ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains that reform campaign which was launched at the end of the 1970s with the contracting of agricultural production to households and the subsequent dissolution of the communes in the countryside, modest experiments in enterprise autonomy in the cities, the legitimation of petty private sectoral trading and a sudden surge in China's participation in the global economy. The use of market mechanisms to supplement the state plan that lay at the core of these initiatives seemed to promise that the country had embarked on a process that would result in China's economic system eventually evolving into one in which the plan had been totally overtaken by the market. The book demonstrates that capitalism, when it emerges, will be distinctive. It does so by documenting the specific content of capitalistic measures undertaken in China's urban economic reforms of the 1980s.
