How China Became Capitalist Summary

After reading “How China Became Capitalist” I realized not only how much I didn’t know about China, but also the history of that region. I’ve been to Thailand twice, once to just to backpack through certain areas by myself. Looking back, I did all the things a tourist would do, but never learned anything about the history of the country I enjoyed visiting. This book gave a nice summary of the economics of China and completely changed what I thought their history would be. Generally, you see documentaries depicting China in the Qin dynasty or earlier. In high school, you learn a little about current economics of the country, but with both scenarios you never dive down to deep and you miss the part where they became capitalists. In the book, it really starts from the early 1900’s and completes after 1996. Most the forward thinking and reform didn’t start until 1976 when Mao passed away. A lot of the issues that China faced in Mao’s time was around fear of straying from the path and lack of communication. Whether it was with their grain exports and over emphasizing numbers or not sharing between provinces and letting peasants starve. …show more content…
There really wasn’t a lot of revolution from the bottom up. Even in the instances where the leaders thought there would be the peasants went along with the flow. This is a little shocking just because of the share numbers that could have been gathered for an uprising. Keeping control of communication was a huge plus for China’s leadership because even when things were bad and peasants were starving they still held the leaders in high regard. If there had been more communication between each of the areas, I think, there would have been more of an opportunity to realize what was really going on in the different