Philippine E-Journals

Economic Reform in China: From Mao to Markets

Jorge A. Composano

Discipline: Economics, History

 

Abstract:

First, there was the fall of the infamous Berlin Wall. Next, there was the collapse of the "Evil Empire," the Soviet Union's simultaneously triumphant and tumultuous shift to democracy and a free market economy.

 

In the latter part of the last decade, the old world order was drastically and rapidly overturned, changing political and economic equations and shifting global competition from the political and military arena to the much more complex and crucial battlefield of economics.

 

The changes have been so overwhelming and so utter that the message is clear for the few remaining bastions of communism: adapt or fail.

 

In the late 1980s, a new breeze began to stir the Communist People's Republic of China.