ABSTRACT
The significance of the expansion of markets within the People's Republic of China, the nation with the largest population and the last important Communist-dominated society, is obvious and has received a great deal of attention. Asian societies have commonly been represented as the Other of the West, and Oriental Despotism is contrasted to Western democracy private property in land and civil liberties, and to the feudalism from which these emerged. While the leadership desires socialist modernisation in the form of increased economic efficiency, the ability to generate foreign currency through exports and the adoption of more sophisticated technology, there has been consistent concern with the social and cultural implications of the market-based reforms and the opening to the capitalist world economy. These 'side-effects' have been variously termed 'bourgeois liberalisation', 'sugar-coated bullets' and 'unhealthy tendencies'. The trend within the leadership, however, has been away from broad conceptualisations of the Market and towards limited technical representations of the market.
