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Odd Arne Westad is a historian of modern international history who is currently the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University. His latest book The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform, written with Chen Jian, recounts the dramatic political struggles that took place in China from the late 1960s until the mid-1980s, the outcome of which — the book argues — fundamentally shaped the country’s development until the present day. In this lightly edited transcript of a recent conversation, Professor Westad outlines the book’s major themes and the legacy of this period.

Q: Why did you think that this period of history in China needed revisiting?

A: There are two answers. The slightly tongue in cheek one is that this was when both Chen Jian and I, in a way, came of age. I didn’t live in China throughout all of this period, but I was there quite frequently and started out at university there in the late 1970s. So there is a personal element to this. 

The other reason, more connected to our work as historians, is that both of us believe that this was the foundational, fundamental time period in which choices were made that determined what came later in China, all the way up to our own time. It was when the reform era was fashioned in the direction of economic growth and dynamism — but also in the direction of a continued political dictatorship. Both of those elements were shaped during that long 1970s period, from the late 1960s and up to the mid-1980s.

Can you explain some of the things that were taking shape beneath the surface in the early 1970s, a period that on the surface seems quite static as Mao Zedong lives out his last years.

We see a lot of change starting in the early 1970s. Starting is an important concept here, because these are seeds being sown that only come fully into fruition quite a bit later on. There are experiments, rebellions, acts of disobedience. There are losses of faith in the way things are and the start of something new. We time that change as being in the very early 1970s. That’s one of the aspects of this book that is probably going to be picked up on by people who are working within this field: We see so much of this starting to happen on the ground, well before the changes from the top start happening in the 1976-78 period. 

And there are two reasons for this. One is sheer desperation. Through the whole time period from the Great Leap Forward [in the late 1950s], and then almost immediately into the Cultural Revolution, things really had gone terribly wrong in China. For a lot of people, particularly away from the political centers, when they were given a chance to, almost as a kind of defensive measure, start preparing for whatever might go wrong by working up a little bit of a surplus — whether it’s for their people’s commune or a collective enterprise, or in some cases, just for their family or clan — that was a good thing. The weakening of central control during the Cultural Revolution enabled some people, in some places, to do this. 

We actually wanted to make the centerpiece of the book into a kind of business history, showing how some of what later became the leading companies in China, at least indirectly, came out of that very early period of self-generated reform — before ‘reform and opening up’ was even a term being used. But because of today’s political situation and the censorship, we couldn’t use some of the materials that we had collected, because the people who had given us access wouldn’t want us to use them. 

That also shows some of the challenges with writing contemporary Chinese history. We still think we have enough in the book to show how these transformations started, obviously against the grain of what was being preached from Beijing. If some of these people had been caught, they probably would have been shot. They are the heroes of reform. 

One of the main reasons why we could do this book at all is that we had gathered so much material at the beginning and then both of us put that aside to do other books, hoping that times would get better in China in terms of access. Of course, we were 100 percent wrong. Things got worse instead. 

So you see at this time the basic prototype of what in the 1980s came to be known as the town and village enterprises, and the development of the private sector. 

Right, but very often undertaken at the individual level, or with a number of people who come together. Much of this happens in areas where clans and larger family units are still of great importance, and increasing in their importance as the Cultural Revolution recedes and faith in the whole Communist project seems to go away for many. It points very much in the direction of what was to come later on. 

There’s hundreds of different forms of this happening. It could be a collective enterprise that starts by repairing stuff like machinery, for instance, over and above the central plan. They then ask for some kind of payment in kind which they can monetize in one form or another. It could be through smuggling goods in or different kinds of currency fraud. You see factories that have a small sideline in producing something that links them to other productive units in the neighborhood, and a kind of bartering system that develops. 

You see a lot of this: not everywhere, not on a national scale, not in a way that could be seen as taking over from the centralized, nationalized economy. But when things then start to change dramatically from 1978 onwards, it gives the people engaged in this kind of completely illicit behavior a leg up.

And so your broader thesis is that the reform era in China is not just down to people like Deng Xiaoping and other leaders suddenly deciding it would be a good idea to introduce more of a market economy: A lot of it is being pushed from below?

Yes, and by combinations of various groups of people. Many of them, when we get to the later 1970s, are Communist Party officials who discover how desperately poor and backward their country is, when they’re allowed to make their own investigations. People like Zhao Ziyang in Sichuan, or Xi Jinping’s father Xi Zhongxun in Guangdong. The idea emerges that something has to be done to move away from these disasters over the past decade and a half, and that the only way to do that is to allow people to get ahead and do their own thing. 

It’s not that these communists have a ‘road to Damascus’ moment where they all of a sudden throw overboard everything they have believed in their whole lives. It’s just that a lot of people are saying that if we don’t do something, if we don’t improve people’s livelihoods, we are done.

The people who take over after Chairman Mao dies in 1976 inherit a country that is a wreck. The more they find out about it, the more nervous they become. So there are different plans and ideas about where the country could turn. Some people want to turn it back to a strictly planned Soviet-style economy that, after all, had done pretty well for China back in the 1950s. Some want to learn from Yugoslavia or even Romania and Hungary, that style of socialism. And some people, probably a small minority, want to learn from other countries in eastern Asia that have done well. 

And then there are those who start saying, from late 1977 onwards, that we really have to learn from the most advanced countries. China can’t be satisfied with looking to the second best: we have to look at countries that have really succeeded. And by the famous Third Plenum meeting in 1978, that kind of development is well on the way, and the emphasis on experimentation comes into being very quickly and mainly because the situation is so desperate. 

It’s not that these communists have a ‘road to Damascus’ moment where they all of a sudden throw overboard everything they have believed in their whole lives. It’s just that a lot of people are saying — and Deng is not in any way the only one, he is actually rather late to some of this — that if we don’t do something, if we don’t improve people’s livelihoods, we are done.

A big part of your book is about the international aspect of all this. One of the seeming contradictions about this period is the opening up to the U.S., beginning with the visit of President Nixon to China in 1972. Can you explain the factors that drove this from the Chinese perspective?

We see this as mainly a security issue for China. The intention, when Mao makes this policy change, has nothing to do with any plans for reform from within China. Quite the contrary: it happens just as he is taking further and further steps to the left in terms of how he sees the economy and society working. 

The issue here is the fear of war with the Soviet Union. Mao, by 1969, has elevated to a doctrine of faith the idea that there will be a war. He probably has in mind an imperialist war, a bit like the First World War, with the chances very high that China will be pulled in. So China has to do the same thing as he believed it had during the anti-Japanese war, which was to ally with one imperialist against another imperialist that was a more immediate and direct danger to his revolution. And since he believed very firmly that the United States was an imperialist in decline, while the Soviet Union was the rising imperialist, then that alliance made sense. 

I think Mao, to his dying day, was wondering why the United States would ally with the real communists against the fake communists in Moscow. But being Mao, he didn’t spend too much time worrying about this, as long as they were willing to do it. 

Now, of course, the significance of this in economic and social terms comes into being after Mao is gone and as that new policy — what becomes reform and opening — then starts to take hold. The already-established security relationship with the United States becomes increasingly significant, because it can also be made use of in a Cold War setting in order to get advantages from the United States to strengthen China as a pseudo-ally against the Soviets. 

When the Americans start coming into China in the mid 1970s, they are shocked about how backward China really is. But it becomes a principle, from the U.S. perspective, that strengthening China, making China better able to defend itself in case of a war with the Soviet Union, would be to the U.S.’s strategic advantage. That’s what Deng then makes use of, for all it’s worth, in terms of importing technology and capital, getting access to world markets: because the United States is willing to do part of that job for them.

Still, there is infighting within the Party over all this. When Deng comes back in from the cold, he starts to talk about importing more from overseas, but he runs up against the hard left and the ‘Gang of Four’ [the group of hardliners including Mao’s wife Jiang Qing]…

Yes, there is a lot of political conflict during this time period in China, and not just between people who are starting to think of themselves as reformers. 

This is perhaps Deng’s strongest moment in terms of his whole political history, that period from from 1978 to 1982 where he basically says, If it delivers results, anything goes. 

The strength of the ‘Cultural Revolution left’ has sometimes been written off. They made some terrible mistakes in terms of how they positioned themselves politically. But there was significant support for the left during the late Cultural Revolution period. The idea that this could only turn in one direction after Mao was gone is something we show to be, to put it mildly, a very doubtful thesis. The number of people attracted by the Cultural Revolution left was relatively small, but they were centrally placed because they were mostly urban. So the idea that this could only have gone in one direction after 1976 is entirely wrong. The left was still an alternative. 

How did the hard left think they were actually going to run China? 

They wanted to have continuous revolution. They believed that the Maoist understanding of Chinese society and what was needed was basically correct; that collectivist solutions, and pushing continuously further towards a communist society was the was the right thing to do; that part of China’s problem was that markets and market-based exchange mechanisms hadn’t completely been eradicated, and that China still had a significant problem with inequality. 

We did find it a little bit hard to understand why so many people were still attracted by these ideas when it was clear that they had led to absolute disaster for China. 

The hold that Mao had over the party, and a significant proportion of the Chinese population, still seems so remarkable, especially when you think about just how frail and old he was, even by the start of the period that you’re writing about. 

Yes, it is. Remember he was seen as the man who had created not just the Chinese revolution, but the People’s Republic of China. When you get into the 1960s, even before the Cultural Revolution, this is a man who many look at almost like a god. Of course, this is helped by the propaganda that he himself unleashes, which stresses his infallibility. He had something to build on, too, with regard to China’s authoritarian traditions, the idea that China needed an all encompassing leader who sets a sense of direction for the people. 

In many ways, the fact that he didn’t appear often in public, certainly after the peak of the Cultural Revolution, probably helped him in terms of stature. It is interesting that by the time you get to 1976, because he lived longer than many people expected him to, there is also clearly a sense of relief when he is gone. That is, in many ways, a turning point. 

How fragile do you think the Party was at the point that Mao dies?

It was very fragile. It wasn’t even able to come up with basic decisions over what was to happen. The military and the security apparatus take control almost immediately. Hua Guofeng, who is the appointed successor, is not a very strong political figure. He needs to rely on the military, on the security people, people like Marshall Ye Jianying and Wang Qing, the head of the bodyguard unit in Zhongnanhai, in order to act against the hard left.

They started to plan the coup [against the Gang of Four] not long after Mao was gone, and in some detail. I think they were surprised by how well it worked initially. They still had major challenges elsewhere, such as in Shanghai, and it wasn’t clear what was going to happen there for several weeks. At that point, the weakness of the Party in terms of being able to make orders was very visible to everyone.

What ensures that the Party does survive through this period, ultimately? 

What saves them is that they embrace reform — and not just reform, but radical reform, and that they do it early enough for that to help them out. When things are at their worst, the Party has always been pretty good at this. When they are in trouble, they sort of undercut everyone else by saying, Well, this is now us. We are the ones who stand for economic reform. We are the only ones who can carry it out, and represent the people — even to the point of admitting that terrible mistakes have been made. At the insistence of leaders like Hu Yaobang and others, they even agree to putting some of the key Cultural Revolution leaders on trial. They understand that in order to survive, they have to do it. There has to be some kind of accountability, some kind of understanding of where things had gone wrong in the past. 

But there’s also this willingness to open up, to accept different viewpoints for a while and to be seen as being open minded in terms of where local reform is going in the provinces. 

This is perhaps Deng’s strongest moment in terms of his whole political history, that period from from 1978 to 1982 where he basically says, If it delivers results, anything goes. When even people who worked very closely with him in the past come complaining about revisionism rearing its ugly head in Guangdong, Deng would say, Well, are they delivering results? Are people happy there: And if they are, well then, let it go. 

But of course, whilst Deng is saying anything goes economically, he’s also very firmly saying: But the party stays in power. 

And that seems to be your key argument, that this is the ultimate legacy of this period. 

Yes, there are two legacies. One is the tremendous economic transformation that came out of the reform and opening. The other one is the continuation, albeit in a slightly different way, of political dictatorship. 

I think this was always intended. The period from 1978 up to 1982, and maybe even 1983, was always seen by the party leadership as being a time when it was fighting a rearguard action against the criticism that it came in for, after all that it had taken China through during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. And as soon as the situation seemed to have been stabilized, at least in the sense that the Party had shown that it could contribute to creating economic success, that’s the point to return to political orthodoxy. And that’s exactly what Deng does.

I think the biggest danger for China at the moment is not its international position, and not even the position of the Party within society and within the state: it’s the kind of fragmentation that you will find when people have less and less of an opportunity to speak their mind…

This is part of the reason why our story ends in 1984. Because then the direction in terms of economic reform, that was going to last for at least two decades, was more or less set; and the political direction was more or less set. There would not be any liberalization in political terms. There would be no political pluralism. The party was going to remain in charge. Even though there are those within the party — and there were quite a few of them, such as its third and last chairman Hu Yaobang — who indicate that there might be other alternatives possible, Deng pushes them aside and delegitimizes everything that they stood for. It shows how strong man rule is back in full, but now under a different leader.

In that sense, the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 could be seen as a final full stop to that debate.

Yes, and eminently predictable in terms of the outcome from the perspective of the mid 1980s. I lived in China in 1989 and felt that all the way through the spring of that year. There’s no way a regime like this would give up power voluntarily to a group of unarmed students who sit down in a city square: It just would not happen. And the question of when the crackdown would come was not ‘if’, but ‘when’. If these kinds of developments had happened in the early 1980s things might have been different. But after the return to all out dictatorship that you find in the mid 1980s, the outcome of 1989 to us is tragic, but entirely predictable.

What other legacies from this period do you see today, both in terms of how China has continued to be run, particularly under Xi Jinping, but also in the conflicts and issues that it’s never quite resolved?

That’s exactly the issue here and some part of the reason why we wrote the book the way we did. We tried to explain how this period of tremendous, total change ended up with a lot of questions still being unresolved.

China has become rich and strong, it has given tremendous opportunities for the wealthy and the stronger members of society. The reason we borrowed the title ‘The Great Transformation’ from Karl Polanyi’s great book is that we wanted to allude to exactly what he wrote about, the breakthrough of capitalism and markets in the European context. 

Some issues in China are set in this period in terms of economic and social development, but not all of them. I’m referring to issues of political participation, of freedom. Those issues are not set because they’re not necessarily related [to the question of the development of markets]. This idea, which so many liberal theorists took on for a long while, that with the development of a middle class and of great wealth in society, and stature for your country internationally, also comes some degree of, if not democracy, at least political pluralism — that’s one that we do not subscribe to. What we’ve seen in China is that over the last decade, it’s more or less gone in the opposite direction. 

And that’s China’s biggest challenge for the future. I think the biggest danger for China at the moment is not its international position, and not even the position of the Party within society and within the state: it’s the kind of fragmentation that you will find when people have less and less of an opportunity to speak their mind and to be able to look after their own interests, without the state and the government constantly interceding or interfering with with how they lead their lives. 

That’s the big challenge for China at the moment, and the current regime is doing absolutely nothing to try to address those issues, and they’re just going to pile up. As long as they cannot resolve those relationships, there will always be something with the Chinese revolution that is unfinished, something that they cannot quite bring themselves to do. 

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