Admission of the “primary stage of socialism” and the counterelite's two developmental models

Abstract

This chapter covers the eve of the 1989 Spring Democracy Movement. In late 1987, party chief Zhao Ziyang at the Thirteenth Party Congress announced that China was still in the “primary stage of socialism” and urged the party-state bureaucracy to be more tolerant of economic and social practices that were conventionally regarded as nonsocialist. The theory of the “primary stage of socialism” was used to justify the economic reforms that had introduced many semicapitalist methods into China's economy. In the counterelite's interpretation, Zhao's announcement was a shy admission of the impracticability of socialism in China. In the relaxed political climate following this announcement, the counterelite began openly debating the best way to end communism in China, which resulted in two competing programs: “enlightened despotism” and “liberal democracy.”