Competing "Policy Packages" in Post-Mao China

Abstract

In the era of Deng Xiaoping, breathtaking changes have opened up the Chinese economy, diversified the culture, and stabilized the polity. Chinese society now seems more familiar and predictable than one decade ago. And yet, a review even in broad outline of post-Mao politics reveals ongoing disputes and abrupt shifts in the balance of influence among groups at the top that testify to much continuity in the political system. Changes in the basic political institutions and the process whereby power is exercised have been more marginal than fundamental thus far. The factionalism at the heart of Chinese politics persists, although the Cultural Revolution strengthened the motivation for keeping disagreement in-house and nonviolent. While the Cultural Revolution years provided powerful negative examples of how not to resolve China's problems, those problems in the meantime persisted and grew: the enormous press of uncontrolled population on a stagnant economy, the lack of discipline among cadre and workers, the near immunity of the populace to moral exhortation, the dearth of educated and experienced technocrats to replace the aging revolutionary leadership, lack of experience in international interchange, and so on. In addressing such challenging problems, Chinese leaders have found some ideas useful from the past or from abroad, but they have been frustrated in efforts to adopt or construct a model fully effective in the current situation. In the course of much experimentation over the past eight years, there have emerged three distinctive sets of solutions or policy packages, as such sets were termed by several scholars of Chinese politics in the