Introduction: Me, China, and the Chinese (by W. Elsner)

This chapter provides an unorthodox introduction. It discusses the history leading up to the book’s main focus of twenty-first-century China, from the late 1960s to the late 2000s. It does so from a deliberately personalized perspective, describing the (un-)political biography of the author as a representative of the “68er” generation. He had been a “68er” who was politically interested but always declared that he did not care much about China. The subtle development of his apparent (and pretended) China “ignorance” is carefully cross-cut and blended with his professional development as an economist and his political thought, and the major events of Chinese history during those 40 years (the Cultural Revolution, Mao, Deng, the Tian’anmen events, China’s accession to the world trading system and the WTO, the Great Financial Crisis, German entrepreneurs in China …), up to the late 2000s, when the book’s main content begins. It is with a winking eye and some self-irony that the author describes and analyzes this development. Major political events in China, and some in the political West, are explained and discussed “off-mainstream”. Widely unknown material and sources are provided. The process tacitly leads to a growing interest by the author in China, which at some point around 2010 quickly evolves into intense and broad cooperation. Since then, the author has taught PhD summer schools and regular classes at several Chinese universities and has cooperated with Chinese academics. His professional profile today equally embraces East and West, with intense professional relations and honors received in both the USA and China (with his former assistants now being professors in the USA, the UK, Germany, and China). Finally, the chapter already introduces a number of fields, events, and issues, which the book picks up in its substantive chapters, always in an interplay of Western and Eastern as well as personal, political, and professional perspectives.