Introduction

Abstract

An Industrial Revolution is occurring in the world’s most populous nation, China. It has been a sustained process of economic reform and opening to the outside world that began in 1978. This process has evolved its own distinctive features and generated long-term political implications for China and beyond. China’s reform has been controversial partly because of its unique style. Following the dramatic change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, there emerged a virtual consensus among politicians and scholars about how communist economies should be transformed: there must be a speedy elimination of the communist legacy (characterized by omnipresent political control and central planning), accompanied by economic liberalization, stabilization, and privatization to free all economic actors and rapidly transform the old political and economic system.