ABSTRACT

In 1985, the year American Motors began producing its Cherokee Jeeps in Beijing, foreign companies signed new contracts worth a total of $5.9 billion for new investment in China. During the 1980s, when Beijing Jeep was starting up, China was looking primarily to the West and to Japan for outside investment, technology, and management skills. Americans and Germans had to be lodged at the biggest and most expensive hotels in Beijing or Shanghai; the Taiwanese and South Korean businessmen settled into the more modest hotels that had once been built for overseas Chinese. Throughout the 1980s, the Chinese Communist Party leadership was divided over the wisdom of pursuing high rates of economic growth. Economic reformers were generally willing and eager to stimulate the Chinese economy. The Chinese government's problems in managing the economy in the 1980s helped to reinforce the arguments of conservative forces.