At a time of intensifying economic and geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China, HANNAH SELL reviews a book that stresses the role of the Communist Party-controlled state in China’s economy.
Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise
By Christopher Marquis and Kunyun Qiao
Published by Yale University Press, 2023, £20
Mao and Markets is an attempt to educate the US capitalist class about the peculiar character of China and to appeal to it to find a way to “productively live with it”. On one level it is an odd read because it attempts to ‘objectively’ explain Maoism in the past and today, and the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), without having any real grasp of the historical processes, above all of the class forces at play. Nonetheless, it contains a lot of interesting information about China today, including on the attitudes of different sections of the Chinese capitalist class.
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