China into the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, China was widely seen as a comic-opera state, but by the end of the twentieth was emerging as a significant world power. Under Mao Zedong, the CCP unified the country and built up considerable industrial and military muscle. When Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, his radical economic reforms triggered two decades of rapid economic growth, and opened up China to the outside world after the isolationism of the Mao years. One of the most significant features of Deng’s rule was his ability to mobilize the capital and expertise of overseas Chinese in a profitable crusade to modernize the homeland. By the mid-1990s there was a new mood of national confidence, at home and among the diaspora, and a growing belief that Greater China — a conglomerate of the PRC, Taiwan, and the overseas Chinese — would be setting the Asian, if not the world agenda in the twenty-first century.