ABSTRACT
Up through 1996, nearly two decades of marketizing restructuring in China spelt spiraling increases in output, living standards, and incomes throughout the economy. Despite a rash of ominous social externalities, such as heightened corruption and widening inequalities, the consensus was that, insofar as the economy itself was concerned, markets were a success. Even times of overheating and occasional inflation — as in the mid-1980s, the late 1980s and the early to mid-1990s — were terminated relatively rapidly through officially triggered recessions; even interfirm debts seemed capable of being brought under control by 1995.
