Democratization and Economic Reform in China

Western analysis of contemporary China has habitually measured ongoing events in China by fashionable ideological standards. During the Cultural Revolution era, there was a tendency toward triumphalist celebration of the virtues of Maoist egalitarianism and mass mobilization; during the 1980s there was a similarly passionate embrace of the alleged virtues of the market; in the aftermath of the Beijing massacre of June 1989, all heads turned toward the virtues of democratization. In each of these three phases, the central virtue be it egalitarianism, the market or democracy has tended to be seen as a panacea for China's developmental ills. In each phase, the reigning paradigm has been so dominant that dissenters have tended to be seen as ignorant, unprincipled or disingenuous. After the Beijing massacre, this phenomenon recurred with unprecedented vehemence. Analyses of the Chinese political economy, both journalistic and scholarly, took on an intensely polemical tone: the Chinese Communist leaders were 'bad' and Stalinist, while the student activists of Tiananmen were 'good' and democratic. It was of course easy to agree and unthinkable to disagree without running the risk of being branded an apologist. One is reminded of the similarly polarized and ideologically super-charged Maoist Manicheism of the Cultural Revolution, albeit with a radically different political content. Since then, the ideological dust has settled somewhat and there has been a partial return to 'business as usual', at least as far as business is concerned. Particularly among intellectual and academic circles abroad, however, speedy democratization is still regarded as the key that will open all the doors to China's future well-being. I share many of the values and assumptions underlying this post-Tiananmen paradigm: the actions of the then leadership in June 1989 were criminal and their