ABSTRACT

This chapter evaluates how and why Deng Xiaoping's initial economic and social success led to an overheated, unbalanced and inflationary growth, which in turn disintegrated Chinese society. It also evaluates how the political crisis emerged from confrontations in 1987-88, marking China's refusal to enter the new era of political reforms. The crisis of the state in the transition from socialist mobilisation and command economy to a market economy with social pluralism demanded strong, coherent state-building policies. The chapter presents the emergence in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union of a 'new regime' of reforms centered on political change, that is in an area which Deng Xiaoping's 'ancien rgime' carefully avoided. Deng's 'pragmatic' management of the party's revolutionary legacy in the new perspective of economic modernisation, with his skilful balancing of 'movement' and 'resistance', is not unlike Louis-Philippe's juste milieu in France during the 1840s.