The Legacy of Tiananmen: China in Disarray [Paperback]

James A.R. Miles (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1997

In The Legacy of Tiananmen, James A. R. Miles asks whether senior leader Deng Xiaoping's gamble that prosperity would bring stability to China has worked or whether, instead, the country's economic transformation is fueling instability. The author, who was the BBC's Beijing correspondent from 1988 to 1994, argues that China today remains at least as unpredictable and volatile as it was at the outset of the Tiananmen Square protests.

On the basis of extensive interviews with officials, ordinary citizens, and intellectuals, the author concludes that China in the late 1990s is a country deeply unsure of its future. Politicians and public alike are asking themselves whether China is emerging as a new economic superpower with global influence to match, or if it is heading toward the chaos they so much fear. In the coming years, the answer to this question will have major implications for the outside world. With a population four times that of the former Soviet Union, a China in turmoil would have a colossal impact on some of the world's most successful economies.

About the Book:

"By brilliantly gathering together newspaper stories, street interviews, leaked official documents and Western chronicles, Miles creates a compelling story of economic change, internal political uncertainty and, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ideological isolation. . . . It's not a reassuring picture, but one that readers--and not just old China hands--should understand. This is an important book now and will be even more so any minute now." --Publishers Weekly

". . . a fascinating, sobering book that contrasts with much of the conventional wisdom on China. . . . [His] argument needs to be considered by all those who think about the future of the world's largest country and its potential impact on the rest of us." --Kenneth Lieberthal

"Miles's book is extremely lucid, coherent, and well-written. Its controversial main theme--that China is a country in deep trouble and may very well not survive a fractious succession struggle after Deng's death--is argued with persuasive force on many different societal levels." --Richard Baum, author of Burying Mao

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Miles spent eight years in Beijing, arriving in 1986 with UPI and staying on as the bureau chief of the BBC. It has been a tenure defined by the decline of the old guard and by the gamble Deng Xiaoping took when he ordered the shooting of student protestors, an act which resulted in some 5000 casualties and, later, hundreds of arrests. Seemingly forgotten by the West a few months after it happened, in China, Tiananmen did give pause to agitators both inside and outside the Communist Party. But, Miles argues, this was a hiatus. By brilliantly gathering together newspaper stories, street interviews, leaked official documents and Western chronicles, Miles creates a compelling story of economic change, internal political uncertainty and, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ideological isolation. This is more than just narrative. Miles analyzes the results of Deng's 1992 endorsement of capitalist initiative (paired, always, with continued political control) and shows the fearful workers, de-stabilizing inflation, income disparity, corruption and rural crime behind the generally rosy official statistics. Miles also looks at the conflicting ideologies and personalities waiting in the wings. It's not a reassuring picture, but one that readers--and not just old China hands--should understand. This is an important book now and will be even more so any minute now. China is a very large, very powerful country, and Deng is a very old man.

Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Several years of rapid economic growth have convinced many observers that China has solved the problems that led to the Tiananmen massacre and stands on the cusp of prosperity and power. Miles, the BBC Beijing correspondent from 1988 to 1994, thinks otherwise. Beneath China's glittering surface, he explores a troubled country polarized along class, ethnic, and cultural lines whose corrupt elite has lost its sense of social and national purpose. With rich anecdotal evidence, Miles sketches the depth of rural unrest and the plight of China's fragmented dissenters. His intelligent, trenchant, and accessible report deserves a wide readership. Even if his pessimism is exaggerated, Miles's perspective is vital in contemplating China's future role in Asia and the world. For academic and larger public libraries.?Steven I. Levine, Boulder Run Research, Hillsborough, N.C.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press (June 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0472084518
• ISBN-13: 978-0472084517
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,313,862 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An important corrective to excessive optimism about China., August 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Legacy of Tiananmen: China in Disarray (Paperback)

I spent 7 years in China, as a diplomat and a lawyer, and I recognize the China which James Miles describes. He has slogged around the grubby disaster sites which pass for towns and cities in the PRC, and has not restricted his range of interlocutors to the usual staple fare of journalists: Beijing-based dissidents, governmental officials and taxi drivers. For the clarity of its analysis, rigorously fair unsentimentality about China and eschewal of the intrusive personal heroics to which so many journalists writing about China succumb, Miles' book stands head and shoulders above most of the recent offerings by reporters who have been posted to the Middle Kingdom.

What I found admirable about this book by a long-time and respected Beijing-based BBC correspondent was its contrarian approach. Miles refused to be dazzled by the glitter of rapid economic growth, choosing instead to focus on the inner brittleness of a political order beset by corruption, fissiparous regionalism, mass migration (nearly 100 million peasants have left their villages in the past decade in search of work) and structural inadaption of the political order to a quickly changing society. Although his book was published well before the Asian financial and institutional crisis which began in late 1997, Miles' analysis of China would need no updating to accomodate the devastating impact of "crony capitalism" on some of China's near neighbours (and China next??) which more superficial journalistic commentators seem not to have discovered until the crisis hit.

Despite its excellence, I think the book would have benefitted from inclusion of a chapter setting out a more formal political analysis bringing in the perspectives of development, the specifities of modern Chinese political and economic history, and the Leninist state structure which survives intact despite the dismemberment of most of the socialist economic system. An overarching structure of that sort might have helped Miles (or his editors) avoid occasionally giving the impression of heaping anecdote upon anecdote, however interesting and telling those anecdotes are. This, however, is a minor reproach for what really is an excellent book.

Since he predicts a more or less iminent collapse of China's political system, while coyly declining to make any guesses about when this will occur, James Miles has opened himself to criticism if this does not transpire. Such a critique would be facile and beside the point; the real contribution of the book is to take a close look at the underside of the rock.

The book deserves a wide readership.