ABSTRACT
China, for several years after beginning its reform process, appeared to offer more grounds for hope. This chapter addresses the question of how the rural reforms developed, how they have arrived at this apparent impasse, and why they will prove difficult if not impossible to 'solve'. The rhetoric of the post-Mao reformers has been consistently negative in its treatment of the Maoist rural system, depicting it as a dreadful failure. The result has been the collapse of the previous implicit social contract that bound together the Chinese body politic, a social contract that represented certain concrete guarantees to certain social groups and created a political elite whose authority rested ultimately on their capacity to sustain those guarantees. From a strictly economic perspective, the solution of China's current developmental impasse requires the austerity measures; and the solution of the food policy impasse, also from this perspective, requires thoroughgoing price reform and the elimination of most state subsidies.
