Asia Society China Wise book series

As China opened up its economy over the past four decades, conventional wisdom held that the country’s growing embrace of free markets would lead to a more liberal society and the shedding of a state-controlled economy. Instead, China’s unprecedented economic growth has positioned state capitalism as a durable foil to the orthodoxy of free markets, to the confusion of many in the West. At the 20th Party Congress in Beijing in October, Xi Jinping — who appears to favor a Party- and state-centric model for the Chinese economy — was appointed to a third five-year term as the all-powerful general secretary of China’s Communist Party. What does this mean for the recovery of the Chinese economy? Could it benefit China to return to some of the ideological principles spearheaded by Mao Zedong? And how much of China’s decades of economic success can be credited to Mao and Maoism?