The Great Transformation: China's Road from Revolution to Reform

"Yes, that fits in well. One way of thinking about the long arc from Liang Qichao to the present is that while people were embracing different kinds of ideologies and strategies the common thread was, ‘How do we make this country cohere and make it strong enough to be able to hold its own in a dangerous world?’ There were all sorts of different formulas for doing this that were tried, most of which involved connecting to parts of the Chinese past and borrowing from clusters of ideas circulating in the wider world. Chen Jian and Arnie Westad are both historians of China who are also very interested in the Cold War and the international situation. They remind us that there was eclectic borrowing going on during the first decades of PRC history that we sometimes forget when we think in terms of East-West polarities, or communist-capitalist dichotomies. Their book looks at what happened after the exhaustion with Mao’s particular utopian interpretation of Marxism-Leninism. What, they ask, came out of the rubble of the early Cultural Revolution? The heroes of their story, in a way, are a combination of ordinary people trying to rebuild their lives, and leaders who were trying to come up with new, mix-and-match ideas to move China forward. A lot of times the story about China opening up after Mao is largely about Nixon going to China, and its opening to the West, and then about Deng Xiaoping having a bold new approach. What they draw attention to is the degree to which the Chinese state always needed to have some connections to places outside in the wider world. So even when China was closed off, there were moves toward connecting up with Japan. This was in the 1960s, when China had pivoted away from the Soviet Union but was still feuding with the United States. It wasn’t as though they could eschew connections with all other places and still have any sort of economic development. The authors write about business in a very fine-grained way—they look at which foreign companies began to get footholds in China and at what point. Germany came fairly early in the 1970s. They’re very interested in details and what they find in the archives. What they cover in the book won’t surprise people who’ve been following the scholarship, but they tell it in an accessible and relatively dispassionate way that’s very appealing. Sometimes, when I’m reading Frank Dikötter’s recent books, as spirited as his writing is, I feel like I’m making my way through a prosecutorial brief against the Chinese Communist Party. There are other writings, focusing on figures like Deng Xiaoping, that veer toward the hagiographic. Both of these kinds of approaches seem to flatten out things that should be, like history often is, bumpy and shaped by contingencies and flukes as well as nefarious plans and good intentions, though those certainly can both exist. There’s something valuable about just going into the nitty gritty of, ‘How exactly does a country that was in such a shambles in the late 1960s end up surging forward economically by the 1980s?’ A lot of specific choices were made. The book is an argument for the importance of contingency, rather than a grand vision. Yes, the long 1970s. It fits with a trend pointing out that it didn’t all start in 1979 with Deng donning a cowboy hat when he went to America, as evocative as photographs of him at that famous rodeo might be. These things were percolating from the early 1970s and then last into the mid-1980s. The Great Transformation , for better and worse, then stops the story with Tiananmen Square events on the horizon. Rather than treating the Cultural Revolution as one topic and the Reform Era as another, how they overlap is something that scholars have become more interested in lately. This book is an example of that. It’s a very accessible survey book that doesn’t start with the death of one leader and the rise of another."