China’s Communist Party celebrates its 100th anniversary next month, a chance for it to reinforce to a domestic audience how the party transformed the country into the world’s second-largest economy and major world power since taking control in 1949. In conventional narratives of China’s economic rise, the action starts in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping launched sweeping reforms to open up trade and investment with Western capitalist countries following the death of Mao Zedong. But in his new book, called Market Maoists, historian Jason M. Kelly argues that China’s Communists emphasized the importance of economic ties with ... (full story)