Readers of the English-speaking world interested in the economic and political transformations in Maoist China from 1949 to 1976 can have most of their questions answered satisfactorily by classic and recent works in the field, such as Mao's China and After by Maurice Meisner (New York: Free Press, 1999); Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006); Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikötter (New York: Walker & Co., 2010); and the list goes on. So what role will Hu Angang's three-volume The Political and Economic History of China (1949–1976), originally published in Chinese in 2007, fill in the market?

Hu, famous for his new-leftist perspectives on Chinese economic development and politics after 2010, is a renowned and prolific economics professor at Tsinghua University. In 2011, The Political and Economic History of China (1949–1976), already the designated textbook for Hu's Master of Public Administration course on socialist economic theory and practice at Tsinghua, was selected by the state-subsidized publication project China Classics International (Jingdian Zhongguo Guoji Chuban Gongcheng 经典中国国际出版工程) to be translated into English to enhance greater understanding of China's past and, particularly, its present with socialist characteristics. In other words, the significance of Hu's work actually lies in the fact that it represents the current mainstream scholarly reconstruction and criticism of the Maoist era, which conforms, not so coincidentally, to the official historical interpretation of the Chinese Communist Party and state. The book is a must-read for people who are interested not only in the politico-economic transformations in Maoist China but also in the epistemological changes of how the Chinese Communist Party (re-)interprets that tumultuous era in the twenty-first century.

In the first volume (chapters 1–3), Hu analyzes the reasons for China's divergence from Western-style modern industrial developments after 1750 from historical and global perspectives. Relying on Douglass C. North's theoretical framework of institutions and economic changes, Hu attributes the dynastic decline of late imperial China to the Qing dynasty's malfunctioning institutions, such as “the lack of unified markets” consisting of tollgates and tariff barriers, “an autocracy impacting the development of newly-emerging productive forces,” “the absence of a strong, modern-minded leadership,” and the Qing's isolationist foreign policies for 200 years (pp. 1:48–49). As a Qing historian, I find Hu's understanding of the Qing's economic trajectory quite problematic, for he still persists with Arnold Toynbee's (dated) Eurocentric “challenge-and-response model” and ignores the Qing's indigenous and bottom-up transformations and innovations as William Rowe, Madeleine Zelin, and many other historians of China have unveiled over the last three decades (p. 1:22).Footnote ⁴

Nevertheless, the rationale behind Hu's (mis-)reading of the failure of the Qing and the Nationalist governments to lead China to rapid modernization is to justify a “government-enforced, fast and dramatic socioeconomic transition,” adhered to by the Chinese Communist Party after 1949, as the only natural and historical choice by the Chinese people. Hu firmly believes that because China was “a latecomer to modernization … [whose] seeds of innovative transitions were not internally generated” (pp. 1:10, 57), so the Chinese Communist Party's ascension to power, which “demonstrated its capacity for economic recovery” and social integration, was the institutional prerequisite to China's modernization and industrialization, given China's “extremely backward and impoverished conditions” by 1949 (pp. 1:60, 66, 67).

In the second volume (chapters 4–8), Hu meticulously reconstructs the history of China's Soviet-style first five-year plan (1953–57), collectivization and nationalization movements, and the Great Leap Forward (1958–62) based on an extensive range of primary sources such as the works and writings of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping and official documents compiled by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council (p. 3:265). Hu contends that because of the global context of the Cold War in the 1950s, modeling China's socialist modernization and industrialization after those of the Soviet Union was the only choice left for the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (pp. 2:68–70). But he also admits that the Soviet model never really suited China because the factor endowments (population, natural resources, and institutions) in preindustrial China and Russia never meshed (pp. 2:70–73). As a result, Hu criticizes Mao's radical approach to rapid nationalization and his abrupt elimination of private ownership and the market system in the 1950s. Instead, he applauds Liu Shaoqi's more elective and practical approach, combining large-scale industries under state ownership with a small-scale market-oriented economy (p. 2:63).

One of the highlights of this volume that lingers on into the third volume is Hu's interpretation of the origins and failures of the Great Leap Forward, and particularly why Mao's radical economic approach eventually outweighed Liu's mild counterpart. Hu ascribes the failures after 1956 primarily to the malfunctioning democratic institutions inside the Party, such as Mao's persistent violations of the 1956 Party Constitution, his destruction of the democratic and collective decision-making structures beginning with the Lushan Plenum, and the persistent absence of general Party plenary meetings in 1960, 1963, 1964, and 1965 (pp. 2:131, 3:29). Although Hu eventually posits in the third volume that constant revisions of the Party Constitution after 1978 have successfully redressed the institutional defects inside the Party, one question will keep haunting Hu's readers: if the Party Constitution is the solution to all malfunctions both inside and outside the Party, why cannot prompt revisions take place during disasters and malfunctions rather than always after the death of leaders who violated the Party Constitution (pp. 3:29–33)?

The second highlight is Hu's estimation of casualties during the Great Famine that there were “approximately 15 million people who died of starvation. American demographers offered a similar estimate of 16.5 million. Other estimates ranged from 2.3 [sic] to 30 million” (p. 2:117). Considering Hu's prominent role as the director of China's leading think tank—the Center for China Studies of Tsinghua University—it is indeed a great leap for mainstream scholars in China to acquiesce in the legitimacy of other estimations that are much larger and more cacophonous than the previous Communist Party's statistics announced to the public.

Hu dedicates his third volume (chapters 9–16) to the causes and effects of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). In compliance with the official conclusions regarding the nature of the Cultural Revolution drawn by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, Hu denounces the manipulators and opportunists during the Cultural Revolution as “evil forces growing and developing rapidly inside the Chinese communist party … (which) played the dirtiest, ugliest and cruelest parts on China's political stage, and they arbitrarily committed political slaughter” (p. 3:140). Ironically, when it comes to judging Mao and the Maoist era in general, Hu switches to a rather selective tone. On the one hand, he concludes that “Mao's political guiding principle in launching the Cultural Revolution had been extremely wrong” (p. 3:118). On the other hand, he insists that “Mao's intentions had been good and sincere, and for the good of the people, in particular workers and peasants,” and Mao, after all, “did not have the power to shape the fundamental factors in China's development” (pp. 3:206, 221). One cannot help but think how difficult it would be, especially for millions of victims of the Cultural Revolution, to distinguish Mao himself from the Maoist era both objectively and subjectively.

Similar to his approach to explaining the underlying reasons for the Great Leap Forward, Hu postulates that the “failure of inner-party democracy” was also the primary cause for the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution. And to prevent future catastrophic political mistakes, the solution, according to Hu, is to guarantee “the democracy within the Party,” which is “the core of the democratization of China.… And the core for the democracy within the Party was completing democratic centralism of the CCP Central Committee. The core of completing democratic centralism was implementing the formal rules stipulated in the Party Constitution” (p. 3:71).

It is also at this juncture that Hu starts applauding the efforts put by Deng Xiaoping into improving democratic institutions within the Party. Deng, after realizing the evil roots of the Cultural Revolution did not lie in Mao himself but in the “systems and institutions” within the Party (p. 3:252), eventually revised the Party Constitution and abolished the rule-of-thumb life-tenure chairmanship of the Communist Party in the 1980s (pp. 3:244, 252). Hu confidently and optimistically concludes that “the failure of Mao Zedong in his old age was the source of success of Deng Xiaoping,” which is also “the most significant and distinctive conclusion in this book” (p. 3:264). But as someone whose grandfather—a Peking University graduate turned communist veteran—was executed at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, I keep wondering how Deng's successes after 1978, however remarkable they seemed to be, could make up for the mistakes and losses incurred during Mao's time. In a broader sense, how could millions of sent-down youths, deprived of their golden education opportunities in the 1960s and returned to the cities as factory workers, or the jobless with no decent education in the 1980s, laid off during the 1990s, sense and share Deng's success at the local level to relieve their pains accumulated since the Maoist era?

That being said, Hu's work is particularly worth praising for his extensive and intensive synthesis of Mao and other communist leaders' works and memoirs. In fact, many sections of the book could be directly utilized as primary sources, such as the parts on “How the Red Guards impacted social order” and “How Zhou Enlai and others tried to maintain social order” (pp. 3:77–92). Furthermore, readers who are interested in the economics and politics of Communist China from 1949 and 1976 will gain a profound understanding of the subject matter from the unique perspective of mainstream state scholars in present-day China. Scholars working on the historiographical transformations of Communist China will also find the book an interesting case study for the Party's (shifting) epistemology of the Maoist era as the Party is undergoing unprecedented self-transformations along with it.