cities were ‘up in arms’. 

A bastion of stability?

Cycles of repression and revolution grew towards the 1990s as oppression ebbed and flowed. The ‘Goddess of Democracy’ became an enduring symbol of defiance as the massacre and iconic photographs at Tiananmen seared into the world’s collective memory. It foretold the Republic’s security crackdown and its gradual move towards a surveillance state. By 2009, Beijing and Shanghai had installed more than three million security cameras. In contrast, police in London had access to 7,000. 

It seems incongruous to think that the West had anticipated the ‘spread of a free society in the wake to free trade’ after China’s accession by special treatment into the WTO in 2001 as a non-market economy. Although politicians were cautiously optimistic, they believed that becoming part of a rules-based international order would blindly coax the People’s Republic into liberalism: ‘political reform would succeed economic reform [and] China would become a democracy around 2015’. The deal meant that the balance of trade between China and other members went up from $28bn in 2002 to $348bn by 2008. However, this came at ‘the China Price’ – counterfeited copies of goods, exploitative migrant labour and environmental woes for the West, and a ‘race to the bottom’ for China, with local competition causing goods to be sold below the cost of production. 

The book is thorough and Dikötter’s emphasis on evidence-based history grounded in archival research is commendable. However, it only adds to an existing notion in which the prevailing view on China is well documented – one in which the country is no stranger to manufacturing its own image to bolster its smooth façade. It’s damning and incriminating, painting China’s leaders as opportunistic and insatiable authoritarians. The likes of Deng Xiaopeng were unshakably hardline in adhering to their version of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, wielding foreign investment to leverage economic growth while simultaneously stoking corruption and inequality. And, of course, his name will always remain synonymous with the Tiananmen massacre. However, in extending this narrative across China’s leaders, he falls short of a more critical debate. 

He finishes his epilogue by emphasising that when US secretary of state Mike Pompeo ‘announced an era of engagement with China was over’ in July 2020, ‘[China had] succeeded in alienating not just one of its greatest supporters, but also the one power that had created the very conditions on which it had depended for survival…they had antagonised a giant.’ In this, he devalues America’s economic reliance on the Chinese market, leaning into the common discourse surrounding China and its ‘rise to power’. Moreso, it alludes to the idea that the People’s Republic is rarely viewed as anything other than a ‘threat’ or ‘opportunity’ to the West, forgoing the fact that the global economy and China are deeply symbiotic.

As the Biden administration announces severe restrictions on the export of semiconductor chips to China, enforces the decoupling of Western economies to the state, and remains steadfast in its commitment to blocking China’s technologies in all capacities, there is a dearth of voices signalling the problems of adopting such an approach. It could risk the loss of 30 percent of the total revenue of US and global chip industry giants’, teetering us farther towards the precipice of the next global recession.

President Xi Jinping took to his podium at the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China against a backdrop of gallant music interspersed with synchronous rapturous applause. One might be persuaded into thinking the country a cradle of prosperity and stability; that the acclaimed ‘Chairman of Everything’ retains a firm political stronghold. In several ways, he assuredly does – after removing the constitutional barrier in 2018 which would prevent a third-term limit, Xi may remain president for life and his zero-Covid policy has spurred the country’s surveillance state. Yet, if there’s one indicator that a strong and stable appearance might not always reflect reality, it’s China’s own legacy in the days since Mao.

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