New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024. US$38.00, cloth; US$22.00, paper; US$38.00, ebook. ISBN 9780300267082.
The standard narrative of China’s transition from Mao to the Reform Era usually centres on Deng Xiaoping as the pivotal “maker of history.” At the heart of the transformation from Mao to post-Mao China are a series of events and processes that installed a “reformist” coalition under Deng in Beijing that transformed China from a centrally planned economy to a market-oriented mixed economy. To this conventional narrative of the “Deng Era,” the recent book by Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian provides the most powerful alternative to date.
Decentring China’s history from the duo of Mao and Deng, this book presents a more nuanced and less teleological account of China’s transformation from the late Maoist days to the early Reform Era by focusing on at least three sources of change: multiple actors vying powers around a wobbling centre in Beijing, grassroots entrepreneurs leveraging local opportunities amid weakening central control, and China’s participation in the accelerating flow of capital, technology, and ideas around the world after making peace with Pax Americana in the 1970s. The 11 chapters of the book generally follow the twists and turns of Chinese politics from the Cultural Revolution to the official start of market reforms in 1984 while paying close attention to bottom-up economic changes and China’s engagement with the changing global order.
The book rewrites Chinese politics from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s by examining a series of power struggles laden with surprises and ironies. Readers who seek a clear pathway from Mao to the Reform Era will miss the mark. Defying the winner’s view of history, the authors foreground neglected actors who played decisive roles but lost out in later struggles. For example, instead of dwelling on Deng, the authors restored Hua Guofeng, who should rightly claim to have reoriented the Party-state from politics to the economy, to his rightful place as the actual initiator of the reform. Writing on the October coup that ended the Cultural Revolution, the authors remind us that the Gang of Four were arrested under comical charges of being “rightists” and counter-revolutionaries at the order of Hua. Following a similarly dramatic showdown in the will to power, Hua himself was ousted by Deng a few years later on such unfounded charges that even his successor and Deng’s protegee, Hu Yaobang, found him wronged. These are simply a few examples of how the authors force readers to grapple with the complexity of China’s politics of reform.
The introduction of grassroots actors, such as entrepreneurs, is another essential feature of this book, distinguishing it from the conventional elite-political narrative of the post-Mao transition or the locally-based grassroots histories. While the extensive use of grassroots sources known as “Sinological garbology” complements the elite-centred narrative with grassroots stories of contemporary China, grassroots histories are usually local stories with national politics as a distant background. The authors undertake the daunting task of weaving a sophisticated elite political history with the voices from below by citing diaries, memoirs, letters, anecdotes, and other private sources. In the book’s narrative of the early 1970s’ political turmoil, for example, the authors demonstrate how the bureaucratic breakdown of the Cultural Revolution bred rural entrepreneurship through the stories of two entrepreneurs, Xu Hang and He Jianxiang, who seized the moment to start their later world-renowned enterprises. The entrepreneurial legends of Zhang Ruimin, Liu Chuanzhi, and Li Jingwei were integrated with the reformer’s struggles with Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaigns and the affirmation of the Sino-American axis in 1984.
With decades of deep research as Cold War historians, the authors are at home describing China’s role in the global transformation in the 1970s. As they demonstrate deftly, the Chinese leadership in the late 1970s was lucky to enter a world of opportunities and promises. While some old cadres in Beijing still harboured a dream of returning to the pre-Cultural Revolution order, most leaders were ready to learn from the broader developmental landscape—from market socialism models like Yugoslavia and Hungary to East Asian developmental states like Japan and Singapore. In addition, Reagan and Thatcher would soon move the world economic order towards an open, capital-friendly neoliberal order, giving a decisive nudge to their Chinese counterparts poised to open the country further. The competing visions for China’s political and economic futures involved intense negotiations between the Party centre, local leaders, grassroots entrepreneurs, and significant global and transnational trends. China’s path to market socialism, a successful economic model without political pluralism, was built on various domestic and foreign development experiences.
Given that China is such a vast country, a book of such a scope inevitably leaves gaps for further exploration. While the authors try to capture a panoramic view of the transformation, the overwhelming focus is still on elite politics. For example, the coverage of grassroots entrepreneurs is not fully integrated with central politics since much of the central-local relations and local political economy are left unsaid. While domestic entrepreneurs receive the spotlight, established transnational business leaders like Matsushita Konosuke, Rong Yiren, and Maurice Greenberg, who linked China to the outside world, are left out of the picture. Similarly left unmentioned are China’s cultural, educational, and intellectual exchanges with the outside world, which played no less important role than economic exchanges.
Despite some underexplored terrains, this book sets a new standard for writing about China’s transition from revolution to reform. It should be on the must-read list of all serious readers who want to understand the historical roots of contemporary China.
Yanjie Huang
National University of Singapore, Singapore