Or Swellsville in books about China, I mean. As in Nixon in China; or, more specifically, as in Apple in China (2025), a book about China that suggested to me this roundup of some recent books about China.
China is another one of my ongoing Mr. Magoo retiree reading projects. Why China? In world history, a high school course I taught for many years, China is a big deal. The oldest and most populous civilization in world history. There were actually many patronizing attitudes and/or omissions in the history of Western civilization I was taught in school growing up but no bigger and more globally consequential oversight than the poor attention given China.
A byproduct of that Eurocentric oversight, going back at least to China’s Opium Wars with Great Britain in the 19th century-- notably, the subsequent 100 years up to China's communist revolution in 1949, a period known in Chinese history as the “Century of Humiliation”-- hardened into a condescending Western (or Washington anyway) consensus. China is viewed as technologically backwards, economically hobbled by communist dictatorship, inferior and incapable of matching the technological development of the free Western capitalist countries.
Emboldened by a couple centuries of colonial and imperial global domination and the great technological advantages of industrialization, and distorted by 20th century Cold War paranoia, it is not hard to figure where arrogant western views of China came from but if you do read any world history before the Industrial Revolution (IR) you know China was nearly always in the mix if not a central driver in globalizing developments.
And, now, or at least since the 2008 Summer Olympics, China has been projecting big time global superpower vibes again, showing off monumental world building in staggering scales and with awesome speed. China’s building for the games was impressive enough. Beijing's National Stadium, the "Bird's Nest," was broadcast via the wide world of sports in '08. Behind this coming out party, however, were already decades of what is now called the Chinese Economic Miracle. Or China’s “Opening and reform." China's “Economic takeoff.” Or just “China speed." All noting, essentially, the astonishing economic growth in China beginning in the 1980s. An industrial revolution in the building of housing and infrastructure in China, creating massive regional urban complexes, called Special Economic Zones (SEZs), like Shenzhen (mainland across from Hong Kong), a population under 100,000 in 1979 expands to over a million by 1990; or Pudong, a SEZ startup in 1993, and a district of greater Shanghai, metastasizes into a massive urban conglomeration of over 16 million by the end of the ‘90s.
There might be some exaggeration in China’s growth numbers over this period, such claims they are exaggerated exist in the English press anyway. But the World Bank, a western created and dominated global institution, reports annual growth rates in China between 1990 and 2010 regularly hitting between 10% and 15%, and almost never dipping below 7%. By contrast, US growth rates in the same period average between 2% to 4%, actually dip into recessionary negative growth in three years (all republican, btw), and tops out in 1999 at 4.8%. In those same 20 years China’s annual GDP growth rate is below the US single year peak in only one year. In those same 20 years the annual growth rate in the European Union (EU) peaks at 3.9%. Nobody disputes anymore that China’s economic growth has far outpaced US/EU growth over the same period. There are patches of GDP growth numbers comparable, industrializing growth spurts in Japan, South Korea, maybe others, but none I know that sustain 10% plus growth averages for two decades solid.
And nobody can seriously dispute that China’s industrialization of a population of 1.4 billion people is unprecedented. There are economies of scale in China's growth that we have never seen before. Going back to Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and opening” program launched in 1978, the Chinese Economic Miracle is not the first industrial revolution by a couple centuries but China is the largest state so far to fully industrialize. Most the reduction in world poverty over the last forty years has taken place in China. Since that global coming out party in the '08 Summer games China has taken over the global economy for green energy technologies, solar panels and batteries, and EV cars, crucial to scaling down our dependence on fossil fuel energy carbon emissions and transitioning to some more sustainable energy future.
So now after nearly two centuries of waning influence China appears to be rising again in global influence. And as a long-time high school world history teacher, I’m interested in such international topics; international relations and global power politics. I make no grandiose claims for any expertise on any of these subjects. My background is reflexively progressive leftist retired schoolteacher from working class origins, semi-follows the news if always grumbling about the news. I like to shout back at the TV/social media and blogosphere now and then, maybe the way you might throw popcorn at the TV during games; or trash talk prestige TV shows while watching them. I have absolutely zero “influence,” and close to zero readers. Blogging like I’m doing is like publishing online your diary entries. In this case, the diary entries of an old geezer merely trying to keep what little wits about him he has left in some kind of working order. I read books, listen to music, watch sports, and follow the news.
Anyway, so some people write books about China for us English-speaking peoples and I've read a handful of them. A recent spate of such books try to help us understand China’s economic miracle. How’d China get so big so fast? How much should we worry about China now that they're gotten so big so fast? Etc. In my random survey of popular books about contemporary China, comments following, I’ll establish upfront my general sense is these books do a little too much sensationalizing about the menace of a rising China and not enough careful consideration of how China got so big so fast but my sample size is small and probably idiotically random. Should you dear reader know a good book about China I've left out of my roundup, please, do share.
The conventional history in these books begins with Nixon in China in 1972. This diplomatic event marked a new opening in US and China relations. Two conservative world leaders decide better trade relations between two big states like the US and China would be a good thing. Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the US in 1978 celebrated new trade and a new openness with China, signing several expansive trade deals in 1979. The exchange in theses trades? The US gets more economic trade access to China’s 1.4 billion potential customers, selling them lots of soybeans and other mostly agricultural products to start, and China, Deng, who was China's supreme leader at the time, wanted extensive knowledge transfers, deepening exchanges in science and technology and joint education ventures with the US.
In some recent accounts of US-China relations the impression is given that China has been stealing technology know-how from the US. Point of historical fact: Deng, going back to 1978, was always quite up front about this. Deng's impressively blunt pitch was for spreading education, science, and technology as progressive values that build a better future, promoting peace and prosperity in the world, and what China always upfront explicitly asked for in trade with the US. (Related, in China's expanding global trade relations today they are reportedly offering now in return knowledge transfers to states less developed in Africa for natural resource extractions.) Anyway, back in the USA, hoping for the best in such promising beginnings, maybe most firmly believing that free market capitalism would promote more democracy in China, the US gradually welcomes China into big time global trade markets. China rejoins the international market trading system ran by the IMF and World Bank in 1990 and is finally fully accepted into the (neoliberal scripted) WTO in 1999.
Lately, however, in the Trump era, sentiments about US-China relations have grown more cautious; if not openly hostile. There are China hawks who think we ought to get out of China altogether, "decouple," etc. 'We gave them the engineering codes of growth capitalism and now look how they’re doing us' might serve as a rough translation of free marketeers who were all in for opening up more trade with China in the 1980s when it looked like a potential new markets bonanza. We had hoped capitalism would make China more democratic and free and open and instead we get the China virus and China bullying Apple and threatening the democratic independence of Tibet. Or, more specifically, Taiwan, where as it happens almost all of the super-duper high-end computer chips essential, reportedly, to many national security weapons technologies are made. Gulp! If China decides it’s time to assert its claims over the islands of Taiwan, and they blow their horns about this inevitability all the time, they could possibly just like that (I know, not really just like that but we’re talking maximal risks here) control over 90% of world production in super high-end chips crucial to AI and national security weapons technologies. Ack!
(Que very scary dramatic major chorded music!)
An essential companion to the story of US-China relations since Nixon in China is Chris Miller's alarming
Chip War (2022). An Economic history professor at Tufts, and a widely read NY Times bestseller,
Chip War pushed semiconductors from business page news into everyday geopolitical vocabulary. So alarming Biden’s CHIPS Act, boosting investments in chips technology and science, was passed in the same year.
In Chip War Miller tells the surprisingly dramatic history of how chips became the world’s most critical industrial input, essential to AI, essential to national security—and why the supply chain now runs through a few choke points in the United States, the Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, but above all, Taiwan, and even just one company: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Where reputably over 90% of these essential high-end chips are currently produced. This is a red alert national security issue, not surprisingly. The risk of China controlling (again, something they threaten with drumbeat regularity) that many of the chips used for military defense appears obviously inadvisable.
Nonetheless, Biden’s CHIP’s act invested in rekindling domestic production of cutting-edge AI chips with places like Intel. Where full-disclosure I worked in Intel's Fabs, manufacturing clean rooms, on the line and in training for three years in the early 1980s; although I possess no trade secrets of any value, I assure you. My point is some positive actions in this area are underway but reducing the scale of dependence on chips from TSMC is also not something you do over night. There was some promising industrial policy response initiated under Biden but all bets are probably off with Trump 2’s insane trade wars and deaths-of-despair anti-green energy crusade.
Miller’s bigger history of the semiconductor industry in the US, the chip makers, goes back to WW2 and is on its own quite fascinating. Launched mostly by post-WW2 military investments--yes, the working stiffs behind cybernetics and technocracy images in comic books-- the chips industry begins as a military contractor and doesn’t turn to private production and consumer demand until the 1960s. When transistor radios and then calculators and Walkman’s and personal computers and iPods and finally iPhones lead the industry into the 21st century. Our little multi-purpose hand-held computers. There are some booms and busts in that history, of course, but the growth trend in chips was always up, I thought. But was it really?
Miller problematizes chip tech boom nostalgia with what he argues was a decisive break in the domestic chips industry in the 1980s and 1990s. A split between design and manufacturing in the US semiconductor chip industry devastates the industry, or Intel and the domestic production of chips anyway. The neoliberal global economic strategy rolled out in the '80s was that the US would move up the global production value chain, doing the high-tech design work domestically, at home, and outsourcing and offshoring the lower paying manufacturing work. This happened in the auto industry, hence the rust belt spread across the midwest. And this eventually happened in chips manufacturing as well. By 2010 former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was famously lecturing President Obama on how iPhone manufacturing couldn’t come back to the US. No way US workers could match the manufacturing acumen and "labor cost scaling" (read: endless supply of cheap labor) available in China. Apple designs the iPhones and China manufactures them, Jobs asserts conclusively.
This leaves former CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, about the same time, 2010-ish, to point out the hidden tragedy in the story: the US was losing important manufacturing technology know-how that could only come from actually doing the manufacturing. Technological knowledge generated on the shop floor or in the Fab. Not only in designs and models, but knowledge developed directly in the factory production process. It only took another 12 years, 2022, before Biden’s CHIPS act (enjoy repeating that, sorry) finally does something about it. Boosting domestic production by Intel, Miller’s poster child for the pivotal 1990s downfall in the chips industry.
Back to Miller's downfall of Intel story the business guys take over from the engineers and production people. They separate design from production in pursuit of the lowest building costs and cheap available labor. They focus on producing chips for cloud storage and cut Intel off from the chip development that would go into the iPhone. They outsourced their production labor costs to Japan and Korea and Taiwan, where a worker costs them 15-20% as much as a worker costs them in the US or EU. How could they resist? How could any manufacturing business resist those kind of labor cost differentials if they are offered to them?
Since the 1980s, if not before, the chip makers, like many large industries in the US were aggressively looking for ways to cut their labor costs by outsourcing manufacturing labor to places in Asia. Low wage manufacturing labor still costs today in China or Vietnam 1/5 or 1/6 what labor costs in the US or EU. I see primarily mercenary concerns in this feature of globalization; if admittedly, I also see cost savings it would be hard for any profit seeking private business to refuse. What I don't see is much interest in spreading democracy.
This is part of the story I think Miller glosses over a bit. He’s a scholar, he doesn’t want to be targeted by the right as anti-business or Marxist or woke whatever, but it’s this part of the story, that the chip companies were fine with the cheap labor conditions in China or Asia, even pursued them and preferred their “discipline” to labor unions or wage pressures and worker’s rights back home. Any actual evidence of the chip industry supporting the development of democracy in Taiwan or China or anywhere else in Asia, the hopes coming out of Nixon in China, are sorrily lacking.
But I don’t actually learn much about how good or bad working conditions are for production line workers at TSMC in Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s, the place that produces over 90% of the cutting edge technology chips in the world discussed in Chip War. I do, however, get a semi-horrifying look at working conditions for Foxconn and other Chinese production facilities contracting with Apple in the 2000s and 2010s in Patrick McGee’s deeply reported, Apple in China (2025), another NY Times bestseller. And let me tell you those working conditions are not good. They are not democratic in any sense. No respect for human rights, or even basic human dignity.
In 2010 it got so bad over 100 employees of Foxconn, Apple’s biggest manufacturing contractor in China, committed suicide protesting working conditions by jumping off the roofs of the dormitories where as many as 12 people are crammed into one living space. Reinforcing my point, Apple, like most foreign industry in China and other parts of Asia, only cares about local working conditions and worker’s rights when the worst sweatshop abuses make the news and only then so long as the story is in the news.
At places like Foxconn’s vast “factory city” campuses in China—and at other assemblers in Apple’s orbit—the recurring picture is a dormitory-labor regime optimized for speed: young migrant workers housed on-site, standing assembly work and strict line discipline, and heavy reliance on overtime to hit launch-season quotas. Few workers last more than two years. It’s for young workers with no other better options. This is “China speed” as a form of brutally oppressive factory organization. Near prison labor camp conditions are reported. In fact, reviewing conditions at Foxconn you wonder how much worse could working conditions be in the Uyghurs prison labor camps in northwestern China?
The global spotlight on working conditions in China intensified after the 2010 wave of worker suicides at Foxconn. An investigation commissioned by Apple reported serious noncompliance issues including excessive hours that, at times, averaged over 60 hours a week—followed by the familiar cycle of audits, promises, and partial fixes that never fully change the pressure-cooker incentives of “time-to-volume”-is-money electronics production. In short, working conditions for Apple’s front line manufacturing workers in China are, shall we say, not very democratic; and do not respect the dignity of the low wage worker. McGee covers for Apple, arguing that these factory labor conditions are organized by China, not Apple. But that is outsourcing to save on labor costs and then blaming the outsourcing when it turns out your contracted Fabs are being run like prison labor camps.
My main point: For American business in China (or Asia), Intel or Apple anyway, it was never about spreading democracy in China. It was principally about securing a large and cheap factory labor force. Always.
But there is another interesting way the story in Apple in China, in the late 2000s-2010s, differs from the story told in Chip War about US-China relations in the 1980-1990s. When Apple is scaling up production in China and iPhone sales are exploding in the 2000s, McGee argues Apple is giving away everything to China.
In contrast with the stark separation between design and manufacturing portrayed in Chip War, Apple claims to have invested billions in Chinese technological development and manufacturing in the 2000s and 2010s. A big section of Apple in China is about the large and continuous flow of Apple engineers flying between Silicon Valley and China throughout the Apple expansion in China. Death march schedules worked in China by US engineers, problem solving the manufacturing process, refining manufacturing step procedures, doing that manufacturing technology know-how stuff, more or less the heart of Miller’s critique of the chip industry in the '90s and what Andy Grove was complaining about in 2010. The US was losing crucial chip manufacturing process know-how. But Apple in China paints a different picture. The design people, the engineers in Cupertino, were deeply involved in the iPhones manufacturing process setup at Foxconn and other manufacturers in China.
Accordingly, McGee’s most sensational claim is that Apple was too involved, giving away manufacturing process secrets and expertise: “My argument is essentially that Apple is playing the role of Prometheus, handing the Chinese the gift of fire.” China’s recent official clap-back says Apple and McGee’s claims about Apple’s investments in China and taking credit for China's gains in technological development are over-stated and exaggerated. I will only say comparing the iPhone assembly process to the gift of "fire" does sound, yes, a tad overstated and exaggerated.
Both Chip War and Apple in China are very readable, Chip War a little drier and more academic but also significantly more convincing. From a national security standpoint alone, the US or EU, or any state really does not want to be that vulnerable to the possibility of China, or any potentially hostile state, controlling so much cutting-edge chip production relevant to your national military defense. And Apple probably should not depend on China for 80-90% of their iPhone production either. Although the national security threat seems significantly less with the iPhone. I own one, but truth be told I’m still not clear as to whether it is more a security asset or threat? If Apple doesn’t like China’s heavy-handed censorship or local data control rules or local labor conditions, the latter tellingly absent in most of Apple’s lists of grievances, btw, they ought to diversify where they produce iPhones. And they are apparently doing so, moving more production to Vietnam right now.
But excuse me if I am unmoved by the crocodile tears in Apple in China about Apple feeling bullied by the Chinese state. Apple got fabulously rich in the 2000s producing iPhones in China essentially because, as Apple in China substantiates, the CCP gave away land to Apple nearly free, they subsidized and removed any regulatory impediments to expanding Apple manufacturing in China, and secured for Apple a cheap labor force living in what looks now like near prison labor camp conditions. A labor force Steve Jobs was lauding as incomparable in 2010, remember. And working conditions Apple never objected to until workers began jumping off the over-crowded dorms they lived in next to the massive manufacturing factory complex where Apple iPhones are produced in China.
I’d like to see Apple keep a significant footprint in China and try to adjust to rising labor costs and social spending in China, which after all are to be expected and only fair. Obviously, trade doesn’t stop wars but I think significant trade connections can deter wars. Better to stay engaged with China, and work for better trade relations, relations that better respect worker’s rights and the environment.
But McGee likes to pitch the conflict in extreme terms, however. For instance, claiming Xi Jinping vows to destroy capitalism in 2014, which appears to be based on internal CCP notes from a speech in 2013 in which Xi actually said, “the eventual demise of capitalism and the ultimate victory of socialism must be a long historical process.” This kind of Us vs Them, Capitalists vs Socialists, stuff goes viral on social media but it too is absurdly overstated and exaggerated.
For a sharper, more economics-first explanation of the Chinese Economic Miracle-- or how China got big so fast?-- I read Yuen Yuen Ang’s How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016).
“The poverty trap” is a self-reinforcing pattern in modern economic development identified in decolonization and national independence movements after WW2 taking place in what comes to be called the global south. But the roots of the poverty trap refer to centuries of European colonialism and western imperialism around the world. In the 19th and 20th centuries industrializing states in the global north extract natural resources and wealth from colonial and/or underdeveloped states in the global south, enriching a small local factory/plantation owner elite and trapping working populations and the general populations in underdeveloped states in austere cycles of grinding poverty. The Poverty Trap. What wealth the colonized and/or imperialized subject state produces, or a hog’s share of it anyway, was extracted and sent back to the industrializing and colonizing trade metropoles in Europe, the US, and Japan. The rip-off remains much the same after WW2 but the poverty trap becomes pervasive in the global south, where new decolonizing UN member states quadruple to nearly 200 nations in the second half of the 20th century.
In standard modern economic development theory, heavily influenced by German sociologist Max Weber, rational “public institutions,” legal and bureaucratic expertise should precede the creation of new markets, defining a fair and predictable legal structure for businesses to grow and thrive in. Drawing on a close first-person study of China’s reform period during the 1980s and 1990s, Ang, a Professor of Political Economy at John Hopkins University, makes the case why China’s Economic Miracle escaped the Poverty Trap. She argues that economic development is "coevolutionary": growth and governance improve together, and the first move to escape the poverty trap is often to “use what you have” to build markets even under messy, seemingly weak institutions. Her key concept—“directed improvisation,” note compatibility with the Deng's pragmatic adage, “crossing the river by feeling the stones,” where China’s party-state leadership in Beijing sets broad direction while local officials experiment and adapt to conditions on the ground. This wild west Laissez-faire approach spread bribes and corruption, but it also unlocked economic growth while managing to keep private capital wealth interests, foreign or domestic, from capturing the power of the state.
Another Deng quote, “Let some people get rich first,” gets at the essential Laissez-faire (leave it alone) principle at work. We can’t wait for the perfect plan, or expert legal officials. We need to let the builders and inventors and free-enterprise hustlers loose, even if this means tolerating some unfair labor practices and inequality and polluting externalities requiring people to wear masks in the cities for a time. This gets the wheels of commerce turning and growth and development happens.You can’t argue with the effectiveness of such an approach, Ang documents in detail how it worked in China, but it isn’t all that hard either to see how this could just be kicking the poverty trap can down the road a piece. It doesn’t eliminate the poverty trap but internalizes it inside China for hundreds of millions of low wage workers. This is an unfortunate pattern of capitalism, trapping low wage workers in sweatshop labor conditions.
Another sharp economic take on Deng’s crucial “Opening and reform” decade of the 1980s is Isabella M. Weber’s
How China Escaped Shock Therapy (2021), which I’ve raved about before. Widely discussed well beyond academia and decorated with major prizes, Weber reconstructs the 1980s fight inside the Chinese economic policy world over price liberalization, inflation, and the pace of market creation, arguing that China’s leaders used pieces of the state planned economy rooted in ancient Chinese history as positive and essential scaffolding for markets rather than getting rid of the state economic system altogether, as they were being urged to do by the big interests of global private capital. Weber's economic argument rubs against free market ideology and its ban on gov't meddling in markets, and provides critical insights into how China got big so fast over the past half century.
At the time of China's "Opening and form" policy debates in the 1980s Milton Friedman and free-market global finance capitalist elites, IMF/WB, multinationals, libertarian neolibs, full-court pressed China to remove all state restrictions on the global flow of private capital in one “Big Bang”of shock therapy. Doing the neoliberal economic shock therapy kind of thing like in Chile in the 1970s; and would do to Russia in the 1990s. Essentially, armed overthrow of democratically elected socialists and letting private big business interests have their way with workers. The state violently suppressing any labor organization. That's the realpolitiks of neoliberalism. But in its fundamentalist free market dogma form peddled in China in the '80s debates shock therapy policies advocate removing all state taxes and regulations and state controls over the private economy in one big ripping off the band-aid of the overbearing state holding down the dynamic energies of the market economy. (Not unlike, btw, what Trump/DOGE and Project 2025 are trying to do in the US right now: Remove all limits on private wealth while, additionally, taking over the national security state.)
China struggled with these “Opening and reform” or "Opening" (read: privatizing) pressures from global capital throughout the 1980s and '90s but were able to establish effective state controls over the private economy in that crucial period in the '80s, limiting the flow of foreign capital while investing heavily in education and technology and infrastructure building. The inference in Weber's case is that state guidance and industrial policy and resistance to neoliberal privatizing pressures were crucial to establishing the institutional conditions for the Chinese Economic Miracle. Weber’s book is a close study of ideas and institutions, and also doubles as a reframing of state-directed “gradualism” as a legitimate policy frame, showing how statecraft can stabilize economic growth and avoid the social hardships and chaos that privatization shock therapy has produced elsewhere.
A couple years back when they were first trying to introduce Chinese EVs into the US some people complained that Chinese EVs had not been produced fairly. China’s EV industry received substantial state subsidies, Biden whined to the press. Maybe not at the same scale but rarely mentioned Big Tech in this country has also been subsidized heavily by the state; as have many other Big industries. It's not just the state subsidies but the state capacity and clear vision of a better future that wins out in China's green energy tech revolution. What China’s impressive green tech development over the last 10-15 years shows us is that any viable vision of an abundant and sustainable future will require more state industrial policy, not less. Not just because private capital, monopoly capital, and free markets in the West haven't delivered the green technologies we need at a cost we can afford, like China now apparently has (although no saying how long before we can enjoy those cost savings in the US), it's how China's green tech revolution has exposed Big Oil and Big Tech monopolizing and obstructing the development of new alternative energy technologies, as now with the Trump2/DOGE regime.
For the bigger political history and backstory behind the Chinese Economic Miracle and China’s economic takeoff, Ezra F. Vogel’s biography of Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011) is now my go-to doorstop classic on the subject—a big award-winning, widely read biography that helped popularize Deng as the central architect of the “Opening and reform” era.
Vogel follows Deng from revolutionary insider to pragmatic modernizer, explaining how he rebuilt party control after the humiliating violence of the Cultural Revolution, while unleashing markets, foreign investment, and export-led growth that reshaped daily life for hundreds of millions in China. Deng was purged twice under Mao, forced to live in rural re-education camps for a total of seven years in the long period before he came to power, and still he was above all to the very end a staunch CCP loyalist, and even still loyal to the legacy of Mao. For Deng and many Chinese, Mao was the George Washington of modern China’s political independence. And, recall, a hard-won independence gained only after a century of humiliating foreign control. The book doesn’t dodge the darker side of China's revolutionary independence legacy, including the harsh limits Deng set on political liberalization, but it’s a useful reminder that today’s China was engineered as much by political institutional decisions about where the buck stops, so to speak, as it was by GDP charts.
The keys to Deng’s “Opening and reform” were liberalizing private enterprise and making continuous and large compounding state investments in agriculture, industry, national defense, science and technology, what Deng called the four modernizations —while never letting private wealth, foreign or domestic, get the upper hand over CCP state power and control.
Deng errored in favor of the heavy-handed state, most famously during the Tiananmen Square crackdown of June 3–4, 1989. After weeks of student-led demonstrations in Beijing calling for political reform (and broader protests in other cities), the government declared martial law and sent the People’s Liberation Army into the capital to clear protesters from the square and surrounding streets using lethal force. The exact death toll remains disputed—official figures were far lower, while many outside accounts describe hundreds, possibly thousands killed—followed by mass arrests, long prison sentences for activists, and decades of censorship and enforced forgetting inside China. Still, overall, Deng's rule, especially in contrast with the humanitarian catastrophes of the Mao era, is typically characterized by Deng's relative benevolence and his progressive investments in education and science and technology.
Additionally, from another angle, one cultivated by Vogel, Deng’s fierce commitment to not letting anything threaten the power of the state, or the political control of the CCP, not foreign capital, foreign states, nor student protesters, was arguably crucial to the Chinese Economic Miracle, drawing strict boundaries around China’s political independence from private capital and foreign control. Deng’s Chinese nationalist engineering task, what I think you could reasonably call Deng's Mandate of Heaven (even though he was in fact a devout secular modernist), was to encourage economic liberalism while never allowing any challenges to the authority of the single party-state government of China, a party-state gov’t that won China’s sovereign political independence in 1949, and above all for significant majorities of the Chinese people, insures that political independence to this day.
Stepping back even further, the strengths of centralized political control are a feature of Chinese civilization going back three or four thousand years. This point can be exaggerated. In China’s actual history political control was often split into warring states or China was ruled by foreign powers for centuries at a time. But, even so, actually not so much as most other world civilizations. And a meritocratic national civil service examination system, reinforcing centralized authority, goes back 2000 or more years in China’s history. At any rate, amongst centralizing political heroes in China’s history I should think Deng has to be one of the greatest, and to my mind has to be on any short list of the most productive and benevolent world leaders of the 20th century. Professor Vogel makes a persuasive case.
Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (2025) is a punchy, highly popular addition to the the growing genre of books trying to explain to Americans the Chinese Economic Miracle. When the book was published Wang worked as a research fellow for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He name-drops Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s Abundance book (2025). Wang’s central argument is that modern China is an “engineering state” and the US is a “legal state,” and the differences explain the Chinese Economic Miracle and why US governments (and especially Blue governments like California, chime in Abundance devotees) are always getting bogged down in process and litigation and can’t build anything.
Wang mixes on-the-ground reporting with political economy to explain how China learned to build big stuff at astonishing speeds—bridges, rail, factories, whole cities. He shares historical experiences of “China speed,” like stories of China building hospitals during Covid from the ground up in a matter of weeks. Wang takes a bike tour through a rural region of China transformed in a only a few years with roads and massively scaled urban industrial infrastructure. He doesn’t ignore the human and political costs of China’s social engineering, surveillance, and coercive campaigns. But the book’s central contrast (China run by engineers, America run by lawyers) is blunt and reductive in the way binary comparisons always are.
I’d like his engineering state argument (and the abundance arguments, for that matter) better (Deng did have the mindset of an engineer after all, and the Chineses Economic Miracle is a colossal achievement in civil engineering) if these arguments didn’t rhyme so damn much with monopoly power and lawless dictatorship and more corporate disregard for labor and the environment. There is a weird sense in how Wang’s engineering state eerily seems to prophesize and/or endorse a host of illiberal engineering schemes, Foxconn labor, Project 2025, the unitary executive theory, Musk's DOGE. Only recently Ezra Klein was still apologizing for Musk and DOGE as wrong-headed but at least trying to bust through walls and cut through all the red tape and get something done in a government stuck in democratic gridlock. (Yeah, gridlock caused by millions in campaign donations to block popular democratic reforms; and instead getting stuff done like destroying gov't programs saving hundreds of thousands of lives.) Anyway, it's this tendency to reductive binary evaluations that makes me skeptical: let the Engineers cook, sideline the lawyers; building good, rules and regulations bad.
To be clear, I think the US ought to build more and invest more in public goods and infrastructure too, like China. Unfortunately, when Wang and the Abundance crowd talk about the engineering state (and techno-optimism) it is always about these heroic engineering world builders eschewing rules and regulations to build and get great things done. But Japan in the 1930s and 1940s has been described as a Techno-fascist engineering state. Surely, China's prison labor camp system for Uyghurs is also a product of China's engineering state. DOGE is a cartoon troll version of the engineering state. Each of these are arguably just various ways the engineering state builds power and doesn’t get bogged down by legal processes or NIMBY neighbors or human rights concerns. Nearly any lawless action can find justification in Wang’s engineering state argument if it can be attributed to some constructive end goal of the engineering state, rendering the distinction kind of useless, if not in fact a negative frame for understanding the Chinese Economic Miracle.
Changho Sohn’s China Worldcraft: From Beijing: Four Concise Keywords of Chinese History You Need to Know to Deal with Chinese (2022) is a compact, thematic “China primer” written from the vantage point of a South Korean diplomat stationed in Beijing, and so naturally it is a bit of a hagiography. Sohn emphasizes often neglected Chinese stories in the west. For instance, how the CCP actually stabilized inflationary pressures after WW2 much better than many “free market” western economies. A story Weber also reinforces in How China Escaped Shock Therapy. But ever the diplomat Sohn also completely ignores shameful humanitarian disasters in China like The Great Famine that plagued rural China between 1959 and 1961, resulting in 30 to 46 million excess deaths, or the Cultural Revolution that terrorized China from 1966 to 1976, leading to 1.6 to 2 million unforced deaths and massive forced displacements. Both standard bullet point history of communist era China in high school history courses in the US. Sohn’s overall message emphasizes China’s long, rich, imperial history and its immense size and ability to absorb conflict and change and still maintain centralized state control. Like I said, China is the oldest and most populous civilization in world history. India, or South Asia, is close but never experiences as much centralized state political control as China.
China Worldcraft is explicitly aimed at outsiders trying to make sense of how Chinese leaders and Chinese public culture reasons from history. Chinese history through Chinese (or a Korean diplomat's) eyes, so to speak. A look into how the Chinese think so that we English speaking people might learn to get along with China better. Instead of a straight dynasty-by-dynasty review of imperial Chinese history, Sohn organizes his story around four recurring keywords in Chinese history—cycle, harmony, evolution, and humiliation—and uses them as a kind of interpretive frame for everything from philosophy and statecraft to modern economic and foreign-policy behavior. Examples: China’s worldcraft is about the dynastic cycle in the Mandate of Heaven, authorizing centralized political authority in an emperor or autocrat; It’s about the harmony in Confucian hierarchy and social order, the Daoist harmony in the yin/yang “unity of opposites; It’s about the evolutionary value of China’s centralizing state in China’s ancient meritocratic civil service examination system; And finally, again, and undoubtably most importantly, it’s about the humiliation of the Opium Wars of the 19th century, and perhaps the bitter residue of all the other periods in history when China has suffered foreign rule, as an absolutely resolute force behind China's commitment to political independence and the centralized authority of the CCP.
Ian Johnson’s
Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future (2023) shifts the focus from the Chinese Economic Miracle to its victims and collateral damage. Built around writers, filmmakers, and citizen-archivists who document everything the state, the political authorities, and the CCP would prefer to erase—famines, political campaigns, local massacres, and the lived reality of recent crackdowns—Johnson, a journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, shows how control of history functions as a pillar of oppressive political power. China tolerates no political dissent, and runs a repressive surveillance police state. One measure of that repression is to what length the state will go to suppress historical memories they would rather be forgotten.
Sparks is about how people in China, jailed, driven underground, driven into exile, still fight to reclaim some of those repressed historical memories. Johnson’s book circles a few especially searing collective “memories,” beginning with the starvation deaths in forced labor camps in the late 1950s/early 1960s, terrible public humiliation mob rituals during the cultural revolution, all the way up to the earthquake of 2008—especially the evidence gathered by parents and citizen investigators that many schools collapsed during the earthquake from shoddy construction, followed by the harsh suppression of accountability efforts backed by the loved ones of victims and local communities.
The title,
Sparks, was the name of a magazine published in 1961 and committed to sharing the stories of family and loved ones that lived through the Great Leap Famine. The publications’ staff were all jailed and/or sent to “retraining” camps in distant rural sections of China. The “underground historians” chronicled in the book, including connections to the original
Sparks publication, continue to dodge the authorities and continue to document and distribute historical memories from The Great Leap Famine to housing crackdowns during Covid, but I have to admit what stays with me most from this book is how relentlessly intolerant the CCP is of any organization or publication critical of the government. It doesn't even have to be a direct insult but anything the party thinks might reflect badly on government authority. .
I’ve accumulated a whole other shelf of books I’ve read about China’s older history, pre-economic miracle (1978 to present), pre-Communist Revolution (1927-1949), many older titles, but none more relevant historical background to understanding China today than Stephen R. Platt’s books about 19th century China. One title about the Opium Wars (1839-1860) and another about the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864).
For a dramatic run through a couple of gargantuan geopolitical shocks of the 19th century—the era that set the humiliated chip-on-a-shoulder terms of China’s modern encounter with the West and its global neighbors—Platt's books leave a strong impression.
Imperial Twilight (2018) traces the long fuse leading to the Opium War, when the British force a trade in opium on China, rationalizing British military aggression on the pre-text of “free trade.” And then
Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (2012) plunges into the Taiping Civil War, a catastrophe at least in part provoked by the Opium Wars, and certainly one that foreign powers ultimately helped shape, and a catastrophe on a scale that’s still hard to comprehend. A Christian missionary educated Chinese religious prophet, Hong Xiuquan, says he is the younger brother of Jesus Christ, and leads a rebellion against the foreign rule of the Qing dynasty. Western powers side with the foreign rulers, not the Christian rebel they educated, essentially to preserve existing trading relationships with China's Qing state. It’s estimated that 20-30 million die in the 14-year civil war. I’d recommend reading them in chronological order and not the order in which they were published. Both books are written with novelistic drive and serious archival muscle, making Platt’s books a great guide to a time when China’s “last golden age” gave way to violent upheaval and humiliation.
Armchair takeaways-
1. The economies of scale, the state capacity to build out infrastructure, roads, bridges, hospitals, massive high-tech factory complexes, solar panels, batteries, and EVs, and assuming a dominant market position in green energy producing technologies with astonishing speed, are all something to behold and feel like possibly some kind of great game changer. At the very least, it is a new model of industrial policy operating at scales and speed never seen before. Where will this new found immense economic power China is now generating lead? At least for now it appears that it will act as a significant counterweight to the monopolizing demand and scarcity economic model of private capital in the west, or anywhere China chooses to counteract private capital’s dominant global market power anyway. This doesn’t have to be so bad. So it turns out China will be delivering the Green New Deal, they could have done much worse with their newfound economic might, right? But this does appear to also indicate that the scale and speed of China’s state industrial policy buildouts will now force older global economic powers like the US and EU to adapt to and adjust to China’s economic development priorities, and not the other way around. Like the cold war in the 20th c maybe checked the exploitation and abuse of workers in the capitalist West, maybe China's industrial policy will check the private billionaires monopoly on progressive technologies. I just learned that the Chinese are now producing learning units of AI so much more cheaply than they are available in the US that several if not all the AI tech giants in the US are training their cutting-edge AI models on AI they buy from China.
2. Of course the Chinese state, the party leadership in China, and the CCP are paranoid. To a degree all political power blocs or groups demonstrate this tendency. They always have great ideas about how to make things better when they're not in power but when in power they end up spending all their time holding onto power. It's a rule in political science; machine politics, dominant party rule, etc. China is no different in this respect but the CCP is a particularly bad case of paranoid party leadership. For some good historical reasons, as I've recounted. It took the CCP 22 years to win China’s independence from foreign meddling and unequal treaties (1927-1949); a humiliating condition that China had lived under for the previous century, going back to at least the Opium Wars (1839). The CCP was also, as reported in the Deng biography, traumatized by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, and feared any sign of weakness by party leadership could jeopardize state power like Glasnost and Perestroika had in Russia. And, actually, beyond contemporary times, as I've already alluded, there's more than enough warring states and foreign rule in China's history to warrant a strong tradition of paranoid nationalist leadership.
Besides, complicating matters, it appears almost certain that China’s paranoid insistence on absolute political sovereignty and power over private foreign capital, haunted by the century of humiliation at the hands of Western colonialism and imperialism, directly contributed to the Chinese Economic Miracle, enabling China to avoid privatizing shock doctrine economics and escaping the poverty trap and avoiding the IMF/WB Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), neoliberal afflictions attacking democratic state capacity to build for the future everywhere else in the developing world but China at the end of the 20th century.
It's not surprising to find China very resistant to foreign capital and foreign entanglements with foreign states for reasons already stated. But why does China and the CCP have to be so hard on their own students and workers? Why force over a 100 million workers to toil and live in sweatshop conditions? One big reason I've picked up from various sources, although they shall go unnamed so as not to be blamed for my crude translation, is that Chinese leadership, Xi and the CCP, fear raising the living standards of workers and making them bigger consumers would only increase the laboring classes crazy demands and turn them all into potentially angry street protesters like in democracies. Like the George Floyd protests. Etc. Again, very paranoid.
China’s paranoid dilemma now still looks a lot to me like Deng’s dilemma: how to open and reform economic development in China, modernizing industry and technology, while never compromising or jeopardizing China’s political independence or the established authority of the CCP leadership. Party dictatorship, basically; free speech and dissent not allowed. You might say the Chinese Economic Miracle is powerful evidence that the CCP has figured out how to effectively defend China’s political independence from foreign private capital and still prosper impressively, still build like nobody's business. But what Deng never figured out and what the CCP has still not figured out is how to extend to its working classes living wages and basic human rights, let alone other democratic rights, which China's leadership views as grave threats to their authority.
You would think the leadership would eventually realize that in the the long-term the legitimacy of their authority also depends to some degree on them at least incrementally improving the conditions of their laboring masses. But you are not getting China to submit to anything that feels like a threat to their national independence and/or political authority. Apple or the US; Students or workers. This goes back at least to the emergence of the CCP in China's 1949 revolutionary independence movement, and almost certainly originates as a paranoid form of national leadership in the humiliation of the Opium Wars and unequal treaties of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
3. United and disunited nations. A lot of the commentary about the Chinese lab leak theory during Covid struck me as crude bigotry and harassment, probably why I've avoided reading so far any of the China books about Covid and the pandemic. But China’s alienating lack of transparency and cooperation around international efforts to investigate the source of Covid was a big blow to peaceful international cooperation and the UN system. Likewise, cracking down on democracy in Hong Kong isn't smart or honorable. I hoped China would try to live with Hong Kong as another SEZ, a democratic SEZ, another SEZ experiment, and see how that would go; Deng's “Feeling the stones as you cross the river.” But the crackdown on Hong Kong's democracy reinforces the CCP’s paranoid abhorrence for democracy and basic civil rights protections. I also wish China would at least try to show some respect for Taiwan or Tibet’s right to self-determination, a nationalist right certainly very important to the Chinese.
But for all that, for all their paranoid state tyranny, China has now electrified global green energy markets, selling relatively cheap solar panels and batteries and EVs in very big numbers all over the world. Or except in the US where they are banned as products of unfair competition but are actually about the most democratic thing China could possibly do for the working poor around the world. Creating the impossibly ironic situation where the adamantly anti-democratic, CCP party-state dictatorship in China, what some are now calling political capitalism, could save democratic capitalism from the monopolizing stranglehold of the fossil fuel industry. Maybe more, who knows?
And, of course, what the conservative right takes from all this is the necessity of the billionaire "engineering state" takeover and aggressive police-state surveillance and suppression of labor organization and protest agitation and antitrust litigation, which they slander as "illegals" or "leftist radicals" or a "woke mind virus." Drill baby drill, etc.
When the real abundance supply-side takeaway of the Chinese Economic Miracle and US-China relations over the last half century, to my mind, oughta be the necessity of big state investments in education, science, and technology, including sustainable energy tech adaptations and projects, and expanding basic civil rights protections for all workers.
For one big reason, in the last instance, supporting workers and providing basic human rights protections and a rule of law and justice that does not favor any particular race or religion or gender or class over another remains our biggest comparative advantage with dictatorships like China, even if we have often fell short of this multicultural democratic ideal. Just as the EU and UN General Assembly and the promise of more justice and peaceful coexistence remains a powerful animating social force in the world, and we may hope can mount some defense of the "free world" against the power-grabbing march of tyranny now in control of the US and China.
