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The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market by John Gittings Review by: Lucian W. Pye Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 2005), p. 186 Published by: Council on Foreign Relations Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20031759 . Accessed: 14/06/2014 20:08 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Foreign Affairs. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.2.32.49 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 20:08:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Marketby John Gittings

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Page 1: The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Marketby John Gittings

The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market by John GittingsReview by: Lucian W. PyeForeign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 2005), p. 186Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20031759 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 20:08

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ForeignAffairs.

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This content downloaded from 185.2.32.49 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 20:08:33 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Marketby John Gittings

Recent Books

argues that the prevailing approach of confronting and deterring North Korea will not work. Pyongyang should be treated

with respect instead of constantly de nounced in offensive terms. He would accordingly have the parties scrap their

militarism and turn instead to reconcilia tion by building "ethics of dialogue and ethics of difference." Needless to say, this search for neutrality means that Bleiker

must pull his punches when criticizing North Korea. He is less hesitant in faulting Washington. But since Bleiker completed his manuscript, Pyongyang has declared itself a nuclear state and resisted a return to the six-party negotiations-developments that make Bleiker's appeal for engagement even less convincing.

Becker, a journalist who has long covered Asia, has a very different view of North Korea-as an evil slave state ruled by a terrorist bent on becoming a nuclear war lord. In his introduction, Becker spells out in frightening detail the horrors of a war that could result from "failing to rein in a rogue leader who might possess and be

willing to use [the country's] nuclear capa bilities." He considers it criminal to ignore the terrible suffering the Kim dynasty has forced onto the Korean people. It is still premature to say with certainty what will and what will not work in bringing about a change in North Korea's approach to the outside world. But so far the government there has exploited the concessions offered

by others to heighten both its demands and its threats-a record well documented in Becker's book.

The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market. BY JOHN GITTINGS. Oxford

University Press, 2005, 384 pp. $30.00. Gittings, a veteran Western journalist

long based in Hong Kong and then Shanghai, has written a vivid history of Communist China. Drawing on his first hand experience, he recaptures the simul taneous absurdity and utopian idealism of the Mao era and depicts the confficting sentiments of China-watchers as they ob served the power struggles of that time.

Troubled by his belief that the Western press was not entirely fair in its coverage of China, he at many points gives China the benefit of the doubt where others have not. Moving forward to the post-Mao era, he offers a history of China's economic rise that is more than just a chronicle of production statistics. (He includes, for ex ample, the production of China's writers and poets.) Looking to the future, Git tings anticipates the gradual expansion of politics but not the disintegration of the party. He identifies economic problems, but none that will fundamentally threaten China's progress. He is most pessimistic about environmental degradation and the escalating demands of a growing popula tion on an inadequate natural-resource base-especially the limited water supply. Yan'an, Mao's wartime capital, recently had to make do with only one and a half hours of running water every three days.

Modern Mongolia: From Khans to Commissars to Capitalists. BY MORRIS RO S SABI. University of California Press, 2005, 4i8 pp. $6o.oo (paper, $24.95).

Mongolia was the first Asian country to adopt communism and the first to aban don it. Rossabi devotes the bulk of his book to the problems reformers have had since communism's collapse there. With the termination of crucial Russian eco nomic support, free-market ideology, advanced by the International Monetary

[i86] FOREIGN AFFAIRS- Volume84No.s

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