The Cold War, oil, and new borders intensified the fight for hegemony in the Middle East. The shah maneuvered around thorny international issues by keeping intact his ties to different US administrations. Iran watched the Vietnam War with concern but maintained a balanced stance. Elsewhere, the creation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) brought some regional cooperation. However, in the Persian Gulf, Iran became isolated and faced competition from the Arabian Peninsula and the newly Arab states of the south. Its conflict with Iraq escalated until a short-lived truce was concluded in 1975. Iran also flexed its muscles by supporting the Sultanate in Oman during the conflict in Dhofar, but the shah’s interventions only fueled the domestic unrest against his rule. Student groups and artists increasingly decried the shah’s dictatorial ways.

This chapter reconstructs rumors and demonstrations in 1968 around the death of Gholamreza Takhti, Iran's beloved gold-winning wrestling champion, recentering them in the history of the 1979 revolution and the global 1960s. The account of the demonstrations provided here explains a mobilization tactic used to great effect in the lead up to the 1979 Iranian Revolution: the staging of protests on the fortieth day of mourning. Locating this tactic in 1968, at a moment of global protest, and before ideological disputes between leftists and Islamists congealed in Iran, casts a spotlight on the indeterminate quality of the revolution as a lived event. The authors argue that discussions of “global 1968,” and approaches to global history more broadly construed, must account both for the local specificity and the global echoes signaled by events like the Takhti demonstrations.

Chapter 7 focuses on the economic and political reforms of General Secretary Zhao Ziyang (1919–2005) and his predecessor Hu Yaobang (1915–1989). The reforms are placed within the context of both the controversial “reform and opening” policies of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), and also the larger context of intra-Party ideological debates dating back to founding of the nation. Zhao’s early career as Party secretary in his native county before 1949 is contrasted with his later posting to Guangdong as part of an initiative to break local resistance to land reform in the 1950s. The disastrous Great Leap Forward is presented as a formative experience for Zhao, leading him to side with Mao’s critics, a decision which would in turn lead to his fall from power in 1967. His eventual rehabilitation by Zhou Enlai in 1971 is described as having led Zhao to support political and economic reform beginning with the Li Yizhe controversary of 1974 and culminating in his work in the late 1970s as Party secretary in Sichuan, where he was responsible for implementing Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the agricultural sector. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Zhao’s rapid promotion to premier by 1980, and his pragmatic approach to political reform and liberalization, which would lead to his eventual downfall for a second time on the eve of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, and contested legacy in the PRC today.