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By contrast, in putting economic reform first (and last), the Chinese leadership focused on reducing the burdens of the state, breaking without any compunction the moral-political promises of the People’s Republic to its labouring classes and to society as a whole. Well before the inflation of 1988…

[...] The pivotal significance of Tiananmen, I would argue, lay in this: it relieved the burden of debt that Deng had owed to popular support since 1976. He could now proceed with a programme of reform that would pose no challenge to the party’s authority—especially not on the terrain of socialist …

Under the new leadership and its bureaucratically minimalist conception of ‘political reform’, a fast track was given to a bankruptcy law and a series of regulations to reduce the economic burden on SOEs by changing life-time job security in a planned economy to contract employment in a labour mark…

The change also left rural land ownership in a morass.

Socialist democracy, or people’s democracy, means that all of the people, enjoying various forms of ownership and usufruct of the means of production, have the overriding right to administer the state.