Contemporary Chinese Politics in Historical Perspective

Front Cover
Brantly Womack
Cambridge University Press, 1991 M11 29 - 334 pages
Few countries have had more turbulent politics in the twentieth century than China. Although China's unprecedented stability and prosperity in the 1980s gave hope that such turbulence was at an end, the crises of Tiananmen, culminating in the massacre of June 4, 1989, proved that the turbulence continues. Here, eight distinguished China specialists provide broad-gauged, original essays that attempt to explain the dynamics of contemporary Chinese politics by analyzing the preceding patterns of development. Some of the essays focus on the most basic issues of the historical development of Chinese politics while other essays focus on developments in important policy areas since 1949. The book concludes with a penetrating analysis of the Tiananmen events by Tang Tsou, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Together, the essays detail the weight of the past on Chinese politics, but also the long-term developments that prevent the simple recurrence of previous patterns.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
From revolutionary cadres to bureaucratic
12
The Dengist reforms in historical perspective
23
public authority
53
A bourgeois alternative? The Shanghai
90
The contradictions of grassroots participation
129
technocrats
180
Chinas search for its place in the world
209
the statesociety
265
Index
329
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