The Legacy of Tiananmen: China in Disarray

By James A.R. Miles

Book Overview

In The Legacy of Tiananmen, James A. R. Miles asks whether senior leader Deng Xiaoping's gamble that prosperity would bring stability to China has worked or whether, instead, the country's economic transformation is fueling instability. The author, who was the BBC's Beijing correspondent from 1988 to 1994, argues that China today remains at least as unpredictable and volatile as it was at the outset of the Tiananmen Square protests.
On the basis of extensive interviews with officials, ordinary citizens, and intellectuals, the author concludes that China in the late 1990s is a country deeply unsure of its future. Politicians and public alike are asking themselves whether China is emerging as a new economic superpower with global influence to match, or if it is heading toward the chaos they so much fear. In the coming years, the answer to this question will have major implications for the outside world. With a population four times that of the former Soviet Union, a China in turmoil would have a colossal impact on some of the world's most successful economies.
About the Book:
"By brilliantly gathering together newspaper stories, street interviews, leaked official documents and Western chronicles, Miles creates a compelling story of economic change, internal political uncertainty and, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ideological isolation. . . . It's not a reassuring picture, but one that readers--and not just old China hands--should understand. This is an important book now and will be even more so any minute now." --Publishers Weekly
". . . a fascinating, sobering book that contrasts with much of the conventional wisdom on China. . . . [His] argument needs to be considered by all those who think about the future of the world's largest country and its potential impact on the rest of us." --Kenneth Lieberthal
"Miles's book is extremely lucid, coherent, and well-written. Its controversial main theme--that China is a country in deep trouble and may very well not survive a fractious succession struggle after Deng's death--is argued with persuasive force on many different societal levels." --Richard Baum, author of Burying Mao

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0472084518
• ISBN13: 9780472084517
• Release Date: April 1997
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Length: 408 Pages
• Weight: 1.21 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An important corrective to excessive optimism about China.

I spent 7 years in China, as a diplomat and a lawyer, and I recognize the China which James Miles describes. He has slogged around the grubby disaster sites which pass for towns and cities in the PRC, and has not restricted his range of interlocutors to the usual staple fare of journalists: Beijing-based dissidents, governmental officials and taxi drivers. For the clarity of its analysis, rigorously fair unsentimentality about China and eschewal of the intrusive personal heroics to which so many journalists writing about China succumb, Miles' book stands head and shoulders above most of the recent offerings by reporters who have been posted to the Middle Kingdom. What I found admirable about this book by a long-time and respected Beijing-based BBC correspondent was its contrarian approach. Miles refused to be dazzled by the glitter of rapid economic growth, choosing instead to focus on the inner brittleness of a political order beset by corruption, fissiparous regionalism, mass migration (nearly 100 million peasants have left their villages in the past decade in search of work) and structural inadaption of the political order to a quickly changing society. Although his book was published well before the Asian financial and institutional crisis which began in late 1997, Miles' analysis of China would need no updating to accomodate the devastating impact of "crony capitalism" on some of China's near neighbours (and China next??) which more superficial journalistic commentators seem not to have discovered until the crisis hit.Despite its excellence, I think the book would have benefitted from inclusion of a chapter setting out a more formal political analysis bringing in the perspectives of development, the specifities of modern Chinese political and economic history, and the Leninist state structure which survives intact despite the dismemberment of most of the socialist economic system. An overarching structure of that sort might have helped Miles (or his editors) avoid occasionally giving the impression of heaping anecdote upon anecdote, however interesting and telling those anecdotes are. This, however, is a minor reproach for what really is an excellent book.Since he predicts a more or less iminent collapse of China's political system, while coyly declining to make any guesses about when this will occur, James Miles has opened himself to criticism if this does not transpire. Such a critique would be facile and beside the point; the real contribution of the book is to take a close look at the underside of the rock.The book deserves a wide readership.