When I began visiting China in the late 1990s, the 1980s already felt untouchably remote. In English-language books on the 1980s in China, I read about an era in which the fundamentals of life were openly and fervently debated: the legacies of the Mao Zedong era (and especially of his most destructive campaign, the Cultural Revolution); the relevance of Western, capitalist societies to a socialist China; the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the country’s modernization.
The China I personally encountered, as a first-time visitor, was very different: It was a place in which people’s energies were absorbed in keeping up with the new speculative market economy; in which press freedom seemed limited to shuffling photographs of the leadership printed first in the CCP’s main newspaper, the . By this point, the “China model” looked set in stone: breakneck economic growth, presided over by authoritarian, one-party rule. The memory and credibility of the
