ABSTRACT
When, in December 2008, the Chinese government celebrated with great pomp the thirtieth anniversary of the launch of its economic reforms, it did not refer at all to the period from 4 June 1989 to the fourteenth congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in October 1992. The Chinese media and, more importantly, economic analyses produced in Chinese academic circles presented the economic reforms as a ‘long quiet river’. The reality is, however, very far removed from this non-conflictual, teleological, linear presentation. The political crisis produced by the student movement of spring 1989 and the collapse of the USSR had a profound impact on the direction of the economic reforms and the structuring of Chinese capitalism. Admittedly, a number of adjustment measures to the reforms put in place after 4 June 1989 would certainly have had to be adopted, even if the reformers had won out. And yet, other choices could have been preferred by the Chinese leaders. Those advocated, for example, by the former general secretary of the CCP; Zhao Zi-yang 1 in the autumn of 1987 at the thirteenth congress of the CCP hinted at a different line of development from that taken from summer 1989 onwards. 2 This is also the line argued by the MIT-based Chinese economist Huang Yasheng in a recent book analyzing the discontinuities between the 1980s and 1990s in terms of the political orientations of economic reforms. 3 In other words, the analysis of the impact of this period on the decisions taken by the leaders with regard to economic reform seems crucial for understanding the current face of Chinese capitalism.
