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.
