"Tsou, one of the country's senior and most widely respected China scholars, has for more than a generation been producing timely and deeply informed essays on Chinese politics as it develops. Eight of these (from a wide variety of sources) are gathered here with a substantial new introduction. Tsou considers events not simply from the point of view of a widely read political scientist (even political philosopher) and a concerned Chinese, but also in the light of history, the dynamics of Marxism-Leninism, individual personalities, and humane realism."—Charles W. Hayford, Library Journal

China's bold program of reforms launched in the late 1970s--the move to a market economy and the opening to the outside world--ended the political chaos and economic stagnation of the Cultural Revolution and sparked China's unprecedented economic boom. Yet, while the reforms made possible a rising standard of living for the majority of China's population, they came at the cost of a weakening central government, increasing inequalities, and fragmenting society. The essays of Barry Naughton, Joseph Fewsmith, Paul H. B. Godwin, Murray Scot Tanner, Lianjiang Li and Kevin J. O'Brien, Tianjian Shi, Martin King Whyte, Thomas P. Bernstein, Dorothy J. Solinger, David S. G. Goodman, Kristen Parris, Merle Goldman, Elizabeth J. Perry, and Richard Baum and Alexei Shevchenko analyze the contradictory impact of China's economic reforms on its political system and social structure. They explore the changing patterns of the relationship between state and society that may have more profound significance for China than all the revolutionary movements that have convulsed it through most of the twentieth century.

"In December 1978 the Chinese Communist Party announced dramatic changes in policy for both agriculture and industry that seemed to repudiate the Maoist “road to socialism” in favor of certain “capitalist” tendencies. The motives behind these changes, the nature of the reforms, and their effects upon the economy and political life of countryside and city are here analyzed by five political scientists and five economists. Their assessments of ongoing efforts to implement the new policies provide a timely survey of what is currently happening in China. Part One delineates the content of agricultural reforms—including decollectivization and the provisions for households to realize private profits—and examines their impact on production, marketing, peasant income, family planning, local leadership, and rural violence. Part Two examines the evolution of industrial reforms, centering on enterprise profit retention, and their impact on political conflict, resource allocation, investment, material and financial flows, industrial structure, and composition of output. Through all ten chapters one theme is conspicuous—the multiple interactions between politics and economics in China’s new directions since the Cultural Revolution."

The decade of the 1980s began in China with great expectations of the societal benefits of modernisation, and ended with gunfire in Tiananmen Square. This book, first published in 1991, presents essays that explore the political and economic reform policies that emerged in post-Mao China under Deng Xiaoping. In general, they conclude that the advent of partial marketization and structural reform tended to magnify structural contradictions rather than solve them.

Since the death of Mao, China has entered a new period in its development. Turning away from the all-encompassing emphasis on revolutionary struggle and ideological transformation that characterized the last years of the Maoist era, China's leaders under Deng Xiaoping have initiated dramatic new reform and development policies. In original essays, the contributors, all senior specialists on contemporary China, analyze the reasons for the new policies, the nature and impact of the changes now occurring, and the prospects for a continuation of these policies in the future. Specifically, they examine the Chinese polity as a "consultative authoritarian" system, the farreaching changes in China's agriculture, important shifts in foreign economic relations, the gradual modernization policy pursued by its military leaders, the relaxation of controls on cultural life, and the possibility that current social policies may well increase equality rather than inequality in Chinese society. The authors conclude that it is too early to judge the eventual, long-term outcome of current reforms, which they believe grew out of the political crises and chronic economic problems that afflicted China in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although they see some opposition and built-in limits to reform, on balance they foresee strong support for continued reform and believe it will be difficult for future leaders to reverse course.

China has, since 1976, been enmeshed in an extraordinary program of renewal and reform. The obvious changes—the T-shirts, blue jeans, makeup and jewelry worn by Chinese youth; the disco music blaring from radios and loudspeakers on Chinese streets; the television antennas mushrooming from both urban apartment complexes and suburban peasant housing; the bustling free markets selling meat, vegetables and clothing in China's major cities—reflect a fundamental shift in the government's policy toward the economy and political life. Although doubts about the long-term commitment to reform arose after the student protests in December 1986 and the dismissal of Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang in January 1987, the scope of reform has been so broad and the pace of change so rapid, that the post-Mao era fully warrants Den Xiaoping's description of it as the "second revolution" undertaken by the Chinese Communist Party.

This book provides an alternative analytical approach to the study of China's political changes since the Cultural Revolution, which treats those changes as a transition from totalitarianism to authoritarianism. While depicting important political-economic events, it focuses on the changes in such major sociopolitical factors as the people's attitude toward the regime, government policy, the ruling methods of the regime, and the interrelationships among them. Based on the analyses of these factors, the book also predicts the future of the current Communist regime in terms of the challenges it will face and its ability to meet them.

Chinese literature has been the slave of politics at least since 1948 and especially during the Cultural Revolution. So repressed and convoluted is most Chinese literature that the West cannot read it as literature at all but rather as sociological and political texts. Professor Duke believes this has changed enough since 1977 to permit genuine literary analysis. This book surveys and analyzes the most important literary events in the PRC from 1977 to 1982. Chapter I covers the significant changes in the Chinese Party line on literature and art during this period and thus provides the backdrop for literary and artistic endeavor. Subsequent chapters deal with the critique of Chinese literature by China's own writers, the neo-realistic fiction of 1979-80, the nonfiction works of a courageous investigative reporter for the People's Daily, and the theme of humanism and its treatment in the works of Bai Hua and Dai Houying. The final chapter discusses the post-Mao generation of young writers, who are trying to create works that go beyond narrowly ideological boundaries of the past and reach toward a true modern Chinese literature.

A guide to China since the death of Mao Zedong, explaining and assessing the political conficts and developments of the post-Mao era and the dramatic economic transformations launched by the new leadership. International relations, education, health and literary revival are also considered.

Since the Cultural Revolution, data have been uncovered to illuminate that tumultuous decade. In this volume 13 scholars examine the gap between the ideology of the Revolution and the harsh and contradictory reality of its outcome. They focus particularly on the violence, coercion, and constant tension between the need for centralization to enforce policies and the need for decentralizing decision-making if those goals were to be achieved.