Institutional Boundaries, Structural Change, and Economic Reform in China

Is China on its way to becoming the first centrally planned economy to successfully navigate the transition to a market-based system under Communist auspices? Or have reforms permanently stalled at an inefficient juncture, halfway between the two worlds? Is general resource mobility in response to scarcity and demand becoming China's order of the day, or do the privileged positions of state industry and of those who populate its payrolls constitute insurmountable political-economic obstacles to change? In the pages that follow, these questions are examined from a variety of vantage points, with sometimes overlapping and sometimes divergent conclusions. The positions presented in this symposium range from that of Barry Naughton, who finds barriers to competition crumbling rapidly, to that of Calla Wiemer, who sees a conflict between market reform and entrenched distributional claims, to that of Hemming Christiansen, who sees the market in the reform era as actually strengthening the state and reinforcing the rural-urban divide. However, the authors share much common ground, and the discussion is more illuminating than it is heated.