'NEVER TURN BACK' A NEW BOOK BY CWP ALUM JULIAN GEWIRTZ
The history the Chinese Communist Party has tried to erase: the dramatic political debates of the 1980s that could have put China on a path to greater openness.
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. For a time, everything was on the table, including democratization and China’s version of socialism. But deliberation came to a sudden halt in spring 1989, with protests and purges, massacre and repression. Since then, Beijing has worked intensively to suppress the memory of this era of openness.
Julian Gewirtz recovers the debates of the 1980s, tracing the Communist Party’s diverse attitudes toward markets, state control, and sweeping technological change, as well as freewheeling public argument over political liberalization. The administration considered bold proposals from within the party and without, including separation between the party and the state, empowering the private sector, and establishing an independent judiciary. After Tiananmen, however, 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.
PRODUCT DETAILS -HARDCOVER - $32.95 • £26.95 • €29.50 ISBN 9780674241848
Publication Date: 10/18/2022 - Trade - 432 pages - 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches - 15 photos - Belknap Press - World
Never Turn Back China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s Julian Gewirtz
Julian Gewirtz is author of two new books, Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s and Your Face My Flag: Poems, as well as Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Financial Times, Journal of Asian Studies, 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 Harvard University. He is currently serving as China Director on the United States National Security Council (NSC); his work on Never Turn Back was completed before his government service, and neither the book nor comments at the event necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. government or NSC.
Photo Credit: Here
