Market Maoists tells the story of the commercial relationships that linked the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to various capitalist firms, traders, and markets around the world during the Mao era. Some readers may not have realized prior to reading the book that Mao’s China even had ties to international capitalism. This is an understandable misconception given how we typically think about China in the world during the Mao years as railing against foreign capitalists rather than negotiating contracts with them. But as the book shows, alongside public denunciations of capitalism, Chinese Communist traders scoured markets in Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere for imports, everything from medicines to whole factories. They also sought buyers for a menagerie of Chinese products, from hog bristles and soybeans to radios and bicycles.

The total value of these deals reached into the hundreds of millions of dollars each year. That is not an overwhelming figure given the size of China’s economy. But a core claim of the book is that trade is about more than just sums in a ledger. Each deal required contact, mutual intelligibility, accommodation, and trust between Mao’s traders and their capitalist counterparts. Over time, these exchanges influenced how Chinese leaders and working-level traders understood the relationship between the Chinese revolution and global capitalism. They began to see that China could pursue capitalist trade abroad without sacrificing China’s claims to socialist modernization, a lesson that helped lay the groundwork for China’s historic turn toward global capitalism in the post-Mao era.Others have written about China’s trade with the capitalist world during this period, but nobody has delved into the personalities and experiences behind the statistics and policies. I tried to bring these dimensions to life by telling an engaging story, which is how I hope people will read the book. I want readers to step into the shoes of the women and men who faced the ambiguities and felt the thrills and terrors of working on the border between capitalism and socialism in Mao’s China.