Vijay Gokhale's After Tiananmen: The rise of China details the machinations inside the Communist Party of China after Mao

Sandeep Dikshit

CHINA today is wrongly defined as the outcome of Mao and Xi Jinping. Actually, today’s China owes more to the 20 years of faceless leaders bookended between the tumultuous regime of Mao and the prickly and aggressive one of Xi, argues former Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale in his third of the trilogy, all written after he hung up his boots at the end of about two decades of handling China for the Foreign Office.

Though this volume is best read after the first two — one detailing the events leading up to and around the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the other on how China negotiates with the world — as a standalone buy, too, it retains the pace and rarely gets bogged in micro details that might interest the academic and the foreign policy practitioner more than the average reader.

During those 20 years till the rise of Xi in 2013, the Chinese leaders at the helm for a decade each — Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao — played amiable buffoons and threw lines that the West would seemingly swallow while they worked furiously inside the system to tear up Mao’s “iron bowl” guarantee of jobs and health to be replaced by what looked suspiciously like the market economy, but never really became one on the lines of the EU or the US, despite the fervent wishes of their think tanks.

As Gokhale details the machinations inside the Communist Party of China, the West put out in public its logic for glossing over the tightening of autocracy post the Tiananmen Square massacre — that this uniquely Chinese brand of market economy will ultimately accelerate political freedoms. This logic may or may not be misplaced but it gave the West a convenient smokescreen to shift its manufacturing base to China. In the process, it provided the Chinese Communist Party enough monetary muscle to turn it into the menace it is today.