Richard McGregor (1) (1958–)

A well-written, succinct insight into the internal context in which Xi Jinping steers China towards global dominance. Australia's inept response will inevitably lead to profound economical and even cultural humiliation. Most interesting was the way in which Xi is shoring up his position by cleansing and then using the Party to abet and then take a slice of the entrepreneurial profits. How long can this all continue - anyone's guess. It would be fascinating to know more about Xi Jinping, the man and his family. Richard McGregor mentions briefly that for all the purging of corruption, Xi's family have been generously profiting. Will this be the ultimate backlash or will it be ignored?… (más)

McGregor's book is excellent. As a US-based businessman who traveled to China often in the 2010s to meet with partners, prospects and customers, I wish that I had read it then. He explains the structure of the Chinese Communist Party and how it influences and controls government, civil society, the military, business and the economy. All of that is new for Westerners like me who know our own governments and economic systems.

My only disappointment in the book is that it was published in 2010, during the tenure of Hu Jintao as President and Party General Secretary. Xi Jinping is mentioned only a few times, in no substantial way. The book predates the spread of autocratic regimes in the west generally, and the Trump Presidency in the US. It would be interesting to read an edition that covered the Party's role, and the shifting balance of power globally, over the last twelve years.

McGregor closes his afterword with this:

"China has long known something that many in developed countries are only now beginning to grasp, that the Chinese Communist Party and its leaders have never wanted to be the west when they grow up. For the foreseeable future, it looks as though their wish, to bestride the world as a colossus on their own implacable terms, will come true."

Pretty good prediction.… (más)

Useful for its overview as well as some of its anecdotes. But there is nothing particularly insightful or groundbreaking, and it is becoming dated.

> Most US presidents become lame ducks in the last years of their final term. So topsy-turvy is the Chinese political system that Hu, like Jiang Zemin before him, only really consolidated power by the time he was approaching the end of his period in office.

> When Jiang Zemin was appointed party secretary in May 1989, weeks before the tanks rolled into Beijing, he had to be smuggled into the capital to take up his position. A rattled Jiang was picked up at the airport in a VW Santana, China’s everyman car, instead of the Red Flag limousine then standard for top leaders. He was told to change into worker’s clothes for the ride into town to meet Deng, lest any of the angry demonstrators still filling the streets should spot him

> Jiang’s handover of power to Hu Jintao at the 2002 congress, held at around the same time as Xu Haiming received his first eviction notice in Shanghai, was a milestone event in the history of the Party. It was not just the fact that Jiang was replaced by Hu as general secretary, but that he agreed to step down without a public fuss. Hu’s displacement of Jiang was not only the first peaceful handover of power in China since the 1949 revolution, which was notable in itself, but the first in any major communist country at all. In addition, the transition from Jiang to Hu was carried out according to an evolving set of rules in the Party, setting retirement ages for top leaders and ministers, and establishing a new unofficial limit of two five-year terms for the party secretary and premier. … Each succession in the Soviet Union, from Lenin to Gorbachev, followed a death in office or a purge of the top leader. In China, Mao had nominated his own successor, the hapless Hua Guofeng, who in turn had been ousted by Deng Xiaoping. Deng declined to become party secretary himself but remained the paramount power behind the scenes, later overseeing the removal of two of his protégés, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, the latter being then placed under house arrest in 1989 for the remainder of his life

> Baidu had long finessed its internet searches for the Chinese government, to block commentary critical of the Communist Party. It sold the same service to commercial clients, in the case of Sanlu for rmb 300 million, to limit or screen out searches linking the company’s products to sick babies and melamine. (Baidu later denied selling this agreement.)

> Ask any genuine entrepreneur whether their company is private, or ‘siying’, literally, ‘privately run’, it is striking how many still resist the description in favor of the more politically correct tag ‘minying’, which means ‘run by the people’. In a people’s republic founded on a commitment to abolish private wealth, an enterprise which is ‘run by the people’, even if it is owned by an individual, is more favored than a company that parades itself as purely private. Most economists now skirt the issue, by dividing companies into two categories, state and non-state, and leave it at that.… (más)