ABSTRACT
Beginning in autumn 1988, China's program of economic reforms was jolted by two sudden blows in succession. First there was the autumn 1988 somber stocktaking of the reforms themselves. What had been the mainstay of policy through the 1980s abruptly seemed to many to have produced startlingly ominous effects. Then the Chinese were compelled to cope with the imposition of economic sanctions by the Western powers and Japan that followed the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989. In the wake of these shocks, the leadership installed and implemented an austerity program, which, in turn, spawned its own set of drawbacks. The net effect, as of mid-1991, was to drag the reform policies through a period of stalemate, in which little was explicitly canceled and nothing novel was attempted.
