Never Turn Back offers a revelatory look at how different China’s rise might have been and at the foundations of strongman rule under Xi Jinping, who has intensified the policing of history to bolster his own authority. Using newly available Chinese sources, Gewirtz details how the leadership purged the key reformist politician Zhao Ziyang, quashed the student movement, recast the transformations of the 1980s as the inevitable products of consensus, and indoctrinated China and the international community in the new official narrative. After Tiananmen, however, Beijing systematically erased these discussions of alternative directions. The administration considered bold proposals from within the party and without, including separation between the party and the state, empowering the private sector, and establishing an independent judiciary. ![]() Julian Gewirtz recovers the debates of the 1980s, tracing the Communist Party’s diverse attitudes toward markets, state control, and sweeping technological change, as well as freewheeling public argument over political liberalization. Since then, Beijing has worked intensively to suppress the memory of this era of openness. It will also present lists of upcoming China books, bestsellers, book-related events. A nationalistic essay widely spread last week by Chinese official media cited the barbaric and ferocious attacks that the U.S. But deliberation came to a sudden halt in spring 1989, with protests and purges, massacre and repression. The China Books Review will offer reviews by respected writers, interviews with authors, edited excerpts, and more general essays in the tradition of The New York Review of Books, focusing on books about and from China, as well as the greater Sinophone world. For a time, everything was on the table, including democratization and China’s version of socialism. That became a mantra as the government forged ahead with reforms in the face of heated contestation over the nation’s future. ![]() “Never turn back,” the Chinese leader replied. Taiwan, Covid, color revolutions, the classroom: everywhere, China’s leader sees threats that foreign forces can exploit, and he has enlisted the whole nation to defend against them. On a hike in Guangdong Province in January 1984, Deng Xiaoping was warned that his path was a steep and treacherous one.
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