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The Broken Mirror; Reform And Reaction In Post-Mao China

Edited by George Hicks
Edited by Richard Baum
Reviewed by By Donald S. Zagoria
Summer 1991
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Edited by George Hicks
St. James Press
1990
526 pp.
$45.00
Edited by Richard Baum
Routledge
1991
209 pp.
$42.50

Both of these are collections of essays on post-Tiananmen China. The essays in the Hicks volume are too brief and the introductions are long on indignation and short on insight. For sophisticated analysis, the volume edited by Baum is superior. There is an essay by Edward Friedman that aptly compares the difficulties of China's modernization to those of the feudal monarchies of eighteenth-century Europe and suggests that Leninism, far from burying feudalism in China, breathed new life into it. Baum, in a stimulating conclusion, says that "China's chaos-fearing leaders will . . . eventually fail in their bid to achieve order without opposition, affluence without openness, modernity without pluralism." Globalized markets, information flows and cries for popular empowerment have already rendered autarky, self-reliance and neo-Maoist ideological mobilization obsolete as development strategies.

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