Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Ten years have now passed since the calamitous year of 1976, when Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Mao Zedong all died, Deng Xiaoping fell for the second time, and the Gang of Four went down once and for all. The of sweeping reform that followed that watershed year has been as momentous as the Cultural Revolution decade which preceded it. The question now is how profoundly this period of reform has altered Chinese politics. The books reviewed in this article represent the first wave of scholarship to come to grips with this question. They offer a composite portrait of postreform politics in China. This portrait, which I will examine in this review, reveals a shift in the locus of state power that has profited certain social groups and harmed others; it also shows the extent to which ideology, law, and democracy now mediate state power. In addition, the books under review adopt distinctive methods for analyzing the unprecedented flow of information from China since 1976, inviting an appraisal of which approaches are most telling in the new conditions for research.
Kelliher et al. (Tue,) studied this question.