Citation:
Date Presented:
February 8, 2013Abstract:
My senior thesis in the History Department reassesses Chinese economic reforms and the crystallization of China's "socialist market economy" in the period 1978-1993 from a new global perspective. In particular, I am studying the ways in which economists from Europe and North America influenced the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) economic thinking and reform policy-making in this period. I argue that this little-known aspect of China’s reform process, which has been largely written out of the dominant narratives of the period, in fact played an important role in the development of both ideology and policy. I give particular attention to the Bashanlun Conference, a September 1985 event organized by the World Bank, which brought a high-level group including James Tobin and János Kornai for an influential week of meetings with top Chinese economists and policy makers on a cruise ship sailing down the Yangtze River. I am also examining visits to China in this period by Ota Sik, Wlodzimierz Brus, and Milton Friedman, with particular attention not only to the ideas discussed on these visits, but also to the political, ideological, and economic context for these ideas’ reception in China. Based on documentary and archival research, including banned writings on Western economic texts and economists’ personal papers, as well as interviews conducted in the summer of 2012, I hope to add to our understandings of how Chinese economic policymakers engaged with international ideas as they managed China’s uniquely successful socialist transition, shedding new light on the CCP leadership’s gradual renegotiation of the boundaries between state and market in this crucial fifteen-year period.