A review by zachcarter
The Governance of China by Xi Jinping

4.0

I chose this book because I wanted a better understanding of how the Communist Party of China relates the ideals of Marxism-Leninism to their present-day governing strategies after Mao, Deng Xiaoping, and others. And that's pretty much exactly what it did. To be fair, this is a book of stitched-together speeches given by Xi Jinping over a few years to different audiences, so there is A LOT of repetition and redundancies. I learned after 100 pages of diligent reading that you can actually just breeze through most of it as long as you're ready to catch the really good parts that are sort of buried in the "fluff." The sections I found most interesting were the ones on social programs (poverty, housing, education, etc), internationalism (in particular with Africa and the Belt and Road Initiative), the explanation of "reform and opening up", and Xi's analysis of the mass line and CPC leadership. So getting through the ~400 iterations of "developing socialism with Chinese characteristics" was totally worth it and presented really well Xi's vision for China and its growing role in the world. I also gained an appreciation for Xi through his mastery of China's 4,000 year history and his optimism that's centered in reality. The only thing that surprised me was that he really has no heat for the United States (or really any capitalist/imperialist nation--one of the only times he uses the term imperialism in the entire book was in an address in Tanzania where he related the imperialist/colonialist histories of China with Tanzania).