The growing threat of China’s sinister regime

A review of ‘China, the Super Predator: a Challenge for the Planet’ by Pierre-Antoine Donnet (Changemaker Books, February, 2024)

I have already written about this timely and enlightening book and its French author in two recent articles, but the importance of the work in today’s precarious and disturbing geopolitical climate also demands a stand-alone review, I feel.

Veteran journalist Pierre-Antoine Donnet is a former Beijing correspondent for Agence France-Presse (AFP) who speaks Mandarin and has studied China for more than forty years. His new book, first published in French in 2021, has been updated for its English edition — the translation is by Richard Lein — and has an afterword by Donnet.

A laudatory foreword, described by Donnet as ‘an act of courage in these times’, is provided by the French sinologist Jean-Pierre Cabestan who specialises in the law and institutions of contemporary China and Taiwan and is a professor and head of the Department of Political Science at Hong Kong Baptist University.

‘The regime in Beijing, and especially the one honed and perfected by President Xi Jinping since 2012, is more toxic than ever to freedom.’ Cabestan writes.