Krzysztof Gawlikowski - The Nature and Dynamics of Deng Xiaoping's Reforms (original) (raw)

R/evolutions: Global Trends & Regional Issues, Vol 1, Issue 1, June 2013, pp. 202-233

Deng’s reforms resulted in a fundamental change to the millenary Chinese civilization: from a backward, predominately agrarian to a modern and industrial one. On the other hand, China entered a period of the most dramatic and massive westernization in her history, that uprooted many of her native traditions. These processes are related to unprecedented urbanization, a technological jump and enormous increase of well-being combined with consumerist ideology, borrowed from the West. China, previously known for her isolationist policy (symbolized by the Great Wall), became a pioneer of globalization, whereas her rise to the rang of the global power, the main partner of the US, changed the entire world architecture and resulted in significant weakening of the political and cultural domination of the West, lasting for several centuries. Now various non-western cultures demand equal treatment and respect. Thus the world entered a new phase of its history. These fundamental changes were combined in China with a particular course of the post-Communist transformation: from the planned economy, commanded by the Party-state, to market economy with private ownership, although the state still plays a significant role in economy (as in other East Asian states). In the political sphere China jumped from the Maoist “barrack Communism” and ideological-moralistic state of the Confucian type to an anarchic authoritarian system, with an unprecedented increase of individual freedoms in everyday life. The Communist Party still rules the country, but her nature had been essentially changed, the Communist-Maoist ideology had been substituted by nationalistic concepts of the “rejuvenation of Chinese nation”, elaborated by the greatest nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925). China also adopts the Western concept and the system of the rule of law, democracy and human rights challenging her native traditions of the last three millennia, although she changes these adopted foreign concepts as she has been done before with Buddhism and Marxism. The dissolution of the Maoist peoples’ communes, the most fundamental political and economic change, had been carried out by the peasants, against the initial will of the leaders. Other ideological and political changes have also been made under the tremendous and open pressure by the people, and civil society plays an increasing role there; Hence the term ‘Deng Xiaoping’s reforms’ is to a certain extent misleading.