Minxin Pei The Broken China Dream review, recensie en informatie boek over hoe hervorming het totalitarisme nieuw leven inblies. Op 2 december 2025 verschijnt bij Princeton University Press het boek over de Chinees-Amerikaanse politicoloog Minxin Pei over het opkomend totalitarisme in China onder Xi Jinping. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verschenen.

Minxin Pei The Broken China Dream review en recensie

• “Minxin Pei has authored yet another major statement about China’s post-Mao trajectory. His provocative and lucid analysis of China’s political evolution after Tiananmen concludes with a fascinating account of the rise of Xi Jinping. It will focus discussions of China’s recent past and likely futures for some years to come.” (Andrew G. Walder, Stanford University)
• “In this outstanding book, today’s leading analyst of modern China reveals why it has been so easy for Xi Jinping to reinstate a totalitarian system. Minxin Pei shows how an unreformed party-state stood behind the economic miracle and how, in the absence of constraining legal or political institutions, Xi Jinping has found it easy to reimpose rule by fear. Anybody interested in modern China should read this book.” (Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times)

The Broken China Dream

How Reform Revived Totalitarianism

• Auteur: Minxin Pei (Verenigde Staten)
• Soort boek: Chinese politiek
• Taal: Engels
• Uitgever: Princeton University Press
• Verschijnt: 2 december 2025
• Omvang: 324 pagina’s
• Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
• Prijs: $ 29,95
• Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst van boek over opkomend totalitarisme in China

A provocative book that demystifies China’s great democratic leap backward under Xi Jinping, revealing why the country’s embrace of capitalism has given rise to hard authoritarianism, mass surveillance, and one-man rule instead of democracy as many in the West had hoped.

When China embarked on its transformative journey of modernization in 1979, many believed the country’s turn toward capitalism would put its totalitarian past to rest and mark the birth of a democratic, open society. Instead, China reverted to a neo-totalitarian state, one backed by one of the fastest-growing, most formidable economies on earth. The Broken China Dream pulls back the curtain on the regime of strongman Xi Jinping, revealing why the reforms of the post-Mao era have been reversed on nearly every front—and why the world failed to see it coming.

Exposing the truth behind China’s economic ascendency after the Cultural Revolution, Minxin Pei shows how, following Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping strategically deployed the tools of capitalism to preserve the Chinese Communist Party. Deng kept intact the institutional foundations of totalitarianism even as he unleashed private entrepreneurship and courted foreign investment, giving China’s one-party state control of a vast repressive apparatus and the most critical sectors of the economy. Only a fragile balance of power among dueling factions prevented the rise of a totalitarian leader in the two decades after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989—but this temporary equilibrium collapsed.

Essential to understanding today’s China, this meticulously researched book is a sobering account of why the country’s reformers and institutions could not stop a shrewd and ruthless politician like Xi from resurrecting dormant totalitarian practices that, for the foreseeable future, have spelled the end of the dream of a free and prosperous China.

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