China's Road from Revolution to Reform

“There is a great disorder under the heaven. The situation is excellent” Global Inequality and More 3.0 Subscribe Sign in “There is a great disorder under the heaven. The situation is excellent” A review of Westad and Chen, The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform Branko Milanovic Mar 08, 2026 61 14 4 Share Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian’s The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform is a book about how China transformed itself between the Great Leap Forward and the early reforms laying the basis for the greatest and most sustained economic growth in history. The book thus covers the period between the debacle of the Great Leap Forward and 1985. There are many writers, political scientists, economists, sociologists etc., dealing with this crucial period. Ideologically, they take (broadly speaking) two different views: Maoism was a disaster and only after Mao died and the Gang of Four were eliminated, could China grow. Or Maoism in many unexpected, and also in some cases very conscious, ways did sow the seeds for future growth. Methodologically, the studies also divide in two broad groups. One set focuses on history as told from the top down, where most of what matters is decided in internecine struggles between different factions; or they take a broader view where economic and social developments (say, the growth of small-scale enterprises or much greater freedom for women) drive the story. Where do Westad and Chen fit? I start with ideology. According to the view that holds that Maoism has retarded China’s economic take-off and that had China moved to the market, and export-led growth much prior to the early 1980s, China would have been even more successful and Its income higher than it is today. Mao’s years were therefore a waste, not only in terms of people’s lives (probably 20 million died due to the Great Leap Forward; demographic losses, as Westad and Chen write, were 30 million) but also in terms of foregone economic growth. Although Westad and Chen do not directly address, or contradict, this view they seem skeptical of it. Not only because they show that many unexpected developments such as the breakdown of the Party apparatus during the Cultural Revolution brought about economic change (multitude of townships and communes engaging in trade, creating unorthodox property structures and borrowing schemes to spur production), but because being political scientists, they know that export-led growth of China was impossible without a political accommodation with the United States. That accommodation was out of the question as long as China was part of the Soviet bloc and even later when China broke from the Soviet Union so long as it wanted to play an implicitly anti-American role in the Third World. Without normalizations of relations with the Unted States, there would have been no export growth, no large direct foreign investments, no transfer of technology. So, a political move, at a global (geopolitical) stage was an indispensable pre-condition for Chinese take-off. Westad and Chen rightly point to the foreign policy origins of China’s success and thus (indirectly) to the role of Maoism: its decisive break with the Soviet Union and view of China as one of three poles in international politics. Methodologically, Westad and Chen are unabashedly of the old-fashioned school where history is created by a limited number of individuals fighting it out on the top. It is a history of individuals and elite politics. The approach gives vivacity to the book because we identify (or not) with some key characters and, given the volatility and vicissitude of Chinese politics, the book can be read as a thriller of sorts. In fact, I read most of the book in one weekend. Despite the topic having been written about in extenso , and especially during the last decade as more documents have become available, Westad and Chen bring a lot of new information, drawing, among others, on Chen’s highly acclaimed biography of Zhou Enlai . The quality of the narrative is high and that in turn makes the reader eager to go on. Rather than reviewing the second part of the book, from Chapters 8 to 11, that deal with the reform process, and which I believe most reviewers will focus on (and which I might review in a second installment), I would like to concentrate only on the period up 1977, i.e. until a year after the death of Mao, Hua Guofeng’s remarkable (and short-lived) unification of the titles of the Chairman of CPC, Prime Minister and head of the Central Committee’s Military Commission, elimination of the Gang of Four, and political return of Deng. And only on the issues that I still find puzzling even after having read this, and other similar, books. I select three issues: (a) the ideological origin of Mao’s insistence on “continuous revolution,” (b) Lin Biao’s intentions in his failed escape to the Soviet Union, and (c) the reasons for the Left’s strength in many industrialized cities in China, notably in Shanghai and Wuhan. The first two issues perhaps cannot be “solved”. Most that we can do is to speculate. The third, however, is, I think, amenable to much more informed discussion. And it might help answer the first. Mao . Explaining the Cultural Revolution as some authors (but not Westad and Chen) do by Mao’s desire to “reshuffle the cards” and through chaos to reimpose his uncontested power is clearly insufficient, not the least because Mao’s preeminence was not questioned, not even after the failed Great Leap Forward. To their credit Westad and Chen do not use that explanation. On the contrary, they show how Mao, even when on a (modest) defensive mood after 1962, was still all-powerful and fully in control. (The term “in control” when applied to Mao has to be read differently than if applied to any other leader. Mao was “in control”, not by being omnipresent and concerned with all decisions, however minute, but was “in control” the way that the Gods of Rain are in control: that is, most of the time by not being around and then capriciously appearing to make crucial or cryptic decisions; having mulled over them in self-imposed solitary confinement. These decisions were then accepted, or pretended to be accepted, by all. Mao’s ruling style comes probably closest to the way ancient Greeks imagined Gods interfering with the matters of mortals.) Further, Mao’s insistence at the end of his life that the Cultural Revolution was (at least) 70% good, and 30% errors, that it was necessary, and a great success of the Party is difficult to explain otherwise but by Mao’s ideological; attachment to the idea of continuous revolution. Perhaps that Mao, like Thomas Jefferson, believed that the tree of freedom and social mobility had to be refreshed by blood-letting at regular intervals. His statement, quoted by Westad and Chen, Some party members do not want to move forward, some people are afraid of the revolution. Why is that? They have been made big officials, so they protect the interests of big officials: they have good houses, cars, high salaries, and waiters, better than capitalists. There is always going to be a revolution. Always some people will feel pressured, small officials, students, workers, farmers, soldiers; they do not like big people pressure them, so they want revolution. Ten thousand years from now, you think these contradictions will not be visible? (Westen and Chen. p. 133) shows that he saw socialism as a class society and the new bureaucracy as a new class, concerned about its own and its offspring material privileges. He wanted to shake them from that comfortable position. The mature Mao might have regarded any social system –even a highly developed socialism—as reproducing, through family structure, the features that Mao, a young librarian who joined the new Communist Party, rebelled against. His critiques of Soviet “social-imperialism” might not have been simply motivated by geopolitics “wrapped” in the language of revolution, but truly expressed revulsion against the establishment of a new class (a critique that Mao would certainly direct at today’s Chinese system). The old Mao might have the same as the young Mao: a rebel against hierarchical structure that any ordered society imposes. If this interpretation is correct, and those who know Chairman’s works better might find it reasonable or not, then Mao must be listed among the anarcho-communist leaders who applied the class analyses to all types of societies. He was perhaps also more realistic, or more radical, than Marx and Engels who thought that there may be a society where class contradictions would cease. Lin Biao . The second topic on which perhaps more light might be shed is the decision of Lin Biao to flee China. Westad and Chen refrain from claiming that there was a planned coup, which is the hypothesis of others who see Lin preparing for the coup rather seriously, including planning to bomb the train in which Mao was riding. None of that appears in Westad and Chen’s book. Very sparsely, they explain Lin’s decision by flee by his gradual realization that Mao was turning against him (even if he was still officially No. 2 and thus the official successor). Rather than facing the usual indignities of self-criticism, punishment and humiliation, Lin Biao decided to flee China. Westad and Chen treat the documents written by Lin’s son about the coup as half-baked scribbling of an incompetent youngster. Others see it as a more serious preparation of a coup. In any case, the (possibly unanswerable) question is, What was Lin trying to accomplish in addition to saving his life? Did he think that from the exile in the Soviet Union he could play a political role in China? (The Lin Biao defection but at a much lower level would be repeated by Wang Lajun in 2012 after the Bo Xilai affair. But there the goal was simply to save own skin.) The Left . When the coup against the Gang of Four was carried out, its success was immediate and total. Most of the success was due to the shambolic nature of pollical maneuvering conducted by the Gang, and much greater organizational capabilities of PLA leadership that organized and actively participated in the coup (especially Marshal Ye Jianying). The Gang’s activity during the years of Mao’s rule until the very end almost entirely consisted in writing articles, attacking imagined “capitalist roaders”, and creating intrigues throughout the Party. They seemed incompetent to do anything more serious. They were perfect examples of half-baked ideologists scheming at the highest levels of bureaucracy, haranguing those below them, but devoid of any serious programmatic policies, organizational skills, or even common sense when it came to the struggle for power. They prospered in the climate where they could (thanks to Jiang Qing and Mao’s nephew) hide behind the Old Man and weave the spider-web of intrigues and innuendos. But their unworldliness (well explained by Westad and Chen) then immediately poses the following question: how are we to explain Left’s (that is, Gang of Four’s) political strength in many large industrial cities, including Shanghai? What was it that these windbags with incoherent ideology offered to the militias in Shanghai who were more than ready to replicate the Paris Commune, to sink ships in the harbor, and to go for an all-out civil war. It cannot be that the Left just offered a couple of higher-level political positions to key city leaders. This cannot explain why thousands of workers were ready to fight there, and, as Westad and Chen show, why the Left’s support was far from negligible in the rest of China. A western (or a current) reader bred in capitalism and aware that China’s post-Mao success was made possible by the elimination of the Left, wonders what was the basis of such strong support. Especially as it came after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when most people—it could be reasonably expected—just wanted to be left in peace and not have to participate in endless rallies, shout slogans, be beaten or “sent down” to rural exile. Yang Jisheng in his monumental The World Turned Upside Down , while extremely critical regarding the Cultural Revolution, and providing hundreds of details of mental and physical torture, highlight also, perhaps reluctantly, its liberatory aspects: rejection of all norms, overturning of hierarchy (so asphyxiating in the Chinese societies, whether traditional or post-revolutionary). (I reviewed Yang Jisheng’s The World Turned Upside Down in two parts: a critical review is here ; a laudatory review is here .) It was a revolution of freedom that inevitably created chaos. People’s power, left to itself, leads to anarchy. Could it be that enough people in 1976 still liked the freedom from any social obligation (despite the risk to end at the wrong end of the stick) more than the return to the usual hierarchies? This last speculation highlights the dual aspect of the Cultural Revolution: a movement for total freedom and violent overthrow of all conventions that produces violence, chaos, and a mob rule. It thus brings up the deeply ambivalent nature of the Cultural Revolution and might answer, or rejoins, my first question: why did Mao launch the Cultural Revolution and why did he so much insist on it being a correct decision? PS. To some superficial observers the Cultural Revolution looks like Stalin’s Great Terror. Both subjected the high Party apparatus and in fact everyone at whatever position (except for the two leaders) to possible downgrading, punishment, and death. But Mao’s Cultural Revolution was a grass roots, chaotic process with an identifiable ideological component. Stalin’s Great Terror was, even if often random, executed in total order using the special services of NKVD. So fundamentally, it was an entirely different endeavor. There was no disorder, improvisation nor people power in the Great Terror; all were present in the Cultural Revolution. 61 14 4 Share Discussion about this post Comments Restacks Jorge 5d While your point about the differences between the Great Terror and the Cultural Revolution is valid, traditional historiography has widely underestimated the importance of grassroots movements and popular participation during the Great Terror: https://thestalinera.substack.com/p/the-enigma-of-terror Reply Share 1 reply by Branko Milanovic Seattle Ecomodernist Society 4d as the regression of the cultural revolution led to the rebirth of the persecuted but persistent Liu Shao Qi trend and the largest greatest advance in history, so the resistance to American aggression inshallah shall lead to the agreement of major powers on the rules of the multi polar relation, respect for the right of all countries to develop, and the flowering of sovereign state capacity, trade and responsibility, the rejoining of the human journey Reply Share 12 more comments... 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