Bøger af Johan Lagerkvist

This book analyses the ideology that China's leader Xi Jinping has crafted during his decade in power. Chinäs political system and domestic and foreign policies have, between 2012 and 2022, become more defined by the political thought of Xi Jinping, the most powerful leader of the Chinese Communist Party since the time of Mao Zedong. Today, Xi¿s China is embroiled in superpower rivalry with the United States and its allies. Therefore, ongoing ideological transformation in the People¿s Republic is destined to have global repercussions. Yet surprisingly, the ideological mission of Xi Jinping is poorly understood. Based on analysis of Xi Jinping¿s collected speeches, the book argues that Chinäs new state ideology is constructed around the three key concepts of loyalty, discipline, and greatness. Xi¿s mission is about ideological re-orientation and re-activation, as well as organizational innovation, seeking to frame Chinäs ¿national self¿ as a collective unit under one political banner and one leader. However, despite the monumental Party-state effort to boost the new ideology and state-scripted ¿moral careers¿, the book contends that Xi Jinping cannot take for granted that political and patriotic loyalty will forever trump the formation of ¿disloyal moral careers¿ in society.

This book contends that the massacre of civilians in Beijing on June Fourth 1989 was a pivotal rupture in both Chinese and world history. If not for that day, China's socioeconomic, political and cultural landscape would not have undergone the kind of dramatic transformation that has made China rich but unequal, open but hyper-nationalist, moralistic but immoral and unhappy. Through the lens of global history the book revisits the drama of Tiananmen and demonstrates how it unfolded, ended, and ultimately how that ending - in a consensus of forgetting - came to shape the world of the 21st century. It offers a theorization on the inclusion of China into global capitalism and argues that the planetary project of neoliberalism has been prolonged by China's market reforms. This has resulted in an ongoing convergence of economic and authoritarian political practices that transcend otherwise contrasting political systems. With China's growing global influence, the late leader Deng Xiaoping's statement that development is a hard truth increasingly conveys the logic of our contemporary world.

China has lived with the Internet for nearly two decades. Will increased Internet use, with new possibilities to share information and discuss news and politics, lead to democracy, or will it to the contrary sustain a nationalist supported authoritarianism that may eventually contest the global information order? This book takes stock of the ongoing tug of war between state power and civil society on and off the Internet, a phenomenon that is fast becoming the centerpiece in the Chinese Communist Party's struggle to stay in power indefinitely. It interrogates the dynamics of this enduring contestation, before democracy, by following how Chinese society travels from getting access to the Internet to our time having the world's largest Internet population. Pursuing the rationale of Internet regulation, the rise of the Chinese blogosphere and citizen journalism, Internet irony, online propaganda, the relation between state and popular nationalism, and finally the role of social media to bring about China's democratization, this book offers a fresh and provocative perspective on the arguable role of media technologies in the process of democratization, by applying social norm theory to illuminate the competition between the Party-state norm and the youth/subaltern norm in Chinese media and society.