ABSTRACT
The Peoples Republic of China is presently undergoing fundamental change. Since the historic decisions made by the 3rd Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in December 1978 (sheyijie sanzhong quanhui), decisions clearly authorized and pushed through by Deng Xiaoping and his supporters on the Party’s “liberal” wing (Harding, 1987, p.90), China has been implementing a programme of reform and opening to the outside world (gaige kaifang) which has had far-reaching effects on the nature of social organisation in the countryside, has significantly expanded the role of markets in all spheres of economic activity and converted China from being a country largely isolated from the global economy to one which, if measured by the proportion of merchandise trade to GNP, has one of the more open economies in the world, ahead of Japan, USA and Germany (World Bank, 1996, pp.212–3). These reforms have been accompanied by such rapid rises in industrial output, foreign trade, GNP and GNP per head that Deng’s optimistic target, announced at the 12th Congress of the Communist Party in China in 1980, of quadrupling real GNP by the year 2000 (Liu Guo Guang et al., 1987, p.28) has already been achieved comfortably ahead of time (China Statistical Yearbook, 1995, p.33).
