Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001
China from the inside
In the century since China became a republic, its social pyramid has survived unchanged - a broad base made up of millions of barely educated peasants and, at the apex, a tiny elite who control the country. The Chinese provides a general introduction to the people of China, taking the reader on a journey from the poorest, those living in remote mountainous regions, to the most powerful families in the campital. 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.
The catastrophic failure to engineer the most egalitarian society on earth has now given way to the most unequal. The new market economy is also driving the need for a new bureaucracy, smaller armed forces, a modern legal system, a freer intelligentsia and, ultimately, a different political system. Having explained earlier attempts to modernize China, the book concludes by asking whether the world's oldest continuous civilization will succeed in the new century.
The Chinese
Published by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd, 2000
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