The Great Transformation
China's road from revolution to reform
- ISBN: 9780300285604
- Editorial: Yale University Press
- Fecha de la edición: 2025
- Lugar de la edición: New Haven. Estados Unidos de Norteamérica
- Encuadernación: Rústica
- Medidas: 24 cm
- Nº Pág.: 424
- Idiomas: Inglés
The first thorough account of a formative and little understood chapter in Chinese history
"A superb history of China's transition into and out of the Cultural Revolution. . . . Chen and Westad-two of the best archival historians of Communist China writing today-coolly but vividly recount the extraordinary drama of this metamorphosis."-Julia Lovell, Financial Times
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 changes, and the unprecedented and sustained economic growth that followed, transformed China and the world.
In this rigorous account, Westad and Chen construct a panorama of catastrophe and progress in China. They chronicle 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. This is a story of revolutionary change that neither foreigners nor the Chinese themselves could have predicted.
Introduction
To the cultural revolution
Great disorder under heaven
A successor dies
Americans
The fall and rise and fall of Den Xiaoping
1976
Succession struggles
Visions of China
Imagining the world
A new China
To the point of no return?
Conclusion: The making and unmaking of Chinese reform
