1 - Introduction: Past and Present

Summary

When I first went to China at the start of the 1980s it was a very poor country, poorer than much of the rest of Asia. Everyone was dressed in drab blues and greens, food and most consumer products – to the extent there were any – were rationed, and the traffic of the cities comprised throngs of many thousands of bicycles. The World Bank development indicators placed China in the late 1970s among the poorest countries in the world with a per capita income about the average for Sub-Saharan Africa.

Poor as China was, this was also an exciting time. The “Gang of Four”, which was led by Mao Zedong's wife Jiang Qing and blamed for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution had been put on trial, and China was embarking on economic reforms. Markets were reviving, China was re-engaging with the world, minds were reopening, and the Chinese people were beginning to experience a new world of economic and personal freedoms they had not known for decades. At Nanjing University where I studied between 1982 and 1985, for example, all sorts of “salons” (shalong) sprouted up to debate western philosophies and theories, and the departments of sociology and psychology among others were restarted. Young Chinese were again going abroad in search of knowledge to serve China.

Fast forward 40 years and we arrive in a very different China, one with an upper-middle-income economy, which has a large urban middle class who can afford overseas holidays, modern cities and infrastructure, and whose political leaders are aggressively wanting to stamp China's vision on the future of the world economy and the system of global governance. The personal freedoms that had blossomed in the first three decades of reform after 1978 have been curtailed increasingly after 2008–09. The Communist Party of China (CPC) under General Secretary Xi Jinping has reasserted the authority of the party in all areas of life, preoccupied as it is with “stability maintenance” (weiwen) and its survival. Since 2011 the internal security budget has even exceeded that of defence, such is the party's fear of internal dissent (Shambaugh 2016: 63).