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.