Karl GERTH (University of California-San Diego)

How much difference does the year make in characterizations of the Chinese Communist Party? What if this lecture series had checked in on the CCP at the end of each decade rather than the beginning? This talk examines 1961, when the CCP began to reverse the policies of the Great Leap Forward, and contrasts that year with 1959, at the height of CCP efforts to catapult the country into Communism. The contrast highlights the massive swings in the policy pendulum that characterizes the CCP during the Mao era (1949-76) and suggests characterizations of the CCP often rely more heavily on one set of policy extremes rather than the other in assessing its history.