Pre-Order: Storming the Heavens, by Jenny Clegg

BOOKS SHIPPING WEEK BEGINNING 27/01/25

Storming the Heavens analyses the historical background behind the foundation of the Chinese People’s Republic. With partisanship and a critical eye both to her subject and to the various accounts, reliable and unreliable, of its particular development.

Jenny Clegg is a foremost authority on China's modern era. The ambitious scope of her work – the programmatic positions of the Chinese Communist Party and the political practice of its leadership; the interrelationship between the movements of the rural poor and the urban proletariat; China's complex class structure as it is transformed by successive stages in the revolution and the relationship between different classes and strata – make this book a valuable contribution to our understanding of modern China.

The contemporary political significance of this book goes beyond the historical account to show how the revolutionary transformation of the life prospects of the Chinese peoples and the development of China's human and productive capacity throws up new challenges both to sclerotic global capitalism and to dogmatic Marxism.

‘Storming the Heavens is a major accomplishment. It combines detailed historical analysis of China's agrarian social relations, prior to 1949 and beyond, with a keen sense of theory, integrating Western and Chinese sources, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, into a vibrant picture of struggle and transformation. The CPC's programs and practices are given detailed, and often admiring, attention, while still being carefully dissected with an eye to errors, misjudgments and shortcomings. The complexities of national vs. agrarian movements, relations between poor and middle peasants, navigation of stages in social and political development, differences in class structure between north and south, and much more -- all of this unfolds in a story that is both remarkably specific and deeply universal in its implications. All in all, a fine addition to our knowledge of modern China.’

—David Laibman
Professor Emeritus, Economics,
City University of New York
Editor Emeritus, Science & Society