Book review: Gilmar Masiero: Brazilian Socio-Economic Dynamics: Contexts and Contemporary Realities - By Elise Marie Andrillon

 Book review:

Masiero, Gilmar (2025). Brazilian Socio-Economic Dynamics: Contexts and Contemporary Realities. Contributions to Economics. Switzerland: Springer Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-87685-1

By Elise Marie Andrillon – Research Assistant at FEA-USP

Gilmar Masiero’s Brazilian Socioeconomic Dynamics arrives at a critical juncture in the intellectual conversation about Brazil. In an era where international headlines often oscillate between portrayals of Brazil as an eternal “country of the future” or a nation mired in perpetual crisis, Masiero, a professor of business management at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), offers a welcome and rigorously argued third path: a blueprint for activating Brazil’s latent “socioeconomic dynamics." He does that by offering a nuanced perspective that goes beyond economic metrics - he incorporates Brazilian social and political dynamics as forces that have shaped the nation.

The book stands out by rejecting siloed thinking. While the world’s technological innovations are of invaluable use to put Brazil in a competitive position worldwide - especially in the agrobusiness industry - it cannot flourish in a vacuum. Meaning, the country's biggest patrimonies should be cherished and preserved, such as its diverse cultures, appealing to the creative economy to guarantee the knowledge and proper use of its biggest competitive advantage – the abundance of natural resources

This is not a work of fleeting political analysis or a dry economic treatise.
Instead, Masiero constructs a sophisticated, multi-disciplinary framework to understand development in the 21st century. His core thesis is both compelling and optimistically bold: Brazil’s path to sustainable, resilient growth lies in the strategic and synergistic cultivation of innovation, creativity, and social inclusion. He posits that these are not separate goals but interconnected pillars that fuel each other in a virtuous cycle.

It seems that the work of the Editor deserves to be mentioned because the final book’s structure was admirable. The first of the six chapters of the manuscript is written to contextualize readers on the Brazilian past, socially and politically, by highlighting its regional aspects, educational history, and economic activities throughout time. With all this background information, he argues that because of the choices that were made in the past, such as a long colonialist period, a slave-based plantation economy, and the nature of its incipient industrialization, the country became shaped by the profound regional inequalities that were common back at the time. Because of this, problems related to income concentration, educational deficits, and climate pressure are so common in the northeast region, for example.

Next, the author presents an analysis of the contemporary economy's structure, highlighting its hybridity. By that, he means that there’s a part of the Brazilian economy that is highly technological, advanced, and globally integrated, while the other part is almost the opposite, given that the domestic sector, composed of informal markets and subsistence activities, has low productivity and engagement. Following that, there is an emphasis on the role of institutions, especially in how Brazil’s legal framework, most importantly the 1988 constitution, molds its current economy, given the contradiction of its expansive social mandates and the rigid fiscal constraints, and how the tax system is complex and poorly thought out.

The third chapter of Masiero’s book discusses sustainable development in Brazil. According to the data, it’s implied that the best way to reduce poverty in the country is through industrialization; however, this requires a considerable amount of pollution to be released, making it necessary to find a way to do it with minimal damage to the environment. The points made by Masiero in this chapter are of extreme importance - the results of growth are seldom positive, and the climate issues will always fall upon the most socioeconomically vulnerable groups, exacerbating the already existing inequalities. Some of the solutions the author proposes include creating “green jobs” that promote a fair transition, as well as investing in renewable energy and high-value products that will enable exports to move beyond raw commodities.

The second half of the book is centered on discussing “Entrepreneurship and SMEs in Brazil”, “Brazil in the Global Market”, and “Brazilian Contemporary Challenges”. Chapter four addresses the importance of SME's, the dynamics of entrepreneurship, and the implications for inclusive growth, regional inequality, and policy design. One of the conclusions that was made is that if SMEs and entrepreneurship are adequately supported, they can mitigate inequality, create jobs, and reduce the country's dependency on primary commodities. The main suggestion is to invest in managerial capacity, innovation, technology, adaptation, and reducing bureaucratic burden. Despite all the evidence, there was a lack of comparativeness with other countries in Latin America, or even maybe Asia, as well as a lack of empirical data to sustain some of its affirmations.

The following chapter brings a crucial pivot for the book, after all the things that have been pointed out and concluded, Gilmar assesses how Brazil interacts with - and is shaped by - global forces. That is a highly delicate subject, because Brazil has always been seen as the “farm” of the globe, exporting only primary materials, whose prices are highly volatile and do not make an amount of money even remotely close to what high-value products could. Despite the risks of a more technologically advanced export industry, a crucial dilemma emerges: the influx of international investment and multinational corporations could have a devastating impact. These large companies could negatively affect small, local producers, who are the backbone of the country's food supply. Furthermore, this shift could exacerbate climate and environmental issues.

Finally, the last chapter of the book synthesizes what has already been said and makes a call to action. Some of the key points it raises are political polarization and institutional strain, where the author debates the problems of deeply rooted opinions in the population's minds. Alongside, social crises such as the high price of basic food and other topics reveal systemic fragility in access to public goods. Next, there is concern for land reform, and what the lack of it can mean. The final part is a reflection on the role of social movements, civil society, and political mobilization in Brazil: what are their reactions? The suggestion is that part of the challenge goes way beyond the structure. The chapter suggests that the changes that have been mentioned are not only an obligation of the Brazilian elites, but a really urgent call.

Gilmar Masiero’s Brazilian Socio-Economic Dynamics succeeds in mapping the interplay between Brazil’s structural legacies and the pressures of contemporary global realities. By weaving together analyses of inequality, education, entrepreneurship, financial systems, internationalization of companies, and the multiple crises that define Brazil’s present moment, the book offers a panoramic yet critical account of a country at once full of promise and fraught with persistent constraints. Its most significant contribution lies in refusing simplistic narratives: Masiero neither celebrates Brazil’s dynamism uncritically nor reduces its problems to intractable failures. Instead, he presents a nuanced framework that highlights both vulnerabilities and levers of transformation.

For scholars, policymakers, and practitioners interested in Latin American development, this volume provides both a diagnostic and a springboard for further inquiry into how inequality, institutional fragility, and environmental pressures intersect with opportunities for innovation and global engagement. Ultimately, Brazilian Socio-Economic Dynamics is a timely and thought-provoking contribution that challenges readers to confront the complexity of Brazil’s present and the uncertainty of its future, while offering insights that resonate well beyond Brazil’s borders.

Xin Fan: World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century, book review by Di Luo (H-Asia)

 Xin Fan. 

World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century

Cambridge University Press, 2021. xiii + 251 pp. $99.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-108-90365-3.

Reviewed by Di Luo (University of Alabama)
Published on H-Asia (August, 2025)
Commissioned by Jenny H. Day (Skidmore College)

The rise of nationalism has long been a central theme in scholarship on twentieth-century China, with many studies emphasizing the Chinese state’s role in shaping nationalist discourse. In World History and National Identity in China, Xin Fan offers a compelling counternarrative. By tracing the development of world history as an academic discipline in China throughout the twentieth century, Fan shifts the focus to Chinese world historians who critiqued narrow forms of nationalism. He argues that the emergence of academic nationalism in twenty-first-century China can be traced to intellectual resistance against the state's imposition of a Marxist worldview in the 1950s. Rather than serving merely as “handmaidens” of political ideology (p. 10), as previous scholarship has often suggested, Fan contends that Chinese world historians made significant and nuanced contributions to challenging Eurocentric frameworks in global historical understanding.

Fan focuses on ancient world history as a field that allowed Chinese scholars to formulate alternative historical perspectives, especially in response to the limitations of Eurocentric modernity. This field raised pressing historiographical questions about the relevance of the ancient past, the spatial divide between East and West, and the persistence of ethnic biases both within China and globally. By situating China within a broader global past, Chinese historians sought to construct a Chinese identity.

The book traces four generations of Chinese world historians. Chapter 1 examines the late Qing period through Zhou Weihan’s An Outline of Western History (1901), which integrated traditional historiographical forms with Western chronology and content drawn from translated Western and Japanese sources. This synthesis reflected the rise of a world-historical consciousness grounded in a revisionist Confucianism. Drawing on neo-Confucian concepts such as xing (common human nature) and gongli (universal principals), Zhou interpreted China’s recent decline as a result of intellectual stagnation rather than civilizational inferiority. His belief in a shared human nature, rooted in Confucian training, became a lasting legacy in the development of world-historical studies in China.

The Republican period (1912-49) saw the rise of academic professionals who institutionalized world history as a teaching field. Fan examines three key figures: Chen Hengzhe, He Bingsong, and Lei Haizong. All were educated in the United States, taught at Chinese universities, and valued professionalism, though they diverged in their views. Chen, influenced by American liberalism and empiricism, promoted internationalism and viewed world history as a means to foster global harmony. In contrast, He and Lei, shaped by the growing threat of Japanese imperialism, turned toward nationalism. He regarded nationalism as a tool of anticolonial resistance, while Lei adopted a culturally conservative and nationalistic stance during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), emphasizing Chinese civilizational uniqueness and calling for strong leadership and militarism.

Through examining the scholarship of these three individuals, Fan highlights how the professionalization of historical studies brought both opportunities and constraints. The inclusion of world history in secondary education in China increased its visibility but also invited state regulation. In times of national crisis, world historians like Lei Haizong, driven by a sense of social responsibility, increasingly aligned themselves with the state and advocated for cultural reconstruction for national survival. The gradual rise of cultural nationalism marked a significant departure from the late Qing vision of a shared human legacy. Despite its limitations, Lei’s culturalist framework, which analyzed world history through seven major civilizations, offered a radical alternative to Eurocentric national historiography and laid the groundwork for future developments in the field.

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the early People’s Republic, when state control intensified. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) introduced Soviet-style Marxist historiography and the jiaoyanshi (teaching and research unit) system, which collectivized teaching and research, enforced ideological discipline, and promoted specialization. Chinese world historians responded in varied ways. Lei Haizong, a prominent scholar from the Republican period, was sidelined for his refusal to conform to Marxist historiography. He challenged the Stalinist five-stage framework of history development (primitive, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism) for its Eurocentrism and teleological assumptions. In contrast, junior scholars like Tong Shuye (1908-68) and Lin Zhichun (1910-2007) embraced Marxism and helped institutionalize world history. Fan emphasizes that belief in Marxism, fear of political persecution, and opportunism all shaped their intellectual trajectories. Despite state control, Chinese historians continued to use the language of professionalization to assert autonomy and critique orthodoxy.

Fan highlights how intellectual resistance emerged through debates over periodization and the Asiatic mode of production (AMP). Tong Shuye’s 1954 periodization of Chinese history, for instance, was criticized for relying too heavily on world-historical models and for drawing inappropriate parallels between China and other ancient civilizations. While the CCP promoted world history as a tool for advancing Marxist-Leninist ideology, many Chinese historians dismissed world-historical research as a series of “forced analogies” that imposed a Eurocentric and teleological framework onto China’s distinct historical trajectory. In this regard, Fan argued that the rise of Chinese cultural exceptionalism was “an unintended consequence of the state’s massive social engineering projects” (p. x). At the same time, Fan cautions against dismissing the work of Chinese world historians as mere “handmaidens” of political ideology. The 1950s saw significant developments in world-historical scholarship. Chinese scholars translated a large body of Soviet texts and primary sources from non-European civilizations, upon which they built their own interpretations using Marxist historical materialism. Tong Shuye, for example, challenged Soviet interpretations by arguing that Asiatic societies were more advanced than their Western counterparts and that the AMP should be seen as a form of feudalism. Tong’s position reflected a broader effort to reconcile national pride with Marxist theory. He used the language of Marxism to challenge Soviet orthodoxy, arguing that Marxist theory was dynamic and open to reinterpretation. Such effort, Fan points out, constituted a form of subtle intellectual resistance to state control.

The Marxist historiography was furthered challenged by Chinese historians in post-Mao China. In chapter 5, Fan explores how economic reforms since 1978 and modernization reshaped world-historical studies. “A belief in cultural difference” between China and the West gradually replaced Marxist historiography that advocated “a common humanity based on historical materialism” (p. 160). Lin Zhichun, once a Marxist advocate, came to view world history as a tool for national rejuvenation in the 1980s. He helped found the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations (IHAC) in 1984, promoting ancient world history as a scientific discipline rooted in linguistic expertise and archaeological inquiry. By the 1990s, Lin Zhichun had rejected the applicability of feudalism to Chinese history, arguing it was a mistranslation of Western concepts. Instead, Lin celebrated China’s unique civilizational attributes, echoing Lei Haizong’s wartime nationalism. These ideological and institutional shifts had mixed effects. While international exchange increased, the relevance of ancient world history declined amid economic concerns. Earlier anti-Eurocentric stances softened, and ironically, Eurocentrism reemerged as world history increasingly focused on the “Great Powers.”

Xin Fan’s World History and National Identity in China offers a rich and nuanced account of how world history developed as a discipline and intersected with nationalism and identity formation in twentieth-century China. While the book excels in tracing intellectual and institutional shifts, it gives limited attention to how academic changes influenced the broader public. A more sustained analysis of public discourse—beyond brief references such as the 1988 television series River Elegy (p. 175)—would have strengthened the study. Additionally, while the focus on ancient world history is well justified, it would be helpful to situate this subfield within the broader landscape of world-historical scholarship in China. Did studies of other historical periods follow similar trajectories of politicization, professionalization, and nationalist reinterpretation? Despite these limitations, Fan’s work is a valuable contribution to Chinese intellectual history, historiography, and global history.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-asia.

Citation: Di Luo. Review of Fan, Xin, World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. August, 2025.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61659

O Ártico se tornou quente de novo: book review of America in the Arctic: Foreign Policy and Competition in the Melting North, by Mary A.Thompson-Jones; review by David Arnold

 Arnold on Thompson-Jones, 'America in the Arctic: Foreign Policy and Competition in the Melting North' [Review]

H-Diplo: New posted content

Arnold on Thompson-Jones, 'America in the Arctic: Foreign Policy and Competition in the Melting North' [Review]

H-Net Reviews
Thompson-Jones, Mary A.. America in the Arctic: Foreign Policy and Competition in the Melting North. : Columbia University Press, 2025. 344 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780231198400.

Reviewed by David Arnold (National War College)
Published on H-Diplo (July, 2025)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=61883

For the first time since the Cold War, the Arctic region has become hot again. The Barack Obama presidential administration published its Arctic strategy in 2013, the first Donald Trump presidential administration built on it with military service strategies for the region, and the Joseph Biden presidential administration published a national strategy and a defense strategy for the region. Mary A. Thompson-Jones’s book, America in the Arctic, provides a useful history of US actions in the region to inform those who might only have begun paying attention to recent regional developments. Thompson-Jones gives us a very readable primer on the Arctic, focused on the history of the United States in the region. It is well-organized and a good place to start for those interested in recent Arctic history. Thompson-Jones is a professor of national security strategy at US Naval War College and a former senior diplomat in the US Foreign Service. She is also the author of a previous book, To the Secretary: Leaked Embassy Cables and America’s Foreign Policy Disconnect (2016).

The research question for this book is “What does change in the Arctic mean for the United States?” (p. xviii). An outline in the introduction proceeds from the assumption that the United States has an “Arctic destiny” (p. xix). Other assumptions embedded in the book are that the climate is changing and influencing the Arctic and that the eight Arctic nations in the book are the most militarized in the world. The author’s regional comparisons highlight cultural, political, and economic differences between the nations at the strategic level.

Chapter 1 provides a historical overview of the history of the Arctic region, emphasizing the many perceptions of the Arctic that have little to do with reality. This chapter focuses on the North Pole, the land, the ocean, the ice, and climate change.

In the second chapter, about Alaska, the author examines the history of the state through two lenses: aviation and distance. A culture of aviation in Alaska, along with the land, the sea, and the military have all had an impact on the state. But even today, most Americans do not see the United States as an Arctic nation, which complicates American foreign policy and Alaska’s relationship with Washington, DC.

Chapter 3 examines Canada’s Arctic interests, using the up-and-down US-Canadian relationship as a lens. The Arctic, the author asserts, is essential to Canadian identity but the Canadian military has atrophied, affecting its ability to secure its interests in the region. Thompson-Jones examines three factors which explain Canadian sensitivities about the Arctic: Canada’s prolonged route to nationhood; the challenges of asserting control over its Arctic, including and especially the Northwest Passage; and the reality of neighboring the United States.

The next chapter, on original NATO member Iceland, points out that although the “Arctic Coastal State” has no military, it nevertheless has a strategic location (p. 80). The American-Icelandic history dealing with cod fishing and Keflavik Air Base is particularly interesting. For various political, cultural, and economic reasons, the locals really did not want US forces in Iceland but they were angry when the US military moved to a non-permanent, rotational approach (p. 101). Nevertheless, the Russian invasion of Ukraine drove the Icelandic government closer to NATO.

The chapter on Greenland, Denmark, and the United States covers the latest idea of the United States buying Greenland, which the United States tried to do even before the current presidential administration suggested it. This chapter might have shown the strong Danish-American relationship with at least a brief mention of the contributions Denmark made in Operations Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom, which were outsized compared to its peers in NATO. That said, chapter 5 is a good synthesis of a lot of previous work, including the 1968 B-52 crash, the Henrik Hansen papers, Camp Century, and Project Iceworm, all of which strained the Danish-American relationship in one way or another during the Cold War.

Norway’s location is more important than its relatively small population because its 1,100 miles of shoreline have greater significance than its population of five million. As in other chapters, chapter 6 has a lot of history of the US relationship with Norway, selectively focused through the lens of the Arctic. For example, the US role in the 1920 Spitzbergen Treaty shows the US’s longtime interests in Arctic policies. But the author points out, the US-Norway relationship has been uneven.

Having a chapter combining Finland and Sweden seems at first glance inconsistent with the approach in the rest of the book but, as the author points out, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was the straw that broke the camel’s back for these two nations. Both countries had been NATO partners for decades but Russia’s actions pushed them into NATO as full members, in part because they were both seeking the guarantees of NATO’s Article 5. Covered in this chapter are Finland’s war against the Soviet Union and Sweden’s development of a nuclear weapon. Today, the author points out, both nations are reliable NATO allies, describing Finland as a “heavyweight ally” and Sweden as jumping in with both feet (p. 180). The Swedish Sámi Indigenous people make an appearance here, but the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic appear in the book only in passing.

A chapter on Russia finishes out the country-by-country tour of the Arctic, with the author asserting that the country’s decline is having a particular impact on the Arctic. There is a lot of discussion about what is happening in Siberia by describing the “dying” cities of Murmansk, Vorkuta, and others (p. 208). This chapter does not, however, say much about the US-Soviet/Russian history in the Arctic. Instead, it asserts that the roots of Russian decline are found in the inability of the Russian government to deal with falling demographics, the Ukraine war, and climate change, all of which affect Russia. This chapter could have used at least a mention of the American army’s operations during the Russian Civil War in the 1920s or American incursions into Soviet airspace during the Cold War. Yet by showing how Russia is again militarizing the Arctic with lots of new construction, the author reinforces that the Arctic is an American security dilemma but that the United States is better positioned than Russia because Russia does not have the same number of friends in the Arctic that the United States does.

Finally, the last chapter concludes that the United States is returning to the Arctic because, in the wake of the Ukraine war, many Arctic nations are afraid the Russians are not done. However, the United States is slow about making changes to Arctic policies and is more likely to be focused on security than economic, climate, or Indigenous peoples’ issues, none of which neatly align with national borders. Unfortunately, the Arctic is seen as a mission no American military service really wants, even the US Coast Guard. Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) is quoted as saying of Department of Defense’s 2019 Arctic Strategy, “It was a thirteen-page document, seven [pages] of which I believe were pictures. Russia was mentioned once in a footnote.... This was not a serious strategy” (p. 241). Therefore, it seems that state governments in the American system are more likely than the national government to take the lead on Arctic issues, an approach seldom discussed in policy work on the Arctic. The author would prefer, however, that the United States use “domain awareness, diplomacy, local collaboration, and science” to improve its Arctic presence and develop new national approaches to Arctic issues (p. 257).

Ultimately the author concludes that the United States has national interests in the region. Generally, though, the United States sees the Arctic as a security problem, despite the loads of good, friendly partners in the region. If the Arctic is a security problem, the author asserts, the United States is woefully unprepared for conflict there because of a lack of deepwater ports, ice breakers, and air power. It is, however, refreshing to see mention of the United States’ northernmost military installation, Pituffik (formerly Thule) Space Base, a critical NATO installation that is usually omitted from Arctic security discussions in print.

It is not surprising, then, that the author sees the key to future US security as lying in diplomacy. Centered on the Arctic Council, diplomacy could be used, the author asserts, to deemphasize threats and emphasize opportunities, especially economic ones, for industry and small entrepreneurs.

David Christopher Arnold, National Defense University, Washington, DC.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the US Government, the Department of Defense, or any of its components.

Citation: David Arnold. Review of Thompson-Jones, Mary A.. America in the Arctic: Foreign Policy and Competition in the Melting North. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. July, 2025.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61883

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Book Review: James J. Sheehan. Making a Modern Political Order: The Problem of the Nation State (H-Diplo)

James J. Sheehan

Making a Modern Political Order: The Problem of the Nation State

University of Notre Dame Press, 2023. ISBN: 9780268205379

26 May 2025 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-40 |

Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo

Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Daniel R. Hart
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Katie A. Ryan

Contents
Introduction by Alexander M. Martin, University of Notre Dame. 2
Review by Anke Fischer-Kattner, University of the Bundeswehr Munich. 8
Review by Andreas Leutzsch, German Academic Exchange Service Returning Fellow, Bielefeld. 15
Review by Jerry Z. Muller, The Catholic University of America 29
Response by James Sheehan, Stanford University. 35

Round Table Book review:

https://www.academia.edu/129591147/Book_Review_James_J_Sheehan_Making_a_Modern_Political_Order_The_Problem_of_the_Nation_State_H_Diplo_

Book Review, Thomas Larkin on China: na origem da dominação ocidental: guerras do ópio e colônia britânica de Hong Kong, by Richard J. Grace

 Book Review: 

H-Diplo Review Essay 622

Thomas M. Larkin. The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society. Columbia University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780231210676 (paperback).

25 March 2025 | PDF: https://hdiplo.org/to/E622 | X: @HDiplo | BlueSky: @h-diplo.bsky.social

Editor: Diane Labrosse 
Commissioning Editor: Kevin Grimm 
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Masami Kimura 

Review by Richard J. Grace, Providence College

At the conclusion the First Opium War, in 1842, the Celestial Empire ceded the island of Hong Kong to Great Britain. Prior to the war, British merchants at Canton (Guangzhou) had complained vociferously to their home government that the Chinese authorities had declined diplomatic relations with Britain but imposed regulations that affected the business of foreign merchants. To escape from that uncomfortable situation, British merchants sought an entrepot of their own, separate from Chinese interdictions as in the case of the opium trade. When Commissioner Lin Zexu seized the foreign opium stocks in 1839, the Scottish merchant William Jardine sent a “paper of hints” to Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, suggesting that the British naval squadron then in Chinese waters seize a suitable island and initiate a negotiation on such terms as: “You take my opium—I take your islands in return—we are therefore Quits, — & thenceforth if you please let us live in friendly Communion and good fellowship.”[1]

When the Treaty of Nanking was agreed to in 1842, Hong Kong was the island that was ceded to Britain; by that time, it was already in British possession, as British naval forces had taken control of the island in 1841. Almost immediately, British firms had begun setting up their operations there and much of the foreign trade of Canton relocated to the new British colony. The Hong merchants, who had been the required conduit of foreign trade at Canton, quickly recognized that “the island-entrepot meant the end of Canton as they knew it.”[2] American firms followed the initial British establishments at Hong Kong, and they became participants in an evolving China trade that took shape differently from the pre-war commerce. The most prominent American firms in the China trade at Canton prior to the Opium War were Russell & Co., Wetmore & Co., Olyphant & Co., and Augustine Heard & Co.

Thomas Larkin’s monograph is the story of Augustine Heard & Co., which was established by Massachusetts people in 1840 and which was declared bankrupt by 1878. The book concentrates much of its attention on four nephews of Augustine Heard, Sr., the founding father of the company. John Heard, Augustine Heard, Jr., Albert Farley Heard, and George Farley Heard were the directors of the Heard business in its heyday.

For most of its life, Augustine Heard & Co. was at home in Hong Kong, though it had offices in some of the treaty ports, most prominently Shanghai. Accordingly, Larkin’s book devotes much of its attention to the way in which the American firm adapted to the circumstances of commerce and society as established by British firms on the island. The book takes in business history, cultural history, personal biographies, and transnational commercial developments. It is a valuable addition to the growing stock of studies of the mercantile history of East Asia during a period when China was in decline. It is written more for scholars than for general readership, in part because of its style of composition, with a vocabulary that employs terms which are more commonly used in other disciplines. In short, the text is sometimes thick, requiring multiple readings for some sentences. However, that does not subvert the value of the author’s research and organization.

The chapters deal with many interesting facets of the firm’s headquarters in Hong Kong, including, for example, the racial dimension of the relationship between these American businessmen and their Chinese personnel who had a great deal to do with the smooth operations of the business and the domicile (under one roof). As the household served commercial affairs and personal accommodation, the operation of the company headquarters had to satisfy a great number of functions, including transactions and entertaining.

One of the most important elements of the book, one which Larkin handles deftly, is the rapport (or lack thereof) between American merchants in China and their English counterparts. The business practices and social practices were established by the British firms there, and the Americans largely conformed and took advantage of the British model. There was some tension or jealousy evident in the way that Americans regarded the more firmly established British firms and the “elite society” that Larkin describes in his presentation of the merchants from different homelands and their ways of life. 

The book gives some attention to women on the scene in China and in Boston, but mostly the four Heard brothers are the primary figures in this history (with the exception of Mary Livingston, wife of Albert Heard). The social code of the China trade opposed marriages between American or British businessmen and Chinese women, but there were many instances where Western traders held long-lasting relationships with “protected women” and, upon leaving China, set up funds to provide for these women and their Eurasian children, as in the case of John Heard’s son, Richard Howard Heard (178-85).

Although the title of the book refers to the Heard “firm,” the text is as much about the lives of the company’s administrators as it is about business operations. Close observation of company management (cargoes, bills of trade, banking transactions, taxes, bankruptcy settlements, consignment sources, pay for employees, etc.) would have been welcome, at the risk of nitty-gritty, but important, detail. 

The man who gave his name to the firm, Augustine Heard, Sr., a sea captain from Ipswich, Massachusetts, does not occupy a prominent role in Larkin’s account of the firm. The founders who were active in China were Joseph Coolidge (formerly of Russell & Co.) and George Dixwell. They assisted British firms in carrying on a clandestine trade during the period of the Opium War. After the Thirteen Factories (where foreign trade was conducted at Canton) were razed to the ground during the British and French assault on the city at the start of the Second Opium War in December 1856, the operations of Heard & Co. were re-established at Hong Kong, which became the headquarters of the firm for the remainder of its existence. The four brothers (John, Augustine Jr., Albert, and George) ran the firm by turns, but not with even management strategies. Accordingly, Augustine Heard & Co. was not a model of business stability. Larkin’s primary documentary collection is the Heard Family Business Records at the Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

One theme that runs through the book examines the relationship between American merchants in China and the British firms which were on home ground in the new colony. The business practices and social practices were established by British firms there, and the Americans largely conformed and took advantage of the British dominance. To some degree, the neutral status of American trade during the Opium War allowed British firms to keep their businesses alive by trans-shipping their cargoes into China on American ships. But there was a quiet tension between the two national groups after the war that was intensified by the sympathies of some British citizens (in China and in England) for the Confederate side in the American Civil War. Larkin handles this tension smoothly, acknowledging it, but not exaggerating it. Sometimes the fusion of local Chinese ways and British practices, as in the emergence of the “tiffin” as a substitute for the English afternoon tea, reduced such tensions between the English and the Americans. Moreover, the author describes a “sense of white cohesion” by which “the Americans and British found unity by identifying that which they both were not: Chinese” (75).

Larkin’s chapters have varying weight. For example, chapter 2, which deals with the properties that served as domicile and business headquarters, offers a great deal of insight into the somewhat confusing social circumstances of the American merchants. Chapter 3, which describes the roles of women in the colony, and the situations in which American and British merchants and families got together in social rounds, at clubs, and at the horse races, explains the odd functioning of social occasions and practices. Larkin’s work is very good in this field of social history. In contrast, the chapter which describes the Heard brothers’ fortunes after China is somewhat less effective because of the awkwardness of the text bouncing from one brother to another repeatedly.

Jacques Downs’s The Golden Ghetto is a good starting point for readers interested in American commerce in China in the first half of the nineteenth century.[3] The field of the old China trade and the post-1842 burgeoning of Western firms is a hot market these days, and those scholars who are interested in this province of East Asian History would do well to keep attention on the work of Paul van Dyke, John Carroll, Alain LePichon, Elizabeth Sinn, Phyllis Forbes Kerr, and Stacilee Ford.[4]

In his introduction, Larkin states that he has used this case study of Augustine Heard & Co. “to establish a more complete understanding of how Americans abroad interacted with nineteenth-century British colonialism and shaped Sino-foreign contact” (9). In that endeavor, he has been successful.

 

Richard J. Grace is an emeritus Professor of History at Providence College in Rhode Island. He holds a PhD in History from Fordham University and has twice been a visiting fellow at St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. His fields of special interest are British and American history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His study of nineteenth-century China traders, Opium and Empire: The Lives and Careers of William Jardine and James Matheson, was published in 2014 by McGill-Queens University Press. He is currently completing an analysis of the various types of costs of World War II for Great Britain. He is the author of articles and reviews in numerous academic journals.

 

---

[1] Memorandum from William Jardine to Lord Palmerston, 5 December 1839, Palmerston Papers, University of Southampton, MS 62 PP/ MM/ CH /5.

[2] Jacques Downs, The Golden Ghetto: The American Commercial Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy, 1784–1844 (Lehigh University Press, 1997), 325.

[3] Downs, The Golden Ghetto.

[4] Regarding Chinese migration via Hong Kong, see Elizabeth Sinn, “In-between Place: A New Paradigm for Hong Kong Studies,” in Elizabeth Sinn, Siulun Wong, and Wing-hoi Chan, eds.,Rethinking Hong Kong: New Paradigms, New Perspectives (University of Hong Kong Centre of Asian Studies, 2009). Regarding the field, see Paul Van Dyke, Americans and Macao: Trade, Smuggling, and Diplomacy on the South China Coast (Hong Kong University Press, 2012); John Carroll, Canton Days: British Life and Death in China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020); Alain Le Pichon, Aux origins de Hong Kong: Aspects de la civilisation commerciale a Canton – Le fonds de commerce de Jardine, Matheson & Co., 1827–1839 (L’Harmattan, 1998); Elizabeth Sinn and Christopher Muss, eds., Meeting Place: Encounters across Cultures in Hong Kong, 1841–1984 (Hong Kong University Press, 2017).

Book review: o fim do colonialismo - Martin Thomas: The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization; review by Eva-Maria Muschik

H-Diplo Review Essay 621: Muschik on Thomas, _The End of Empires and a World Remade_ christopher ball H-Diplo Review Essay 621 Martin Thomas. The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization. Princeton University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780691190921. 20 March 2025 | PDF: https://hdiplo.org/to/E621 | X: @HDiplo | BlueSky: @h-diplo.bsky.social   Editor: Diane Labrosse  Commissioning Editors: Carleigh Cartmell and Seth Offenbach Production Editor: Christopher Ball Pre-Production Copy Editor: Masami Kimura Review by Eva-Maria Muschik, University of Vienna Martin Thomas’s The End of Empires is a rich book. Drawing on a wide range of English-language scholarship and a broad base of European archival materials, Thomas puts the issue of violence front and center and reminds us that twentieth-century decolonization was a globally connected process, but not strictly speaking a post-1945 phenomenon. In his understanding, it is also not a finished process. The emphasis throughout the book is on politics, especially individual conflicts, but also transnational networking and international law, economic matters, and the sociology of violence. Readers interested in learning more about the people, ideas, and culture that animated the global history of decolonization may need to turn elsewhere.  Thomas describes decolonization as not a single event, but a “process of ending empire and breaking with colonialism” (2). More specifically, his book is concerned with the end of twentieth-century oceanic empires mostly after 1945. “The story of these collapses,” he writes, “is the history of decolonization” (16). With this focus of the book, as opposed to, say, the break-up of European land empires during and after World War I or empires in the Americas in the preceding centuries, Thomas follows Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel’s argument: that the twentieth-century breakdown of oceanic empires was the most consequential “wave” of decolonization, for it resulted in the “disappearance of empire as a political form” and the “end of racial hierarchy as a widely accepted political ideology and structuring principle of world order” (16).[1] For Thomas, decolonization “stands alongside the twentieth century’s world wars, the Cold War, and the longer arc of globalization as one of the four great determinants of geopolitical change in living memory” (16). Indeed, he argues, it represents the “biggest reconfiguration of world politics ever seen” (7). Thomas maintains that “decolonization was one globally connected process” and that “we cannot understand decolonization’s global impact by examining individual empires or single colonial histories,” with the caveat added later that “decolonization unfolded globally but contingently” (3, 40). Hence, the global history angle. There are, of course, many discussions about what global history actually means.[2] For Thomas, it seems, global history is not primarily concerned with de-centering European perspectives on a given subject.[3](Somewhat indicative of this stance, the book opens and closes with the perspective of British politician Barbara Castle.) Rather, Thomas defines the approach of global history as “rejecting the nation-state as the analytical starting point and focusing instead on…entanglements of peoples, ideas, and discriminations” (15, my emphasis). As chapter 2 lays out, Thomas is moreover concerned with convergence or “globalization,” which he understands to be “the acceleration of global integration” (27). He suggests that “we need to locate decolonization both chronologically and in relation to” this process (26) and attempts to “unscramble conflicting perspectives on which of these processes—either decolonization or globalization—accelerated or even catalyzed the other” (27).[4] He concludes somewhat defeatedly, however:  Assessing the impact of globalization on the end of empires is difficult in the absence of consensus over which vectors—economic output and trade flows, cultural connections and migratory patterns, or shifts in transregional power—best express its impact (44).  Without weighing in on the matter himself, Thomas cautions against understanding globalization as a one-way traffic (from Europe to the rest of the world) and underestimating the extent to which decolonization reorganized the world (45). He does not explicitly discuss globalization in the rest of the book, but returns to aspects which are associated with it, e.g. economic integration, in the chapters that follow.  According to Thomas, the book seeks, first, to explain “what brought down European overseas empires”—that is, the causes of decolonization, and in particular the global factors that either accelerated or slowed down the process (4, 335)—and, second, to “work out how much changed when [foreign colonial rulers] left or were compelled to go” (3)—that is, the global impact of decolonization. This is arguably a mammoth task.  With regard to the second question of impact, Thomas’ main argument seems to be—as the title indicates—that the world was remade as empire was undone. But he argues that decolonization remains unfinished first, because of unequal power relations rooted in colonial-era hierarchies; second, because of enduring patterns of colonial thought, speech, and behavior; and third, because of lasting economic inequalities rooted in empire (349). Overall, the book is less concerned with what the “world remade” looked like, than with “paths of empire destruction.”  In answer to his first question about causes, or “factors that triggered colonial collapse,” Thomas presents a somewhat eclectic bucket list that includes issues of political economy, anticolonial opposition and rights claims, the two World Wars, territorial partitions, pro- and anti-colonial violence, and the vulnerability of colonial civilians (5). Thomas concedes that the list could be longer and could include, for example, questions of identity and culture, gender and ethnicity, ideology and ethics, geopolitics, international organization, and the global Cold War, and that it is the historian’s task to distinguish between major and minor factors among all of the above. Yet Thomas does not explicitly reveal where he comes down on this question, nor how this sets his book apart from existing literature on the topic.[5] To me, Thomas’s list of causal factors is confusing rather than clarifying. Some of them cannot be neatly separated from one another. For example, “issues of global political economy,” as Thomas discusses in the book, resulted to a large extent from the “transformative aftereffects of two world wars” (5). It is also unclear how partitions were a cause rather than an effect of the end of empire. Is it the case that we cannot determine causal factors for the global process of decolonization as such, but have to look at individual processes of decolonization after all to determine the relative weight of factors?  The organization of the book departs from that of comparative titles:[6] The introductory part I, “Globalizing Decolonization,” Thomas explains, deals with “ideas and concepts” (4) of both scholars and historical actors: chapter 1 discusses the term “decolonization,” chapter 2 focuses on the relationship between globalization and decolonization (thus going beyond “ideas and concepts”), and chapter 3 presents “alternatives” (4) to decolonization, as in historical alternatives to national sovereignty claims, including, for example, empire citizenship reform, pooled sovereignty polities (federations, regional associations), and global governance mechanisms. The much longer part II, “Paths of Empire Destruction,” proceeds roughly chronologically from the impact of World War One (chapter 4) to that of World War Two (chapter 7), with a mix of more thematic and geographically focused chapters in between and after: chapters 5, 12, and 13 deal with the economic effects of the wars and with interwar and postwar political decisions. In a very welcome addition to the more familiar focus in the literature on development, Thomas discusses global trade, debt, and monetary arrangements here. He also engages the burgeoning scholarship on the push for a New International Economic Order.[7] Chapters 6 and 14 focus on key sites, concerns, and moments of transnational anti-colonial networking and activism, from interwar Communist internationalism, to the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955, the founding of the Non-Alignment Movement in Belgrade in 1961, and the Tri-Continental Conference in Havana in 1966. Other important milestones and organizations in this regard, such as the 1900 Pan-African Congress, the League against Imperialism, and the Group of 77, are discussed in chapters 4 and 13. The remaining chapters, in one way or another, discuss the violence of decolonization. Chapter 8 deals with post-World War Two conflicts in South East Asia. Chapter 9 discusses partitions. Chapter 10 focuses on decolonization wars of the 1950s and 1960s in Kenya, Vietnam, and Algeria, which, as Thomas underlines, imperial powers tried to hide from public attention. Chapter 11 shines the spotlight on the civilians who bore the brunt of decolonization violence. The concluding chapter 15 discusses “endgames” of empire in the Portuguese and Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Ocean island territories.  To my mind, the guiding questions or focus are not always comprehensibly explained in the chapter introductions. Many topics and events surface in various chapters, and the chapter conclusions often bring in new aspects and actors rather than summarizing the main points made. Much prior contextual knowledge regarding historical actors and events is required of the reader. Compared to other titles on this topic, Thomas’s book is thus not an easy introductory read, even if it is certainly a worthwhile, thought-provoking one.[8] A real strength of the book is that, in line with his own earlier research plus other recent publications on imperial history more generally,[9] Thomas convincingly reveals that a panoply of violence is central to the history of decolonization, from psychological to physiological, from economical to ecological, from military to civilian. This is a story of mass displacement, forced labor and migration, hunger, disease, and ecological devastation related to both imperial economic exploitation and mismanagement as well as war efforts, which fueled both resistance against empire and rising tensions among the various groups within colonial societies. Chapter 7, which focuses on World War Two, serves as something of a hinge chapter for Thomas’s second major intervention: “The logic of the Second World War as decolonization’s catalytic agent is flawed because the disintegrative process had begun decades earlier,” Thomas writes, and the preceding chapters serve his point. But his argument is also forward-looking: Decolonization “would play out for decades more” (124). Building on Robert Gerwarth’s work on World War I,[10] Thomas’s “proposition is that wartime cataclysm did not—indeed, could not—‘cause’ decolonization after 1945 because there was no clear division between war and postwar.” Notions of “empires at peace” or “peacetime colonialism” are thus misleading (125). As he writes, “the war itself persisted, mutating into other violent anti-colonial struggles” (132). The chapters that follow amply prove his point that the transition-of-power narrative sanitizes the history of decolonization, which “was anything but transitory or clean” (171). Throughout the book, Thomas raises and discusses several important questions that are related to the extent to which international law, humanitarian actors, and international organizations served to shape (if not mitigate) decolonization violence and vice versa and what role anti-colonial violence played in bringing down empire. A key section comes in chapter 13, where Thomas rejects the narrative of a “managed” decolonization in the sense of a process being set in motion and directed by imperial authorities (263). Empire was brought down by its opponents, Thomas notes. But he also allows for a correlation between European economic decline and retrenchment overseas (263). Frederick Cooper has argued that by the late 1950s, imperial authorities began to consider the developmental colonialism of the post-1945 period too expensive to maintain.[11]Thomas’s account adds to this analysis the fact that decolonization violence also “punched big deficits into imperial balance sheets,” whether they are “measured in money or reputation” (266). This is also where factors such as transnational activism, global public fora like the ones affiliated with the United Nations, and international law, come in. Because of this mix of factors, Thomas suggests, “finding partners to show the way out [became] more advantageous than trying to stay in” from the metropolitan perspective (267).[12] Because Thomas’s narrative is largely concerned with the “paths of empire destruction,” I was left wondering about the impact or legacies of the violence of decolonization in the post-independence era in terms of authoritarian regimes, civil wars, social and economic disruptions, foreign interventionism, etc. This question is especially pertinent in view of the unfinished “decolonial” pursuit of achieving economic sovereignty and prosperity, be it through national projects, federal or regional arrangements, or changing the institutions of global governance. Thomas’s book thus raises several crucial questions about the global history of decolonization that—building on his important work—may be further tackled down the line.   Eva-Maria Muschik is a historian and Assistant Professor in the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna. She is the author of Building States: The United Nations, Development, and Decolonization, 1945–1965 (Columbia University Press, 2022), the special issue introduction “Towards a Global History of International Organizations and Decolonization,” published in the Journal of Global History in 2022, and co-editor of the forthcoming volume International Organizations and the Cold War: Competition, Cooperation and Convergence(Bloomsbury, 2025).   [1] Jan Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel, Decolonization: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2017), 1. [2] For a most recent discussion, see Stefanie Gänger and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., Rethinking Global History(Cambridge University Press, 2024). [3] For a contrasting understanding of global history, see, for example, Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History?(Princeton University Press, 2016), 67. [4] An engagement with another book that is co-authored by Jürgen Osterhammel might have been insightful here: Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2021), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400824328.　 [5] See, for example,Muriel Evelyn Chamberlain, Decolonization: The Fall of the European Empires (Blackwell, 2004); Prasenjit Duara, ed., Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (Rewriting Histories) (Routledge, 2004); Dietmar Rothermund, The Routledge Companion to Decolonization (Routledge, 2006); Martin Shipway, Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (Blackwell, 2008) as well as recent introductory books cited in footnote 9. [6] See footnotes 6 and 9. [7] Giuliano Garavini, After Empires: European Integration, Decolonization, and the Challenge from the Global South 1957–1986 (Oxford University Press, 2012); Nils Gilman, “The New International Economic Order: A Re-Introduction,” Humanity: An International Journal for Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6:1 (2015): 1-16; Christopher Dietrich, “Oil Power and Economic Theologies: The United States and the Third World in the Wake of the Energy Crisis,” Diplomatic History 40:3 (2016): 500-529; Jonas Kreienbaum, Das Öl und der Kampf um eine Neue Weltwirtschaftsordnung – Die Bedeutung der Ölkrisen der 1970er Jahre für die Nord-Süd-Beziehungen (De Gruyter, 2022); Michael Franczak, Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s (Cornell University Press, 2022). [8] Dane Kennedy, Decolonization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016); Jansen and Osterhammel, Decolonization. [9] See, for example, Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and the Roads from Empire (Oxford University Press, 2014); Thomas and Gareth Curless, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies (Oxford University Press, 2023); Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (The Bodley Head, 2022); Lauren Benton, They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press, 2024).  [10] Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End: 1917–1923 (Allen Lane, 2016). [11] Frederick Cooper, “Writing the History of Development,” Journal of Modern European History 8:1 (2010): 5-23, here 15. [12] For a similar argument on the interwar period, see Susan Pedersen, “Getting out of Iraq—in 1932: The League of Nations and the Road to Normative Statehood,” The American Historical Review 115:4 (2010): 975-1000, here 975.

Book review: Efeito Xi Jinping por Ashley Esarey e Rongbin Han (eds.), review by Olivia Cheung (H-Net Reviews)

Cheung on Esarey and Han, 'The Xi Jinping Effect' [Review]

H-Net Reviews

Esarey, Ashley; Han, Rongbin, eds..  The Xi Jinping Effect

 University of Washington Press, 2024. 304 pp. $32.00 (paper), ISBN 9780295752815.

Reviewed by Olivia Cheung (King's College London)
Published on H-Diplo (March, 2025)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=61434

Xi Jinping is known for his authoritarian rule, foreign policy ambitions, and confrontational stance toward the United States. Shortly after taking power in late 2012, Xi articulated the goal of achieving “the China Dream of national rejuvenation” by mid-century.[1] To reach this, he has focused on reinvigorating the Chinese Communist Party on the basis of centralizing powers in his hands. He has disregarded conventions, launching an unprecedentedly intense rectification-cum-anticorruption drive; elevating his “thought” as the state ideology; restructuring the party, military, and state; abolishing term limits in 2018; taking a third term in 2022; and ending the “hide and bide” foreign policy. Politically, Xi appears invisible, but does his power translate to effective governance? Even under former Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s totalitarian rule, resistance and subversion persisted. As a Chinese saying goes, “From the top comes policies; from the bottom, coping strategies.” To govern as effectively as he holds power, Xi must overcome not only resistance and inertia, but also deep-seated structural factors and international forces beyond his control.

To what extent does Xi impact China’s governance and policies? The Xi Jinping Effect, edited by Ashley Esarey and Rongbin Han, examines this question. The book is divided into four parts, with the first three addressing the Xi effect on domestic affairs—internal party governance and ideological rectification (part 1), socioeconomic inequality (part 2), and mass surveillance and control (part 3). Part 4 considers Xi’s impact on Taiwan and China’s relations with Southeast Asia. While these areas are significant, it is unclear why they were chosen over others. Notably, Xi has invested in technological supremacy, party control in business, securitization, military-civilian fusion, rebooting “One Country, Two Systems” in Hong Kong, befriending the Global South, competing with the United States, and changing the global governance system in a more Sino-centric fashion. Would focusing on these areas yield a different assessment of the Xi effect?

If I were to study the Xi effect, I would use X’s strategic intentions as the starting point and anchor. Based on an analysis of Xi’s speeches and writings, I would identify the areas he is most and least determined to change, his benchmarks of success, time frame, and the trade-offs he is willing to make.[2] Thereafter, I would sort Xi’s policies into categories depending on the strength or outcome of the Xi effect as Xi intended them to be. I would then select several cases from each category for analysis with a view of producing findings that will have a good degree of generalizability. Putting Xi’s preferences and worldview, or Xi Jinping Thought, front and center implies taking Xi’s agency fully into account in appraising the Xi effect. Assessing the Xi effect by checking whether Xi Thought was faithfully implemented should allow us to probe more deeply into the nature and limits of Xi’s strongman rule, this being the very phenomenon that motivates a study of the Xi effect in the first place.

The book concludes that the Xi effect is highly uneven. It is found to be the main reason behind the “total surveillance” of society (chapter 6), especially the Xinjiang Uyghurs (chapter 7). It has shown to be robust in anticorruption in the party-state (chapter 1). Its impact on ideological governance in the party (chapter 2) and society (chapter 3) is sweeping. Furthermore, it has risen above all factors in shaping China’s Taiwan policy (chapter 8). In these areas, Xi has overturned long-standing post-Mao policies. It is nothing short of a “counter-reformation” (chapter 2) of the post-Mao or Dengist reform, one that will most likely endure as long as Xi is in power. The authors of these chapters, except chapters 7 (on Xinjiang) and 8 (on Taiwan), observe that the changes ushered in by Xi are not entirely new. They either built on or adapt existing trends or took a page from earlier periods. Deng Kai, David Demes, and Chih-Jou Jay Chen (chapter 7) point out that Xi’s “total surveillance” system was made possible by the preceding Hu Jintao regime’s decision to build a national population database (p. 154). Andrew Wedeman traces the origin of Xi’s anticorruption campaign to Mao’s times (chapter 1). Timothy Cheek observes ideological governance under Xi had roots in the Qing dynasty (chapter 2). Gerda Wielander demonstrates that Xi’s reaffirmation of “faith” in the party, though overtly political, strikes a chord with popular thinking at the social grassroots (chapter 3). Prior to Xi, many human right dissidents in China publicly proclaimed the importance of keeping faith. Like Xi, they also saw faith as a “spiritual and motivational force” to help them move forward (p. 73). Whereas they claimed inspiration from Christianity (pp. 73-74) to confront the authorities, Xi, an atheist, urged people to submit to the party out of faith in its moral righteousness.

In contrast to the above chapters, Martin King Whyte (chapter 4) and Alexia T. Chan (chapter 5) conclude that the Xi effect is slight, if not negligible, in improving socioeconomic inequality. Both present ample evidence of persistent and increasing urban-rural inequality under Xi. Their findings juxtapose to Xi’s declaration, in 2020, that the antipoverty campaign he started in 2015 had delivered a “miracle.” Xi claimed that the campaign had lifted seventy million rural Chinese out of “absolute poverty.”[3] Yet, the everyday poverty documented in chapters 4 and 5 shows that the success of the antipoverty campaign was short-lived. Whyte attributes the lack of a Xi effect in reducing inequality not to Xi’s weakness but his reluctance to take “bold” steps to combat inequality (p. 117). Chan goes further. She finds that the persistence of second-class citizenship under Xi is intentional and “serves state goals” (p. 146). Both further observe that structural factors have come into play. For example, Chan finds that the problem of “unfunded mandates” has persisted under Xi (p. 139), whereby the central government announced goals to improve the people’s livelihood without supporting cash-strapped local governments to translate these goals into actual policies. I would add that the massive increase in local government debt under Xi is another important structural factor, this being one that is inadvertently contributed by his other policies, notably the crackdown on the property sector and shadow banking.[4]

The middle point between a strong Xi effect and a weak Xi effect is found in China’s relations with Southeast Asia. Brantly Womack (chapter 9) shows that the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s signature foreign policy program, has strengthened connectivity between China and Southeast Asia, and with that, their asymmetric power balance to the advantage of China (p. 229). Yet Womack stresses that Southeast Asia is not only “concerned” about Xi’s arrogance but also “the possible side effects of China’s confrontation with the United States”—a prominent feature of Xi’s foreign policy (p. 229). Womack concluded that Southeast Asia’s reluctance to take a side between the United States and China is a more decisive factor than Xi’s personality, diplomacy, or aggressive actions in shaping their approach to China.

Every chapter in this book is highly informative on the latest developments of China under Xi. However, not all of them addresses the Xi effect explicitly or systematically. In some chapters, there is a lack of a focused examination of the Xi effect. Policy changes under Xi are taken as evidence of a Xi effect at work, almost at face value. Other chapters, notably chapter 9, make efforts to isolate Xi’s agency from other factors contributing to the policy outcome observed under Xi. The lack of a shared theoretical framework to examine the Xi effect is not particularly conducive to understanding the Xi effect. This brings me back to my earlier suggestion of using Xi Thought as a yardstick to appraise the Xi effect, one that is, from what I can see, feasible to be adopted by all chapters.

As discussed earlier, the book concludes that the Xi effect is highly uneven across policy issues. It would have been helpful if the book had also addressed the implications of this observation more deeply, beyond pointing out the tension between agency and structure. At a start, perhaps the following questions could be addressed. Has Xi’s success in implementing a system of total surveillance in society, which greatly raises the cost of the public expression of dissatisfaction, inadvertently reduced his commitment to take bold steps to improve the quality of living for China’s workers? Has the persistence of income inequality in China weakened Xi’s ideological governance? What are the common variables behind the strong Xi effect in anticorruption, ideological governance, social control, and China’s Taiwan policy?

Finally, it would have been invaluable had the authors reflected on whether the conclusions drawn in their studies can be extrapolated and why. In the book where this is done, it is often insightful. For example, in chapter 3, Wielander links Xi’s ideological governance—namely his strategy to “tighten control of all faith-based activity and to position the Party itself as an object of faith”—to China’s emergence as a “fundamentalist power” that challenges the “international order built on commonly shared values” (p. 71). This is a fascinating insight that speaks of the role of domestic factors in how China sees its place in the world. It contributes a more textured understanding to the role of domestic factors in Chinese foreign policy, a welcome variation to the dominant accounts, which focus heavily on international structural factors. This is only one of many examples of the usefulness of this volume in unraveling the complexities of Xi’s China.

As Xi is nearing the middle of his third five-year term, we are increasingly witnessing a distinct Xi effect on China’s relations with the rest of the world. Xi’s personal rapport with Putin, head-of-state diplomacy with world leaders, and the three global initiatives he introduced as a better alternative to the liberal international order are some examples.[5] To bring the analysis of the Xi effect up to date, it would be helpful to examine closely Xi’s tianxia worldview and his role in foreign policymaking. This could be one of the directions which the research program of the Xi effect may develop.

Notes

[1]. Jinping Xi, Xi Jinping tan zhiguo lizheng [Xi Jinping: The Governance of China] (Beijing: Waiwen chubanshe, 2014), 35-36.

[2]. Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung, The Political Thought of Xi Jinping (Oxford University Press, 2024).

[3]. Ibid., 102, 112-13.

[4]. Victor Shih and Jonathan Elkobi, Local Government Debt Dynamics in China: An Exploration Through the Lens of Local Government Debt and LGFV Debt, November 27, 2023, 21st Century China Center, UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, https://china.ucsd.edu/_files/2023-report_shih_local-government-debt-dynamics-in-china.pdf.

[5]. These are the Global Development Initiative (2021), Global Security Initiative (2022), and Global Civilization Initiative (2023).

Olivia Cheung is a lecturer in politics at the Department of European and International Studies, King’s College London. Her research specialization is the domestic politics and foreign policy of China. Her latest major publications are The Political Thought of Xi Jinping (Oxford University Press, 2024), coauthored with Steve Tsang, and Factional-Ideological Conflicts in Chinese Politics: To the Left or to the Right?(Amsterdam University Press, 2023).

Citation: Olivia Cheung. Review of Esarey, Ashley; Han, Rongbin, eds.. The Xi Jinping Effect. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. March, 2025.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61434