ABSTRACT
The beginning of the 1980s found China in the throes of an economic riptide. * A reform-minded leadership, attempting to reverse the direction of two decades, was promoting an economic system quite different from any espoused by the late Mao Zedong — one with independent enterprises practicing "scientific management" and responding to the signals of the market. Such a system, according to the reformers, has the best chance of overcoming the still prevalent attitudes of "feudalism" in China, strengthening the forces of economic rationality, and ultimately speeding economic growth. Yet the partial reforms that were introduced conflicted with still dominant elements of the old approach to economic management, eroded central control of investment activity, and worsened long-standing problems of economic imbalance that the leadership was equally committed to solving. Economic reform was therefore slowed, and its future put in doubt.
