China’s history under the Communist Party has been demarcated, like geological ages, into neat, self-contained phases. There is the Great Leap Forward (1958-62); the Cultural Revolution (1966-76); and Reform and Opening (December 1978-1989). The bits outside these branded groups of years, including the first nine years of CCP rule, can feel a little fuzzy, while the links between phases are often overlooked.
This delineation isn’t solely an invention of western historians; the CCP too likes to rule off periods of its history, often in an effort to contain the bad times to a few specified years. In particular, the Party was, at least before the Xi Jinping era, keen to emphasize the Third Plenum of 1978 as a clean break from the trauma of the recent past; the Cultural Revolution a failed experiment which Deng and his younger acolytes (though Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang would themselves become problematic characters in the historiography of the 1980s) had the remedy for: a shift to free markets, and close political control. This transition, the story goes, was effectively complete by the party congress of 1992, after Deng’s January “Southern Tour” ended the post-Tiananmen period of economic “rectification”.
In their new history of China’s “road from revolution to reform”, to quote the book’s subtitle, historians Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian subtly but significantly shift narrative convention, focussing not on 1978-1989 but rather stretching out what they name the “long 1970s”, to examine the period from the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to one of the decisive years of Reform and Opening, 1984—the year of Deng’s first Southern Tour, by which time, the authors note, “China had reached a phase in which it would remain for the next generation”.
This allows the authors to subvert some of the received wisdom regarding the legacy of both the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s nominated successor, Hua Guofeng, who took over the leadership of the party following Mao’s death in 1976. As they note, much of the later change that blooms in the late 1970s and early 1980s had put down roots in the early 1970s, with small-scale trade, manufacturing and agriculture clandestinely pursued by individuals or small groups of people, outside of the state plan. Hua Guofeng too, oft-maligned until relatively recently as a Mao-lite placeholder, was in fact a great advocate of the need for economic reform, even if his ideas were more top-down than bottom-up. The frequently overlooked period of 1976-1978, with its complex political infighting and restoration of purged cadre, benefits in particular from the authors’ clarity and insight.
The book is also strong on the international politics of China in this era, which is often treated as background context to the drama of Beijing’s elite politics in histories of this era. The 1972 visit of President Richard Nixon marked the beginning of the end of the disengagement of the 1960s; though motivated more by “a combination of fear and luck”, the opportunities that resulted from this greater international engagement were key in the later economic transformation of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Deng Xiaoping is, of course, at the heart of this story, and the authors offer a balanced and accurate portrait of both his emergence as “paramount leader”, supported by his key allies in the military leadership, and his clear belief that reform should be pursued not purely for its social benefit, but because it supported the legitimacy of the party and enabled it to stay in power. That legacy resonates into the current authoritarian era of Xi Jinping.
The book’s title, drawn from Karl Polanyi’s seminal history of the emergence of the market economy in England, is apt in highlighting the somewhat ambivalent legacy of such transformation. It also perhaps implies that this volume, like Polanyi’s, will be a work of dense historical theorizing; whereas The Great Transformation is, in fact, a lucid, readable and engaging account of this key era—one which continues to develop our understanding of the relationships and continuities that exist across modern China’s recent history.