The Post-Mao Reforms in Historical Perspective

Abstract

Academic writing on the post-Mao reforms—as indeed on almost every other aspect of China since 1949—has been largely in the hands of social scientists. Much of this writing, moreover, has been done either explicitly or implicitly from a systemic perspective. That is, it seeks to understand the reform process as unfolding within a particular kind of social, economic, and political system and to infer from other reform attempts in comparable systems something about the course the Chinese reforms are likely to take. When Chalmers Johnson (1982) applies the “Leninist government paradigm” to the Chinese case and makes certain observations about the potential for “peaceful structural change” within societies that conform to this paradigm, he is operating from the systemic perspective.