Publications

Latest book

UNENDING CAPITALISM

What forces shaped the twentieth-century world? Capitalism and communism are usually seen as engaged in a fight-to-the-death during the Cold War. With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party aimed to end capitalism.  Gerth argues that despite the socialist rhetoric of class warfare and egalitarianism, Communist Party policies actually developed a variety of capitalism and expanded consumerism. This negated the goals of the Communist Revolution across the Mao era (1949-1976) down to the present. Through topics related to state attempts to manage what people began to desire – wristwatches and bicycles, films and fashion, leisure travel and Mao badges – Gerth challenges fundamental assumptions about capitalism, communism, and countries conventionally labeled as socialist. In so doing, his provocative history of China suggests how larger forces related to the desire for mass-produced consumer goods reshaped the twentieth-century world and remade people’s lives.

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Book Sample
“A brilliantly researched and analyzed account of consumerism during the Mao era. It richly documents the survival of consumer impulses and behavior amid the puritanical ideology of the early People’s Republic. This is a crucial book for understanding the social, economic, and political history of the Mao era, and the tensions and tragedies resulting from the Communist Party’s state capitalism.”
Julia LovellAuthor of Maoism: A Global History
“Hugely stimulating and deeply researched, this book shows just how important material possessions and desires were in Mao’s China. Essential reading for anyone who is trying to understand how consumption became as powerful as it is.”
Frank TrentmannAuthor of Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers,
from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
"This outstanding book demands that we look again at an entire period, and reassess it from top to bottom. Gerth examines the period of Mao's China and asks how we would re-read the period if we were to think of it as driven by consumerism, a project that means that if you want to engage in the scholarly discussion around consumerism in China - a huge topic - you have to read and deal with Gerth. To understand why Chinese consumers have behaved as they have, and to understand the continuities between the sharply contrasting historical periods that they have lived through, Karl Gerth's is now the scholarly standard work - without question."
Rana MitterAuthor of China's Good War: How Memory of the World War II Past is Shaping a Nationalist Future
"Karl Gerth liberates the study of Maoist China from the Cold War obfuscations of too much academic output. He moves beyond simplistic notions of the capitalism/socialism binary that has so distorted our understanding of 20th-century China, and brings back the study of political economy to the center of debate in the bargain."
Oscar Sanchez-SibonyUniversity of Hong Kong
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Curriculum Vitae

Other Publications

As China Goes, So Goes the World

In this revelatory examination of the most overlooked force that is changing the face of China, Gerth shows that as the Chinese consumer goes, so goes the world. While Americans and Europeans have become increasingly worried about China’s competition for manufacturing jobs and energy resources, they have overlooked an even bigger story: China’s rapid development of an American-style consumer culture, which is revolutionizing the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese and has the potential to reshape the world. This change is already well under way. China has become the world’s largest consumer of everything from automobiles to beer and has begun to adopt such consumer habits as living in large single-occupancy homes, shopping in gigantic malls, and eating meat-based diets served in fast-food outlets. Even rural Chinese, long the laggards of consumerism, have been buying refrigerators, televisions, mobile phones, and larger houses in unprecedented numbers. As China Goes, So Goes the World reveals why we should all care about the everyday choices made by ordinary Chinese. Taken together, these seemingly small changes are deeper and more profound than the headline-grabbing stories on military budgets, carbon emissions, or trade disputes. For a complete copy of the book in PDF, click here.

Other Language Editions of As China Goes, So Goes the World

Chinese Edition

The Chinese edition removed significant parts of the original book. To read the complete translation in PDF, click here. 

Taiwan Edition

To read the Taiwan edition in traditional characters, click here.

Russian Edition

To read an excerpt of the Russian edition, click here.

Arabic Edition

To read the Arabic edition, click here. See Al Jazeera’s Review (in Arabic) here.

China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation

This slogan “Chinese people should consume Chinese products!” was the catchphrase of a movement in early twentieth-century China that sought to link consumption and nationalism by instilling a concept of China as a modern “nation” with its own “national products.” From fashions in clothing to food additives, from museums to department stores, from product fairs to advertising, this movement influenced all aspects of China’s burgeoning consumer culture. Anti-imperialist boycotts, commemorations of national humiliations, exhibitions of Chinese products, the vilification of treasonous consumers, and the promotion of Chinese captains of industry helped enforce nationalistic consumption and spread the message—patriotic Chinese bought goods made of Chinese materials by Chinese workers in factories owned and run by Chinese.

In China Made, Gerth argues that two key forces shaping the modern world—nationalism and consumerism—developed in tandem in China. Early in the twentieth century, nationalism branded every commodity as either “Chinese” or “foreign,” and consumer culture became the place where the notion of nationality was articulated, institutionalized, and practiced. Based on Chinese, Japanese, and English-language archives, magazines, newspapers, and books, this first exploration of the historical ties between nationalism and consumerism reinterprets fundamental aspects of modern Chinese history and suggests ways of discerning such ties in all modern nations.

For details and excerpts, see Google Books here. 

For a complete copy of the book in PDF, click here.

In ‘Compromising with Consumerism in Socialist China,’ Gerth addresses the question: What happened to Chinese consumer culture after the Communist victories in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and China? To read his chapter, click here.

Chinese Edition

To read the Chinese edition, click here.  To watch a TV program on China Made (in Chinese), click here.

Contributions to Edited Volumes

The Cambridge History of Communism, Volume III

Who created post-Mao China starting at the end of the 1970s? Conventional histories focus on bold national leaders led by Deng Xiaoping, who initiated a major transformation of Chinese society and foreign relations. Others emphasize changes from below, experiments and risks taken first by local farmers, even in secret, and then by mom-and-pop private businesses in the countryside and cities. This chapter attempts to connect top-down and bottom-up explanations, examining the evolving processes through which the state reauthorized and promoted market economy and consumerism. In the 1980s, the heart of revived markets and consumerism was the state-managed creation of a new class of local entrepreneurs, the getihu, and the revalorization of “bourgeois lifestyles.” To read the entire article, click here.

The Capitalist Dilemma in China's Communist Revolution

This chapter examines what happened to China’s consumer culture and to its “patriotic producers” after the China’s Communist Revolution in 1949. Through the case of one industrialist, Wu Yunchu, this chapter illustrates how the state destroyed the power, absorbed the wealth, and discredited the lifestyles of capitalists in the early 1950s. To read the entire article, click here.

Past & Present Supplement

In ‘Compromising with Consumerism in Socialist China,’ Gerth addresses the question: What happened to Chinese consumer culture after the Communist victories in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and China? To read his chapter, click here.

The Oxford Handbook on the History of Consumption

Gerth’s essay in The Oxford Handbook on the History of Consumption traces the changing historical connections between consumption and nationalism across modern Chinese history down to the present, focusing on the most conspicuous form of economic nationalism in the twentieth century, boycotts, as well as a newer form, brand nationalism.

To read his chapter, click here. 

China Across the Divide

What are the transnational political, societal, and cultural consequences created by the reintegration of China into international markets? Gerth’s essay in China Across the Divide: The Domestic and Global in Politics and Society examines the negative and largely unintentional transnational consequences of China’s emergence as a consumer culture by examining four ‘extreme markets’ for babies and wives, sexual services, organs, and endangered species.

To read his chapter, click here.