The book that Odd Arne Westad is now working on sounds very interesting. It’s a collaboration with his fellow historian of the Cold War, Chen Jian, on China’s “long 1970s.” Their project tackles the late 1960s to the mid 1980s as one unified period, rather than dividing them into the conventional eras of the Cultural Revolution and Reform and Opening. The overarching question is a basic one: how and why did China make that transition from revolutionary politics to economic growth?

In a webinar last week organized by the University of California, San Diego, Westad said they still have three chapters to write, but was able to summarize some of the book’s main arguments. One of them is the importance of “change from below, from outside the state and Party sectors.” The following passages are from my notes of Westad’s remarks, slightly rearranged for readability:

It’s pretty clear to us that much of the economic transformation of China during the long 1970s originated in the south. It’s most visible in Guangdong and parts of Fujian. This is a fascinating story. It’s something that starts after the first, most intense phase of the Cultural Revolution is over.

It’s a kind of market revolution carried out in desperation by people and families who knew a bit about a how a market economy would operate, and were deathly afraid that things would move back to a situation like the Great Leap Forward. There are these small businesses that come up, completely against any regulation, already in 1972 and 1973, based on a barter economy and links to Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. This vanguard was already in place when reform from the center was launched.

One example we use is the No.3 Memory of Lenin Tractor Repair Factory in Zhuhai, which already in 1973 had started repairing tractors outside the plan. It would take tractors that needed to be repaired from other units, repair them on the side of the plan, and then get payment in kind. That payment in kind was then either bartered further within Guangdong, or smuggled downriver to Hong Kong. By 1973 this unit had a Hong Kong bank account. If this had been discovered at the central level, these people would have been shot.

We are not arguing that the specific models of economic and social transformation that you see in Guangdong were then put in motion at the central level. But it primed units to behave in ways they had already prepared for. That made it possible for them to get one step ahead in Guangdong. They could develop very quickly into very profitable companies.

This is really significant for China’s history over the next generation. Without these moves that had privileged certain areas and certain units prior to 1978, that development would have taken a very different course. With one exception, all the units that we looked at have since become constituent elements of some of the largest companies in China.

The tractor factory with a Hong Kong bank account is amazing! It reminds me of Frank Dikotter’s 2016 article “The Silent Revolution: Decollectivization from Below during the Cultural Revolution,” which uses archives to give numerous examples of people leaving collectives to raise crops or run factories on their own initiative, often with the implicit or explicit toleration of local officials.

It seems as if the book’s focus will be less on high politics and foreign relations than one might have guessed from their previous works: Westad is the author of, among other things, a survey of China’s foreign relations entitled Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750, while Chen is the author of Mao’s China and the Cold War. But the Cold War context of this period clearly informs their analysis. Here are some more interesting comments from Westad:

It’s very unlikely, at least to me, that Chinese reform would have been as successful if it weren’t for the Cold War, if the US did not have an interest in facilitating China’s economic reform and economic growth. What the Americans found when they started coming back to China was just how far behind China was in terms of economy, technology, science. US leaders from Nixon to Reagan believed they had China as a partner in putting pressure on the Soviet Union, but they discovered quickly that China was far too weak to play that role. So that put great pressure on them to help China develop. The fact that the Chinese state after 1976 made use of the security links with the US to get the technology and credit it needed is of crucial importance.