ABSTRACT
Many Chinese and China specialists wondered at the end of the 1970s whether the reform effort recently begun by the Deng Xiaoping leadership would survive for more than a decade. The reforms reduced the role of politics in people’s lives, increased the role of the market in shaping economic decisions, and broadened China’s exposure to the international arena. The initial reforms focused on agriculture and on opening China to the outside world. The early rural reforms paid off handsomely, with unprecedented gains in grain production and rapidly increasing rural living standards. During the winter of 1988–89 popular support for the political leadership collapsed. Moreover, the leadership showed every sign of disagreeing about how to deal with the inflation that contributed so strongly to popular discontent. Chinese history abounds with examples of conflict between a highly personalistic system and a highly articulated bureaucratic environment.
