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Never turn back : China and the forbidden history of the 1980s / Julian Gewirtz.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022Description: 418 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780674241848
  • 0674241843
Subject(s):
Contents:
Introduction Forbidden History -- Reassessing History, Recasting Modernization -- Part I Ideology and Propaganda -- Spiritual Pollutions and Sugar-Coated Bullets -- The Scourge of Bourgeois Liberalization -- Part II The Economy -- Liberating the Productive Forces -- The Powers of the Market -- Part III Technology -- Responding to the New Technological Revolution -- A Matter of the Life and Death of the Nation -- Part IV Political Modernization -- Masters of the Country -- Explore without Fear -- Part V Before Tiananmen -- Two Rounds of Applause -- A Great Flood -- We Came Too Late -- Part VI Tiananmen and After -- Political Crackdown and Narrative Crisis -- Recasting Reform and Opening -- The Socialist Survivor in a Capitalist World -- Conclusion A New Era
Summary: "The 1980s saw spirited debate in China, as officials and the public pressed for economic and political liberalization. But after Tiananmen, the Communist Party erased the reform debate from memory. Julian Gewirtz shows how leadership expunged alternative visions of China's future and set the stage for the policing of history under Xi Jinping"-- Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 951.058 G396 Available 33111010903785
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A BBC History Magazine Best Book of the Year
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year

The history the Chinese Communist Party has tried to erase: the dramatic political debates of the 1980s that could have put China on a path to greater openness.

On a hike in Guangdong Province in January 1984, Deng Xiaoping was warned that his path was a steep and treacherous one. "Never turn back," the Chinese leader replied. That became a mantra as the government forged ahead with reforms in the face of heated contestation over the nation's future. For a time, everything was on the table, including democratization and China's version of socialism. But deliberation came to a sudden halt in spring 1989, with protests and purges, massacre and repression. Since then, Beijing has worked intensively to suppress the memory of this era of openness.

Julian Gewirtz recovers the debates of the 1980s, tracing the Communist Party's diverse attitudes toward markets, state control, and sweeping technological change, as well as freewheeling public argument over political liberalization. The administration considered bold proposals from within the party and without, including separation between the party and the state, empowering the private sector, and establishing an independent judiciary. After Tiananmen, however, Beijing systematically erased these discussions of alternative directions. Using newly available Chinese sources, Gewirtz details how the leadership purged the key reformist politician Zhao Ziyang, quashed the student movement, recast the transformations of the 1980s as the inevitable products of consensus, and indoctrinated China and the international community in the new official narrative.

Never Turn Back offers a revelatory look at how different China's rise might have been and at the foundations of strongman rule under Xi Jinping, who has intensified the policing of history to bolster his own authority.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction Forbidden History -- Reassessing History, Recasting Modernization -- Part I Ideology and Propaganda -- Spiritual Pollutions and Sugar-Coated Bullets -- The Scourge of Bourgeois Liberalization -- Part II The Economy -- Liberating the Productive Forces -- The Powers of the Market -- Part III Technology -- Responding to the New Technological Revolution -- A Matter of the Life and Death of the Nation -- Part IV Political Modernization -- Masters of the Country -- Explore without Fear -- Part V Before Tiananmen -- Two Rounds of Applause -- A Great Flood -- We Came Too Late -- Part VI Tiananmen and After -- Political Crackdown and Narrative Crisis -- Recasting Reform and Opening -- The Socialist Survivor in a Capitalist World -- Conclusion A New Era

"The 1980s saw spirited debate in China, as officials and the public pressed for economic and political liberalization. But after Tiananmen, the Communist Party erased the reform debate from memory. Julian Gewirtz shows how leadership expunged alternative visions of China's future and set the stage for the policing of history under Xi Jinping"-- Provided by publisher.

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