Accomplishments and problems: a review of China’s reform in the past twenty-three years

If we regard reform as a process, the social economic situation of China in 1978 serves as the starting point of the process. We can regard reform as the reform of “something old.” This serves as the object and foundation of reform. The “old something” is precisely the situation of the social economy at the beginning of reform. In a short article, “The Three Thirty Years” published in 1993, I wrote:

Things happened as luck would have it. It was exactly thirty years from the May Fourth Movement in 1919 to right before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. This was the thirty years in which the Chinese people conducted the national-democratic revolution (also called the ‘new democratic revolution’), in which was seen ideological mobilization, three revolutionary civil wars, and finally, nationwide victory. This was the first “thirty years.”