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BOOK REVIEW

China according to the Chinese. The Origin, Process, and Outcome of China's Reforms in the Past One Hundred Years by Enbao Wang

Reviewed by Yu Bin

Asia Times, November 7, 2009

French leader Napoleon Bonaparte had an aphorism: "Let China sleep; when she wakes she will shake the world," said Napoleon (1769-1821). Nearly 180 years after his death, this famous aphorism (or cliche, for Sinologists/China experts) by the French military genius and dictator is both right AND wrong.

He was right because China, indeed, had gone into almost a century-and-a-half "sleep" - a benign word for a prolonged devastation from 1839 to 1979 by wars, defeats, occupation, revolution, civil wars and political upheaval.

Napoleon was wrong, however, to predict that China's awakening would shake the world, meaning to challenge the West-dominated international system. Thirty years after China unfolded its historical reform in 1979, a strong and stable China - instead of switching between Napoleonic "sleeping" and "shaking" modes - has served as a world factory and has been a "stakeholder" of the existing international system still dominated by the West.

(...) [artículo aquí]