Empire of Lies: The Truth about China in the Twenty-First Century

Description

The Western press these days is full of stories on China's arrival as a superpower, some even warning that the future may belong to her. Western political and business delegations stream into Beijing, confident in China's economy, which continues to grow rapidly. Crowning China's new status, Beijing will host the 2008 Olympic Games. But as Guy Sorman reveals in Empire of Lies China's success is, at least in part, a mirage. True, 200 million of her subjects, those fortunate enough to be working in an expanding global market, enjoy a middle-class standard of living. The remaining one billion, however, are among the poorest, most exploited people in the world. Popular discontent simmers, especially in the countryside, where it often flares into violent confrontation with Communist Party authorities. In truth, China's economic "miracle" is rotting from within. In this extraordinary book, Sorman explains how the West has conferred greater legitimacy on China than do the Chinese themselves. He has visited the country regularly for forty years and spent most of the past three years exploring her teeming cities and remotest corners. Empire of Lies is the culmination of these travels and perhaps the only book on China that lets the Chinese people speak for themselves.

Guy Sorman gives a human face to brutal oppression in today's China. He introduces us to the daily suffering of many individual human lives: students thrown into exile for signing their names to political leaflets, pregnant women beaten for being pregnant without the authorization of the state, peasant families enduring the long, slow sufferings of AIDS brought to them by unsanitary blood transfusions in public clinics. Sorman has long been a promoter of a realistic form of democracy in China and of a "barefoot capitalism" that would begin to diminish the huge number of those who suffer. -- Michael Novak From the Back Cover: In political philosophy, a whole generation of French thinkers like Revel, Jean-Marie Benoit, and Guy Sorman are rejecting the old cliches about state power and rediscovering the danger such power poses to personal freedom. -Ronald Reagan