Since Deng Xiaoping established himself as the paramount leader of the Chinese Communist Party CCP around , China has undergone waves of economic reforms, ranging from implementing the Household Responsibility System in agriculture to establishing Special Economic Zones, encouraging direct foreign investments and joint ventures, devolving economic planning power to local authorities and enterprises, experimenting various reforms to incentivize the management of state-owned enterprises SOE , and finally corporatizing and privatizing the SOE s in the late s and early s.
Politically, the reform era also saw significant changes in the inner workings of the party-state, most significantly the introduction of collective leadership and fixed tenure of top leaders, and the establishment of a legal system to accommodate the increasingly sophisticated economy and society, while the CCP strived to retain control of the entire political system.
This consensus, however, soon gave way to a profound divide among the intellectuals in the s and thereafter, as the reforms caused a myriad of problems, most strikingly the massive unemployment of SOE workers, polarization in wealth distribution, widening of regional gaps in development, and rampant corruption of government officials at all levels. In sharp contrast, liberal intellectuals called for further steps in privatizing the SOE s, integrating Chinese economy with the global market, establishing the rule of law, and making the decision-making process transparent and democratic as the true solutions to building a sustainable economy and sound political system.
The result was a juxtaposition of Maoist socialism and post-Mao reform in the writings of the politically divided intellectuals, who either called for further steps of liberalization by rewriting the history of Maoist China in a completely dismissive tone or highlighted the downside and failures of the reforms by eulogizing the institutions and experiments of the Mao era.
Having lost interest in the ideologically driven writings on post China, the most innovative researchers in humanities and social sciences made efforts to rediscover the history of socialism and reform in China by shifting attention from macro political or economic systems to the operational realities of such systems at the micro level and investigating the everyday experiences of ordinary Chinese people who lived through the decades of political movements and economic reforms.
