China After the 13th Congress

It is almost exactly a decade since the process of change in China initiated by Deng Xiaoping and his political and ideological supporters began to gather momentum. Formally speaking, the decisive break point was, of course, the holding of the Third Plenum in December 1978, but by the spring of that year the confrontation between the “Whateverists” and the supporters of the “practice criterion” had become open and acute.