In the mid-1990s, I was researching the Cultural Revolution and living in the Inner Mongolian area of China. Although we foreigners hardly suspected it at the time, this was a more liberal, open period than what would come afterwards. Local friends managed to borrow piles of Chinese newspapers from the late 1960s and 1970s for me to read – something unimaginable in today’s China, where everything seems to be regarded as ‘restricted material’. I waded through them, following the fortunes of various Maoist campaigns: the attacks on ‘China’s Revisionists’ in the late 1960s; the denunciation of Lin Biao, once heir presumptive to Mao, after he had disgraced himself by trying to flee the country (he died in the process); the mysterious ‘Criticise Lin, Criticise Confucius’ campaign that began in 1973. Slogans came and went. The ‘revolution to touch the soul’, as Mao’s wife Jiang Qing called it, often involved vitriolic and frenetic language.

After weeks of studying this material, I came across an announcement blasted across front pages in characters almost half a page high: on 9 September 1976, the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong, had died. Two decades after the event, quietly reading these reports in my flat in Hohhot, I could still sense its seismic impact. A man treated like a god in his life had, finally, shown his mortality. 

The Great Transformation covers China’s evolution from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. Mao’s death sits at the heart of this period – one the authors call ‘the long 1970s’. China in this era emerged more and more onto the international stage. It opened up to visits and engagement