With the end of the Cultural Revolution and the downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976, China entered the “Golden Age” of reform, which ended tragically within a decade in 1989. Deng’s Southern Tour launched economic reforms without its political counterpart, and created huge interest groups that have benefited from the authoritarian system, further hindering political reform. The Initiative for Building Consensus on Reform advocated comprehensive constitutional reforms to be taken for China to return to healthy economic development. Without political reform that makes the ruler accountable to the ruled, no matter how much freedom, wealth or half-baked rule of law enjoyed by the ruled, it can be taken away from them overnight, as the zero-Covid policy showed in 2020– 22.

This chapter explores Angang and Northeast China during the economic reforms following Mao’s death in 1976. As the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) developmental strategy shifted its focus to export-oriented light industry, regions with a greater presence of heavy industry such as Northeast China fared worse than light industry regions such as East China. Despite a series of state-owned enterprise (SOE) reforms including privatization, the PRC further integrated larger SOEs such as Angang into the party-state bureaucracy. The final echo of the Maoist era emerged in the form of SOE workers protesting for job security and social welfare benefits by appropriating the socialist discourse of the state. As China moved away from socialist industrialization, the legacies of this period in Northeast China transformed the region into a rust belt filled with ageing, unprofitable SOEs in heavy industry.

This chapter recounts Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese relations from 1975 to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 as well as Sino-Vietnamese relations during the same period. The chapter also introduces Hun Sen and describes the state of Vietnam–US relations since the end of the Vietnam War.

This chapter describes the immediate aftermath of the Vietnamese invasion. Apart from the ongoing war in Cambodia, the immediate, violent response to the Vietnamese invasion was the February 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war.

By 1977–78, the Horn of Africa became a key area of Soviet–American rivalry, with both superpowers supporting rival regimes. Both the Soviets and the Americans wanted their clients to embrace specific legitimating discourses, such as human rights or Marxism-Leninism, establishing patterns of deference, recognition, and legitimation. By the late 1970s, China concluded that involvement in Africa was not worth the cost and retreated, while the Soviets continued despite the costs. Driven by inertia of proletarian internationalism, Moscow sought involvement in faraway struggles, seeking recognition as the leader of revolutionary forces. As before, the Soviets failed to see the contradiction between detente with the United States and supporting third world revolutions. Meanwhile, in the late 1970s, the Cold War was reshaped by China's transformation under Deng Xiaoping, who shifted focus from revolution to development. This strategic pivot led China to lean toward America, which the United States welcomed to contain the Soviet threat. Despite being based on tactical choices rather than shared values, this alignment deeply worried Soviet leaders.

This chapter accounts for the twists and turns of Soviet–American and Sino-Soviet relations in 1960–61. Khrushchev's primary concern was resolving the Berlin issue, and he hoped that the new US president, John F. Kennedy, would be more amenable to finding a solution than Eisenhower had been. China continued to be a problem for Khrushchev. During the November 1960 Moscow conference of Communist parties, he faced Chinese resistance and criticism but ultimately prevailed in having the conference adopt a declaration that largely ignored Beijing's objections. After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Soviet leader became increasingly concerned with the prospect of Cuba's survival. Berlin, Cuba, and other global issues were at the center of his discussions with Kennedy in Vienna in June 1961. The summit ended on a sour note, but despite Khrushchev's bluster and his optimistic evaluation that the chances of a war with the United States stood at merely 5 percent, he proved unwilling to push his luck over Berlin and ultimately authorized the building of the Berlin Wall to stem the flow of refugees and stabilize a highly volatile situation in East Germany.

The Afterword reflects on the peculiarities of the CCP’s politics of historical justice. Placing the results of the volume in the larger context of transitional justice research, it discusses the reasons why the policies of “bringing order out of chaos” (boluan fanzheng) generated short-term cohesion but did not result in meaningful political reconciliation. The party leadership, despite a few alternative statements by high-ranking leaders in the early 1980s, did not allow for multivocal discussions of guilt and responsibility. Instead, it attempted to pacify the populace through financial subsidies, symbolic rehabilitations, and highly selective persecutions of supposed perpetrators. The core strategy under Deng Xiaoping was to overcome the legacies of the past through a focus on economic development and the depoliticization of past conflicts. An increasingly rigid truth regime was installed and enshrined in the 1981 resolution on party history. The contradictions between lived experience and these official formulae resulted in a pronounced shift toward historical amnesia in the following decades, as the legacies of the Mao era have become increasingly incorporated into a larger narrative of national rejuvenation and regaining great power status.

Since 2008 Pacific Asia has been reconfigured as a region, with China as its center. In economics, China has been the central driver and partner in growth. In politics, China has become the central concern of its neighbors. China’s GDP surpassed Japan’s in 2000, and by 2009 it equaled the combined totals of Japan, ASEAN, and Korea. While this shows China’s demographic power, it is not simply a matter of size. Its per capita GDP is now at eye level with countries such as Malaysia and Thailand. China is again the major presence in Pacific Asia, with a majority of its population and its production. Re-centered China is quite different from premodern China. China and its region are now globally integrated, and its former, cautious thin connectivity has been replaced by assertive thick connectivity. China now tries to maximize win-win contact. However, the new asymmetries worry the neighbors. China’s challenges of integrating Greater China and avoiding hostility with Japan are vital for China’s global prospects as well as its regional stature.

The institutions of the developmental states set up in the postwar period began to crumble in the 1980s as liberalisation took hold. Isolationist approaches were on the back foot. However, this did not mark the end of economic nationalism. Nation-states were now recast as agents shaping competitiveness and therefore growth. This process is visible in the Baltic states breaking free from the Soviet Union, in Malaysia of the 1990s, and most importantly in reform-era China. Beyond these similarities, the differences are equally enlightening. China’s reforms as conceived by Deng Xiaoping saw an initially cautious, but increasingly rapid, dismantling of Maoist autarky, with the ‘rejuvenation’ of the nation becoming the principal aim. Malaysia under Mahathir Mohamad only slowly moved towards a developmental policy, because policy also tried to achieve the economic advancement of ethnic Malays over the country’s ethnic Chinese minority. Finally, not all independent states born from the Soviet dissolution could turn to the West. Ukraine in the early 1990s remained caught between internal divisions and increasingly aggressive Russian policy.

Despite the conflicts in cultural exchanges that disrupted his first year in office, Gerald Ford hoped to use exchange diplomacy as one means to realize a successful summit trip to China in December 1975. This chapter shows, however, that this tactic proved largely unsuccessful: Ford’s primary interlocutor, Deng Xiaoping, was uninterested in expanding cultural ties before an improvement in the diplomatic relationship – even if the vice premier could not hide his interest in deeper Sino-American scientific cooperation. Growing Chinese interest in the US science and technology was already well known to American scientists and, while Ford and Henry Kissinger declined to exploit this interest to political ends, the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) advocated that the United States must demand something more in return for the benefits that China was gaining from scientific exchange with the United States. Meanwhile, American politicians outside of the executive branch sought to fill the void left by Ford’s limp China policy during their own visits to the PRC – but often met the same uncompromising, even bellicose, Chinese response that Ford and Kissinger had grown used to.

This chapter analyzes how diplomacy over Sino-American scientific cooperation was central to the final agreement for China and the United States to establish official diplomatic relations, finally reached in December 1978. In the wake of Mao Zedong’s death in September 1976, China’s emerging post-Mao leadership prioritized the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s scientific development, believing that drawing on scientific knowledge from outside of China – including from the United States – was critical to the country’s development. The Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC had long been arguing that China’s interest in US science provided leverage to the United States and, after President Jimmy Carter recruited the top leadership of the CSCPRC into his administration, utilizing this leverage became a critical part of US China policy. Thus, Chinese and US leaders, working hand-in-glove with the nongovernmental CSCPRC, achieved a simultaneous upgrading of the Sino-American scientific and diplomatic relationship in 1978 that offered a final demonstration of the symbiotic relationship between exchange and high-level Sino-American diplomacy in the pre-normalization era.

Scientists had a distinctive part to play in the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign relations prior to it coming to power as well as during the early decades of the People’s Republic. The Conclusion considers the significance of this sustained party and party-state interest in scientists’ international activities for subsequent developments from the 1970s through China’s rise as a science and technology power by the early twenty-first century. These relations did not just spring out of nowhere, fully formed, and ready to go with the onset of rapprochement. Nor were they simply a product of long-term Americanisation. Consequently, the Conclusion explores notable areas of continuity and others of revived relevance when it comes to the party-state and the spectrum of international activities undertaken by scientists.

The chapter introduces strategic opportunity as the analytical approach guiding the book. China’s strategic opportunity is defined by the national goals and ambitions as set by the Chinese leadership, the opportunities and risks presented in the international environment, and the policy instruments and resources at the nation’s disposal. The chapter first shows how the concept is anchored in the reformist Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s assessment that peace and development were the predominant trends in the world. It then explains why the concept provides an appropriate and innovative approach to the study of Chinese foreign policy. Finally, the chapter investigates how Chinese leadership under Xi Jinping has launched a major-power diplomacy seeking to effectively deploy its newfound resources to reshape its international environment. It also lays out the salient causal beliefs and policy patterns behind the assertive Chinese foreign policy and concludes with a summary of the contents of the book.

Since 1949, the Chinese party-state’s approach to health policy has fluctuated with the vicissitudes of politics, oscillating between neglect and an instrumental use of healthcare to promote state legitimacy. This chapter examines health policy in China from 1949 until the 2000s, with a focus on rural areas. During the Maoist period, two factors hindered the erstwhile Ministry of Health in improving health services: budget constraints and political oscillations that prioritized ideology over expertise. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping initiated market reforms and subordinated healthcare and social policy to economic growth. In the early 2000s, due to pressure from society, shifts in governance style, and encouragement from at home and abroad, the Chinese government initiated a dialogue on healthcare reform that culminated in the 2009 plan to overhaul the health system. But because local government was still primarily responsible for funding health policy and faced budget constraints, legacies of health policy in the second half of the twentieth century continued to impact healthcare in the 2000s.

As reports of mass famine turned from a trickle to a flood in 1960, the leadership slowly realized that the party had made a mistake of historical proportion. According to Ministry of Public Security data, 675 counties and cities had death rates exceeding 2 percent of population in the early 1960s, compared to the normal 1 percent or so. In forty counties, mainly in Anhui, Sichuan, Henan, Guizhou, and Qinghai, the death rates exceeded 10 percent of the population (Yang et al. 2012: 395). Economists and demographers estimate that the Great Leap Forward caused sixteen to thirty million unnatural deaths in the early 1960s (Kung and Lin 2003). The policy of using confiscated grain to finance a rapid buildup of industrial capacity championed by Mao and his colleagues had led to one of the greatest man-made disasters in the twentieth century.

Even at an abstract theoretical level, the power configuration in China after the 1969 9th Party Congress was highly unstable. On the one hand, Mao continued to be an active and powerful chairman of the party. On the other hand, Lin Biao, the anointed successor, had a great deal of control over the military. Without the possibility of other powerful factions in the party to check a potential fight between Mao and Lin, both sides had much temptation to eliminate the other if they believed they had sufficient power to do so (Acemoglu et al. 2008: 162). Fortunately for Mao, he had cultivated two disparate groups to help him govern China in the event of a purge of Lin Biao: the Fourth Front Army (FFA) and the surviving scribblers. Mao’s strategy of cultivating the tainted FFA paid off handsomely. Instead of having to concede to Lin Biao’s reluctance to carry out self-criticism or being forced to rely on Lin’s followers, Mao forced Lin’s hand, knowing that he could credibly threaten Lin with replacing the Lin Biao faction with FFA veterans. After Lin Biao fled, Mao carried out his threat and eradicated close associates of Lin Biao wholesale from the military, replacing them with veterans of the FFA. The Lin Biao incident on September 13, 1971, finally led to the full installation of the coalition of the weak.

After Mao’s passing in September 1976, the coalition that Mao had put in place at the end of his life, which was composed Cultural Revolution radicals with little revolutionary experience, even more junior officials like Wu De and mass representatives, the tainted Fourth Front Army (FFA) group, and a handful of trusted First Front Army veterans like Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing, took over the People’s Republic of China. An uneasy truce persisted for a very short time before the Gang of Four had alarmed Hua Guofeng by challenging his role as the anointed successor, which compelled him to seek more drastic solutions (Zhang 2008b: 263). In this decisive moment, the FFA swung behind Hua, thus sealing the Gang of Four’s fate, but Hua also became very dependent on FFA veterans. His dependence on military veterans with vastly more experience and greater networks ultimately also brought about his downfall. Within two years of Mao’s death, none of the potential successors Mao had put into place just prior to his death survived as powerful figures in the party. The Gang of Four had ended in jail, while Hua was sidelined at the third plenum in 1978. Even FFA veteran Li Desheng, who had served as vice chairman of the party for a short while, ended his career in the 1980s as the head of the National Defense University (Zhu 2007: 425). Except for key members of the FFA group, the vast majority of Mao’s coalition of the weak had ended in jail or in retirement by the early 1980s. His legacy of continuous revolution also was completely expunged from the party ideology in favor of a single-minded focus on economic development.

Although much of this book concerns political dynamics in the Mao Era, the tumults of the Cultural Revolution and the coalition rule that resulted from late-Mao politics indirectly led to an important political outcome by the 2010s, the survival of Xi Jinping as one of the few princelings among political leaders on the civilian side of the CCP. This created one of the preconditions for Xi to dominate the party soon after taking office as the head of the party in late 2012 – the relative absence of competition and oversight from other highly networked princelings. In the 1980s, two forces drove the selection of future leaders in the party. First, founding leaders such as Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping had a genuine desire to promote a new generation of well-educated, loyal potential successors as their health began to fail them. Second, as the rest of the book has argued, the top leadership and even mid-level officials at the ministerial level did not want serious competitors to their power bases, and each pursued a coalition of the weak strategy within his own jurisdiction. Thus, besides a few senior veterans who had placed their children on accelerated paths for promotion, the vast majority of revolutionary veterans resisted the promotion of princelings due to their Red Guard activism during the Cultural Revolution and to fear of interference by well-networked princelings.

Authoritarian regimes must grapple with a fundamental source of instability that a significant redistribution of power, often unseen or only partially observed, can radically alter the incentives of regime insiders and overturn initially stable equilibria (Acemoglu et al. 2008). Although institutional features such as authoritarian legislatures and a ruling party can alleviate the incentives to usurp the incumbent leader to some extent, especially among lower-level officials (Gandhi 2008; Svolik 2012), they cannot fundamentally remove the incentives to grab power forcefully in the top echelon of these regimes. For one, one-party states by design entrust enormous power in the hands of the top few officials or even in the hands of one person. For ambitious officials just one layer below the very top facing a low probability of ordinary promotion, the reward for achieving an extra step upward can be enormous and can justify a risky gamble, especially if an external shock leads to a significant redistribution of power. Even for those who are already in the top echelon of the ruling party, a gamble to break the existing power-sharing equilibrium can reap enormous rewards as the power and resources of authoritarian colleagues are consolidated into one’s hands. Knowing the dangers of these possibilities, authoritarian leaders also have the incentives to preempt potentially threatening colleagues by removing them from power with coercive measures. In the absence of credible constitutional frameworks or electoral pressure to stop the actions of the top leadership, the stable façade of authoritarian politics can quickly descend into coups, purges, and assassinations.