Abstract
At the end of the nineteenth century, China was widely seen as a comic-opera state, but by the end of the twentieth was emerging as a significant world power. Under Mao Zedong, the CCP unified the country and built up considerable industrial and military muscle. When Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, his radical economic reforms triggered two decades of rapid economic growth, and opened up China to the outside world after the isolationism of the Mao years. One of the most significant features of Deng’s rule was his ability to mobilize the capital and expertise of overseas Chinese in a profitable crusade to modernize the homeland. By the mid-1990s there was a new mood of national confidence, at home and among the diaspora, and a growing belief that Greater China — a conglomerate of the PRC, Taiwan, and the overseas Chinese — would be setting the Asian, if not the world agenda in the twenty-first century.
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Recommended Reading
The China Quarterly (London); The Journal of Chinese Affairs (Canberra); and China Information (Leiden, Holland) publish high-quality research on contemporary issues, book reviews, chronicles of recent events, etc. Beijing Review is a good source for official Chinese news. Finally, an ever-increasing number of Internet sites provide a wide variety of China-related information and debate.
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© 1999 Alan Hunter and John Sexton
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Hunter, A., Sexton, J. (1999). China into the Twenty-First Century. In: Contemporary China. Contemporary States and Societies. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27441-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27441-3_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-71003-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-27441-3
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