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The essays in this volume address the industrial, commercial, urban and regional reforms of China's planned economy during the 1980s. The emphasis is on the dominating institutional and bureaucratic presence of the state even as it sought to loosen the pre-1979 vertically structured centralised command system and to introduce some market principles to stimulate economic activity. The essays fall into four categories: theoretical and policy discussions and debates at the central leadership level; reform of the urban economy and of inter-regional relations; industrial and commercial reforms; and the rise and position of the new entrepreneurial class. Many of the essays draw on interviews with Chinese economic officials in the Central China city of Wuhan and therefore this is the only study that uses local data on actual operations of reforms from a Chinese city; the other sources are the Chinese press and Chinese official and scholarly journals. In each of the categories there are pieces from different points in the chronological process of reform. This study begins with the first theoretical discussions among China's economists and top political leaders in the late 1970s and concludes with experiments with bankruptcy and stock markets in the late 1980s. The countervailing heavy presence of the state at both the policy and the practical levels throughout the reform decade is its unifying theme.
List of contents
Acknowledgments, Introduction, Part 1: Policy Making and Policy Conflict over Reform, 1. Economic Reform via Reformulation: Where Do Rightist Ideas Come From?, 2. The Fifth National People's Congress and the Process of Policy Making: Reform, Readjustment, and the Opposition, Part II: Experiments in the Urban State Economic Bureaucracy, 3. Commercial Reform and State Control: Structural Changes in Chinese Trade, 1981-83, 4. China's New Economic Policies and the Local Industrial Political Process: The Case of Wuhan, 5. Urban Reform and Relational Contracting in Post-Mao China: An Interpretation of the Transition from Plan to Market, 6. Capitalist Measures with Chinese Characteristics, Part III: Reforms in Restructuring Regions, 7. Uncertain Paternalism: Tensions in Recent Regional Restructuring in China, 8. City, Province, and Region: The Case of Wuhan, 9. The Place of the Central City in China's Economic Reform: From Hierarchy to Network?, Part IV: State Cadres and Urban Entrepreneurs, 10. The Petty Private Sector and the Three Lines in the Early 1980s, 11. Urban Entrepreneurs and the State: The Merger of State and Society, Afterword, Index
About the author
Solinger, Dorothy J.
Summary
These essays address the industrial, commercial, urban and regional reforms of China's planned economy during the 1980s. The emphasis is on the dominating institutional and bureaucratic presence of the state even as it sought to loosen the pre-1979 vertically structured command system.
