Neoconservatism and the End of the Dengist Era

Abstract

The sense that the Dengist era is coming to an end in China is not limited to the prospect of Deng Xiaoping's imminent death, an event that appears all the closer with Xiao Rong's public disclosure that her father can no longer walk. Indeed, in many ways the Deng Xiaoping era and the period's central struggle between reformers and conservatives came to a close with the crackdown in 1989. Since then, an uncertain period of transition has seen the old conservative-reformer dynamic accompanied and gradually superseded by new and more complex tensions over how to manage the consequences of reform while guiding the process of marketization. Indeed, in this post-Tiananmen era, the question is not so much whether to reform as to how to hold on in the face of reform. Reforms have brought tremendous benefits to China but the costs and dislocations are not negligible. The rural riots of 1992 and 1993 underscored the continuing and, in some areas, worsening problems in the agricultural sector. Although the riots clearly caught the attention of the leadership, the central government lacks the resources to address the problems of the countryside in a fundamental way. As a result, the income gap between the interior and the coast will inevitably increase, and growing numbers of peasants will seek their livelihood by migrating to the already overcrowded cities. At the same time, the decline in state-owned enterprises appears to be reaching a crisis point at which a choice will have to be made between large-scale layoffs and mounting state subsidies. Moreover, social issues such as crime and corruption appear to be eating ever more deeply into China's social fabric. The decline of ideology has accompanied reform from the beginning but Tiananmen exposed the loss of faith, and the search for some unifying system of belief seems to have intensified since then.