What Does China Think?
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
We know everything and nothing about China. We know that China is changing so fast that the maps in Shanghai need to be redrawn every two weeks. We know that China has brought 300 million people from agricultural backwardness into modernity in just thirty years, and that its impact on the global economy is growing at unprecedented speed. We have an image of China as a dictatorship; a nationalist empire that threatens its neighbors and global peace.
But how many people know about the debates raging within China? What do we really know about the kind of society China wants to become? What ideas are motivating its citizens? We can name America's neo-cons and the religious right, but cannot name Chinese writers, thinkers, or journalists -- what is the future they dream of for their country, or for the world? Because China's rise -- like the fall of Rome or the British Raj -- will echo down generations to come, these are the questions we increasingly need to ask. Mark Leonard asks us to forget everything we thought we knew about China and start again. He introduces us to the thinkers who are shaping China's wide open future and opens up a hidden world of intellectual debate that is driving a new Chinese revolution and changing the face of the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Commonly characterized as a juggernaut monomaniacally focused on breakneck economic growth, China is actually riven by a lively, far-reaching debate over its future, argues this inquisitive study. Leonard (Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century) divides Chinese intellectuals into a New Right that wants to extend laissez-faire market reforms and an increasingly influential New Left that decries rising inequality, corruption and environmental destruction and wants a strong government to rein in capitalist elites and protect workers. Meanwhile, political reformers push cautiously for local and Communist Party elections against a consensus that associates democracy with chaotic mob rule or national dismemberment. China's foreign policy is split between liberal internationalists and truculent "neo-comms" who contend that China must be ready to use force against its enemies. The author notes that these ideological divisions resemble those in Western countries, but emphasizes the distinctiveness of Chinese ideas, like the concept of the "deliberative dictatorship" of a one-party state that stays responsive to popular pressures, or a "Walled World" where globalization enhances rather than erodes the autonomy of national governments. Leonard's is a lucid, eye-opening account of China's intellectual scene and its growing importance to the world.
