Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China

Debut author Gewirtz’s account of China’s transition from Marxist central planning to “socialist market” economics is masterful: detailed, balanced, and illuminating. After the death of Mao Tse Tung in 1976, successor Deng Xiaoping encouraged the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to “emancipate the mind” from outdated ideology. Without any clear plan in mind, Chinese economists embraced Deng’s aphorism—“crossing the river by feeling for the stones”—and began to study both capitalist and socialist economies, looking for objective economic laws that would enrich China. Gewirtz patiently chronicles this halting, frequently frustrating, process. Before even instituting change, progressives had to rewrite party ideology to make free markets compatible with Marxist thought. Economists punished during the Cultural Revolution were returned to the CCP and encouraged to study previously forbidden foreign economic theory. Powerful conservatives in the CCP often slowed or halted progress. And any signs that liberalization threatened political control (such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests) placed reform in jeopardy. Economist Zhao Ziyang, a key figure, spent the remainder of his life under house arrest after opposing martial law. This is a revelatory account of China’s economic evolution, its debt to Western economic thought, and its love-hate relationship with capitalism. [em](Jan.) [/em]