BOOK REVIEW: THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform
By: Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian /Yale University Press
Reviewed by: Martin Petersen
The Reviewer — Martin Petersen is a CIA veteran, Asia expert, and a Cipher Brief Expert. He is the author of City of Lost Souls, A Jack Ford Shanghai Mystery , which was recently named Earnshaw Books Best Seller of 2024
REVIEW — The Great Transformation is an excellent history of what the two authors, both eminent China scholars, refer to as “The Long 1970s”—China’s journey out of the chaos of Mao’s Cultural Revolution to the birth of Deng’s reforms, which laid the foundation for China’s emergence as a global economic power. The book is very readable. It is written by China experts, but one does not have to be a China expert to follow the story of China’s transformation domestically and internationally.
At the center of the book is Deng Xiaoping, one of the great men of the 20th Century in my opinion. The book charts his rise and fall and rise again. He is truly the architect of today’s China. Westad and Chen take us through the machinations of the late 1960s into the early 1980s. It is a story of Mao, the Gang of Four, Zhou Enlai, and the young reformers around Deng. Mao’s personally selected successor, Hua Guofeng, emerges as a much more sympathetic and capable individual that most China experts (me included) thought at the time.
The book benefits greatly from access to Chinese documents and archives. The authors also tapped the national archives of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan plus the Presidential libraries of Ford, Carter, Nixon, and Reagan, which gives the book a richness but does not smother the reader in unnecessary detail.
Everyone needs a good nightcap. Ours happens to come in the form of a M-F newsletter that provides the best way to unwind while staying up to speed on national security. (And this Nightcap promises no hangover or weight gain.) Sign up today.
I was a young China analyst for much of this period. China was very much a denied area, and truth be told, what our own government was doing on China was almost as hard to divine, especially in the Nixon-Kissinger years. As analysts, our primary tool was propaganda analysis, and I was curious to see how the work we did then stands up in light of the excellent research done by Westad and Chen. The answer is quite well. We lacked a lot of the details The Great Transformation provides, but we did identify the bumps moving under the rug and correctly assessed the strengths and weaknesses of the various players.
The book concludes with an excellent chapter on the making—and unmaking—of Chinese reform. The authors point out that the pressure for political reform, even modest political reform, died with Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang, and the Tiananmen crisis. Deng and the economic reformers created the conditions for China’s transformation, but the great economic and social change came from below. This was change in both thinking and behavior by the average Chinese. The authors point out that this is an ongoing process and “we cannot know where (it) will end.”
Indeed, they point out that Xi Jinping and those around him are worried about the amount of power held outside the immediate control of the party. This is evident in the crackdowns on corruption and the purges of senior officials in the military and government. Xi’s efforts to tighten control, according to the authors, undercuts some of what has made the great transformation work and has left China increasingly isolated internationally.
To understand today’s China and where it may be going it is necessary to understand how it got to here—the politics, the pressures, the trade-offs, and legacy of the “The Long 1970s.” You can do no better in this regard than start by reading The Great Transformation.
The Cipher Brief participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and may make a small commission from purchases made via links.
Interested in submitting a book review? Send an email to [email protected] with your idea.
Sign up for our free Undercover newsletter to make sure you stay on top of all of the new releases and expert reviews.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business.
Search