From Rebel to Ruler
One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party
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- £31.99
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- £31.99
Publisher Description
A Project Syndicate Best Read of the Year
On the centennial of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, the definitive history of how Mao and his successors overcame incredible odds to gain and keep power.
Mao Zedong and the twelve other young men who founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 could hardly have imagined that less than thirty years later they would be rulers. On its hundredth anniversary, the party remains in command, leading a nation primed for global dominance.
Tony Saich tells the authoritative, comprehensive story of the Chinese Communist Party—its rise to power against incredible odds, its struggle to consolidate rule and overcome self-inflicted disasters, and its thriving amid other communist parties’ collapse. Saich argues that the brutal Japanese invasion in the 1930s actually helped the party. As the Communists retreated into the countryside, they established themselves as the populist, grassroots alternative to the Nationalists, gaining the support they would need to triumph in the civil war. Once in power, however, the Communists faced the difficult task of learning how to rule. Saich examines the devastating economic consequences of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the political chaos of the Cultural Revolution, as well as the party’s rebound under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms.
Leninist systems are thought to be rigid, yet the Chinese Communist Party has proved adaptable. From Rebel to Ruler shows that the party owes its endurance to its flexibility. But is it nimble enough to realize Xi Jinping’s “China Dream”? Challenges are multiplying, as the growing middle class makes new demands on the state and the ideological retreat from communism draws the party further from its revolutionary roots. The legacy of the party may be secure, but its future is anything but guaranteed.
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Saich (Finding Allies and Making Revolution), a professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, delivers a sweeping history of the Chinese Communist Party, from its fledgling urban beginnings in 1921 Shanghai to today. In encyclopedic detail, Saich covers Mao Zedong's early "experiment with combining the revolutionary potential of the peasantry with military strength"; the 1949 creation of the People's Republic of China; the disastrous, famine-inducing policies of the Great Leap Forward; and the personality cult behind Mao's Cultural Revolution, which nearly derailed the nation in the 1960s. While the decades from Mao's death and the implementation of Deng Xiaoping's economic reform policies in the late '70s to the present-day are less gripping, Saich lucidly details how the party has evolved into a market-oriented yet "essentially Leninist" political behemoth that "fluctuat between soft and hard authoritarianism." Though Saich's focus on high-level political gamesmanship somewhat obscures the deadly consequences of crackdowns on student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and Uighurs in Xinjiang province today, he offers key insights into how the party survived the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe and the steep challenges facing current leader Xi Jinping. This exhaustive, well-informed chronicle sheds light on one of the world's most consequential political institutions.
