DW News
2.78M subscribers
Chinese leader Xi Jinping is widely regarded today as the country's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong.
But in his latest book called “China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom” China-watcher Roger Garside predicts that he will soon be removed from office.
A quick overview of the power Xi has amassed:
- In November 2012 he was elected Communist Party General Secretary and Chairman of the party's Central Military Commission, making him China's paramount leader.
- A few months later he launched a national anti-corruption drive which many see as having been conducted outside the framework of due process.
- It's seen the downfall of hundreds of thousands of officials and functionaries.
- In 2018, the National People's Congress abolished term limits for the president and vice-president, making Xi a potentially life-long leader.
- And in 2020 Xi called anti-monopoly efforts against online firms one of the country's chief goals.
- A speech by Alibaba founder Jack Ma criticizing the party is said to have infuriated Xi.
Unrealistic expectations about change in China
By
James Mann
James Mann, a resident fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is the author of three books about the United States and China, including
“The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression” and
“About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship With China, From Nixon to Clinton.”
September 10, 2021
===
1
Western fantasies about China are rich and varied and have deep historical roots. But a new book called “China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom” stands out as a pipe dream of mind-boggling implausibility.
In it, author Roger Garside lays out his belief that there will be a coup d’etat in Beijing in which rivals within the Chinese Communist Party will overthrow the current leader, Xi Jinping — and that this will happen within the next 18 months or so.
Unlikely as that sounds, this is merely the second-most far-fetched idea in “China Coup.” It is topped by what comes next: The book argues that the supposed new leaders, having overthrown Xi, will then promptly open the way for democracy, the rule of law and economic liberalization in China.
Such dubious predictions are all the more surprising if you know that the author previously wrote one of the most informative books about modern China. Garside was a British diplomat in Beijing in the 1970s, and his book “Coming Alive” (1981) is the best historical account of the events (the politics, the emerging dissent) in the years before and after the 1976 death of Mao Zedong, leading up to Deng Xiaoping’s rise to power.
In the four decades since then, Garside has worked for the World Bank and in the fields of banking, development and capital markets. This is significant, because his later experiences seem to have shaped how he came to the conclusions in “China Coup”: He has imbued the book with many of the international financial community’s dreams about China. Garfield believes that democratic change is coming to China in large part because economic necessities will require it.
(University of California Press)
During the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, a fantasy took hold that China was bound to open up its repressive one-party system to political liberalization or even democracy. The notion was that with growing trade and investment, and with increasing prosperity, the Chinese people, notably the middle classes, would become the driving force for political change. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof caught the spirit of those times when he wrote in 2004, following the opening of Starbucks stores in China: “No middle class is content with more choices of coffees than of candidates on a ballot.”
Political liberalization didn’t happen, of course. But at the same time, a second fantasy also took shape in the West: that after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, it would inevitably move toward economic liberalization. To compete globally, this thinking went, China would be compelled by the rules of the international economy to take definitive steps toward a market economy, privatize its mammoth state industries, phase out subsidies and other protections for Chinese products, lift barriers to imports, and end the theft of intellectual property.
This second fantasy still lingers, and Garfield reflects this viewpoint. As he summarizes in “China Coup,” “Radical restructuring is needed to put the economy on a sounder footing.” That, in fact, is what many bankers and economists at places like the World Bank have been saying about China for close to a quarter-century. The optimism that such political and economic changes are all but inevitable is a legacy of the end of the Cold War, when Francis Fukuyama famously spoke of “the end of history.” (Indeed, Clinton told then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin directly that Chinese policy was “on the wrong side of history.”)
It is worth noting that “China Coup” offers a new variant on the old fantasies. Earlier, it was said that the Chinese regime would move toward liberalization because of pressure from below: That is, the emerging middle classes would demand it. Now, Garfield suggests that liberalization will be imposed from the top down, through a coup carried out by Chinese leaders such as Premier Li Keqiang and Vice President Wang Qishan.
Of course, none of us from the outside can know what’s going on inside the top ranks of the Chinese Communist Party. So what’s so implausible about Garfield’s scenario?
Well, for starters, there is not the slightest indication that Chinese leaders have either the desire or the ability to stage a coup. And if, hypothetically, any of them ever expressed interest in doing so — even to a close Chinese friend, much less a British author — China’s formidable Ministry of State Security would probably know about it and report it to Xi. So, in a sense, the coup scenario underestimates both the ability of China’s pervasive security apparatus and the ruthlessness of China’s leader.
“China Coup” further argues that one of the reasons other Chinese leaders might seek to seize power would be a desire to improve relations with the United States. “Xi’s rivals understand that trust between China and the United States cannot be rebuilt without the removal of Xi from power, as a prelude to changing China’s political system,” Garside writes.
But if China’s leaders really wanted better ties with America, they would almost certainly try to get them (and probably succeed in doing so) through lesser means, such as by making specific changes in security and trade policies, rather than by taking the mortal risks of a coup.
Whatever Chinese leaders may suggest to visitors to Beijing from places like Wall Street or the institutions of international finance, there is no concrete sign that any of them favor far-reaching liberalization, political or economic. And this points to the biggest flaw in Garside’s book: It ignores the developments in China over the past few decades, namely the emergence of strong vested financial interests in the repressive status quo, which has enriched quite a few of the country’s leaders; a pervasive, technologically advanced security apparatus; and intense populist nationalism, whipped up by Chinese leaders.
September 10, 2021
===
1
Western fantasies about China are rich and varied and have deep historical roots. But a new book called “China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom” stands out as a pipe dream of mind-boggling implausibility.
In it, author Roger Garside lays out his belief that there will be a coup d’etat in Beijing in which rivals within the Chinese Communist Party will overthrow the current leader, Xi Jinping — and that this will happen within the next 18 months or so.
Unlikely as that sounds, this is merely the second-most far-fetched idea in “China Coup.” It is topped by what comes next: The book argues that the supposed new leaders, having overthrown Xi, will then promptly open the way for democracy, the rule of law and economic liberalization in China.
Such dubious predictions are all the more surprising if you know that the author previously wrote one of the most informative books about modern China. Garside was a British diplomat in Beijing in the 1970s, and his book “Coming Alive” (1981) is the best historical account of the events (the politics, the emerging dissent) in the years before and after the 1976 death of Mao Zedong, leading up to Deng Xiaoping’s rise to power.
In the four decades since then, Garside has worked for the World Bank and in the fields of banking, development and capital markets. This is significant, because his later experiences seem to have shaped how he came to the conclusions in “China Coup”: He has imbued the book with many of the international financial community’s dreams about China. Garfield believes that democratic change is coming to China in large part because economic necessities will require it.
(University of California Press)During the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, a fantasy took hold that China was bound to open up its repressive one-party system to political liberalization or even democracy. The notion was that with growing trade and investment, and with increasing prosperity, the Chinese people, notably the middle classes, would become the driving force for political change. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof caught the spirit of those times when he wrote in 2004, following the opening of Starbucks stores in China: “No middle class is content with more choices of coffees than of candidates on a ballot.”
Political liberalization didn’t happen, of course. But at the same time, a second fantasy also took shape in the West: that after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, it would inevitably move toward economic liberalization. To compete globally, this thinking went, China would be compelled by the rules of the international economy to take definitive steps toward a market economy, privatize its mammoth state industries, phase out subsidies and other protections for Chinese products, lift barriers to imports, and end the theft of intellectual property.
This second fantasy still lingers, and Garfield reflects this viewpoint. As he summarizes in “China Coup,” “Radical restructuring is needed to put the economy on a sounder footing.” That, in fact, is what many bankers and economists at places like the World Bank have been saying about China for close to a quarter-century. The optimism that such political and economic changes are all but inevitable is a legacy of the end of the Cold War, when Francis Fukuyama famously spoke of “the end of history.” (Indeed, Clinton told then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin directly that Chinese policy was “on the wrong side of history.”)
It is worth noting that “China Coup” offers a new variant on the old fantasies. Earlier, it was said that the Chinese regime would move toward liberalization because of pressure from below: That is, the emerging middle classes would demand it. Now, Garfield suggests that liberalization will be imposed from the top down, through a coup carried out by Chinese leaders such as Premier Li Keqiang and Vice President Wang Qishan.
Of course, none of us from the outside can know what’s going on inside the top ranks of the Chinese Communist Party. So what’s so implausible about Garfield’s scenario?
Well, for starters, there is not the slightest indication that Chinese leaders have either the desire or the ability to stage a coup. And if, hypothetically, any of them ever expressed interest in doing so — even to a close Chinese friend, much less a British author — China’s formidable Ministry of State Security would probably know about it and report it to Xi. So, in a sense, the coup scenario underestimates both the ability of China’s pervasive security apparatus and the ruthlessness of China’s leader.
“China Coup” further argues that one of the reasons other Chinese leaders might seek to seize power would be a desire to improve relations with the United States. “Xi’s rivals understand that trust between China and the United States cannot be rebuilt without the removal of Xi from power, as a prelude to changing China’s political system,” Garside writes.
But if China’s leaders really wanted better ties with America, they would almost certainly try to get them (and probably succeed in doing so) through lesser means, such as by making specific changes in security and trade policies, rather than by taking the mortal risks of a coup.
Whatever Chinese leaders may suggest to visitors to Beijing from places like Wall Street or the institutions of international finance, there is no concrete sign that any of them favor far-reaching liberalization, political or economic. And this points to the biggest flaw in Garside’s book: It ignores the developments in China over the past few decades, namely the emergence of strong vested financial interests in the repressive status quo, which has enriched quite a few of the country’s leaders; a pervasive, technologically advanced security apparatus; and intense populist nationalism, whipped up by Chinese leaders.
===
(Oxford University Press)While “China Coup” represents a new Western dream about China, another book, “The Gate to China: A New History of the People’s Republic and Hong Kong” by the journalist Michael Sheridan, a veteran foreign correspondent, returns us to the unhappy realities we face today. Sheridan traces the story of Hong Kong from its last years under British rule in the 1970s and 1980s, through the handover to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, to China’s recent abandonment of its pledge to let Hong Kong have “a high degree of autonomy” until 2047.
Sheridan’s narrative has quite a few flaws. He spends the first half of the book bogged down in the weeds of Britain’s diplomatic negotiations with China over Hong Kong’s future, struggling to find ways to make the account colorful without adding much new perspective. The final parts of the book, which cover the past decade of upheavals in Hong Kong, read like a long, repeatedly updated news story. Overall, for an American reader, the book seems written too much for a British audience: It dwells on intra-British debates, and senior British officials are regularly identified not merely by their universities (Oxford, Cambridge) but by which colleges they attended there (Balliol, St. John’s), and sometimes by their boarding schools as well.
Still, Sheridan’s account testifies to the Western dreams about China and to the ways they are shattered. Then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, he writes, “was ushered away for his first meeting with Jiang Zemin, who, he seems to have decided on the spot, was a reformer.”
Sheridan describes how China crushed Hong Kong’s democracy movement and its street protests — and now, after he finished the book, its once-lively free press as well. “The Gate to China” details the regime’s use of its cyber-capabilities to monitor dissent, block communications and even interfere with efforts to measure public sentiment in Hong Kong.
Garfield, ever hopeful for democratic change, tells us in “China Coup” that “political modernization is the great unfinished business of contemporary China.” But what if the advanced surveillance state that China has been developing is, in fact, its unique contribution to political modernization?
China Coup
The Great Leap to Freedom
By Roger Garside
University of California.
231 pp. $23.95
The Gate to China
A New History of the People’s Republic and Hong Kong
By Michael Sheridan
Oxford.
456 pp. $29.95
By James MannJames Mann, a resident fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is the author of three books about the United States and China, including “The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression” and “About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship With China, From Nixon to Clinton.” Twitter
===
Book Review: China Coup: The Great Leap To Freedom
16 AUG 2021
Reviewed by John West
READING ROOM
Roger Garside predicts that China’s strongman leader Xi Jinping will soon be removed from office in an internal Communist Party coup. While highly debatable, Garside’s new book highlights the potential for and costs of political instability in China.
President Xi Jinping is China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. He so dominates Chinese politics that he has been referred to as the “Chairman of everything.” And since the abolition of presidential term limits, which he engineered, he has also been called China’s “President for life.”
And yet, in his new book, Roger Garside predicts that Xi will be removed from office by an internal Communist Party coup before the next National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), due in November 2022, at which meeting his leadership of the Party was widely expected to be extended. Unbelievable? As Garside reminds us, in January 1991, not a single expert was predicting that the Soviet Union was about to collapse nor the Communist Party of the Soviet Union might dissolve itself. But within ten months, both had happened.
Garside’s book, China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom, is an intriguing work.
Two chapters are semi-fictional, based on real people, with a fictional storyline of how the coup takes place. The remaining eight chapters, the main body of the book, offer reasons for the coup taking place, principally, growing discontent within China, and the deterioration in China’s relations with the US.
Garside, a long-time diplomat, development banker, and author, identifies a combination of factors driving his coup scenario.
First, he argues that a mass of people in the CCP believe that the regime under Xi Jinping’s leadership is on a course which is disastrous for the Party, the nation, and themselves personally. The underlying reality is that China’s one-party dictatorship is in a state of irreversible political decay. The regime is fearful. It fears democracy, truth, and religion. China’s problems have arisen because economic reform has not been accompanied by political reform. Like all totalitarian regimes, it’s forced to rely on control rather than trust.
Second, Xi has put China on a collision course with the US, something which has only been exacerbated by the initial coverup of COVID-19. The US is increasingly concerned that China poses a threat to the world order established since 1945. The prospect of China becoming the biggest economy in the world under a totalitarian regime armed with advanced technologies is a nightmare that must be stopped by pushing for political change.
Through China’s high-growth years, close economic integration with the West through finance, trade, and technology has been a boon, but it also made China vulnerable to geoeconomic warfare. Nearly two hundred Chinese companies have been registered on major US stock exchanges since 1992, raising tens of billions of dollars each year. But Beijing has prevented these companies from disclosing financial information required by US law.
This provides a key trigger in Garside’s coup scenario, during which the US Securities and Exchange Commission suspends trading for five big Chinese companies that have failed to comply with financial disclosure requirements. This leads to a crash on Chinese stock markets and civil disturbances around the country. To add fuel to the fire, Garside posits that a People’s Liberation Army Navy ship rams a US Navy destroyer in the South China Sea, killing five US sailors and wounding six others.
In the background leading up to this crisis, Li Keqiang, the second-ranking member of the CCP after Xi Jinping, was assembling a group of “Friends” from the CCP leadership and military to mount the coup. And when the CPC Politburo meets in the midst of this economic and political crisis, Premier Li and his co-conspirators turn on President Xi, with the support of others present, and hold him responsible for the imbroglio in which China finds itself. They inform Xi that he has been forcibly retired. Li and the others then proceed to set in motion the process for China to become a democracy with rule of law. Garside’s book stops with the announcement of imminent changes, and leaves the reader wondering what might happen next.
Garside’s China Coup scenario, with its sudden great leap to freedom, has great naive appeal for those of us who would wish for the Chinese people to achieve democracy, respect for human rights, and the rule of law, and wish for a China which is a cooperative partner in the rules-based world order. But, quite frankly, his argument is not very convincing, to this reader at least. It is all too neat and simple.
China has always been changing, and one can imagine many different scenarios for future political change in China. But is an internal CCP coup really likely? Xi has surrounded himself with many loyal supporters who would do their utmost to prevent a coup, and they are supported by China’s high-tech surveillance. And public support for Xi and the CCP is reportedly quite high at the moment.
Political change, if it were to occur, would more likely come from other sources. There could be a revolt by private sector business elites in response to things like the current tech crackdown underway in China. A popular uprising could occur again, such as in 1989. Instability could also emanate from the periphery like Xinjiang, Tibert, Inner Mongolia, and Hong Kong. And while there are many possible sources of political change, it is far from certain that political change would lead to democracy. A group of leftists could take China backwards rather than forwards. And chaos and instability could easily result. In short, the possibilities are endless, and it is not clear that Garside’s scenario is the most likely.
All that said, Garside’s book contains many interesting ideas and information, and is a stimulating and entertaining read. Moreover, it raises the very important question of possible future instability in China, a country where peaceful power transitions have been rare. In the past, Chinese political instability was usually relatively self-contained. But with China having, by some estimates, the world’s largest economy and having economic and political linkages spanning the entire global, any future political instability will be felt by everyone. In short, the risks are enormous.
This is a review of Roger Garside, China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom (University of California Press, 2021). ISBN: 9780520380974 (hardcover).
John West is adjunct professor at Tokyo’s Sophia University and executive director of the Asian Century Institute. His book Asian Century … on a Knife-Edge was reviewed in Australian Outlook.
This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.
===
China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom 2021
by Roger Garside (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars 50 ratings
See all formats and editions
Kindle
AUD 22.00
An expert’s take on how a coup in China could launch a transition to democracy.
This short book predicts—contrary to the prevailing consensus—that China’s leader Xi Jinping will very soon be removed from office in a coup d’état mounted by rivals in the top leadership. The leaders of the coup will then end China’s one-party dictatorship and launch a transition to democracy and the rule of law. Long-time diplomat and development banker Roger Garside draws on his deep knowledge of Chinese politics and economics first to develop a detailed scenario of how these events may unfold, and then—in the main body of the book—to explain why. His gripping, persuasive account of how Chinese leaders plot and plan away from the public eye is unique in published literature.
Garside argues that under Xi’s overconfident leadership, China is on a collision course with an America that is newly awakened out of complacency. As Xi’s rivals look abroad, they are alarmed that he is blind to the reactions that China’s actions have provoked from the world’s strongest power and its allies. In domestic affairs, Xi’s rivals recognize that economic and social change without political reform have created problems that require not just new leaders but a new system of government. Security abroad and stability at home demand a revolution to which Xi is implacably opposed. To save China—and themselves—from catastrophe, they must remove him and end the dictatorship he is determined to defend. But their will and capacity to do so depend crucially on how liberal democracies act. Garside’s scenario shows America leading its allies in creating the conditions in which Xi’s rivals move against him.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“I just finished reading China Coup and loved it . . . . By posing a provocative ‘what if,’ Mr. Garside expands the terms of our debate on China.”
― CHINADebate
“A compelling read and a convincing one. At the very least, if Canadians are worried about growing Chinese Communist influence in the free world, they can find in this book a key to unlock a twenty-first-century riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”?
― Literary Review of Canada
"I decided to treat China Coup as a kind of Orwellian-but-with-a-happy-ending foray into speculative fiction. I knew I would need to take Garside’s claims with a grain of salt, as he would focus as intently on finding cracks in seemingly smooth facades as CCP propagandists, who create ‘semi-fictional’ texts of their own, strive to present those surfaces as flawless."
-- Jeffrey Wasserstrom ― Mekong Review
From the Back Cover
"Roger Garside is the author of one of the most influential and prescient books on China's early reform era, and now he has done it again with a thought-provoking book on how the country might get back on track. He dares to challenge the conventional wisdom that an economically powerful authoritarian state is invulnerable to change, showing instead how China is actually a brittle superpower where a series of events could well usher in radical change. China Coup is a must-read for anyone curious about China's future."
—Ian Johnson, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao
"This book combines a story full of suspense and drama with by far the best-judged introduction I know to the facts of China today. Nothing is invented except the particular moves in the game. At a time when the faulty policies of Xi Jinping are taking China toward a developmental dead-end (at best) or conflict (at worst), how might actual named figures active today work together to replace their leader and also change direction to avert disaster? This speculation is so dramatic because, inventive though it is, it also stays close to the facts. The thrill comes not from fertile fantasy, but from deep understanding. What is described here could really happen."
—Arthur Waldron, Professor of International Relations, University of Pennsylvania, and former Director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute
"China Coup is an astute and original analysis of the adverse dynamics that are eroding the Chinese Communist Party's capacity for long-term survival. It identifies the key drivers of regime decay, such as internal political disunity, an ideologically driven and power-hungry strongman, inefficient economic management, and geopolitical confrontation with the US. The author, Roger Garside, is a highly respected and knowledgeable analyst on China with decades of experience in 'China-watching.' He is also an excellent writer with an admirable ability to tell an absorbing story."
––Minxin Pei, author of China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy
Read more
Product details
Publisher : University of California Press; First edition (May 4, 2021)
Language : English
Hardcover : 256 pages
Customer Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 stars 50 ratings
Biography
As a diplomat, development banker, capital markets advisor, and author, I spent decades working in China and other nations ruled by dictatorships or undergoing radical transition to economic and political freedom. These experiences on the front-line of change have given me a unique understanding of how the interaction of politics and economics is determining China’s future.
As a British diplomat, I served in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, and again during the struggle for the succession to Chairman Mao. I then taught Chinese politics at the US Navy Post-graduate School, in California while I wrote Coming Alive: China After Mao (McGraw-Hill, Andre Deutsch and Mentor Books, 1981) which describes how and why Deng Xiaoping won that struggle, and what he would do with his power.
The New York Times called Coming Alive “One of the most cogent and elegant accounts of revolutionary China to have appeared in the West.” The Los Angeles Times described it as “An absolutely splendid work, an extraordinary accomplishment, a collection of wealth, an intellectual, emotional feast to assuage your appetite and whet it at the same time.” The Irish Times declared “On every page of this book there is glowing evidence of a man of genuine understanding and sympathy…His book will come to be regarded as a classic study of contemporary China.”
I hold Master’s degrees in English Literature from the University of Cambridge and in Management Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I speak, read and write Mandarin Chinese.
My reviews of China books have been published in the Economist, the New York Times and the Spectator, and my articles on China in the Nikkei Asian Review and Prospect. My views on China have been quoted in The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times.
Customer reviews
4.5 out of 5 stars
======
Top reviews from the United States
James Hewes
5.0 out of 5 stars Chinese History and re-imagining the story
Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2021
Verified Purchase
China Coup… I received it Thursday and finished it Saturday. It really hit the nail on the head for me. I was looking for fiction to supplement all the history I’ve been reading and got both in one book. It was an excellent read! I particularly liked the structure in three parts. The past (fiction), the present (facts), the future (fiction). Garside’s credentials are amazing.
12 people found this helpful
Helpful
Report abuse
Dean Wermer
4.0 out of 5 stars Optimistic View of Potential China Governance Change
Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2021
Verified Purchase
Quick, easy read of author’s optimistic view of the possibility at any time of CCP elites, who oppose Xi, pushing him aside and setting China on a course to multi-party governance. Start and ending of book sketch out, in a fictional, novelistic fashion, how such an event could play out. Underlying assumption is that there is widespread discontent amongst CCP elites as to current course of Xi internal and external policies
11 people found this helpful
John H
5.0 out of 5 stars Want to understand Chine better?
Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2021
Verified Purchase
This book is an excellent condensed version of modern China history. It summarizes the political direction of the country as well as the limiting issues with it’s economics due to the totalitarian government against the people. Also gives an insight into the people themselves. Excellent read.
One person found this helpful
BryTu
5.0 out of 5 stars Very Informative for average Americans too!
Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2021
Verified Purchase
The author speaks from a standpoint of really understanding both the people of China and the political establishment of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Although it is fiction, with the USA and EU agreeing to defend Taiwan and continually patrolling around the Isle of Formosa . . . it might just become non-fiction! Remember that a lot of the 1950's science-fiction "dreams" became factual, this novel may become less fictional!
David Cotton
5.0 out of 5 stars Very good read on a Coup of China that could easily happen
Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2021
Verified Purchase
It would be nice if these events really did happen. It’s really just a matter of getting a few leaders to agree. Good read! Half nonfiction and half fiction but written sensibly!
Joylaw
5.0 out of 5 stars Realistic or Optimistic
Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2021
Verified Purchase
An interesting, provocative, highly informed and well written. A book well worth reading.
Serafim Batzoglou
5.0 out of 5 stars page turner
Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2021
Verified Purchase
Well written and insightful, very difficult to put down. Finished it in two days.
One person found this helpful
Hsien-Hsin Sean Lee
5.0 out of 5 stars Optimistic
Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2021
Verified Purchase
Garside mixed the fiction and the historical recount of CPC, a real page turner. His expected political transformation launched by the current Chinese autocrats is, nonetheless, very optimistic.
Hande Z
1.0 out of 5 stars Leap in fantasy
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 23, 2021
Verified Purchase
The author is a former diplomat. He seems eminently qualified to write a book China, but the views expressed by him in this book are naïve and slanted that one wonders how that is so. He begins with the confident assertion that ‘Before the next National Congress of the Communist Party of China, due in November 2022, President Xi Jinping will be removed from office by a coup d’etat mounted by rivals in the top leadership who will end the tyranny of the one-party dictatorship and launch a transition to democracy and the rule of law’.
Surely a diplomat knows that a dictatorship is the rule of one man – not one-party. But that is the least astonishing part of this statement.
No one can say for sure that President Xi may not last the full term, but most rational observers would not conclude that a coup d’etat is coming and China will be transformed into a country in the image of the West – a democracy with the rule of law (not that China is presently without that).
The author declares that the reasons for the above statement will be found in the body of the book. Not really. The body of the book contains standard Western criticisms of China and Xi. It contains stories of the persecution of Christians and their churches.
He states that ‘under Xi’s leadership, the Communist Party of China is set on a collision course with the United States’. The thought that it might be the other way round – that under the leaderships of recent presidents, the US is set on a collision course with China – has not occurred to him. He also claims that China is reeling under Covid-19, and the problems of the pandemic are not over for her. It is strange that he finds China as an example of a failed state insofar as dealing with Covid-19 is concerned. One might be forgiven in thinking that the US and Europe have dealt more admirably with the pandemic.
Read less
6 people found this helpful
E. Tsang
5.0 out of 5 stars An interesting thought exercise, a good read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 29, 2021
Verified Purchase
This book is a thought exercise. It describes a possible future in China as a consequence of what has happened. It is meant to be fiction, not a forecast. It is a speculation on one of the many possible futures that the author believes is plausible.
Here is the author's speculation:
Some CCP members have accumulated a huge amount of wealth since the economic reform started in 1982. Beijing's current policies threaten their interest. So they have greater incentives than most other Chinese to replace Xi. Succeed they will. Some of them are very clever. They know that the best way to keep their wealth is to install democracy in China. That’s what they’d do.
This speculation is based on the author's research into Bejing's economic, political and foreign policies, which is elaborated in the book. The author believes that they are not in the interest of China. Nor do they protect the interest of the Chinese Communist Party elites. Thus, the factions in the Party will unite and start a coup against Xi.
How plausible is the speculation? I will be surprised if everything described in the book turns out to be true. Having said that, it is a logical thought exercise that deserves attention. Besides, this is a good read.
Read less
One person found this helpful
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Keen insight and fascinating plot
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 3, 2021
Verified Purchase
Great read, keen insight, although personally I think Mr Garside is on the optimistic side when he predicts China will go on to democratic reforms after leadership change.
P W Sterndale
5.0 out of 5 stars A heart-wrenching view of what could be…
Reviewed in Australia on August 6, 2021
Verified Purchase
For those who saw first hand the rise of enlightenment in China during the late eighties, made friends with wonderful people who were hungry for news from the outside, only to see the same people in the years since 2013 suppressed and humiliated to the point of giving up hope, this book stands as a beacon of what could be. And, for those who have the power to initiate change but may not have the confidence to act, may this book be a source of inspiration.
Report abuse
See all reviews
The Tiananmen Victory
By Nicholas D. Kristof
June 2, 2004
On Friday, it will be 15 years since I stood at the northeast corner of Tiananmen Square and watched China go mad.
The Communist Party was answering the demands of millions of protesters who had made Tiananmen Square the focus of their seven-week democracy movement. The protesters included students, Communist Party members, peasants, diplomats, laborers -- even thieves, who signed a pledge to halt their ''work'' during the demonstrations.
I was in my Beijing apartment when I heard that troops had opened fire and were trying to force their way to Tiananmen. So I raced to the scene on my bicycle, dodging tank traps that protesters had erected.
The night was filled with gunfire -- and with Chinese standing their ground to block the troops. I parked my bike at Tiananmen, and the People's Liberation Army soon arrived from the other direction. The troops fired volley after volley at the crowd on the Avenue of Eternal Peace; at first I thought these were blanks, but then the night echoed with screams and people began to crumple.
The Communist Party signed its own death warrant that night. As Lu Xun, the great leftist writer beloved by Mao, wrote after a massacre in 1926: ''This is not the conclusion of an incident, but a new beginning. Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood.''
So, 15 years after Tiananmen, we can see the Communist dynasty fraying. The aging leaders of 1989 who ordered the crackdown won the battle but lost the war: China today is no longer a Communist nation in any meaningful sense.
Political pluralism has not arrived yet, but economic, social and cultural pluralism has. The struggle for China's soul is over, for China today is not the earnest socialist redoubt sought by hard-liners, but the modernizing market economy sought by Zhao Ziyang, the leader ousted in 1989. The reformers lost their jobs, but they captured China's future.
Sign up for the Peter Coy newsletter, for Times subscribers only. A veteran business and economics columnist unpacks the biggest headlines. Get it in your inbox.
In retrospect, the Communist hard-liners were right about one thing, though: they warned passionately that it would be impossible to grab only Western investment and keep out Western poisons like capitalism and dreams of ''bourgeois freedom.'' They knew that after the Chinese could watch Eddie Murphy, wear tight pink dresses and struggle over what to order at Starbucks, the revolution was finished. No middle class is content with more choices of coffees than of candidates on a ballot.
So Communism is fading, in part because of Western engagement with China -- trade, investment, Avon ladies, M.B.A.'s, Michael Jordan and Vogue magazines have triumphed over Marx. That's one reason we should bolster free trade and exchanges with China, rather than retreating to the protectionist barricades, as some are urging.
The same forces would also help transform Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Burma, if only we would unleash them. We are doing a favor to the dictators in those countries by isolating and sanctioning them. If we want to topple them, we need to unleash our most potent weapons of mass destruction, like potbellied business executives and bare-bellied Britney Spears.
So when will political change come to China? I don't have a clue, but it could come any time. While it might come in the form of a military coup, or dissolution into civil war or chaos, the most likely outcome is a combination of demands from below (perhaps related to labor unrest) and concessions from the top, in roughly the same way that democracy infiltrated South Korea and Taiwan.
It's often said that an impoverished, poorly educated, agrarian country like China cannot sustain democracy. Yet my most powerful memory of that night 15 years ago is of the peasants who had come to Beijing to work as rickshaw drivers.
During each lull in the firing, we could see the injured, caught in a no-man's-land between us and the troops. We wanted to rescue them but didn't have the guts. While most of us in the crowd cowered and sought cover, it was those uneducated rickshaw drivers who pedaled out directly toward the troops to pick up the bodies of the dead and wounded.
Some of the rickshaw drivers were shot, but the rest saved many, many lives that night, rushing the wounded to hospitals as tears streamed down their cheeks. It would be churlish to point out that such people are ill-prepared for democracy, when they risked their lives for it.
A version of this article appears in print on June 2, 2004, Section A, Page 19 of the National edition with the headline: The Tiananmen Victory. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
No comments:
Post a Comment