Chinese checkers

National Review, May 22, 1987

Chinese Checkers

AS DENG XIAOPING ages, it has become clear thatthe modest--but implicitly revolutionary--reforms he has introduced are being resisted by what the Western media are pleased to call "conservatives," by which, in the Chinese context, they mean Stalinists, who want to return to the Soviet-style central planning of half a century ago.

In selected cities the reforms have been tiny butreal. In Shenyang, for example, we now see a regulated bond market and stock issues; some small shops and factories have been auctioned off; some poorly managed firms have been forced into bankruptcy; and there are plans to sell steel in the marketplace. At the same time, at the highest levels of government and Party, attachs are intensifying on "Western ideas," "bourgeois attitudes," and "money grubbing."

For Communist Party officialdom, the issue is astark one: Is the Party going to retain its monopoly on political and economic power? The possibility of a rival center or centers of economic power arising through market economics threatens that monopoly. The introduction of economic freedom of any sort is thus agonizingly difficult.

Whether Deng has taken two steps forward andwill be obliged to take only one step back remains to be seen.