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The Deng XiaopingEra: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism 1978-1994, by Maurice Meisner. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. $30.00. Pp. xiv, 544.
Meisner dismisses as illusion the conviction of some foreign commentators that the turn to capitalism is certain to have a loosening, even liberalizing effect on China's hard politics. In his view, Chinese capitalism requires a political dictatorship prepared to be brutal. He observes that the bureaucracy has become the essence of the new bourgeoisie, its capital seized by corruption; that China's chief asset in competing in the global market, and in particular with other Asian economies, is cheaper labor; and that cheaper labor is necessary also to maximize the surplus extracted from it which provides most of the capital needed to maintain the heady growth rate. The regime has to hone its coercive capabilities. So Meisner calls the Chinese present bureaucratic capitalism.
He cites supporting evidence in the past, in particular the 1989 events. What began that summer as a student protest movement was soon joined by scores of thousands of Beijing workers, some of them organized into three new unions that challenged the Party-run unions. Delegations from the major factories marched with the students and one of the new unions had a headquarters tent at Tiananmen, but the underreported outpouring of workers took on the temporarily successful task, away from the square and the television crews, of constructing barricades at intersections to keep troops from penetrating a city in revolt. What took place in Beijing had smaller replications elsewhere in China. The regime was seized by what Meisner calls...