State, Bureaucracy and Reform
CHINESE SOCIALISM: STATE, BUREAUCRACY AND REFORM Roland Lew Everyone knows that things are changing in China, and that they have been changing for some time: ever since Mao went to join Marx, to use his own expression, in September 1976. Two years later, China embarked upon a reformist phase which also signalled a broad process of 'de-Maoification'. More recently, the sudden chill in the internal conjuncture has led observers to wonder if reforms in China can have any lasting effect, and whether the appearance of Maoist gestures might not prefigure a return to a period of sinister repute. At a deeper and more fundamental level, the People's Republic of China, like the other Eastern bloc countries, experienced, and is still experiencing, a desire for reform, for economic and even for self-reform on the part of the system. It some- times seems that even the reforms are in need of reform. Is this a real transformation or an illusion? Whatever the answer to that question, the movement towards change appears to be irresistible. But why are reforms necessary? And what is to be reformed? What type of changes should be introduced? Economic modernization? China's four great modernizations? But, as a number of oppositionists and, more discreetly, certain figures in the regime point out, the fifth modernization must not be forgotten: democracy, political change. Whilst the stated objectives of the reforms are not always entirely clear, which must reflect tensions and uncertainities within society and especially within the ruling elite, alternatives to the official version of reform are also far from being as clear as one might wish.
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