ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the economic 'soft shoe shuffle', adopted by the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) since 1978 can be seen as a response to damaged Party legitimacy. In the wake of the programme for economic reform sanctioned by the Central Committee's Third Plenum of late 1978, the C.C.P. planners have followed the path trodden by Soviet and Eastern European 'socialists'. They have shifted their substantive (value) rational goal from attaining a classless society to promoting 'socialist modernisation'. Like their Soviet and Eastern European counterparts, they have allowed their re-definition of a functionally orientating substantive goal to be reduced to value-free purposive rationality. Rationality is valued more highly than efficiency. Clearly, since the vast majority of prices are in the higher categories, the real effect of enterprise autonomy is limited. Enterprises are urged to intensify the qualitative aspects of accounting, but often are not given the means so to do. Rationality demands that the grant of those means be selective.
