The first thorough account of a formative and little understood chapter in Chinese history

Historians Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian chronicle how an impoverished and terrorized China experienced radical political changes in the long 1970s and how ordinary people broke free from the beliefs that had shaped their lives during Mao's Cultural Revolution. These political changes, and the unprecedented and sustained economic growth that followed, transformed China and the world.

From the corridors of CCP headquarters to collective enterprises in Guangdong and the arrival of the US table tennis team, Westad and Chen reconstruct a panorama of catastrophe and progress in China. In this rigorously told account they describe China's gradual opening to the world-the interplay of power in an era of aged and ailing leadership, the people's rebellion against the earlier government system, and the roles of unlikely characters: overseas Chinese capitalists, American engineers, Japanese professors, and German designers. It is the story of revolutionary change, in directions that almost no foreigners and very few Chinese could have imagined when it all started.