Title: “Playing to the Provinces:” Deng Xiaoping's political strategy of economic reform
Abstract: The classical problem in marketizing a communist economy is how to create an effective political counterweight to the “center, ” the central Communist Party and gover’nment bureaucracy that has a strong vested interest in perpetuating central planning and that dominates policy-making in communist states. In the Soviet Union, Gorbachev decided that the only way to create such a counterweight was to open up the political arena to mass participation and political competition. It was a high-risk gamble, but he believed he had no other choice. As he said in 1987, “Restructuring will only spin its wheels unless the main actor-the people-is included in it in a thoroughgoing way In order to make restructuring irreversible and to prevent a repetition of what happened in the past, everything must be placed under the control-once again-of the people. There is only one way to accomplish these tasks-through the broad democratization of Soviet society.“’ Although Deng Xiaoping never publicly articulated his political strategy of economic reform, it is clear from the actions he took that he made a very different strategic calculation. He believed that he could use local officials as an effective political counterweight to the center without changing the old political rules of the game. He opted to retain the traditional communist bureaucratic polity, with only minor modifications such as the more frequent policy work conferences designed to enhance the voice of the provinces in bureaucratic policy-making. Why did Deng and his reformist allies decide to stick with the old authoritarian bureaucratic system? An important reason was that China’s central bureaucracy was less strong and less entrenched than that of the Soviet Union.? The Stalinist model of a centrally planned economy was transferred to China from the Soviet Union less than 40 years ago and was easier to uproot in China than in the land of its origin: 40 years is a brief stretch of time from the perspective of 2500 years of Chinese history. Moreover, during the period when the Soviet-style system reigned, central control over economic life was much less extensive and less effective than in the
Publication Year: 1990
Publication Date: 1990-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 35
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