One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party
April 5, 2021
Saich (Finding Allies and Making Revolution), a professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, delivers a sweeping history of the Chinese Communist Party, from its fledgling urban beginnings in 1921 Shanghai to today. In encyclopedic detail, Saich covers Mao Zedong’s early “experiment with combining the revolutionary potential of the peasantry with military strength”; the 1949 creation of the People’s Republic of China; the disastrous, famine-inducing policies of the Great Leap Forward; and the personality cult behind Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which nearly derailed the nation in the 1960s. While the decades from Mao’s death and the implementation of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform policies in the late ’70s to the present-day are less gripping, Saich lucidly details how the party has evolved into a market-oriented yet “essentially Leninist” political behemoth that “fluctuat between soft and hard authoritarianism.” Though Saich’s focus on high-level political gamesmanship somewhat obscures the deadly consequences of crackdowns on student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and Uighurs in Xinjiang province today, he offers key insights into how the party survived the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe and the steep challenges facing current leader Xi Jinping. This exhaustive, well-informed chronicle sheds light on one of the world’s most consequential political institutions.