The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Financial Times, etc.
A history book that has attracted the attention of numerous foreign media outlets

A leading researcher of modern Chinese history
Frank Dikötter's new work

1976-2020,
From Mao Zedong's death to Xi Jinping's rise to power
Analyzing the hidden side of modern China's "economic miracle"!

Frank Dikötter's "People's Trilogy", consisting of "The Tragedy of Liberation," "Mao's Great Famine," and "The Cultural Revolution," vividly portrayed the impact of Mao Zedong's communism on the lives of the Chinese people, winning the Samuel Johnson Award and opening up new horizons for the study of modern Chinese history.
Now the gaze turns to “after Mao.”
"China After Mao" is a historical book that reexamines China's "economic miracle" from Mao Zedong's death in 1976 to Xi Jinping's rise to power in 2020.

Drawing on a vast array of materials, from documents obtained from various Chinese archives to unpublished memoirs and secret diaries of key figures, DeKötter meticulously explores how the People's Republic of China rose to superpower status.
The assessment that the country achieved an economic miracle through orderly development under the leadership of the party is nothing more than a superficial narrative.
Behind the 40 years of rapid growth that have characterized modern history, lies powerful control, contradictions, illusions, and constant power struggles.

In particular, DeKötter focuses on the country's unilateral actions during the 2008 financial crisis, its hostility toward Western intervention, and its move toward becoming a dictatorship with one of the world's most sophisticated surveillance systems.
And ultimately, it concludes that the Communist Party's goal is not to join the democratic camp, but to resist it and gain the upper hand.
This book traces China's political and economic trajectory, providing essential insights for a deeper understanding of today's China.

In the summer of 1985, when the movie "Back to the Future" was a box office hit, I, a student at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, headed to China to study Chinese.
--- From "First Sentence"

Deng Xiaoping frequently intervened to protect Chairman Mao's reputation.
He admitted that "some comrades point out that the mistakes made during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution far surpassed those made by Stalin."
“However, our evaluation of Comrade Mao Zedong and Mao Zedong Thought is not about Mao Zedong as an individual, but cannot be separated from the entire history of our Party.” He concluded as follows:
“To tarnish Mao Zedong is to tarnish our Party.”
--- p.64

Fourteen cities, including Dalian, Tianjin, Shanghai, Wenzhou, and Guangzhou, have been opened and have effectively become special economic zones.
There was only one condition set by Beijing.
Having previously poured billions of yuan into propaganda, they were now unwilling or unable to provide more funding to the newly designated special economic zones.
“We gave you the freedom to be open,” Zhao Ziyang explained.
"Don't come to Beijing every time a problem arises." In effect, local governments gained more discretion in exchange for less pressure on central government resources, and this seemed like a win-win scenario.

--- p.124

Just after midnight, the Prime Minister appeared on television and read from a prepared manuscript.
“We must take firm and decisive action to bring a swift end to the chaos,” he declared.
“If we fail to bring this situation to a swift end and allow it to continue, there is a very high possibility that serious consequences will ensue that none of us would like to see.” Finally, martial law was declared.

--- p.193~194

Deng Xiaoping argued that the tools of capitalism would be safe in the hands of socialists.
But his vision for reform contained a contradiction, one that showed he was ignorant of even basic economic laws.
In a political system based on the separation of powers, the central bank possessed the so-called interest rate and the deposit rate as the main financial tools at its disposal, whereas under a socialist system, banks were subordinate to the state.
With the successive decentralizations that followed in 1979, local banks became unresponsive to either the market or central government plans.
They only followed the instructions given by the local party secretary.
Despite constant directives from the central government, there was no market discipline or party discipline.
Therefore, the regime, which had no intention of giving up control over the means of production, including capital, had only one option.
The goal was to take back the power that had been dispersed to local governments and impose discipline from the top down.
This required a dictator prepared to carry out purges, cut outs, burns, and punish on a scale sufficient to bring every local leader to their knees.
To borrow the expression of a local banker, “What this country needs is an enlightened Mao Zedong.”

--- p.269

In September 1997, Jiang Zemin announced that he would address the structural problems holding back the public sector.
In his speech at the 15th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, he summarized the party's new policy as follows:
This policy, which seemed to argue, “Catch the big ones and let the small ones go,” or “Big is beautiful,” called for eliminating thousands of small, inefficient factories and instead fostering giant corporations that would drive industry itself, much in the same way that South Korea fostered its chaebols.
Rather than allowing entrepreneurial passion to play a significant role, the party believed that Beijing's bureaucrats could select future winners and elevate them to higher levels through massive state capital injections.
In short, they planned to increase rather than minimize state intervention.
The message to state-owned enterprises was simple.
Expand or perish.
Officials in Beijing handpicked what they considered the best and biggest companies and showered them with preferential loans, development funds, and other forms of state support.

--- p.305

In April 2009, Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People's Bank of China, declared that China's swift response to the financial crisis demonstrated the superiority of its political system, challenging the US-led world order.
The Chinese leadership believed they had sufficiently proven their legitimacy.
And, mirroring the US government, it began to act as an advisor to the international community and provide guidance on how to run the economy.
They explained that the capitalist model was unsustainable and that it was time to pursue a new approach that would ultimately prove its superiority: “socialism with Chinese style.”
Hu Jintao called this “the Chinese way.”

--- p.387~388

Between 2010 and 2020, growth doubled, while debt tripled to 280 percent of GDP.
China's debt dependence had to be improved by shifting demand away from investment in infrastructure projects and towards more domestic consumption.
Yet, domestic demand could not grow any further for one very simple reason.
That is because most of the wealth flowed into the country, not the people.
As Li Keqiang pointed out in May 2020, more than 600 million people in China lived on $140 a month, barely enough to rent a room in a city.
To stimulate greater consumption, a massive redistribution of income to non-party members would have been necessary, but that seemed unlikely to happen.

--- p.431~432