Beijing is a political center in the book’s account of modern China, where calls for change became publicly visible and where the central authorities asserted limits on both economic competition and access to information. Its role is clearest in the Democracy Wall movement of 1978 and in the later suppression of a privately initiated steel project and independent media coverage.

Public criticism and reform debate

In 1978, people posted complaints about the country on a wall in Beijing, making the Democracy Wall movement a visible expression of public pressure during a contest over China’s direction. Deng Xiaoping encouraged criticism of the Cultural Revolution as he maneuvered against Hua Guofeng, and the movement gave that broader struggle a public dimension. The wall did not itself settle the contest, but it formed part of the pressure surrounding the party’s turn toward economic modernization at the Third Plenum in November and December 1978.

The limits on private enterprise

Beijing also figures as the seat of authority that could stop economic initiatives approved or encouraged at lower levels. In 2003, Dai Guofang began building Jingsu Tieben Iron and Steel in Changzhou, anticipating rising urban demand and aiming to compete as a low-cost producer against inefficient state-owned factories. Local party bosses supported the project. By March 2004, however, the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing had ordered it stopped, and Dai was arrested. The reasons were never clearly articulated; in 2009 he was found guilty on a minor charge after spending five years in jail and home detention. The book presents the underlying issue as his attempt to build a major competitor to state-sponsored firms without higher-level approval.

Control over information

The city’s political significance also belongs to a wider account of party control over public communication. The government’s management of media and the Internet is described as operating partly through self-censorship and partly through technical measures that can monitor communications, shut websites and newspapers, and block access to particular online stories. In 2009, when reports emerged about corruption charges against the son of Hu Jintao, the party’s apparatus prevented Chinese media from covering the case and selectively blocked related stories on the New York Times and Financial Times websites. Together, these examples set public criticism and economic initiative against the power of a centralized political system to restrict both.