Overreach

How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise

By: Susan L. Shirk

Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt

Length: 15 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

For three decades after Mao's death in 1976, China's leaders adopted a restrained approach to foreign policy. To facilitate the country's inexorable economic ascendance, and to prevent a backlash, they reassured the outside world of China's peaceful intentions.

Then, as Susan Shirk shows, something changed. China went from fragile superpower to global heavyweight. Combining her decades of research and experience, Shirk, one of the world's most respected experts on Chinese politics, argues that we are now fully embroiled in a new cold war.

As she shows, the shift toward confrontation began in the mid-2000s under the mild-mannered Hu Jintao. When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, he capitalized on widespread official corruption and open splits in the leadership to make the case for more concentrated power at the top. Those who implement Xi's directives compete to outdo one another, provoking an even greater global backlash and stoking jingoism within China on a scale not seen since the Cultural Revolution.

Here is a devastatingly lucid portrait of China today. Understanding the domestic roots of China's actions will enable us to avoid the mistakes that could lead to war.

©2023 Susan L. Shirk (P)2023 Tantor

Performance is poor

Interesting review of China’s recent political history. Refreshing break from the US-centric analyses of china’s foreign policy problems. However, the narrator clearly does not speak Chinese and her pronunciation is so bad it’s at times hard to understand who or what she is referring to. It’s very inconsistent — a name might be pronounced correctly in one sentence and unrecognizable in the next. Disappointing. The text deserves to be re-recorded.

Good review of recent history but awful conclusion

I enjoyed the book. I have been into China studies for almost 50 years. Unlike the author who is a scholar, I am a practitioner, using my China/Chinese knowledge trying to promote U.S. products and technologies to China having lived in China 15 years and around China (Hong Kong/Taiwan) another 15+ years. The book is a good review of recent China particularly in the Hu and Xi years. All good.

Then you get to the last chapter. The author provides some things China should do, like open up to the West and be less security obsessed and she offers what I think is a positive suggestion that the U.S. should join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but beyond that the suggestions seem incredibly naive. Although Shirk quite correctly blames China for the breakdown of China's relations with the outside world, what she then suggests is that the West (particularly the U.S.) try harder with the engagement that hasn't worked and which China rejects nevertheless!

For instance Shirk suggests that the U.S. avoid an arms race with China. A potential war with China would devastate the world economy. Increasing military preparedness among America's allies is a good way to avoid such a conflict in that China is likely to avoid international adventurism if it thinks the costs might be to great. Taiwan, Japan and the U.S. arming themselves to the teeth is a form of disaster insurance well worth the price.

What might be a more credible strategy in addition to arming up would be increased engagement with non-hostile and friendly regimes particularly in Asia ( this is already happening) and the real hope of the allies should be to facilitate a more positive regime in China that could revive the possibility of positive re-engagement between China and the non-rogue world (i.e. the world minus Russia, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela). Shirk like most academics is a person with left leaning inclinations so doesn't seem to appreciate how disastrous China's statist economic policies are likely to be in the fulness of time. The west can't do much to facilitate China's collapse nor does it need to since Xi and his CCP are doing a fine job of that. We have to be patient and wait.

Shirk does a good job chronicling how China is becoming increasingly a paranoid national security state, but then fails to offer appropriate policies in response.

If this is a PHD thesis and I am on the faculty review board I would review the work positively but refuse to approve the final work without a complete rework of the last chapter virtually from scratch.