China Since 1978

In the late 1970s, Deng Xiaping created a watershed in Chinese history by committing China to an ambitious program of economic and social reform. Initially this was highly successful, though in recent years serious problems have become apparent. The crisis in Beijing in 1989 produced a big change in Chinese development, but did not alter the overall policy of reform. The authors of this book - a historian, a political economist and a political scientist - explore the period in a multi-disciplinary way with considerable scholarship and a highly readable style. As well as studying the political evolution of the period and rural and industrial economic reform, the book covers topics such as law, foreign relations and problems of the environment, the last never before having been covered in a general book on China. Students of contemporary China will find China Since 1978 an excellent text giving considerable information across a wide panorama of the policies, politics, personalities and events of this tumultuous period in China's development.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.