Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Introduction

China and the Long 1970s: The Great Transformation

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Book cover China, Hong Kong, and the Long 1970s: Global Perspectives

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

  • 732 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter first provides a broad perspective on overall changes in the international system from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and how changes in China both contributed to and were affected by these. It focuses particularly on the major shifts in the post-1945 international system that occurred during this decade. It then moves to consider how and why China’s domestic and external policies changed so dramatically in the course of the 1970s, and why China chose the path of domestic economic reform and opening up, rather than continuing the policies of the previous quarter-century. It explores the domestic roots of these changes, internal Chinese political struggles over China’s future during the decade, and how these were related to broader shifts in China’s international alignment and the global power system.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    See Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Barbara Zanchetta, The Transformation of American International Power in the 1970s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).

  2. 2.

    See esp. Odd Arne Westad, “The Great Transformation: China in the Long 1970s,” in The Shock of the Global, eds. Ferguson et al., 65–79.

  3. 3.

    Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

  4. 4.

    Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

  5. 5.

    Christian Caryl, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21 st Century (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

  6. 6.

    Ferguson, “Introduction” to The Shock of the Global, 1–21, quotation from 5.

  7. 7.

    Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005); and James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  8. 8.

    David Bruce, diary, December 25, 1973, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, VA.

  9. 9.

    Jacco Pekelder, “Towards Another Concept of the State: Historiography of the 1970s in the USA and Western Europe,” in Linksalternative Milieus und Neue Soziale Bewegungen in den 1970er Jahren, eds. Cordia Baumann, Sebastian Gehrig, and Nicolas Büchse (Heidelberg: Universitätslag Winter, 2011).

  10. 10.

    Konrad Jarausch, ed., Das Ende der Zuversicht: Die siebziger Jahre als Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2008); and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael, Nach den Boom: Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschicte seit 1970 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2008).

  11. 11.

    Sargent, A Superpower Transformed, ch. 4.

  12. 12.

    Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, “The Vietnam Decade: The Global Shock of the War,” in The Shock of the Global, eds. Ferguson et al., 159–163, 169–172.

  13. 13.

    See, for example, Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001); David Frum, How We Got Here: The ’70s, The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse) (New York: Basic Books, 2000); and Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

  14. 14.

    David Cannadine, In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 2; Richard Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s (London: Simon and Schuster, 2009); Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (New York: Free Press, 2000); and Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964–1980 (Roseville, CA: Forum, 2001).

  15. 15.

    Lee Marsden, For God’s Sake: The Religious Right and US Foreign Policy (London: Zed Books, 2008); and Clyde Wilcox and Carin Larson, Onward Christian Soldiers? The Religious Right in American Politics, 4th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2010).

  16. 16.

    Stephen Kotkin, “The Kiss of Debt: The East Bloc Goes Borrowing,” in The Shock of the Global, eds. Ferguson et al., 80–93.

  17. 17.

    Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Tom Buchanan, East Wind: China and the British Left, 1925–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 6.

  18. 18.

    Bruce Cumings, review of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, ed., The Cold War in East Asia, 1945–1991 (Washington, DC, and Stanford, CA: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2011), H-Diplo Roundtable Review 13:30 (June 25, 2012), 16.

  19. 19.

    Takashi Shiraishi and Caroline Sy Hau, “China, Japan and the Transformation of East Asia,” in The Cold War in Asia: The Battle for Hearts and Minds, eds. Zheng Yangwen, Hong Liu, and Michael Szonyi (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 28–38.

  20. 20.

    Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987).

  21. 21.

    Westad, “The Great Transformation,” 65–79.

  22. 22.

    Raghavan, 1971, ch. 8.

  23. 23.

    Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History (London, Bloomsbury, 2016); see also Dikötter, “The Silent Revolution: Decollectivization from Below during the Cultural Revolution,” China Quarterly 227 (September 2016), 796–811.

  24. 24.

    Lynn T. White III, Unstately Power, 2 vols. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997); also Westad, “The Great Transformation,” 67–71.

  25. 25.

    Westad, “The Great Transformation,” 65–79.

  26. 26.

    Chen Jian, “From ‘Liberation’ to ‘Peaceful Unification’: Beijing’s Changing Policies toward Taiwan in the Long 1970s,” draft paper for workshop on “China, Hong Kong, and the Long 1970s in Global Perspective,” December 2014, IDEAS, London School of Economics, London.

  27. 27.

    Nguyen, “The Vietnam Decade,” 163–175.

  28. 28.

    Chi-kwan Mark, Hong Kong and the Cold War 1949–1957 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 130–132, 169; David Clayton, Imperialism Revisited: Political and Economic Relations between Britain and China, 1950–54 (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1997), 120–121, 199–200; Christine Loh, Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 84; and Richard Roberts and David Kynaston, The Lion Wakes: A Modern History of HSBC (London: Profile Books, 2015), 15–18.

  29. 29.

    See, for example, Tracy Steele, “Hong Kong and the Cold War in the 1950s,” in Hong Kong in the Cold War, eds. Priscilla Roberts and John M. Carroll (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016), 92–116.

  30. 30.

    Cited in Mark Hampton, Hong Kong and British Culture, 1945–97 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 3.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 161–167.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 5–6.

  33. 33.

    Xu Guoqi, Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895–2008 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), ch. 8.

  34. 34.

    Shu Guang Zhang, Beijing’s Economic Statecraft During the Cold War 1949–1991 (Washington, DC, and Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 265–267.

  35. 35.

    “A Record Number of Chinese Students Abroad in 2015 but Growth is Slowing,” April 6, 2016, ICEF Monitor Website, http://monitor.icef.com/2016/04/a-record-number-of-chinese-students-abroad-in-2015-but-growth-is-slowing/, accessed July 23, 2016.

  36. 36.

    Lu Xun, “The American Cold War in Hong Kong, 1949–1960: Intelligence and Propaganda,” in Hong Kong and the Cold War, eds. Roberts and Carroll, 117–139; and Johannes Richard Lombardo, “A Mission of Espionage, Intelligence and Psychological Operations: The American Consulate in Hong Kong, 1949–64,” Intelligence and National Security 14:4 (Winter 1999), 64–81.

  37. 37.

    Chi-kwan Mark, “Hong Kong as an International Tourism Space: The Politics of American Tourism in the 1960s,” in Hong Kong and the Cold War, eds. Roberts and Carroll, 161–162, 168–174.

  38. 38.

    Mei Renyi and Chen Juebin, “Hong Kong’s Role in US–China Trade Relations during the 1970s,” in Bridging the Sino-American Divide: American Studies with Chinese Characteristics, ed. Priscilla Roberts (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 412–430.

  39. 39.

    See Mei and Chen, “Hong Kong’s Role in US–China Trade Relations During the 1970s,” 422–430; Steve Tsang, A Modern History of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 159, 175–179; John M. Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 136–137, 142; Roberts and Kynaston, The Lion Wakes, 167–171; Cindy Yik-yi Chu, Chinese Communists and Hong Kong Capitalists: 1937–1997 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 68; and David R. Meyer, “Hong Kong’s Enduring Global Business Relations,” in Hong Kong and the Cold War, eds. Roberts and Carroll, 60–83.

  40. 40.

    Hampton, Hong Kong and British Culture, 44–49, 61–63.

  41. 41.

    Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution; also Dikötter, “The Silent Revolution.”

  42. 42.

    Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest 16:3 (Summer 1989), 3–18; and Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

  43. 43.

    Michael W. Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review 80:4 (December 1986), 1161–1179.

  44. 44.

    Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Beijing Consensus (London: The Foreign Policy Centre, 2004).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. City University of Macau, Taipa, Macau

    Priscilla Roberts

Authors
  1. Priscilla Roberts
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Priscilla Roberts .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. City University of Macau, Taipa, Macao

    Priscilla Roberts

  2. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Odd Arne Westad

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Roberts, P. (2017). Introduction. In: Roberts, P., Westad, O. (eds) China, Hong Kong, and the Long 1970s: Global Perspectives. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51250-1_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51250-1_1

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-51249-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-51250-1

  • eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation