China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower

by Frank Dikötter

Has the country opened up during the era of ‘Reform and Opening Up’? Compared to the Cultural Revolution, definitely. But barely, relative to the rest of the world. What the regime has built over the past four decades is a fairly insulated system capable of fencing off the country from the rest of the world. Openness means that there is movement of people, ideas, goods and capital. But the state controls all these flows, which are often permitted in just one direction. Millions of people can move out, living and working in the rest of the world, but very few foreigners move in. After forty years of ‘Reform and Opening Up’ China had fewer than a million resident foreigners, or roughly 0.07 per cent of its total population, the lowest proportion in any country, less than half that of North Korea. (Japan, often decried as a ‘xenophobic’ country, has 2.8 per cent.) Finished products can move out of China in phenomenal quantities, but relatively few can actually move in. Today, each year one-fifth of humanity can view 36 foreign films sanctioned by the state.