Completing China's Move to the Market

Beginning in late 1978, by luck as much as design, China arrived at a strategy for market-oriented economic reform that combined substantial reform with rapid growth in GDP and exports. The sequencing of reform began with the ‘easy to reform’ sectors, agriculture and foreign trade, and then took up the more difficult task of reforming the large state-owned enterprises. With respect to agriculture, small-scale industry, and foreign investment, China found ways of introducing meaningful property rights into the increasingly marketized system. A partially unreformed financial system and inadequate autonomy of large state enterprises accounts, however, for the current stop-go nature of Chinese development.