ABSTRACT
China’s spectacular changes in its global economic presence over the last ten years have attracted much attention to the fundamental policy changes behind this phenomenon. These have transformed China from a closed country, separated from the global economic (and political) community, with images of Mao’s army of uniformed peasants in communes dominating the public images in the West. Since the 1980s, however, China has increasingly opened its borders, albeit geographically selectively, and embraced western culture and, especially, capital. The repatriation of the symbol of successful free trade, Hong Kong, in 1997, and its continued existence as a clearly separate entity and political-economic system, highlights China’s attempt at maintaining a balance between the communist ‘old’ and embracing, albeit carefully, the capitalist ‘new’. It is this strategy of riding two horses simultaneously that has, over the last 20 or so years, characterised China’s post-Maoist (economic) transformation. The underlying new policy has sought to carefully introduce marketisation, while maintaining strict political control of a one-party state, including the rhetoric of communist values of Mao Zedong Thought and its political morals.
