{"id":14111,"date":"2024-05-25T06:30:31","date_gmt":"2024-05-25T06:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/?p=14111"},"modified":"2025-04-23T09:00:32","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T09:00:32","slug":"how-the-uk-and-other-countries-helped-make-china-the-worlds-foremost-trading-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/how-the-uk-and-other-countries-helped-make-china-the-worlds-foremost-trading-power\/","title":{"rendered":"How the UK and others made China the world\u2019s foremost trading power"},"content":{"rendered":"

Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade<\/em> (Harvard University Press), the new book by Assistant Professor of International History at LSE Elizabeth O\u2019Brien Ingleson, may focus on the US experience of trading with China, but there is much for the UK to learn too. How did the US, EU and Britain \u2013 along with many other countries \u2013 help make China the world\u2019s foremost trading power?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also an extremely useful overview of the up-and-down vicissitudes of trading with contemporary China. From the faltering, uncertain beginnings of trade in the 1970s through the period of opening up and reform, to the go-go years around the new century and the problems of retrenchment since then. Paul French<\/strong> spoke with Elizabeth O\u2019Brien Ingleson about the rocky ride of the last 50 years and where things stand at present.<\/p>\n

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Made in China<\/em> is a fascinating history of American (and, by extension the UK and Western European) trade with China from the 1970s. Usually, we just think Maoism equalled no trade and seclusion before the Nixon visit and then Deng Xiaoping opened things up. However, you frame it slightly differently and suggest Mao had started a process of encouraging trade even during the Cultural Revolution?<\/h4>\n

Yes, I was surprised to find that it was during the latter years of the Cultural Revolution \u2013 from the late 1960s and into the 1970s \u2013 that China\u2019s foreign trade began to change substantially both in terms of the volume of trade and its geographic partners. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, China maintained small levels of trade with foreign nations, especially the Soviet Union and the Global South. From the late 1950s, China also began to trade with some capitalist nations, such as Britain, Japan and West Germany. But it was only during the 1970s that Mao began to increase China\u2019s overall levels of trade for the first time since the Communists\u2019 victory in 1949, and it was China\u2019s engagement with advanced capitalist democracies \u2013 not members of the socialist world \u2013 that drove this growing trade. It was amidst the social and political chaos of the Cultural Revolution that Chinese leaders within and beyond the elite levels of politics experimented with economic reorganisation that laid the groundwork for the reform and opening that Deng Xiaoping would later launch.<\/p>\n