Richard Baum - Reform and Reaction in Post-Mao China: The Road to Tiananmen

The idea for a collection of essays examining the effects of the first decade of Chinas post-Mao reforms was originally suggested to me by Stanley Rosen. The product of our collaborationa special double issue of the journal Studies in Comparative Communism (Summer/Autumn 1989) went to press several weeks before the Tiananmen crisis reached its violent climax on the weekend of June 34, 1989.

In the aftermath of the crackdown in Beijing, Jay Wilson, then my editor at Routledge, Chapman and Hall, encouraged me to revise and update the various essays in the original collection for inclusion in a new, post-Tiananmen volume. David Cattell, editor of Studies in Comparative Communism, generously consented to permit reproduction of portions of the original articles in a new and expanded format. The authors then rewrote their individual essays to incorporate analysis of the forces shaping the Tiananmen tragedy; and new introductory and concluding chapters were added relating the events of the Beijing Spring to the extraordinary gentle revolution that swept through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the autumn and winter of 198990.