Overview

The first thorough account of a formative and little understood chapter in Chinese history Historians Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian chronicle how an impoverished and terrorized China experienced radical political changes in the long 1970s and how ordinary people broke free from the beliefs that had shaped their lives during Mao's Cultural Revolution. These political changes, and the unprecedented and sustained economic growth that followed, transformed China and the world. From the corridors of CCP headquarters to collective enterprises in Guangdong and the arrival of the US table tennis team, Westad and Chen reconstruct a panorama of catastrophe and progress in China. In this rigorously told account they describe China's gradual opening to the world—the interplay of power in an era of aged and ailing leadership, the people's rebellion against the earlier government system, and the roles of unlikely characters: overseas Chinese capitalists, American engineers, Japanese professors, and German designers. It is the story of revolutionary change, in directions that almost no foreigners and very few Chinese could have imagined when it all started.

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Reviews

“Westad and Chen have written a masterful account of China’s modernization that illuminates the path it took to emerge as America’s only true peer competitor.”—Graham Allison, author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? “In The Great Transformation, Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian ask a fresh question: How did the People’s Republic of China emerge from the lunacies of the Cultural Revolution and embark on the path to prosperity—a market-based industrialization that prior to 1978 would have been denounced as the ‘capitalist road’? Deeply researched and clearly written, this new account of a transformative period gives due weight to the local and international forces at work—as well as to the roads not taken, which might have been more liberal politically but less effective economically.”—Niall Ferguson, author of Civilization: The West and the Rest and Kissinger, 1923–1968: The Idealist “Almost every page contains an eye-opening detail. . . The Great Transformation evokes the multiple paths, ideas and possibilities that have shaped, and continue to shape, China’s present.”—Julia Lovell, Financial Times

“Westad and Chen have written a masterful account of China’s modernization that illuminates the path it took to emerge as America’s only true peer competitor.”—Graham Allison, author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? “In The Great Transformation, Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian ask a fresh question: How did the People’s Republic of China emerge from the lunacies of the Cultural Revolution and embark on the path to prosperity—a market-based industrialization that prior to 1978 would have been denounced as the ‘capitalist road’? Deeply researched and clearly written, this new account of a transformative period gives due weight to the local and international forces at work—as well as to the roads not taken, which might have been more liberal politically but less effective economically.”—Niall Ferguson, author of Civilization: The West and the Rest and Kissinger, 1923–1968: The Idealist

Author Information

Odd Arne Westad is the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University. His books include The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, winner of the Bancroft Prize, and Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750. He lives in New Haven, CT. Chen Jian is Distinguished Global Network Professor of History at NYU and NYU Shanghai and Hu Shih Professor of History Emeritus at Cornell University. His books include China’s Road to the Korean War, Mao’s China and the Cold War, and Zhou Enlai: A Life. He lives in Ithaca, NY.

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