Is China on track to become the superpower of the 21st century? Given its enormous influence as the “factory of the world” – it is the largest exporter of manufactured goods – and as a permanent member of the select nuclear club, one might imagine that the fulfilment of that aspiration is just around the corner.
Valérie Niquet, a doctor in Political Science and advisor to the French Foreign Ministry, does not think so. The expert has taken the scalpel to dissect the Asian giant in several of its facets – politics, economy, religion, history, demography, foreign relations, military force, etc. – and offers them to us in a very didactic volume, a kind of manual in the style of “everything you always wanted to know about equis and never asked”, and a very useful synthesis for a first and quick approach to the phenomenon.
The questions are posed and answered by the specialist herself, trying not to take for granted historical data that the unfamiliar reader would not relate to the image of a modern China where iPhones and electric vehicles are manufactured as if there were no tomorrow.
China was, until recently, the world’s largest country in terms of population, but the ideologically motivated and radically misguided interventionist actions of successive Communist Party governments in past decades have had lasting negative consequences for a huge mass of citizens, have affected the country’s demographic balance and have negatively compromised its growth and development model (and, logically, the well-being of its citizens).
The author devotes space to all the tragic milestones mentioned – born from the mind of Mao Zedong or his successors – as well as to the horizons of improvement that were outlined under the mandate of Deng Xiaoping and his gradual opening to the market economy since the late 1970s, a strategy that lifted 500 million people out of poverty. Likewise, she speaks about the current rehabilitation of the figure of Mao and the return to centralization, to control personified in a single figure: that of President Xi Jinping, who was once another victim – he and his family – of the Maoist power machinery, and who is today, ironically, the main singer of the “glories” of that era of hunger and terror.
According to Niquet, the regime is short of allies (it can only truly consider Pakistan and North Korea as such) and “does not have much to offer.” Therefore, “unless it overcomes these problems, at the price of accepting reforms, and if there is no regime change, the country will not be able to establish itself as the superpower of the 21st century, and even less so in its region, where a return to a China-centred past is not at all an acceptable option.”
