Knowing China

Book excerpt: Contemporary China appears both deceptively familiar and inexplicably different. China is a cauldron of forms of entrepreneurship, social organization, ways of life and governance that are at once new and unique, recognizably Chinese and generically modern. In analyzing and interpreting these developments, Frank N. Pieke adopts a China-centric perspective to move beyond western preoccupations, desires, or fears. Each chapter starts with a key question about China, showing that such questions and assumptions are often based on a misunderstanding or misconstruction of what China is today. Pieke explores twenty-first-century China as a unique kind of neo-socialist society, combining features of state socialism, neoliberal governance, capitalism and rapid globalization. Understanding this society not only helps us to know China better, but takes us beyond the old dichotomies of West versus East, developed versus developing, tradition versus modernity, democracy versus dictatorship, and capitalism versus socialism.