What does the future hold for China’s economic transformation as its first ‘reformists’ fade from prominence?
After years of decision-making, retirements of market believers, such as Wu Jinglian, set to complicate China’s process of reinventing its economic model
In 1989, after Deng Xiaoping crushed the democracy movement in Beijing, it seemed that an age of liberal and pro-market experiments were over.
In the compound of Zhongnanhai, the walled community of the Chinese leadership, a small office with the task of studying how to dismantle China’s command economic system for a market-based one was closed down.
But unlike political reform advocates and researchers, who were later jailed or expelled by Deng, those involved in designing an overall market-based economic system in China, without challenging the absolute power of the Communist Party, were largely protected and assigned to other government jobs.
The market reform researchers in the late 1980s and early ’90s published many articles detailing their thoughts on the country’s economic future.
Many climbed China’s bureaucratic ladder over the following years, becoming Beijing’s most capable hands on economic, financial and monetary matters and wove their early views into state policies that fundamentally shaped the economic landscape of China and also the world.
They are known as China’s reformists, a vaguely defined group that played an instrumental role in framing the country’s “socialist market economy” – a hybrid of a free market economy and an authoritarian government.