Julian Gewirtz '13: Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China

October 27, 2016
Julian Gewirtz '13: Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China

Read an excerpt from this book published in the October, 2016 issue of Foreign Affairs and meet the author November 29th, 2016 at the Fairbank Center.

We are happy to share a book by Julian Gewirtz ’13: Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China (Harvard University Press), a project born from his Harvard senior thesis.

As Evan Osnos summarized in the New Yorker: "The book tells the little-known story of how Chinese intellectuals and leaders, facing a ruined economy at the end of the Cultural Revolution, sought the help of foreign economists to rebuild. Between 1976 and 1993, in a series of exchanges, conferences, and collaborations, Western intellectuals sought not to change China but to help it change itself, and they made indispensable contributions to China’s rise as a global economic power."


Description:

Unlikely Partners recounts the story of how Chinese politicians and intellectuals looked beyond their country’s borders for economic guidance at a key crossroads in the nation’s tumultuous twentieth century. Julian Gewirtz offers a dramatic tale of competition for influence between reformers and hard-line conservatives during the Deng Xiaoping era, bringing to light China’s productive exchanges with the West.

When Mao Zedong died in 1976, his successors seized the opportunity to reassess the wisdom of China’s rigid commitment to Marxist doctrine. With Deng Xiaoping’s blessing, China’s economic gurus scoured the globe for fresh ideas that would put China on the path to domestic prosperity and ultimately global economic power. Leading foreign economists accepted invitations to visit China to share their expertise, while Chinese delegations traveled to the United States, Hungary, Great Britain, West Germany, Brazil, and other countries to examine new ideas. Chinese economists partnered with an array of brilliant thinkers, including Nobel Prize winners, World Bank officials, battle-scarred veterans of Eastern Europe’s economic struggles, and blunt-speaking free-market fundamentalists.

Nevertheless, the push from China’s senior leadership to implement economic reforms did not go unchallenged, nor has the Chinese government been eager to publicize its engagement with Western-style innovations. Even today, Chinese Communists decry dangerous Western influences and officially maintain that China’s economic reinvention was the Party’s achievement alone. Unlikely Partners sets forth the truer story, which has continuing relevance for China’s complex and far-reaching relationship with the West.

The book is now available from Harvard University Press and on Amazon.


About the Author:

Julian Gewirtz graduated from Harvard College in 2013, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in History. Professor Erez Manela advised his senior thesis, which won the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize and the Philip Washburn Prize for best thesis on a historical subject. After graduating, He moved on to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and is a doctoral candidate in history.