"Crisis/Opportunity: 1970s global stagflation and flexible accumulation in China"
Andrew Liu, Villanova University
Thursday, March 26, 2026
2:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
307 Tier building
Reception to follow
In the late 1970s, after the passing of Mao Zedong (1893-1976), Chinese planners pursued an ambitious “new Great Leap Forward” by aggressively purchasing cutting-edge technology from the capitalist world, especially western Europe. By 1980, however, Party elders had shut down the new Great Leap, panicked by looming political and inflationary dangers. Central to the budgetary fight were competing visions about the meaning and causes of the 1970s global stagflation crisis, stemming from the end of the gold standard (1971) and the oil shocks of 1973. This obscure Politburo debate, in fact, crystallized broad social antagonisms inherited from the Mao era and also eventually pushed China to emulate the Asia-Pacific’s strategy of “flexible,” export-driven industry by the new century. This paper contributes to a wider effort to rethink the history of the neoliberal era from a global perspective.
Dr. Andrew Liu is an associate professor of history at Villanova University, His book Tea War: A history of capitalism in China and India (Yale University Press) was published in 2020, which won the 2022 Ralph Gomory Prize, sponsored by the Business History Conference.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Asian Studies Program.
