2019-10-07
44 分钟Welcome to lseiq.
I'm Sue Windibank,
and this is the podcast where we ask social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question.
This month sees the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China.
In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party won the Chinese civil war,
having overthrown the nationalist government of the Republic of China.
Mao Zedong declared the People's Republic on October 1st in Tiananmen Square.
The last 70 years have been tumultuous for China.
Under Mao, it experienced economic breakdown and societal chaos.
Famously, the Great Leap Forward, a campaign designed to industrialize and modernize the economy,
led to the largest famine in history, with millions of people dying of starvation.
And yet today, after widespread market economy reforms started by Deng xiaoping in the 1970s,
China is the second largest economy in the world.
This wealth is reflected in the country's international influence,
which is growing through sizable investments the country is making in large infrastructure projects around the world.
And of course, hundreds of thousands of Chinese students study abroad every year, including at LSE.
In this episode of LSEIQ, I ask, is the 21st century the Chinese century?
So maybe I could put it in a bit of more personal terms.
And I was telling people when I Left China in 1989,
you can read newspapers for weeks without hearing anything about China.