ABSTRACT
Choice and duty Having portrayed the reforms and their effects as inevitable, participants in the debate identified the humanist’s response to ‘change’ as the issue at stake. They realised the regime had jettisoned the intentions of political reform of the 1980s and adopted a combination of political conservation and economic laissezfaire. They saw urban culture being reshaped by consumerism and the rise of a business-oriented mentality in antithesis to their values and hopes. While society ‘marketised’ and ‘secularised’, they remained subject to the Party’s ideological supervision.
