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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…

We have seen that the primary force driving the changes after Mao’s death was a reaction against the Cultural Revolution. Yet this was never presented as a revolt against socialism. In both official discourse and popular understanding, the Cultural Revolution was treated as socialism gone wrong. Ec…

[...] Since the dissolution of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, we have not seen any comparable movements of working-class political militancy. Labour protests have not disappeared, but their aims are usually limited: defending wage levels or social benefits, without any horizon of political t…