9 - China and the Cold War after Mao

Summary

On September 9, 1976, Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist leader who had ruled the country for twenty-seven years, died. Almost immediately, the development of China’s domestic and international policies reached a critical juncture. In the last years of the Chinese chairman’s life, he endeavored to keep China on course in his continuous revolution. Meanwhile, in view of a growing security threat from the Soviet Union and a persistent legitimacy crisis – one that was characterized by his revolution’s inability to meet the expectations of the Chinese people’s lived experience – Mao led China to a rapprochement with the United States. He also introduced a set of ideas about China’s place in the world that were development-oriented rather than revolution-driven. These changes in China’s international policies had a significant and long-lasting impact on the global Cold War.

After Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping emerged as China’s paramount leader. In order to modernize China, Deng initiated the “reform and opening” policies in the late 1970s. China then experienced a profound derevolutionization process, gradually changing from an “outsider” in the existing international system – dominated by the United States and the capitalist West – to an “insider.” All of this, while altering further the structure of the Cold War, buried the last hope of international Communism being an alternative to liberal capitalism as the mainstream path toward modernity. Consequently, China played a crucial – indeed, at times even central – role in bringing the Cold War to its conclusion in the late 1980s and early 1990s.