ABSTRACT
The Conclusion recapitulates the core of China’s two competing reform paradigms. China’s reform economists agreed on the need for marketization, but they clashed over how to move forward. The quintessentially neoliberal shock therapy view held that the most desirable future model—and the means of establishing it—could be derived from neoclassical economic theory and had to involve a universalization of the market. The gradualists acknowledged an unknowability of both the desired future economy as well as the path to get there. From this viewpoint, the mechanism of reform and the specifics of the new system had to be worked out through experimentation, wherein the state participated in and created the market while retaining control over the core of the system. China’s market reform debate ground to a halt in 1989. When China restarted marketization in 1992, most gradualist reformers had been exiled or had disappeared from policy-making, since they had stood loyal with Zhao Ziyang. The 1990s brought major victories for neoliberals in China. Yet, the basic mode of gradual, experimentalist marketization had been set in the 1980s. Although it was renegotiated, challenged, and amended in the subsequent decades, it was not overturned.
