How the New Left won the battle of ideas for 21st-century China
Their revisionism challenges the neoliberal perspective which treats Maoist command economics and Deng-era capitalist reforms as diametrically opposed
We are all used to Western assessments of Deng Xiaoping. You may even be convinced by them, as I was for a long time.
Ezra Vogel, for example, wrote in Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China: “It was [Deng] who would finally realise the mission that others had tried for almost two centuries to achieve, of finding a path that would make China rich and powerful.”
And, according to Orville Schell and John Delury in Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century, “Once in power, he did not hesitate to foment a new kind of frenzy – for making money. By the mid-1980s, he had named his counterrevolution gaige kaifang, ‘reform and opening-up’.
“Deng’s strange hybrid reform combined Vladimir Lenin’s recipe for a disciplined and well-organized state and Milton Friedman’s celebration of free market economics.”