Product Description

China enters the 21st century as the world's largest surviving empire, a vast bureaucratic dictatorship with close to 1.3 billion people drawn from 56 different races. This text 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1267389 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 475 pages

Review
'A captivating study of the fragility and volatility of the most populated nation on earth, and with many lessons' -- Martin Booth, Daily Telegraph '[Becker] is an assiduous reporter and a shrewd analyst, and much of the power and pleasure of the book lies in his detailed exploration of the realities that lie behind the official smoke-screen' -- Isabel Hilton, Financial Times

About the Author
Jasper Becker has been a resident correspondent in China for a decade and was formerly 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.

Customer Reviews

journalism at its best
The rapid change that is taking place in China has always intrigued me and I was looking for an informative book on modern China when I stumbled upon this book.

Becker portrays modern China at both macro (governmental) and micro (individual/commmunity) levels based on his extensive journalistic repoting. The former is more or less a history of sheer political and economic mismanagement based on ignorance or not-so-innocent ideologies, as seen in Mao's Cultural Revolution. It is complemented with an effective use of statistics. Such statistics, often staggering and their scale hard to make sense of, are made meaningful and contextualised by his sympathetic reporting of the stories of individuals and communities which suffered immensely as a result of such bad policies.

The overall picture that emerges is the extreme volatility -politically, economically and socially- of China's recent past. Becker treats the subject skilfully by interwoving the broad picture with people's stories. It is perhaps thanks to this skill that the enduring impression the book left in my mind is not of cynicism or disdain for the Communist rule but of sympathy and admiration for the dynamism of those who have survived and continue to survive in such environment.

What I particularly liked in the book is Becker's allusions, both explicit and implicit, to the similarities between the Communist Party's political ambitions and those of the First Emperor of the Qin dynasty. It is full of insight and I wish he delved more into such 'historical' considerations (for example, consideration of the significance of the concepts of Middle Kingdom and nationalism in people's psyche would be interesting).

In short, it is informative, it is moving. It's a five-star book.

Highly Recommended
Becker is the Beijing head of bureau for the South China morning Post. His description of contempory China should be read by any and all who have to deal with China and the Chinese. he is particularly good at exposing the West's shiboleths concerning 'evil empires' and 1.5 billion consumers. I only have 2 criticisms: 1. the book is too short, the country is so huge, there must be much more to say 2. Becker has to keep his accreditation, I sometimes had the impression that he had much more to say but has to be careful about how he says it.