New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. xviii, 288 pp. (Map.) US$40.50, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-70190-7.
The avowed purpose of this book is to examine the historical, economic and political background to China’s transformation since 1978 from the Maoist system of totalitarian politics and centrally planned economy to the more market-oriented characteristics of the economic reforms introduced in the last forty years. “[T]his most recent evidence of change,” the author suggests in the preface, “must be seen in the context of China’s overall struggle for modernization if it is to be more fully understood” (xi). While political circumstances in the late 1970s were obviously critical to the radical changes brought forth first by Deng Xiaoping and his line of successors, “the manner and rate of progress from Mao to market, … could be said to be influenced by factors dating from much earlier in the twentieth century, or in the nineteenth century, or even 2,500 years ago” (xiii). Over the course of the book’s 11 chapters, the author explores this thesis from a variety of historical, political, economic and cultural perspectives.
Central to the author’s approach is a belief, quite appropriate in this reviewer’s view, that the essence of any society becoming “modern” is the adoption of advanced technology. What separates the developed regions of the world in North America, Europe, Japan and comparable societies from the world’s “backward” regions is, indeed, the application of increasingly sophisticated forms of technology in virtually all societal realms from military power, to economic production, communication and, most importantly, scientific advance. To the extent China has become increasingly “modern,” it is primarily because of the mobilization and organization of human capital and material resources for developing and absorbing technology, often from abroad.
As a thesis for examining China’s transition from the state-centred structures and policies of the Maoist era (1949-1976) to the more open and market-based institutions of the reform era, the author’s judgment is a sound one. The problem is that throughout the book’s subsequent chapters this thesis often gets lost in a rambling examination of all facets of Chinese history from the very beginnings of the centralized state during the early dynasties to the formation of the Chinese communist government in 1949. Virtually every aspect of Chinese history and culture, from the evolution of the Chinese bureaucratic state to its philosophical underpinnings of Confucianism and ancillary doctrines, to the cultivation of a highly refined literary style, is examined, usually in very short order, with no clear-cut and analytical link to the book’s central thesis. Along the way China’s development and absorption of technology from ancient times to the recent past is given some attention but without linking it to the central concepts that informed the author’s goals. At times, the book reads like a simple compilation of major works on China, virtually all in English, again without any common thread or analytical focus, as the main focus of the book—China’s transition “from Mao to market”—generally gets lost in the shuffle of largely unrelated and well-known material. (This is one of the first books I have ever read on China where I can honestly say I learned absolutely nothing new!)
This fatal flaw is most evident in the chapters that seem to have virtually no organic relationship to one another or to the book’s announced focus. While the first three chapters providing historical background to the 1978 reforms seem appropriate enough, though again without the tight analytical treatment that this subject deserves, the next eight come across as a hodgepodge of topics that lack any organic linkage and often seem completely unrelated to the book’s supposed focus. Chapter 5, for example, examines China’s “Confucian heritage,” followed in chapter 6 by a discussion of “orthodoxy, ideology, and law” and then in chapter 7 by an examination of “technology and political power,” again with very little if any linkage to the goals of the volume outlined in the preface. While some discussion, though very general, is made of topics relevant to the subject of “from Mao to market” in subsequent chapters on “command structures,” “management of China’s enterprises” and “public policies, private goals,” the overall focus on technology as the essence of modernization and how that played out in China gets lost. This culminates in the last chapter’s discussion of the “fifth modernization,” namely democracy, which is rather ancillary to the issues of technology and modernization since, as we know, many societies have adopted democratic institutions and yet remain hopelessly backward technologically and decidedly non-modern. Once again, the topic and goals outlined in the beginning of the book seem to disappear in a fog of sweeping generalizations and little specificity.
Published by Columbia University Press, which has a long record of producing some of the most well-researched works on China, this book, the reviewer was surprised to find, relies, according to the bibliography, on virtually no Chinese-language sources. While the author has had extensive personal experience in the People’s Republic, the book draws entirely on English-language works and indeed comes across as simply a rendition of their findings, which raises the question of why it was published in the first place. Just how it was that China managed to carry out the transformation from one of the most ideologically driven and repressive communist societies under Mao Zedong to today’s second-largest world economy with world-class corporations and enterprises is a fascinating issue that this volume provides little insight on. Such a topic, in this reviewer’s view, requires a very in-depth and extensive research project, with perhaps a few case studies of such highly competitive companies as the telecommunications giant Huawei and the first-class genomic sequencing firm of Beijing Genomics Institute and the policies that made their dramatic advances possible. Instead, the book is filled with well-established and frankly well-worn nostrums—Chinese people fear “chaos”/Confucianism preaches loyalty to the family—that explain little or nothing about one of the greatest social-economic transformations of our time.
Lawrence R. Sullivan
Adelphi University, Garden City, USA
pp. 326-328