A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year A BBC History Magazine Best Book of the Year
“Excellent…A fascinating, authoritative account of the paths for China’s future explored during a decade long buried by official, state-sponsored history.”—Julia Lovell, Foreign Policy
“A vivid and readable account…Exceptionally well-researched.” —Andrew Nathan, Foreign Affairs
"The definitive book on China in the 1980s in terms of the depth of research and originality of the argument." ―Minxin Pei, author of The Sentinel State
"A gift to our understanding of today’s China."―Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition
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.
Recovering the debates of China in the 1980s, Julian Gewirtz traces the Communist Party’s diverse attitudes toward markets, state control, and sweeping technological change, as well as freewheeling public argument over political liberalization. Deng Xiaoping’s administration considered bold proposals from within the party and without, but after Tiananmen, 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.
Julian Gewirtz is author of Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China (called “a gripping read” by The Economist). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, Financial Times, Past & Present, and Foreign Affairs. He has been a Rhodes Scholar, Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Lecturer in History at Columbia University. He is currently serving as China Director on the National Security Council (NSC); his work on Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s was completed before his government service and does not necessarily reflect the views of the US government or NSC.
Table of Contents
Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Introduction. Forbidden History 1. Reassessing History, Recasting Modernization Part I. Ideology and Propaganda 2. Spiritual Pollutions and Sugar-Coated Bullets 3. The Scourge of Bourgeois Liberalization Part II. The Economy 4. Liberating the Productive Forces 5. The Powers of the Market Part III. Technology 6. Responding to the New Technological Revolution 7. A Matter of the Life and Death of the Nation Part IV. Political Modernization 8. Masters of the Country 9. Explore without Fear Illustrations Part V. Before Tiananmen 10. Two Rounds of Applause 11. A Great Flood 12. We Came Too Late Part VI. Tiananmen and After 13. Political Crackdown and Narrative Crisis 14. Recasting Reform and Opening 15. The Socialist Survivor in a Capitalist World Conclusion. A New Era Abbreviations Notes Acknowledgments Index
