Before handing over to my colleague Jonathan Watts in 2003, I covered a range of important stories to which I had been alerted by excellent reporting in the Chinese press or TV.

There were powerful exposes of mining and environmental disasters linked to official corruption, of the plight of migrant workers cheated out of their pay, and of lawless behaviour by local government mafias. There were discussions on the widening gap between rich and poor, on the criminal justice system, including the death penalty, and even (though rarely) on press freedom itself.

Yet the history of the Chinese media in modern times is more complex than a simple progression from less to greater freedom – and more worrying too. Instead of allowing restrictions to ease year by year – the logical policy for a regime claiming to be committed to political as well as economic reform – Beijing continues to impose periodic clamp-downs.

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Post tags: foreign correspondents, John Gittings, media reform
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Gittings is one of that rare breed of journalists who has maintained a specialist interest in his subject for so long and with such thoroughness that he commands the respect of academic specialists and journalists alike. In a field increasingly populated with Johnnies-come-lately, Gittings is a Johnny-come-early: one only has to read this book to feel the depth and span of his knowledge. Far from holding the view that China’s modern history began in 1978, one of Gitting’s central objectives in the book is to try to make sense of the relationship between the Maoist period of Chinese history from 1949 to 1976 and the frenzied period of Deng-inspired economic growth that has ensued.

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Post tags: book reviews, economic reform, John Gittings, reform and opening
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Fifty years ago this month, when China was finally at peace after decades of war, Mao Zedong launched a new revolution in the countryside – for reasons that are still highly controversial. Mao insisted that the peasants wanted more and bigger cooperatives; they were a “blank sheet of paper” on which beautiful socialist words could be written. China could not mark time in the transition to socialism, or else it would go backwards.

Mao’s impatience in that July of 1955 set in train a tragic sequence of events which led first to the people’s communes and the Great Leap Forward of 1958-61. The failure of the Great Leap amid serious famine encouraged his critics to speak out, and led in turn to the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) when he sought to crush their “revisionism”. Finally, reacting against the last two turbulent decades of Mao’s life, his successors have jettisoned socialist policies, moderate as well as extreme, and embraced capitalism in all but name.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, John Gittings, Mao Zedong
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