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 market. The ensuing sense of insecurity in urban population centres was then intensified by the abolition of price controls on a range of goods which, in an economy already overheating, pushed the rate of inflation to nearly twenty per cent, causing widespread panic and withdrawals from state banks. Zhao’s government wanted to convince the party and the public that the price adjustment of 1988 was urgently needed. But in looking at the benefits the changes would bring, it paid little attention to their costs or to where the burden would fall. Urban residents who bore the immediate brunt had every reason to feel they had been denied any political say in the reform process. The economic crisis of 1988 would become a major factor in popular sympathy for the Tiananmen protests a year later.