Is the Beijing Consensus finally replacing the Washington Consensus? In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the Ethiopian president Meles Zenawi gave a series of speeches lauding China’s “developmental state” as an alternative to a failed “neoliberal” model in Africa. Indeed, the former Albania-aligned Marxist guerrilla and Open University MBA student became something of an ideologist of Chinese-style state capitalism. Since then, the benefits of Chinese aid in Africa and elsewhere have been questioned, but the recent “Belt and Road Initiative” Forum in Beijing still attracted a record 37 world leaders eager to profit from Chinese economic expansion; seven came from the European Union (and three from governments that include right-wing populists: Italy, Hungary and Austria).
As China’s influence rises and America’s declines, it is unsurprising that historians should revisit the Maoist era – when China last seemed to offer an attractive political and economic model – and Julia Lovell’s highly readable and well-researched book is therefore timely. One of Lovell’s main aims is to put China itself at the centre of the story, challenging a common view that it has never harboured ambitions to be a global power. This line was pushed not only by the post-Mao leadership, keen to stress China’s “peaceful rise”, but also by influential figures such as Henry Kissinger, who has long claimed that China, unlike the United States and Russia, has never been a missionary, proselytising state. But Lovell argues convincingly that under Mao at least, this was certainly not the case; indeed she quotes Mao declaring that, “China is not only the political centre of the world revolution, it must also be the centre of world revolution militarily and technically.”
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