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.

Chapter 5 gives an overview of the Chinese Communist Party’s many campaigns against corruption throughout its history up to 1990. As with Taiwan and South Korea in previous chapters, authoritarian anti-corruption success in China has depended on a strongly motivated leadership with discretionary power driving reforms and a capable party-state implementing them. This combination of factors allowed Chairman Mao’s Three Antis–Five Antis Campaign (1951–53) to curb corruption and help the new communist regime penetrate and reform China’s complex urban areas. However, the disastrous failure of the Great Leap Forward (1958–62) triggered a rise in bribe-taking and embezzlement, especially among rural cadres, and later campaigns under Mao aimed at controlling corruption ended in failure. After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping prioritized liberalizing economic reforms and proved unwilling to jeopardize these reforms by cracking down on the corruption that had come with them. The party leadership conducted a large-scale purge of allegedly corrupt officials to assuage public discontent after the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square, but it ultimately had little effect.