How did the People's Republic of China (PRC) become a global trading power at the dawn of the twenty-first century? According to one narrative, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) embarked on its program of “Reform and Opening” during the late 1970s in a bid to restore domestic legitimacy and shake off international isolation. New engagement with the global economy marked a radical and decisive break from the preceding three decades of rule under leader Mao Zedong, when domestic economic hardship and frosty diplomatic relations led to the collapse of foreign trade and forced China's turn to autarky. This version of the PRC's transformation has been espoused frequently by journalists, scholars, and even the CCP itself. It is also ostensibly supported by official statistics, which show the total value of Chinese imports and exports virtually unchanged between 1959 and 1970 before later taking off with the inauguration of reforms.
In contrast to this narrative of rebirth and redemption, Jason M. Kelly's Market Maoists offers another narrative to account for the PRC's engagement with the capitalist world: one of continuity and adaptation. Drawing on diverse archival sources from around the world—some once declassified but now reclassified—Kelly's important study looks at the long history of the CCP's delicate balance of expanding trade while pursuing revolution. Its coverage spans roughly five decades from the 1930s, when the CCP remained a nascent rural insurgency, to the 1970s, when the PRC was about to kickstart its “Reform and Opening.” Kelly's key argument is that foreign trade in Maoist China was neither negligible nor insignificant; it always worked in tandem with foreign policy and left consequential legacies that eventually facilitated China's capitalist boom. Market Maoists offers a valuable contribution to a burgeoning scholarship rethinking the origins of the contemporary Chinese economy and, by extension, the global economy.
Market Maoists focuses on three themes regarding CCP rule and foreign trade. First, Kelly shows how trade was always embedded at the heart of CCP statecraft. Even when the party was fighting not just for supremacy but for survival during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the Chinese Civil War (1946–1950), it was already looking to trade as a means of funding and equipping its armies. Extending its commercial networks beyond China, the CCP opened front companies in colonial Hong Kong and employed polyglot cadres, bourgeois traders, and economic specialists who learned, step by step, how to do business with the capitalist world. It continued aggressively wooing foreign businessmen and companies after 1949, inking deals at the 1954 Geneva Conference, publicizing Chinese goods with savvy marketing, and hosting the annual Canton Trade Fair. These ties proved remarkably durable even as the PRC steadily tightened control over foreign trade and reoriented its economy to the socialist bloc. Indeed, after a brief spike in the 1950s, the PRC's balance of trade with the socialist world never matched its balance of trade with the capitalist world.
The CCP thus always evinced a remarkable pragmatism in dealing with the capitalist world. Yet it did not entirely decouple political considerations from commercial relations. In fact, Kelly argues in the second theme of his book, “trade always served politics” (p. 6). Throughout the Cold War, CCP officials adroitly and doggedly leveraged commerce in the service of different political aims, such as securing wider diplomatic recognition for the PRC or supporting domestic campaigns. Trade proved an especially formidable weapon to break the economic embargo imposed during the Korean War and to secure critical materiel from around the world. Most importantly, it drove a sizable wedge between the United States, who wanted to continue isolating the PRC, and its key allies like the United Kingdom and Japan, who were eager to restore commercial relations with the People's Republic. Diplomatic relations usually came before commercial relations, but the PRC often sought to reverse this equation by dangling commercial relations to induce diplomatic relations.
The political dimensions of foreign trade also inform the third theme of the book. According to Kelly, PRC leaders bore an unshakable belief that “unchecked markets posed an existential threat to the Chinese revolution, and by extension, the Party, and the Chinese state” (p. 6). The CCP thus always prioritized sovereignty over trade, even when it had to trade by necessity. When Mao's ambitious Great Leap Forward (1958–1960) failed to jump-start development and led instead to economic collapse and widespread famine, Chinese trade negotiators scoured global markets for urgently needed wheat to feed their people and technologies to boost agricultural yields. While originally driven by desperation, the CCP ultimately learned some valuable lessons trading with the capitalist world: how to negotiate for advance credit, solicit competitive bids, and shop for sophisticated technologies. These experiences, Kelly argues, marked a turning point in the PRC's relationship to global markets. Henceforth, the PRC moved away from “tightly scripted, discrete transactions conducted at arm's length” and toward carefully “calibrated and continuous connections [that] posited a tight, lasting link between global commodity markets and global consumer markets via China's own production bases” (p. 176). Such new thinking survived the chaos of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and laid the foundations for reforms in the late 1970s, when the PRC inaugurated new “special economic zones” (SEZs) that spearheaded its export drive and embedded China within the circuits of global exchange.
Market Maoists strikes a deft balance in writing the history of trade into the general history of the early People's Republic. It broadens the research on China in the Cold War, which until recently focused mostly on high diplomacy, key events (e.g., Taiwan Straits crises, Sino-Soviet split, Sino-American rapprochement), or elite politics in Beijing, Moscow, and Washington. More famous leaders like Mao and premier Zhou Enlai remain important figures in the narrative, but less-heralded bureaucrats, cadres, and agents who established and nurtured the PRC's links to the capitalist world are also given their due. Market Maoists should appeal to business historians who may want to learn more about lesser known but strategically important enterprises, like the China National Technical Import Corporation (CNTIC), the state-owned company managed by the Ministry of Foreign Trade to import technical designs and equipment, or China Resources, the CCP's long-time Hong Kong front company and a now Fortune Global 500 company. More broadly, it should also appeal to scholars exploring the rise of neoliberalism and the transformation of global capitalism since the 1970s, in which the PRC played a leading role. The history of China's capitalist ascent as sketched in Market Maoists is therefore critical to any history of the contemporary global economy.
