Reformers and Internationalists Are Likely Partners

In Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China, Julian Gewirtz argues that a coalition of Chinese reformers and Western economists made it possible for the post-Mao economic reform to emerge in the 1980s. Although “Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently claimed that ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ was ‘grown out of the soil of China,’ and former vice premier Zeng Peiyan ... fully credits [the development of the socialist market economy] to ‘Chinese Communists’ ” (pp. 10–11), according to Gewirtz, the Chinese socialist market economy was rooted in Zhao Ziyang’s effort to import ideas fromWestern economists. Moreover, at each crucial point of the power struggle between the reformers and the conservatives (i.e., anti-reformers), the reformers were enabled by their coalition with internationalists. This book provides important insights that explore the implications of China’s rise in the twenty-first century as it reminds us that the origin of China’s current prosperity is not nationalism but internationalism.