Price of China's Economic Development
Subtitle: Power, Capital, and the Poverty of Rights
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 308
ISBN-13: 9780813161150
Subjects: Economic development; Human rights, china; China, social conditions, 1949-; China, economic conditions, 1949-; China, politics and government, 1949-
Description: The People's Republic of China has experienced significant transformations since Deng Xiaoping instituted economic reforms in 1978. Subsequent leaders continued and often broadened Deng's policies, shifting the nation from agrarianism to industrialism, from isolation to internationalism, and from centralized planning to market-based economics. As the world strives to understand the nation's rapid development, few observers have comprehensively examined the social and cultural price of the economic boom for the majority of the Chinese people. Zhaohui Hong assesses the sociocultural consequences of these reforms in this provocative study. He contends that modern China functions as an oligarchy or plutocracy ruled by an alliance of political power and private capital where the boundaries between the private and public sectors are constantly shifting. This "power-capital institution" based on three millennia of Confucian ideology and decades of Maoist communism exercises monopolistic control of public resources at the expense of civil society and social justice for the majority of citizens.