The Great Transformation
China’s Road from Revolution to Reform
Odd Arne Westad author Chen Jian author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Yale University Press
Published:24th Sep '24
Should be back in stock very soon
The first thorough account of a formative and little understood chapter in Chinese history
“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
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.
Named one of the Financial Times’s Best Books of 2024 in History
“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
“By choosing to begin with Mao’s final years, Messrs. Westad and Chen build a strong case for their account of how and why events played out after the leader’s death.”—Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, Wall Street Journal
“[A] compelling book by two of the best historians of the modern Chinese experience.”—Tony Barber, Financial Times
“Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian make an effective partnership. . . . [They] expertly and authoritatively cover events inside and outside China during a momentous time in the country’s history.”—Kerry Brown, Literary Review
“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
ISBN: 9780300267082
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
424 pages