Adapting To Kill a Mockingbird

My Near-Impossible Job: Adapting To Kill a Mockingbird
Aaron Sorkin Culture Vulture

“You’re Licked Before You Begin, But You Begin Anyway.” —Atticus Finch

Bringing To Kill a Mockingbird to Broadway was nearly impossible.

Aaron Sorkin. Photo: Benjamin Lowy

“I have something very exciting to talk to you about.” That’s how Scott Rudin, the EGOT-winning producer, began a phone call to me three years ago. The last three times he’d called me to say, “I have something very exciting to talk to you about,” I ended up writing The Social Network, Moneyball, and Steve Jobs. So I was listening.

“After several years of trying,” he said, “I’ve got the stage rights for To Kill a Mockingbird.” He wanted me to adapt the novel into a play. He was right — it was very exciting. It was also a suicide mission, and I understood that right away. This wasn’t just any Pulitzer Prize–winning novel; it’s one that holds a sacred place on America’s bookshelf. We all read it together in seventh or eighth grade. For some of us, it was the first time we read about injustice. It was the first time the hero wore glasses. It was the first time we were lulled into a bucolic world, seen through the eyes of a child, without knowing we were about to get kneecapped when we turned the page. It was the first time we liked reading a book more than watching television. It sells more than a million copies a year, and it continues to be taught in every school district where it hasn’t been banned for making Jim Crow laws look bad.

And I’ve heard there’s a movie.

Adding to the lore was the book’s author, Nelle Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird was her first novel and her last. (Go Set a Watchman, the rejected first draft of Mockingbird, was published in the final years of her life.) She never wrote again. She hid from the limelight — which can’t be easy to do when your best friend since childhood is Truman Capote — and in spite of the money that comes from a blockbuster book and movie, she lived the balance of her life very modestly in the town where she was born, Monroeville, Alabama, which served as the inspiration for fictional Maycomb County, where the story takes place.

What could I do but make it all less than it was? Why invite the comparison between a legend and … not a legend? Why put on a nightly PowerPoint presentation on the difference between Harper Lee’s skills and my own? It would be like entering a head-to-head competition with Tom Brady in which points were awarded based on passing efficiency and handsomeness. It wouldn’t be a wise thing to do. Without hesitation, I said yes.

I’m an accidental writer of movies and television shows. And while it’s been a very happy accident, what I love most is writing plays. Not just writing them, doing them. My last play was 11 years ago. This was a chance to be in a theater again, a chance to work with Bartlett Sher (whom Scott was dangling in front of me as director), a chance to be in a rehearsal room with a company of world-class actors, and a chance to work with this material. I wanted to be a part of it.

Six months later, I turned in my first draft and it was terrible. Probably the best thing you could say about it was that it was harmless, which is probably the worst thing you could say about To Kill a Mockingbird. Basically, I’d just taken the most necessary scenes from the book and stood them up. It was a greatest-hits album performed by a cover band. I sent the first draft to Scott, and the next day he called and asked me to come to New York for a conversation. That’s regular working procedure for Scott and me. These work sessions usually last three or four days and I fly home with dozens — sometimes hundreds — of notes and write the next draft. The first Mockingbird work session lasted 45 minutes. Scott had two notes.

The first was “We have to get to the trial sooner.” Yes. Agreed. How? I didn’t know yet.

But the second note was the one that changed everything. Scott said, “Atticus can’t be Atticus for the whole play. He has to become Atticus by the end.”

Well … duh.

That’s Freshman Playwriting. First semester, first week. A protagonist has to change. A protagonist has to be put through something and be changed by it. And one more thing: A protagonist has to have a flaw.

How did Harper Lee get away with creating a flawless protagonist who’s the same person at the end of the book as he is at the beginning? Simple. In the book, Atticus isn’t the protagonist — Scout is. Faced with the brutal realities of the Jim Crow South, Scout loses some of her innocence. Her flaw is that she’s young. But for the play, I didn’t want Scout (or Jem or Dill) to be the only protagonist. I wanted Atticus to be a protagonist too — in fact, the central one. I left Scott’s office knowing what I wanted to do, not knowing how to do it, and wishing I drank. A kind flight attendant tapped me on the shoulder a few times during the flight home to tell me I was talking to myself.

Sorkin across from the Shubert Theatre moments before the first preview began. Photo: Benjamin Lowy

I went to my office and wiped the dry-erase board clean, tore down all the index cards, and deleted the first draft from my computer. I didn’t want any part of that draft anymore. I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to swaddle the book in bubble wrap and transfer it gently to a stage. Theaters aren’t museums; they’re the places we go to have — as Lily Tomlin puts it — “the goose-bump experience.”

The structural problem — getting to the trial sooner — was easily solvable. But how do you give Atticus Finch a flaw? Does he go from a bad guy to a good guy? A bad lawyer to a good lawyer? An abusive father to a loving one? A racist man to one who believes in equality and justice? No, no, definitely not, and no. I tried all the doors and they were locked, until I found one that swung open with the lightest touch. I didn’t have to give Atticus a flaw because, to my mind, he already had one; it’s just that we’d always considered it a virtue. Atticus believes that you can’t really know someone unless you “climb into someone’s skin and walk around in it.” He believes that Bob Ewell should be understood as a man who lost his job. He believes Mrs. Dubose should be understood as a woman who recently stopped taking her medication and lives in physical pain. He believes in the fundamental goodness in everyone, even homicidal white supremacists. He believes … that there are fine people on both sides?

In the play, this set of beliefs would be challenged.

There’s a story about James Carville on the night Bill Clinton won his first term, in 1992. Clinton walked out to a floodlit podium in front of the statehouse in Little Rock to address thousands of his supporters and millions more on television. A man turned to Carville and said, “My God, look at him. He’s so presidential. How did he change in just a few hours?” Carville said, “He didn’t change — we did.” There’s no event that occurs in the play that doesn’t occur in the novel, but the play takes a new look at some of those events because things have happened in the past 58 years. The book hasn’t changed; we have. That’s why it’s alarming when we abruptly discover how much we haven’t.

There are only two significant African-American characters in the story: Calpurnia, the maid, and Tom Robinson, the accused. In a tale about racial injustice, neither of them has anything to say on the matter. Tom begs for his life, and Cal bakes crackling bread. It’s the kind of thing that would have gone unnoticed in 1960, but in 2018, using black characters only as atmosphere is as noticeable as it is wrong. Also, in this instance, a wasted opportunity. Does that mean all copies of the novel should be recalled and edited like a Wikipedia entry? Of course not. But neither could I pretend I was writing the play in 1960.

To Kill a Mockingbird is about the nature of decency. What it means to be a person. In the novel, Atticus has the answers. In the play, he would struggle with the questions. There was speculation outside my circle of collaborators that I would incorporate Go Set a Watchman into the play. I’ve never read Go Set a Watchman,specifically so I could truthfully say I’ve never read Go Set a Watchman.

I delivered the new draft in August 2017, a year after the previous one. Scott read it and immediately took out a two-page ad in the New York Times to announce that To Kill a Mockingbird, “a new play,” would open on Broadway in December 2018. Sher, about whom enough good things can’t be said, was onboard to direct. Jeff Daniels signed on to play Atticus for a year (there had never even been a conversation about anyone else playing the part). Things had gotten real in a hurry.

As we started planning two workshop sessions that winter, we faced one big casting challenge. That was the kids — Scout, Jem, and Dill. The roles were potentially too difficult for child actors. Scott suggested that, just for the purpose of the first table read, we use adults. So we asked Celia Keenan-Bolger to read Scout and Will Pullen to read Jem. (Gideon Glick joined them a little later as Dill.) We’d told them it was a one-time thing and they wouldn’t be moving on with the play, but as they read, it all just seemed … right. Even inevitable. It was a memory play narrated by the three kids as they tried to work through the lingering questions surrounding the death of Bob Ewell. With only an afternoon’s worth of rehearsal, the three of them made the subtlest of adjustments to their posture and their voices, slipping easily back and forth between the children they were and the adults they became. It simply worked, and what had been an expedient solution became the right idea.

The day of the first table read, which began with so much anxiety — what would the cast think of what they were reading? What would Bart think? Will this work at all? — ended with enthusiasm, energy, optimism, and commitment. There was a hard road ahead, but we had murderers’-row creative and investment teams. The Shubert Organization offered up its flagship theater, and we had dates — September 20 to start rehearsal, November 1 to start previews, opening night on December 13. A new Broadway play at Christmas.

That’s when we were sued.

In the deal to have To Kill a Mockingbird reimagined as a play, Harper Lee had retained absolute approval over who the playwright would be. She approved me. Three weeks later, she died. (I like to think those two events were unrelated.) A woman named Tonja Carter took over as executor of Lee’s estate. Lee’s contract with Scott — which was now the estate’s — also stated that I would not “alter its characters” or “depart in any manner from the spirit of the novel.” Carter filed a suit in federal court in Alabama claiming I’d done both.

With Jeff Daniels, left, on November 1, the first day of previews. Photo: Benjamin Lowy

New plays, like new movies, aren’t finished — they’re confiscated. In other words, a play isn’t done until opening night. Carter’s suit was filed six months before the start of rehearsal. The complaint laid out a number of examples of how I had, to her mind, altered the characters and departed from the spirit of To Kill a Mockingbird. I don’t know what the spirit of To Kill a Mockingbird is, and neither does anyone else. There’s certainly no legal definition, and I’m not sure there’s a literary one, either. Still, whatever spirit means, I’m confident I didn’t depart from it.

As for altering characters, Carter’s demand letter included a list of things these fictional characters would never do. “Atticus would never take the Lord’s name in vain,” “Atticus would never drink alcohol,” and “Atticus would never have a rifle in the house,” but that was the least troubling of our troubles. Here’s an example of an exchange that takes place during an argument that Atticus and Calpurnia return to throughout the play:

Calpurnia: Jem was stickin’ up for you and maybe a little bit me and you made him say he was sorry.

Atticus: I believe in being respectful.

Calpurnia: No matter who you’re disrespecting by doin’ it.

“A typical black maid in the South at this time would never talk to their employer this way,” Carter said.

A coupla thoughts:

There’s no such thing as a typical black maid.

Plays aren’t written about typical people doing typical things.

Lawyering up isn’t cheap. Once the complaint was served, Scott started bleeding about $30,000 a day in legal bills. The story was news, and every headline that read HARPER LEE ESTATE SUES OVER BROADWAY PLAY looked, to a glancing eye, like it was Harper Lee who was objecting to the play and not Tonja Carter. Carter herself, we suspected, was in a tough spot. She’d been the main engine behind the publication of Go Set a Watchman, a book that had done no favors for the legacy of either To Kill a Mockingbird or Lee herself, and fans were angry. There were whispers that its release had been a money grab. Carter had told Scott she’d received death threats. She likely didn’t want to make the same mistake again.

We set up a meeting for the principals — Carter, Scott, and me — and held a prep session at our lawyers’ office the day before. Jonathan Zavin, our lead litigator, was to introduce Scott, who would offer some remarks and then introduce me. I was to explain to Carter how a play is different from a novel and do it without sounding condescending. I stared down at the table for a second, shook my head, and said, “If our defense rests on my ability to explain what a play is without sounding condescending, we’re completely screwed.”

The next morning, a snowstorm closed the airports, so the face-to-face meeting turned into a teleconference. I came into the room wearing a coat and tie and my lawyer immediately grabbed the jacket off my back and put it off camera. I never asked why. I thanked Carter for the face-to-face and told her how honored I was to be working on the material. I told her she was going to be part of a thrilling night in the theater. Then I told her that drama has rules, no less strict than the rules of music — 4/4 time requires four beats to a measure, the key of C-major prohibits sharps and flats, and a piece of music has to end on the tonic or the dominant. “The rules of drama,” I said, “were written down by Aristotle in the Poetics in 350 BC. These rules are four centuries older than Christianity. A protagonist— ” Yeah, we got nowhere.I said, “If our defense rests on my ability to explain what a play is without sounding condescending, we’re completely screwed.”

Tonja Carter said to Scott and me, “I think you both hate To Kill a Mockingbird” (which would explain the three years we spent working on it), and we faced the scary possibility that we weren’t going to be able to do the play. It’s not that we thought we were going to lose the case — the lawyers were confident we would win — it’s that Scott and his investors couldn’t go into a production under a cloud of litigation, and with every passing day we were getting closer to losing our theater to another show. Was it possible that a person could win a lawsuit just by filing it?

We made a motion to have the Alabama suit moved to New York, hoping for a more sympathetic court, and it was approved. Scott also sued Carter in New York, hitting back hard at every single thing in her lawsuit and raising the specter that being simultaneously the agent, lawyer, and literary executor for Harper Lee wasn’t legal. But the clock was ticking, and workshopping was underway. Scott even made a bold offer to the court: He would have the entire cast come perform the play for the judge in his courtroom — and it would be open to the press. If nothing else, we’d be in the record books as the first play to close on opening night in New York’s Southern District.

Moving the case to New York and the pressure of an immediate trial apparently broke the logjam. Carter and her lawyers agreed to meet with Scott and his lawyers in a room at the courthouse, where they would sit with a judge who would act as a mediator. After ten hours of back-and-forth, Scott called me and asked what items on Carter’s list of objections I was willing to alter to her satisfaction.

“None of them,” I said. “The play can’t be written by a team of lawyers.”

“If this isn’t settled by the end of the day,” Scott replied, “there is no play.” The end of the day was in 90 minutes. Scott and I talked about Bart and Jeff and the rest of the cast and crew, about the great work at our workshops, and about the potential of where we could go from there, and I finally said, “If Tom Robinson and Calpurnia are taken off the table as issues, I’ll cut ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘Goddamit,’ Atticus won’t have a rifle in his closet, and he won’t drink a glass of whiskey after the trial.”

And that was that.

The curious part of me wished we’d gone to court so I could hear a federal judge decide what imaginary people would and wouldn’t do. Instead, we were able to settlewithout damage to the play other than the unwanted publicity. (The audience was already coming in with a lot of personal thoughts about To Kill a Mockingbird. Would people now be watching the play through the lens of “Who was right?”) We were on.

I’ve been asked if I thought Harper Lee would like the play. Of course, I don’t know. No one knows or ever will. I suspect — in spite of her approval — that she’d have a very difficult time with new words written by a stranger coming out of the mouths of her beloved characters in a story that’s semi-autobiographical. (I know that after I left The West Wing, the first time I saw an episode that was written by someone else, I needed CPR.) My hope is that, if nothing else, Harper Lee would agree that the playwright had a deep love and respect for the book she wrote and that she’d be pleased (or maybe horrified) that the themes she wrote about in 1960 were at least as relevant in 2018.

My friend David Fincher, who directed The Social Network, used to say that art isn’t supposed to answer questions, it’s supposed to ask them. If you walk into a theater already knowing what’s going to happen when the lights go down, you’ve walked into the wrong theater. To Kill a Mockingbird isn’t a revival. It’s not an homage or an exercise in nostalgia. It’s a new play, directed by a genius and performed by 24 of the best actors in the world. Was it a suicide mission? I’m not the judge of that, and there will be no shortage of strong opinions.

All rise.

536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’

Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’

By Ann Gibbons Science

An 72-meter ice core drilled in the Colle Gnifetti Glacier in the Swiss Alps entombs more than 2000 years of fallout from volcanoes,  storms, and human pollution.

NICOLE SPAULDING/CCI FROM C. P. LOVELUCK ET AL., ANTIQUITY 10.15184, 4, 2018 

Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year," wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record "a failure of bread from the years 536–539." Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.

To Kyle Harper, provost and a medieval and Roman historian at The University of Oklahoma in Norman, the detailed log of natural disasters and human pollution frozen into the ice "give us a new kind of record for understanding the concatenation of human and natural causes that led to the fall of the Roman Empire—and the earliest stirrings of this new medieval economy."

Slivers from a Swiss ice core held chemical clues to natural and humanmade events.

NICOLE SPAULDING/CCI FROM C. P. LOVELUCK ET AL., ANTIQUITY 10.15184, 4, 2018 

Ever since tree ring studies in the 1990s suggested the summers around the year 540 were unusually cold, researchers have hunted for the cause. Three years ago polar ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica yielded a clue. When a volcano erupts, it spews sulfur, bismuth, and other substances high into the atmosphere, where they form an aerosol veil that reflects the sun's light back into space, cooling the planet. By matching the ice record of these chemical traces with tree ring records of climate, a team led by Michael Sigl, now of the University of Bern, found that nearly every unusually cold summer over the past 2500 years was preceded by a volcanic eruption. A massive eruption—perhaps in North America, the team suggested—stood out in late 535 or early 536; another followed in 540. Sigl's team concluded that the double blow explained the prolonged dark and cold.

Mayewski and his interdisciplinary team decided to look for the same eruptions in an ice core drilled in 2013 in the Colle Gnifetti Glacier in the Swiss Alps. The 72-meter-long core entombs more than 2000 years of fallout from volcanoes, Saharan dust storms, and human activities smack in the center of Europe. The team deciphered this record using a new ultra–high-resolution method, in which a laser carves 120-micron slivers of ice, representing just a few days or weeks of snowfall, along the length of the core. Each of the samples—some 50,000 from each meter of the core—is analyzed for about a dozen elements. The approach enabled the team to pinpoint storms, volcanic eruptions, and lead pollution down to the month or even less, going back 2000 years, says UM volcanologist Andrei Kurbatov.

Darkest hours and then a dawn

A high-resolution ice core record combined with historical texts chronicles the impact of natural disasters on European society.

 months, records say. Summer temperatures drop by 1.5°C to 2.5°C. 536–545Coldest decade on record in 2000 years. Crops fail in Ireland, Scandinavia, Mesopotamia, and China. 540–541Second volcanic eruption. Summer temperatures drop again by 1.4°C–2.7°C in Europe.541–543The “Justinian” bubonic plague spreads through the Mediterranean, killing 35%–55% of the population and speeding the collapse of the eastern Roman Empire.640After declining in the mid-500s, a surge in atmo-spheric lead signals an increase in silver mining because of economic recovery. 660A second lead peak reflects silver mining, proba-bly at Melle, France, tied to a switch from gold to silver for coins and the beginnings of the medieval economy.

(GRAPHIC) A. CUADRA/SCIENCE; (DATA) C. P. LOVELUCK ET AL., ANTIQUITY 2018; M. SIGL ET AL., NATURE 2015; M. MCCORMICK 

In ice from the spring of 536, UM graduate student Laura Hartman found two microscopic particles of volcanic glass. By bombarding the shards with x-rays to determine their chemical fingerprint, she and Kurbatov found that they closely matched glass particles found earlier in lakes and peat bogs in Europe and in a Greenland ice core. Those particles in turn resembled volcanic rocks from Iceland. The chemical similarities convince geoscientist David Lowe of The University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand, who says the particles in the Swiss ice core likely came from the same Icelandic volcano. But Sigl says more evidence is needed to convince him that the eruption was in Iceland rather than North America.

Either way, the winds and weather systems in 536 must have been just right to guide the eruption plume southeast across Europe and, later, into Asia, casting a chilly pall as the volcanic fog "rolled through," Kurbatov says. The next step is to try to find more particles from this volcano in lakes in Europe and Iceland, in order to confirm its location in Iceland and tease out why it was so devastating.

A century later, after several more eruptions, the ice record signals better news: the lead spike in 640. Silver was smelted from lead ore, so the lead is a sign that the precious metal was in demand in an economy rebounding from the blow a century before, says archaeologist Christopher Loveluck of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. A second lead peak, in 660, marks a major infusion of silver into the emergent medieval economy. It suggests gold had become scarce as trade increased, forcing a shift to silver as the monetary standard, Loveluck and his colleagues write in Antiquity. "It shows the rise of the merchant class for the first time," he says.

Still later, the ice is a window into another dark period. Lead vanished from the air during the Black Death from 1349 to 1353, revealing an economy that had again ground to a halt. "We've entered a new era with this ability to integrate ultra–high-resolution environmental records with similarly high resolution historical records," Loveluck says. "It's a real game changer."

China The Land that did not fail

The Land That Failed to Fail

China Rules; The New York Times Special

They didn’t like the West’s playbook. So they wrote their own.

Part 1 

The pull of the past: Aerospace workers wearing Long March-style uniforms.

The West was sure the Chinese approach would not work. It just had to wait. It’s still waiting.

In the uncertain years after Mao’s death, long before China became an industrial juggernaut, before the Communist Party went on a winning streak that would reshape the world, a group of economics students gathered at a mountain retreat outside Shanghai. There, in the bamboo forests of Moganshan, the young scholars grappled with a pressing question: How could China catch up with the West?

It was the autumn of 1984, and on the other side of the world, Ronald Reagan was promising “morning again in America.” China, meanwhile, was just recovering from decades of political and economic turmoil. There had been progress in the countryside, but more than three-quarters of the population still lived in extreme poverty. The state decided where everyone worked, what every factory made and how much everything cost.

The students and researchers attending the Academic Symposium of Middle-Aged and Young Economists wanted to unleash market forces but worried about crashing the economy — and alarming the party bureaucrats and ideologues who controlled it.

Late one night, they reached a consensus: Factories should meet state quotas but sell anything extra they made at any price they chose. It was a clever, quietly radical proposal to undercut the planned economy — and it intrigued a young party official in the room who had no background in economics. “As they were discussing the problem, I didn’t say anything at all,” recalled Xu Jing’an, now 76 and retired. “I was thinking, how do we make this work?”

The Chinese economy has grown so fast for so long now that it is easy to forget how unlikely its metamorphosis into a global powerhouse was, how much of its ascent was improvised and born of desperation. The proposal that Mr. Xu took from the mountain retreat, soon adopted as government policy, was a pivotal early step in this astounding transformation.

China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users, college graduates and, by some counts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has fallen to less than 1 percent. An isolated, impoverished backwater has evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union.

China today might be unrecognizable to its Communist founders, but the past still holds a powerful allure. “Red tourism” is a big industry.

It is less worried now about catching up to the West. Instead, it wonders how to pull ahead.

The country leads the world in the number of internet users and college graduates. It is now working to land a person on the moon.

Gone are the days when the state decided where everyone worked and what every factory made.

The world thought it would change China, but China’s success has been so spectacular that it has changed the world.

An epochal contest is underway. With President Xi Jinping pushing a more assertive agenda overseas and tightening controls at home, the Trump administration has launched a trade war and is gearing up for what could be a new Cold War. Meanwhile, in Beijing the question these days is less how to catch up with the West than how to pull ahead — and how to do so in a new era of American hostility.

The pattern is familiar to historians, a rising power challenging an established one, with a familiar complication: For decades, the United States encouraged and aided China’s rise, working with its leaders and its people to build the most important economic partnership in the world, one that has lifted both nations.

During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.

But neither happened. Instead, China’s Communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail.

In late September, the People’s Republic of China marked a milestone, surpassing the Soviet Union in longevity. Days later, it celebrated a record 69 years of Communist rule. And China may be just hitting its stride — a new superpower with an economy on track to become not just the world’s largest but, quite soon, the largest by a wide margin.

The world thought it could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the American understanding of how the world works.

There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Even as they put the disasters of Mao’s rule behind them, China’s Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform” must never include democratization.

China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction for fear of running aground.

Many people said that the party would fail, that this tension between openness and repression would be too much for a nation as big as China to sustain. But it may be precisely why China soared.

Whether it can continue to do so with the United States trying to stop it is another question entirely.

Apparatchiks Into Capitalists

None of the participants at the Moganshan conference could have predicted how China would take off, much less the roles they would play in the boom ahead. They had come of age in an era of tumult, almost entirely isolated from the rest of the world, with little to prepare them for the challenge they faced. To succeed, the party had to both reinvent its ideology and reprogram its best and brightest to carry it out.

Mr. Xu, for example, had graduated with a degree in journalism on the eve of Mao’s violent Cultural Revolution, during which millions of people were purged, persecuted and killed. He spent those years at a “cadre school” doing manual labor and teaching Marxism in an army unit. After Mao’s death, he was assigned to a state research institute tasked with fixing the economy. His first job was figuring out how to give factories more power to make decisions, a subject he knew almost nothing about. Yet he went on to a distinguished career as an economic policymaker, helping launch China’s first stock market in Shenzhen.

Among the other young participants in Moganshan were Zhou Xiaochuan, who would later lead China’s central bank for 15 years; Lou Jiwei, who ran China’s sovereign wealth fund and recently stepped down as finance minister; and an agricultural policy specialist named Wang Qishan, who rose higher than any of them.

Mr. Wang headed China’s first investment bank and helped steer the nation through the Asian financial crisis. As Beijing’s mayor, he hosted the 2008 Olympics. Then he oversaw the party’s recent high-stakes crackdown on corruption. Now he is China’s vice president, second in authority only to Xi Jinping, the party’s leader.

The careers of these men from Moganshan highlight an important aspect of China’s success: It turned its apparatchiks into capitalists.

Bureaucrats who were once obstacles to growth became engines of growth. Officials devoted to class warfare and price controls began chasing investment and promoting private enterprise. Every day now, the leader of a Chinese district, city or province makes a pitch like the one Yan Chaojun made at a business forum in September.

“Sanya,” Mr. Yan said, referring to the southern resort town he leads, “must be a good butler, nanny, driver and cleaning person for businesses, and welcome investment from foreign companies.”

It was a remarkable act of reinvention, one that eluded the Soviets. In both China and the Soviet Union, vast Stalinist bureaucracies had smothered economic growth, with officials who wielded unchecked power resisting change that threatened their privileges.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, tried to break the hold of these bureaucrats on the economy by opening up the political system. Decades later, Chinese officials still take classes on why that was a mistake. The party even produced a documentary series on the subject in 2006, distributing it on classified DVDs for officials at all levels to watch.

Afraid to open up politically but unwilling to stand still, the party found another way. It moved gradually and followed the pattern of the compromise at Moganshan, which left the planned economy intact while allowing a market economy to flourish and outgrow it.

Once an impoverished backwater, China is now the most significant rival to the United States. Wuhan, a former river town, has swelled into a metropolis of over 10 million.

A businessman stretched before a round of video golf at a hotel he built in Kunming.

Rising incomes have turned China into a nation of consumers.

In cities like Shanghai, Chinese schoolchildren outperform peers around the world.

Western economists doubted that innovation could take place under China’s rigid bureaucracy. They were proved wrong.

Party leaders called this go-slow, experimental approach “crossing the river by feeling the stones” — allowing farmers to grow and sell their own crops, for example, while retaining state ownership of the land; lifting investment restrictions in “special economic zones,” while leaving them in place in the rest of the country; or introducing privatization by selling only minority stakes in state firms at first.

“There was resistance,” Mr. Xu said. “Satisfying the reformers and the opposition was an art.”

American economists were skeptical. Market forces needed to be introduced quickly, they argued; otherwise, the bureaucracy would mobilize to block necessary changes. After a visit to China in 1988, the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman called the party’s strategy “an open invitation to corruption and inefficiency.”

But China had a strange advantage in battling bureaucratic resistance. The nation’s long economic boom followed one of the darkest chapters of its history, the Cultural Revolution, which decimated the party apparatus and left it in shambles. In effect, autocratic excess set the stage for Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, to lead the party in a radically more open direction.

That included sending generations of young party officials to the United States and elsewhere to study how modern economies worked. Sometimes they enrolled in universities, sometimes they found jobs, and sometimes they went on brief “study tours.” When they returned, the party promoted their careers and arranged for others to learn from them.

At the same time, the party invested in education, expanding access to schools and universities, and all but eliminating illiteracy. Many critics focus on the weaknesses of the Chinese system — the emphasis on tests and memorization, the political constraints, the discrimination against rural students. But mainland China now produces more graduates in science and engineering every year than the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan combined.

In cities like Shanghai, Chinese schoolchildren outperform peers around the world. For many parents, though, even that is not enough. Because of new wealth, a traditional emphasis on education as a path to social mobility and the state’s hypercompetitive college entrance exam, most students also enroll in after-school tutoring programs — a market worth $125 billion, according to one study, or as much as half the government’s annual military budget.

Another explanation for the party’s transformation lies in bureaucratic mechanics. Analysts sometimes say that China embraced economic reform while resisting political reform. But in reality, the party made changes after Mao’s death that fell short of free elections or independent courts yet were nevertheless significant.

The party introduced term limits and mandatory retirement ages, for example, making it easier to flush out incompetent officials. And it revamped the internal report cards it used to evaluate local leaders for promotions and bonuses, focusing them almost exclusively on concrete economic targets.

These seemingly minor adjustments had an outsize impact, injecting a dose of accountability — and competition — into the political system, said Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “China created a unique hybrid,” she said, “an autocracy with democratic characteristics.”

As the economy flourished, officials with a single-minded focus on growth often ignored widespread pollution, violations of labor standards, and tainted food and medical supplies. They were rewarded with soaring tax revenues and opportunities to enrich their friends, their relatives and themselves. A wave of officials abandoned the state and went into business. Over time, the party elite amassed great wealth, which cemented its support for the privatization of much of the economy it once controlled.

The private sector now produces more than 60 percent of the nation’s economic output, employs over 80 percent of workers in cities and towns, and generates 90 percent of new jobs, a senior official said in a speech last year. As often as not, the bureaucrats stay out of the way.

“I basically don’t see them even once a year,” said James Ni, chairman and founder of Mlily, a mattress manufacturer in eastern China. “I’m creating jobs, generating tax revenue. Why should they bother me?”

In recent years, President Xi has sought to assert the party’s authority inside private firms. He has also bolstered state-owned enterprises with subsidies while preserving barriers to foreign competition. And he has endorsed demands that American companies surrender technology in exchange for market access.

In doing so, he is betting that the Chinese state has changed so much that it should play a leading role in the economy — that it can build and run “national champions” capable of outcompeting the United States for control of the high-tech industries of the future. But he has also provoked a backlash in Washington.

‘Opening Up’

In December, the Communist Party will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the “reform and opening up” policies that transformed China. The triumphant propaganda has already begun, with Mr. Xi putting himself front and center, as if taking a victory lap for the nation.

He is the party’s most powerful leader since Deng and the son of a senior official who served Deng, but even as he wraps himself in Deng’s legacy, Mr. Xi has set himself apart in an important way: Deng encouraged the party to seek help and expertise overseas, but Mr. Xi preaches self-reliance and warns of the threats posed by “hostile foreign forces.”

In other words, he appears to have less use for the “opening up” part of Deng’s slogan.

Of the many risks that the party took in its pursuit of growth, perhaps the biggest was letting in foreign investment, trade and ideas. It was an exceptional gamble by a country once as isolated as North Korea is today, and it paid off in an exceptional way: China tapped into a wave of globalization sweeping the world and emerged as the world’s factory. China’s embrace of the internet, within limits, helped make it a leader in technology. And foreign advice helped China reshape its banks, build a legal system and create modern corporations.

The party prefers a different narrative these days, presenting the economic boom as “grown out of the soil of China” and primarily the result of its leadership. But this obscures one of the great ironies of China’s rise — that Beijing’s former enemies helped make it possible.

President Xi Jinping has shown no sign of abandoning what he calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” The observation deck of the Shanghai Tower, the world’s second-tallest building.

A Communist Party Congress. Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to its authoritarian past.

China tapped into a wave of globalization and emerged as the world’s factory. Advertising for day laborers in Shenzhen.

A fashion design employee at a bridal wear exhibition in Beijing may have taken the opportunity for a break, but no one calls China a sleeping giant anymore.

Installing solar panels on a 47-story residential development. China succeeded by leaving a planned economy intact and allowing a market economy to flourish and outgrow it.

The United States and Japan, both routinely vilified by party propagandists, became major trading partners and were important sources of aid, investment and expertise. The real game changers, though, were people like Tony Lin, a factory manager who made his first trip to the mainland in 1988.

Mr. Lin was born and raised in Taiwan, the self-governing island where those who lost the Chinese civil war fled after the Communist Revolution. As a schoolboy, he was taught that mainland China was the enemy.

But in the late 1980s, the sneaker factory he managed in central Taiwan was having trouble finding workers, and its biggest customer, Nike, suggested moving some production to China. Mr. Lin set aside his fears and made the trip. What he found surprised him: a large and willing work force, and officials so eager for capital and know-how that they offered the use of a state factory free and a five-year break on taxes.

Mr. Lin spent the next decade shuttling to and from southern China, spending months at a time there and returning home only for short breaks to see his wife and children. He built and ran five sneaker factories, including Nike’s largest Chinese supplier.

“China’s policies were tremendous,” he recalled. “They were like a sponge absorbing water, money, technology, everything.”

Mr. Lin was part of a torrent of investment from ethnic Chinese enclaves in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and beyond that washed over China — and gave it a leg up on other developing countries. Without this diaspora, some economists argue, the mainland’s transformation might have stalled at the level of a country like Indonesia or Mexico.

The timing worked out for China, which opened up just as Taiwan was outgrowing its place in the global manufacturing chain. China benefited from Taiwan’s money, but also its managerial experience, technology and relationships with customers around the world. In effect, Taiwan jump-started capitalism in China and plugged it into the global economy.

Before long, the government in Taiwan began to worry about relying so much on its onetime enemy and tried to shift investment elsewhere. But the mainland was too cheap, too close and, with a common language and heritage, too familiar. Mr. Lin tried opening factories in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia but always came back to China.

Now Taiwan finds itself increasingly dependent on a much more powerful China, which is pushing ever harder for unification, and the island’s future is uncertain.

There are echoes of Taiwan’s predicament around the world, where many are having second thoughts about how they rushed to embrace Beijing with trade and investment.

The remorse may be strongest in the United States, which brought China into the World Trade Organization, became China’s largest customer and now accuses it of large-scale theft of technology — what one official called “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”

Many in Washington predicted that trade would bring political change. It did, but not in China. “Opening up” ended up strengthening the party’s hold on power rather than weakening it. The shock of China’s rise as an export colossus, however, was felt in factory towns around the world.

In the United States, economists say at least two million jobs disappeared as a result, many in districts that ended up voting for President Trump.

Selective Repression

Over lunch at a luxurious private club on the 50th floor of an apartment tower in central Beijing, one of China’s most successful real estate tycoons explained why he had left his job at a government research center after the crackdown on the student-led democracy movement in Tiananmen Square.

“It was very easy,” said Feng Lun, the chairman of Vantone Holdings, which manages a multibillion-dollar portfolio of properties around the world. “One day, I woke up and everyone had run away. So I ran, too.”

Until the soldiers opened fire, he said, he had planned to spend his entire career in the civil service. Instead, as the party was pushing out those who had sympathized with the students, he joined the exodus of officials who started over as entrepreneurs in the 1990s.

“At the time, if you held a meeting and told us to go into business, we wouldn’t have gone,” he recalled. “So this incident, it unintentionally planted seeds in the market economy.”

Such has been the seesaw pattern of the party’s success.

The pro-democracy movement in 1989 was the closest the party ever came to political liberalization after Mao’s death, and the crackdown that followed was the furthest it went in the other direction, toward repression and control. After the massacre, the economy stalled and retrenchment seemed certain. Yet three years later, Deng used a tour of southern China to wrestle the party back to “reform and opening up” once more.

Many who had left the government, like Mr. Feng, suddenly found themselves leading the nation’s transformation from the outside, as its first generation of private entrepreneurs.

Now Mr. Xi is steering the party toward repression again, tightening its grip on society, concentrating power in his own hands and setting himself up to rule for life by abolishing the presidential term limit. Will the party loosen up again, as it did a few years after Tiananmen, or is this a more permanent shift? If it is, what will it mean for the Chinese economic miracle?

The fear is that Mr. Xi is attempting to rewrite the recipe behind China’s rise, replacing selective repression with something more severe.

For decades, China has veered between openness and repression, including of the ethnic Uighur minority.

Since the Tiananmen movement, the government has been vigilant about crushing potential threats. Surveillance cameras in Beijing.

China’s high-speed rail network, the largest in the world, has changed the way its people move. In Hangzhou, passengers waited outside the railway station.

As China opened up, farmers were allowed to grow and sell their own crops, while the state retained ownership of the land. Greenhouses filled with bok choy and yellow cabbage abut investment properties and golf courses.

Under Mao, many educated Chinese were sent to “cadre schools,” where they did manual labor. In May, these real estate agency employees went for a morning run as part of a company team-building exercise.

The party has always been vigilant about crushing potential threats — a fledgling opposition party, a popular spiritual movement, even a dissident writer awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But with some big exceptions, it has also generally retreated from people’s personal lives and given them enough freedom to keep the economy growing.

The internet is an example of how it has benefited by striking a balance. The party let the nation go online with barely an inkling of what that might mean, then reaped the economic benefits while controlling the spread of information that could hurt it.

In 2011, it confronted a crisis. After a high-speed train crash in eastern China, more than 30 million messages criticizing the party’s handling of the fatal accident flooded social media — faster than censors could screen them.

Panicked officials considered shutting down the most popular service, Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, but the authorities were afraid of how the public would respond. In the end, they let Weibo stay open but invested much more in tightening controls and ordered companies to do the same.

The compromise worked. Now, many companies assign hundreds of employees to censorship duties — and China has become a giant on the global internet landscape.

“The cost of censorship is quite limited compared to the great value created by the internet,” said Chen Tong, an industry pioneer. “We still get the information we need for economic progress.”

A ‘New Era’

China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other.

The question now is whether it can sustain this model with the United States as an adversary rather than a partner.

The trade war has only just begun. And it is not just a trade war. American warships and planes are challenging Chinese claims to disputed waters with increasing frequency even as China keeps ratcheting up military spending. And Washington is maneuvering to counter Beijing’s growing influence around the world, warning that a Chinese spending spree on global infrastructure comes with strings attached.

The two nations may yet reach some accommodation. But both left and right in America have portrayed China as the champion of an alternative global order, one that embraces autocratic values and undermines fair competition. It is a rare consensus for the United States, which is deeply divided about so much else, including how it has wielded power abroad in recent decades — and how it should do so now.

Mr. Xi, on the other hand, has shown no sign of abandoning what he calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Some in his corner have been itching to take on the United States since the 2008 financial crisis and see the Trump administration’s policies as proof of what they have always suspected — that America is determined to keep China down.

At the same time, there is also widespread anxiety over the new acrimony, because the United States has long inspired admiration and envy in China, and because of a gnawing sense that the party’s formula for success may be faltering.

Prosperity has brought rising expectations in China; the public wants more than just economic growth. It wants cleaner air, safer food and medicine, better health care and schools, less corruption and greater equality. The party is struggling to deliver, and tweaks to the report cards it uses to measure the performance of officials hardly seem enough.

“The basic problem is, who is growth for?” said Mr. Xu, the retired official who wrote the Moganshan report. “We haven’t solved this problem.”

Growth has begun to slow, which may be better for the economy in the long term but could shake public confidence. The party is investing ever more in censorship to control discussion of the challenges the nation faces: widening inequality, dangerous debt levels, an aging population.

Mr. Xi himself has acknowledged that the party must adapt, declaring that the nation is entering a “new era” requiring new methods. But his prescription has largely been a throwback to repression, including vast internment camps targeting Muslim ethnic minorities. “Opening up” has been replaced by an outward push, with huge loans that critics describe as predatory and other efforts to gain influence — or interfere — in the politics of other countries. At home, experimentation is out while political orthodoxy and discipline are in.

In effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture — and that to survive and surpass the United States it must.

Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump’s America is in retreat while China’s moment is just beginning.

Then again, China has a way of defying expectations.

Philip P. Pan is The Times’s Asia Editor and author of “Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China.” He has lived in and reported on China for nearly two decades.

Jonathan Ansfield and Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Beijing. Claire Fu, Zoe Mou and Iris Zhao contributed research from Beijing, and Carolyn Zhang from Shanghai.

Design: Matt Ruby, Rumsey Taylor, Quoctrung Bui Editing: Tess Felder, Eric Nagourney, David Schmidt Photo Editing: Craig Allen, Meghan Petersen, Mikko Takkunen Illustrations: Sergio Peçanha