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“This book is interesting because he introduces the concept of ‘pre-totalitarianism.’ What he sees happening in Xi Jinping’s China has tendencies of totalitarianism, but it’s not completely totalitarian yet…We’ve seen the term ‘pre-totalitarianism’ before, in political science, and famously, in Hannah Arendt’s work, but she didn’t develop it. She used the term, but Steven Feldman did the difficult work of really trying to conceptualise what it is. He went to China and talked to a lot of different people at all levels: people who are more senior in politics or business, and ordinary folks. It’s an ethnographical approach to looking at pre-totalitarianism, and I thought that was interesting because I’ve never seen that before.” Read more...
