It is a fascinating tale of contradictions and illusions; of shadow banking, repeated anti-corruption drives and the existence of extreme state wealth alongside everyday poverty. Dikötter explores the decades of so-called 'Reform and Opening Up' – a forty-year period that has left China with the lowest proportion of resident foreigners in any country – and the country's emergence into a post-industrial era. He examines China's navigation of the 2008 financial crash, its increasing hostility towards perceived Western interference and its development into a thoroughly entrenched dictatorship with a sprawling security apparatus and the most sophisticated surveillance system in the world.
Drawing on hundreds of previously unseen municipal and provincial archives, as well as unpublished memoirs, newspaper reports and the secret diaries of Mao's personal secretary, China After Mao is a brilliantly researched and mesmerizing account of a country in flux – and in crisis.
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