Two new books challenge the sense of inevitable permanence of the Chinese party state — China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower and Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s.
The slim volume covers the 1970s to early 1990s, a spread of time during which ideas about economic and political reform gestated. Those half-formed ideas towards liberalization that were abruptly thrown out as the party closed flanks following the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. Where Dikötter's book is a roadmap of how we got here, Gewirtz looks at the road not taken — and a tantalizing glimpse, perhaps, at the political possibilities that remain still.
But the 1980s were not all smooth sailing towards greater market liberalization and political opening, as official Chinese history now casts it. The decade brought numerous setbacks for the reformist camp, including a half-hearted and disastrous experiment with doing away with price controls that led to runaway inflation and ruinous state subsidies.
Intriguingly, Gewirtz utilizes cast-off propaganda directives and internal meeting notes gathered from ragtag collections of loose papers he obtained from online auction sites and Beijing flea markets. These documents allow him to piece together this period of historical re-writing and censorship that would glorify Deng Xiaoping while relegating Zhao Ziyang to the margins.
This extraordinary adaptability to meet the perceived challenges of the day is the most novel argument presented in both books. Once resolutely socialist, the party has overseen a surge in the issuing local debt, using the stock market to fund hugely bloated state firms, and created one of the largest property markets in the world — each solving a critical short-term problem while also engendering larger issues down the road.
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