The election of Donald Trump, notes Strittmatter, has been a gift to China: confirmation of the West’s demise. Reintroducing an ideological mix of Mao, Marx, and Confucius, Xi is a brilliant technocrat who has engineered an authoritarian state. “Both the Chinese people and the world at large have good reason to be nervous,” writes the author. The state has used its new prosperity to essentially bribe the enlarged middle class to abide by increasingly autocratic measures, and the Chinese Communist Party has placed its leader, Xi Jinping, in a “godlike” position. In this highly relevant, frequently revelatory book, originally published in Germany in 2018, journalist Strittmatter, who has studied China for 30 years and was stationed in Beijing for a decade, argues that the opened-up China of Deng Xiaoping is an illusion. A chilling warning that China’s authoritarian rule is only growing more insidious.
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