ABSTRACT
This chapter undertakes precisely such a rethinking rather than viewing post-Mao reform as a reaction against the Cultural Revolution. It argues that the power-restructuring events of 1966-1976 established the political preconditions and created the structural context for the changes of the late 1970s and 1980s. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, the power and privileges of Chinese Communist officials expanded massively. The crucial act of Maoist power restructuring in fall 1966 and January 1967 was a historically unprecedented deconcentration of political power and suspension of control mechanisms. At the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee in December 1978, the theory and program of resurgent officialdom were confirmed and vindicated, and power-devolving processes already in motion were formalized and accelerated. While triggering an economic boom of historic proportions, the decentralized, material incentive logic of post-Mao reform also resulted in pervasive official corruption, localism, inflation, an erosion of central fiscal capacities, and widening developmental and social disparities.
