Amy King reviews Jason Kelly’s ‘Market Maoists’
Source: Harvard University Press
Dominant narratives typically depict the Cold War as a battle between capitalist and communist camps, with little economic or other contact taking place between the two. Yet such narratives do not fully capture China's trade relations during the Cold War. In a new H-Diplo Roundtable, Amy King joins a group of leading historians and political scientists to review Jason Kelly’s Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China’s Capitalist Ascent. This terrific book effectively dismantles the depiction of Maoist China as detached from the capitalist world. Instead, it explores the people, policies, and institutions that facilitated China's trade with capitalist countries during the Cold War, paving the way for Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening in the 1970s.
King’s review applauds Kelly’s crafting of the ‘fine-grained texture’ of China’s day-to-day trade relations in the lead up to, and during, the Mao era. She also considers how Kelly’s book reshapes our understanding of China’s relationship to the global economy, the significance of key ideas such as ‘self-reliance’ (zili gengsheng) and ‘normal’ trade, and how Communist China learned to live with the tensions posed by trade with the capitalist world.
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