CHINA UNDER REFORM
POLITICS IN ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Haruhiro Fukui
Series Editor
China Under Reform, Lowell Dittmer
Global Television and the Politics of the Seoul Olympics,
James F. Larson and Heung-Soo Park
Japans Foreign Aid: Power and Policy in a New Era,
edited by Bruce M. Koppel and Robert M. Orr, Jr.
Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China: Learning from 1989,
edited by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry
Southeast Asia in the New International Era, Clark D. Neher
FOR1HCOMING
Japans Land Policy and Its Global Impact, Shigeko N. Fukai
Mass Politics in the PRC: State and Society in Contemporary China,
Alan P.L. Liu
Nationalism in Contemporary Japan, Bruce Stronach
Comparative Politics of Asia, Sue Ellen M. Charlton
Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China,
Second Edition, edited by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
and Elizabeth J. Perry
Southeast Asia in the New International Era, Second Edition,
Clark D. Neher
This Volume Is Sponsored by
The Center for Chinese Studies,
University of California, Berkeley
CHINA UNDER REFORM
Lowell Dittmer
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Politics in Asia and the Pacific: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
First published 1994 by Westview Press
Published 2018 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dittmer, Lowell.
China under reform / Lowell Dittmer.
p. cm. (Politics in Asia and the Pacific :
interdisciplinary perspectives)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8133-1119-5. ISBN 0-8133-1120-9 (pbk.)
1. ChinaPolitics and government1976- . I. Title. II. Series:
Politics in Asia and the Pacific.
DS799.26.D58 1994
320.951dc20
93-23584
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-0-8133-1120-3 (pbk)
To the Memory of My Mother
Contents
This is a study of the political consequences of economic reform in the Peoples Republic of China, a process that has been so successful that (barring an economic calamity) it can no longer be reversed, although it can still be steered in different directions. Having unleashed this economic dynamo, politics appears at this point on the verge of losing command. This may, of course, be only temporaryfor the worlds last major Communist Party-state now awaits its third generation of leadership. Heir to a sterling economic performance, that leadership is apt to be haunted by rising expectations and perplexed about how to reconcile continued growth with its own political interests. Realistically considered, its options are limited. Either the leadership will grasp the tendencies that have been loosed and shape them creatively in the national interest, or a less edifying recent trend will resume: stagnation amid orthodoxy at the center, as the more dynamic regions become integrated with Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the surging Pacific Rim economies.
Although, of course, the blame is entirely mine for any flaws that remain in this study, I am indebted to many for any conceivable virtues. I am grateful to Elizabeth J. Perry and to Chin-chuan Lee for reading and criticizing an earlier version of . An anonymous reader read the entire manuscript and made many helpful comments. I am grateful to Haru Fukui for including me in his series. I am indebted to Westviews Susan McEachern for the books title and for the tireless prodding without which the book would probably never have been written. The Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California at Berkeley sponsored the project and helped subsidize my research, for which I am thankful. For serendipitous suggestions and intellectual stimulation I wish to thank my students and my family. Guoliang Zhang did a fine job on the index and helped with the jacket design. Finally, having published on some of these topics before, I have taken the liberty to plagiarize myself liberally, often without sufficient attribution: Thanks!
Lowell Dittmer
The American image of China has fluctuated throughout the twentieth century but perhaps never more dramatically than at the end of the 1980s, when the Chinese regimes well-publicized massacre of student protesters at Tiananmen Square electrified American public opinion and dissipated much of the goodwill that had been built up during a decade of highly successful economic reform. The protesters had caught the imagination and sympathy of the American media and public as nothing in Chinese politics had since the Cultural Revolution, and the bloody terminus of their protests when negotiations and leadership appeals failed to disperse them only sanctified that support. Thus the American love affair with China seemed to reach its simultaneous apotheosis and eclipse in the flames that gutted hundreds of abandoned military vehicles littering the streets of Beijing on June 4,1989.
Yet despite the temporary pause in reform momentum that followed the crackdown, reform has henceforth resumed with apparently undiminished vigor: Chinas gross domestic product (GDP), already the third largest in the world, according to new World Bank calculations, surged in 1992 by 12.8 percent (the fastest in the world); per capita GDP jumped by nearly 20 percent; and China attracted U.S.$11.6 billion-worth (all dollars are U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted) of foreign investmentnearly as much as was lured by the United States, the worlds biggest economy. At the same time, despite the regimes best efforts to put worries to rest through a rotation of elites at the Fourteenth Party Congress (October 1992) and the Eighth National Peoples Congress (NPC) (March 1993), the structure of the political system has remained essentially Leninist, leaving it still susceptible to factional splits, purges, succession crises, mass movements, and other forms of politically driven instability. Although Chinas unique synthesis of economic reform and political dictatorship has thus far spared it the fate of the former Soviet Union, how well can such a patchwork of contradictions be expected to survive the storms yet to come?
This book reconsiders the progress and pitfalls of Chinese reform socialism at a crucial turning point, as the regime stands poised between the fatal discrediting of its revolutionary leadership and the succession of a new generation. Our purpose is to assess the politics of the reform decadein the light of its historical antecedents, its authors intentions, its consequences. At a pivotal juncture, when so many different contingencies and options are still open, it goes without saying that any such assessment must be preliminary and schematic.
