The “Nanjing Incident” of late March 1976 was a precursor of, and according to some analysts a trigger for, the more famous Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 4-5 April. The two protests have widely been interpreted as spontaneous outpourings of dissent from Cultural Revolution radicalism, expressed through mourning for the recently deceased Premier Zhou Enlai. A closer look at the background to these demonstrations in Nanjing, however, reveals that the protests there occurred in the midst of, and in response to, a vigorous public offensive by former leaders of rebel factions to overthrow local civilian cadres for reversing Cultural Revolution policies. The outpouring of respect for Zhou—and criticism of Politburo radicals—mobilized enormous numbers of ordinary citizens into the city streets, far larger numbers than the rebel leaders were able to muster. This demonstrated beyond dispute the virtual disappearance of the popular support rebel leaders had briefly enjoyed a decade before. While the Nanjing protests were unanticipated by either the rebel leaders or the party officials they sought to overthrow, they were only the latest in a linked series of local political confrontations, and had a decisive impact on the national political scene.

State socialist economies provided public housing to urban citizens at nominal cost, while allocating larger and better quality apartments to individuals in elite occupations. In transitions to a market economy, ownership is typically transferred to existing occupants at deeply discounted prices, making home equity the largest component of household wealth. Housing privatization is therefore a potentially important avenue for the conversion of bureaucratic privilege into private wealth. We estimate the resulting inequalities with data from successive waves of a Chinese national income survey that details household assets and participation in housing programs. Access to privatization programs was relatively equal across urban residents in state sector occupations. Elite occupations had substantially greater wealth in the form of home equity shortly after privatization, due primarily to their prior allocations of newer and higher quality apartments. The resulting gaps in private wealth were nonetheless small by the standards of established market economies, and despite the inherent biases in the process, housing privatization distributed home equity widely across those who were resident in public housing immediately prior to privatization.

China’s Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long period of guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the Chinese revolution was just beginning. China Under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist revolutionary state from 1949 to 1976—an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong.

Mao’s China, Andrew Walder argues, was defined by two distinctive institutions established during the first decade of Communist Party rule: a Party apparatus that exercised firm (sometimes harsh) discipline over its members and cadres; and a socialist economy modeled after the Soviet Union. Although a large national bureaucracy had oversight of this authoritarian system, Mao intervened strongly at every turn. The doctrines and political organization that produced Mao’s greatest achievements—victory in the civil war, the creation of China’s first unified modern state, a historic transformation of urban and rural life—also generated his worst failures: the industrial depression and rural famine of the Great Leap Forward and the violent destruction and stagnation of the Cultural Revolution.

Misdiagnosing China’s problems as capitalist restoration and prescribing continuing class struggle against imaginary enemies as the solution, Mao ruined much of what he had built and created no viable alternative. At the time of his death, he left China backward and deeply divided.

In the third annual Nancy Bernkopf Tucker Memorial Lecture on U.S.-East Asia Relations, Thomas Fingar, Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, former deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, discusses U.S. policy toward China. The speech titled "The United States and China: Same Bed, Different Dreams, Shared Destiny" was delivered at The Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., on April 20, 2015. Links to English and Chinese versions are listed below.