Workers Democracy In China S Transition From State Socialism

This fascinating book is among the first to examine state workers’ protests against privatization in China. Philion discusses how Chinese state enterprise workers have engaged a discourse of ‘workers democracy’ in the process of struggle with the new social relations of work that are engendered by privatization oriented policies in China today. By the 1990s, this discourse was being deployed by the state in an effort to minimize the social obligations of the Party and enterprise to state workers and to win the latter over to faith in markets. Philion reveals that Chinese workers have recently engaged this discourse in order to do something they never envisioned having to do: fight for what Chinese state socialism had always promised them as the ‘masters of the factory’, namely the right to a job and basic social security.

Exploring the transformation of state socialism through a comparative study of the reform experiences of China and Hungary, this book focuses on the relationship between economic and political change. Despite following parallel paths through much of the reform period, China and Hungary diverged drastically in 1989, when Hungary installed a democratic political system while China used brutal military force to suppress political dissent. After tracing common political, economic, and ideological dimensions, Yanqi Tong explains the dramatically different outcomes in the two countries. She identifies key differences in the social costs of economic reform, the international setting, strategies pursued by the establishment and its opponents, and the coalitions formed by political elites. Tong also argues that developments since 1989 demonstrate that the end of conventional state socialism has guaranteed neither stability, democracy, nor prosperity as powerful legacies from both the communist and reform eras thwart the development of healthy political and economic systems.

A significant contribution to both political theory and China studies, this volume provides a critical assessment of the past and future Chinese socialism.

This study aims to fill the gap in the existing literature on China's Democratic development, by presenting a comprehensive and detailed examination of the key factors that have created and sustained state domination over society in China.

As recent events in the Far East have demonstrated, China is a nation that is in the midst of a massive social and political upheaval. The Chinese leadership is as uncertain as the populace on the future course for modern China, and remains dramatically split over capitalism and communism, pragmatism and realism, and democracy and despotism. In this work, Ronald Glassman analyzes the remarkable changes that are occurring in China, and examines the country's difficult movement from state-run economics to free enterprise, and from Communist Party dictatorship to electoral democracy. The book focuses on the emergence of a modern middle class in China, illuminating their political and economic desires and their impact in a postcommunist society. Glassman provides a Weberian analysis of the recent radical changes, using the concepts of rationalization, the bureaucratic middle strata, the greater degree of efficiency of capitalism over socialism, the independent power of the state, and charismatic leadership to help explain China's transition to modernity. His study is divided into four sections, covering the majority middle class and democracy, free enterprise and democracy, the transition to a legal democratic state, and political culture, legitimacy, and charisma. The book concludes with the thesis that China will make the transition to democracy when the new generation of leaders comes to power and the middle class becomes the mediating stratum. Students of sociology, political science, and Chinese history will find this work to be a valuable resource, as will both public and academic libraries.

Analysing the transformations that China has undertaken since 1989, Wang Hui argues that it features elements of the new global order as a whole in which considerations of economic growth and development have trumped every other concern, particularly democracy and social justice.

How China Became Capitalist details the extraordinary, and often unanticipated, journey that China has taken over the past thirty five years in transforming itself from a closed agrarian socialist economy to an indomitable economic force in the international arena. The authors revitalise the debate around the rise of the Chinese economy through the use of primary sources, persuasively arguing that the reforms implemented by the Chinese leaders did not represent a concerted attempt to create a capitalist economy, and that it was 'marginal revolutions' that introduced the market and entrepreneurship back to China. Lessons from the West were guided by the traditional Chinese principle of 'seeking truth from facts'. By turning to capitalism, China re-embraced her own cultural roots. How China Became Capitalist challenges received wisdom about the future of the Chinese economy, warning that while China has enormous potential for further growth, the future is clouded by the government's monopoly of ideas and power. Coase and Wang argue that the development of a market for ideas which has a long and revered tradition in China would be integral in bringing about the Chinese dream of social harmony.