Tiananmen Redux: The Hard Truth about the Expanded Neoliberal World Order

ISBN-13: 9783034320054 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 363 str.

Johan Lagerkvist

Opis

This book contends that the massacre of civilians in Beijing on June Fourth 1989 was a pivotal rupture in both Chinese and world history. If not for that day, China s socioeconomic, political and cultural landscape would not have undergone the kind of dramatic transformation that has made China rich but unequal, open but hyper-nationalist, moralistic but immoral and unhappy. Through the lens of global history the book revisits the drama of Tiananmen and demonstrates how it unfolded, ended, and ultimately how that ending in a consensus of forgetting came to shape the world of the 21st century. It offers a theorization on the inclusion of China into global capitalism and argues that the planetary project of neoliberalism has been prolonged by China s market reforms. This has resulted in an ongoing convergence of economic and authoritarian political practices that transcend otherwise contrasting political systems. With China s growing global influence, the late leader Deng Xiaoping s statement that -development is a hard truth- increasingly conveys the logic of our contemporary world."

Spis treści

Contents: The hard truth about the massacre in Beijing - Background and the Rise of the Movement - Rifts, Escalation and Crackdown - The hard truth of silence and market momentum - Global Amnesia and June Fourth - The Silencing of China's Civil Society and Deng Xiaoping's Pivot to Capitalism - Authoritarian convergence and moral cost - Capitalist Convergence and Rising Inequality - The Global Expansion of Authoritarianism and Democracy Under Threat - Epilogue: Two Phone Calls - List of important names.

O autorze

Johan Lagerkvist is Professor of Chinese Language and Culture, Stockholm University and Senior Research Fellow, The Swedish Institute of International Affairs.