ABSTRACT
China's Communist Party-managed move to "market socialism" or to "socialism with Chinese characteristics," as different slogans put it, has made China a clearly more unequal place. Nationwide, the gaps between the richest and the poorest and between the incomes of rural dwellers and urban residents have continued to increase, accompanied by the simultaneous townization and urbanization of the society as a whole. This is the norm for the poor and developing countries of the world, where urbanization "is characterized by uneven growth and inequality." "A raw, unadulterated laissez-faire capitalism," has emerged in this reform-era China, in the words of one perceptive researcher. With the state removed from micro-management of the economy, the harsh economic calculus of early capitalism dominates much of the new political economy of reform China, and nowhere more than in those firms newly tied to the international economy, such as those in the Special Economic Zones.
