ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors seek to explore the reasons for the success of economic reform in China through an analysis of factors which may be similar to or different from the experience of the Soviet Union and former Eastern European countries on one hand, and the non-Chinese communist Asian countries on the other.
While all the former Stalinist countries shared a common systemic inheritance, the choice of economic policies and the political context for reform in the case of China and certain other Asian countries were distinct. A destructive phase did not precede reform, and a programme of economic shock therapy was found to be unnecessary. Moreover, success was achieved despite apparently inadequate economic and political institutions. As China possessed no obvious advantages over the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the rapid-change policies of ‘capitalist triumphalism’ implemented in those countries may simply have been wrong; the strong state, with a self-reforming communist party, may be the ‘least bad vehicle’ with which to achieve a successful transition away from a communist economy.
