4 - The Vicissitudes of a Crippled Reform

Summary

With the end of the Cultural Revolution and the downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976, China entered the “Golden Age” of reform, which ended tragically within a decade in 1989. Deng’s Southern Tour launched economic reforms without its political counterpart, and created huge interest groups that have benefited from the authoritarian system, further hindering political reform. The Initiative for Building Consensus on Reform advocated comprehensive constitutional reforms to be taken for China to return to healthy economic development. Without political reform that makes the ruler accountable to the ruled, no matter how much freedom, wealth or half-baked rule of law enjoyed by the ruled, it can be taken away from them overnight, as the zero-Covid policy showed in 2020– 22.