ABSTRACT
The economic forces released during China's ten-year reform made it impossible to push the country's economy back into the bird cage of the old planned economy. The market economy smashed the "ideological forbidden zone" that once upon a time had prohibited inquiry into whether an initiative was "in the nature of capitalism or socialism." And the continuing development of a market economy signaled a historic shift of focus from the central to the local economic level and from an economy managed by the state to one managed by the people. The historical progression in China since June Fourth indicates that after the reform forces at the center were smashed, local reform forces took up the slack and acted as a force to counterbalance the center. Such counterbalancing, in fact, prevented the "Jiang-Li structure" from using "administrative rectification and readjustment" in 1989-1990 to pull the Chinese economy back from the market to a more centrally planned system.
