I first encountered the term “critical juncture” in the book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012) by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Critical Junctures are significant, rapid, discontinuous changes (Collier & Collier, 1991) and the long-term causal effect or historical legacy of these changes (Flora, 1992). They can be defined as “major events or confluence of factors disrupting the existing economic or political balance in society” (Acemoglu and Robinson (2012); see also Capoccia and Kelemen (2007)). Critical junctures include events such as the discovery of the Americas, the Black Death, and the Arab Spring (Rivas, 2023)[1]. James Mahoney suggests another definition in his book, The Legacies of Liberalism: Critical Junctures, which is a choice point when a particular option is adopted from two or more alternatives. These junctures are ‘critical’ because returning to the initial point becomes progressively more challenging once an option is selected when multiple alternatives are still available.[2] The COVID-19 pandemic can also be considered as one. The book The Class of ’77: How My Classmates Changed China (2022) by one of the top Filipino foreign news correspondents in China, Jaime FlorCruz, describes how China’s cultural revolution during the 1970s became a critical juncture towards the transformation of the Middle Kingdom (中国) to a nation powerhouse it is today.
Continue reading The Class of ’77: China and Critical Junctures
Migo Aguado 