There Isn’t Going to Be Any Trouble

Jane Hayward reads two recent books on China’s post-Mao reform period.

By Jane HaywardJune 30, 2025

• History

• Politics

I FIRST ARRIVED in China in 1996, a naive 18-year-old, to work as an English teacher at a prestigious middle school in Guangdong province. My job had been organized by a British gap-year organization whose mission involved sending young people to different parts of the world to experience different cultures and ways of life. They had been sending people to Guangdong province for years, but they were going to stop soon, they said. Guangdong, the southern coastal province just across the South China Sea from Hong Kong, which had become the epicenter of China’s experimental market reform policies, was so developed now that the British teenagers they were sending were not getting a worthwhile experience. Life there, the organizers believed, was too much like life in the United Kingdom.

The city where I went in Guangdong was, indeed, a noisy and bustling metropolis. I have strong memories of the local park at night, with bright neon lights and electric fountains, where people would sit at outdoor cafés eating ice cream. I also remember the pizza restaurant down the road where they layered grated carrot on top instead of cheese. And I remember well the student in one of my classes who pestered me on behalf of her entrepreneurial father for possible business contacts back in England. She would take me to shops and ask what British people liked to buy. “Do people in England like buying snake baskets?” she once asked earnestly, as she held one up to me.

Living there was not actually like living in the UK. This was most notable in the staff room, where I would wait between classes chatting with the other teachers. Even as their own lives were transforming (represented not least by the girl from England who sat drinking Chinese tea with them), there was an eerie sense that the Cultural Revolution—which had officially ended only two decades earlier, in 1976, just after Mao’s death—was still in the room. My closer colleagues would bring it up repeatedly. One told me that, at 10 years old, he had been sitting by a river when he saw a dead body float past. He was frightened. Then he saw another body, then another. They kept coming. Soon he wasn’t frightened, just curious, as he sat and watched them drift by.

Based on his age at the time, this would have been around 1966 or 1967, when the Cultural Revolution had just begun and was at its most violent. He was likely witnessing the aftermath of a particularly brutal denunciation meeting, where Mao’s most ardent followers, known as the Red Guards, meted out criticism and punishment to those they considered class enemies. Another colleague recounted an experience of his own school days, his sadness on hearing of the passing of his physics teacher who had been a mentor to him. This teacher had been subject to denunciation by Red Guards and, driven to despair, had leapt from the school roof. A third colleague would point out other teachers across the staff room and whisper, “He was a Red Guard, and so was he, but we don’t talk about these things now.”

I had been in Guangdong for about six months when I walked past a newspaper stand on the way to the shops and saw a somber photo of Deng Xiaoping—the top reform-minded leader of China after Mao—on the front page. It was the morning of February 19, 1997. “Has he died?” I asked the shopkeeper, who quietly nodded. Back in the staff room, a colleague formally broke the news. “But you don’t need to worry,” she said. “Everything is fine. He was very old, and we already know who our new leader is. There isn’t going to be any trouble.” Her emphasis was more on reassuring me that calm and continuity would prevail than on marking the loss of Deng. Mao’s death 21 years earlier had been treated publicly as a moment of earth-shattering national grief, and of course they all remembered.

Histories of modern China often convey a sense of clear periodization. There’s the dark chaos of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, then Mao dies, then an amorphous power struggle ensues, from which Deng Xiaoping emerges as paramount leader in 1978; he launches the Reform and Opening movement, at which point the slate is wiped clean for a new beginning. This is an “end of history” version in which a backward China was always destined to join the modern world of open markets and burgeoning consumerist lifestyles. All that was needed was the right kind of enlightened leader to put the right policies in place, and that was Deng. There are two problems with this narrative. The first is its sense of inevitability, which occludes the question of how this most dramatic shift—from the turbulence of Maoist socialism to the breakneck speed of Dengist marketization—actually happened. The second is that the story of China’s Reform and Opening is primarily recounted as a change in economic policy at the top.

Two books came out last year that challenge this predetermined and one-dimensional version of history—The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform by Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian, and China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Ascendance, and Aftermath by Wang Feng. Both grapple with the complex question of how China’s extraordinary historic shift took place, tracing its roots back to well before 1978. And both seek to foreground a bottom-up perspective, highlighting the importance of ordinary people’s experience of living through this momentous period. It has been argued before that the 1980s reforms relied upon the legacies of the Mao era in a variety of ways, and these authors clearly acknowledge their debts to earlier scholarship. Even so, the overarching framings, and sometimes unexpected details, make for compelling challenges to the more standard narratives.

Westad and Chen begin with a question raised by Karl Polanyi, the famous Austro-Hungarian social philosopher whose own famous book, also titled The Great Transformation (1944), emphasized that markets do not magically appear on their own. All economic systems, including markets and capital, are produced out of particular social, cultural, and political contingencies. Hence, Westad and Chen seek to establish what those historical contingencies were for China. They locate the answer in what they call “the long 1970s,” a period that lasted from 1968 to 1985. The start date is deliberately selected as the point when most of the violence of the Cultural Revolution was already over (in fact, some scholars have argued that the event itself did not, in practice, outlast the 1960s).

This choice is significant. The dynamism of the 1970s is too often obscured in accounts of the market reforms, submerged into the decade-long “official” Cultural Revolution, the whole of which is too often associated with the traumatic upheavals of the first two years. Their chronological resetting allows the authors to incorporate key factors often missed in the standard historical accounts. This includes the growing hostility of relations with the Soviet Union, which fueled Mao’s “obsession” with the possibility of war, and which, by sheer circumstance, happened to coincide with Richard Nixon’s desire to extricate the United States from the Vietnam War. This coincidence enabled the Sino-US rapprochement of 1972. A shift in Party discourse and policymaking followed, with a downplaying of class struggle and an increased emphasis instead on modernization and development (which, of course, we seldom associated with the Cultural Revolution).

Meanwhile, as Party officials were still distracted by Cultural Revolutionary matters, unofficial and unauthorized grassroots market activities sprung up under the radar. These activities, Westad and Chen argue, were driven by the fear and desperation of those who had lived through both the famine of the Great Leap Forward (1958–62) and the political instability of the 1960s. People sought to buttress material security in any way they could, devoid of any certainty that conditions would not once again take a nosedive.

After Mao’s death, the reticence shown by Hua Guofeng, his immediate successor, in dealing once and for all with the “historical issues” of the Cultural Revolution set the conditions for his rapid replacement by Deng. Instead of recognizing the need to issue an official verdict promptly, Hua demurred, leading those who had been persecuted during the era, and who had now returned to leading political circles, to swing behind Deng in frustration. Had Hua been more savvy in putting this issue to rest, the surge behind his rival may not have gathered such momentum. Once it did, and Deng took over—in practice, if not in title—the grassroots conditions were already in place for the market reforms to catch fire.

Westad and Chen’s book is, on the whole, a lively read. The accounts of Party infighting are laced with vivid details. The coup against the Gang of Four (those accused of ultimate responsibility for the Cultural Revolution, including Jiang Qing, Mao’s widow) reads not unlike a suspense thriller. Deng, meanwhile, is portrayed as decidedly shifty and calculating, knowing exactly whom to suck up to and when. This is not the hagiographic treatment we often find.

In China’s Age of Abundance, Wang likens our attempts to make sense of China’s reforms to several people trying to work out what an elephant looks like by each person only touching one part of it. While many have described the economic policies from the top, he sets out to provide a comprehensive account from the ground level, showing in detail how people’s daily lives have changed. His chosen angle is consumption, and the pages are packed with data and graphs describing remarkable transformations from before the era of reforms up until, in many cases, the 2020s. An early anecdote about a mischievous four-year-old child stealing an egg in 1972, at the time an “enviable luxury” and meant for his ailing father, sets the scene. The following chapters detail changes in the availability of food, household appliances, clothing, education, healthcare, and housing.

Even with all the numbers, the book is engaging and accessible. There are some fascinating insights that bring home the significance of these changes for people’s lives. In parts of rural China in the 1960s, there were some households in which family members had to take turns going out because they did not have enough clothes to cover everyone. Compare this to the year 2000, when China exported 1.56 billion pairs of shoes—the equivalent of every person in China making a pair for export. Another striking detail is the rapid change in children’s height, “virtually unprecedented in the history of human physical development.” At primary school age, a boy in urban China was 5.2 cm taller in 2002 than in 1992, and a girl 5.7 cm taller. The change was even more striking for their less well-off rural counterparts, where the difference in height between a seven-year-old boy and girl across the same 10-year gap was 7.8 and 7.9 cm respectively.

Like Westad and Chen, Wang also makes clear that the success of the market reforms was not predetermined. In fact, as he emphasizes, the dramatic transformations were most unexpected (the first chapter is titled “Surprise”) and rested on certain specific conditions. While the resultant economic growth is often put down to China’s abundance of cheap labor, Wang emphasizes that it was more than that—this was good labor, which was made cheap. First, the Mao era, while marked by scarcity, did, from the mid-1960s onward, result in a healthy (if often hungry) population, and also raised literacy levels to an impressive extent. When the reforms began, Chinese workers were fit and ready, and they could read instructions. Second, a large portion of Chinese workers, the rural migrants, had their labor made extra cheap because of preexisting institutions. The household registration system, under which the rural and urban populations had been governed separately since the 1950s, restricted the rights of rural people while they were in the cities. As a result, their wages were kept low in comparison with their urban counterparts. This highly exploitative system was favored by investors, both domestic and international, which helped to keep the flow of money coming in. While the access to low-paid jobs in cities did help to raise living standards in the countryside, the legacy of urban-rural inequality remains today, after the age of abundance has ended. This income gap is now proving to be a stumbling block as China’s leaders try to raise household spending while economic growth slows.

Finally, at a time when China’s rise must seem, to many, to have been inevitable, both books serve well to remind us of the contingency of history and the opaqueness of the future when viewed from the present. When Xi Jinping took the helm in 2012, few foresaw China’s repressive political turn or the abolishment of leadership term limits. For example, in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal published shortly after Xi’s inauguration, a highly respected China analyst observed Xi’s tolerant reaction to a protest against political censorship at the Guangdong-based newspaper Southern Weekly. This analyst presented Xi as an economically liberal reformer and noted how he branded himself after Deng Xiaoping. Xi might find that the greatest risk to his rule, the analyst warned, was his own “softness” toward political dissent. How different things have turned out to be. One day, history books will be written on how we got from there to here.