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The dual projects of “reform and opening up” in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and perestroika in the Soviet Union (USSR) transformed Chinese and Soviet society. Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang transformed from a backward, agrarian society recovering from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution to a country embedded in the global capitalist economy—if also one that would not hesitate to crush challenges to the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to revive the socialist dream led to more ambiguous results. Gorbachev’s economic reforms led to the disintegration of the Soviet economy, while attempts to introduce glasnost’, or openness, into the Soviet system, undermined Communist Party rule and opened a Pandora’s box of historical and nationalist resentments. In the last decade, historians have begun to write histories of the socialist 1980s that draw on archives, memoirs, and document markets in the former USSR and China.

We know far less, in contrast, about the global reverberations of the two projects of socialist reform that transformed the PRC and the USSR from 1978 to 1991. This is surprising, since Beijing and Moscow supported socialist parties and movements throughout the world. They had a direct hand in the making of communist regimes like the German Democratic Republic, North Korea, Albania, or Vietnam. Countries like India, Syria, or Tanzania may not have embraced communism, but they relied on aid from the socialist superpowers and were keen observers of domestic events in both countries. So, too, did national liberation movements like the Palestine Liberation Organization. Indeed, elites in the PRC and the USSR conceived of reform as an event with global implications: Mikhail Gorbachev’s book Perestroika, for instance, was subtitled New Thinking for Our Country and the World. So, actors from Managua to East Berlin understood that the transformation of the world’s two largest socialist states held major implications for them, and Soviet and Chinese leaders saw reform as a global project. Yet this story is scarcely reflected the historiography of the 1980s – to say nothing of teaching.

To that end, Prof. Dr. Timothy Nunan (University of Regensburg) is organizing, with the generous support of the Point Alpha Research Institute, a two-day workshop that will bring scholars of international history together to Geisa to explore how state and non-state actors around the world understood and adapted to the processes of reform in the USSR and the PRC from 1978 (the rise of Deng Xiaoping) to 1991 (the dissolution of the Soviet Union). This workshop breaks with convention in not being centered on workshop papers or an edited volume. Instead, our aim is to produce a small collection of translated primary source documents that can be used in future teaching on the 1980s. Invited scholars will be asked to prepare English-language translations of a primary source document that illustrates how actors from North Korea, South Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Tanzania, Brazil, and Hungary perceived Soviet and Chinese reform. Over the course of our time in Geisa, invited scholars will also draft a short blurb situating and contextualizing the document for readers. A series of intense conversations and feedback over a weekend will allow us to produce our ultimate “deliverable,” namely a collection of sources and a jointly authored introductory essay highlighting themes across the various sources. Over the autumn and winter, these resources will be uploaded to the Wilson Center Digital Archive, available for use by students and university educators.

More ambitiously, the networks formed over two days in Geisa may be used for future third-party funding applications. Indeed, given the small size of the workshop, it would be impossible to curate a selection of documents that reflects all of the global dimensions of reactions to Chinese and Soviet reform processes. It is our hope that our discussions in Geisa and the subsequent publication of the documentary collection will spur future initiatives exploring the complex international legacies of “reform and opening” and perestroika.

Interested in learning more about the workshop? Please use the menu navigation above to find out more about the speakers, the program, the organizing team – or register your interest in attending the workshop as an external guest.