The Privatization of China

In the last 12 years under Deng Xiaoping China's agriculture and its economy have been transformed by reforms to encourage private enterprise and the pursuit of profit. This collection of essays looks critically at the implications and impact of these reforms.

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The reforms of the last twelve years have transformed China's rural economy, giving peasants control over some of their own produce and encouraging "private" enterprises at the village and township levels. But what has been achieved? This, the first critical appraisal of the reforms, shows that after an initial spurt of productivity and new wealth, alarming longer-term consequences are beginning to appear - growing landlessness, deepening inequality and above all, the destruction China's natural resources and of the collectively built infrastructure created by the revolution. It sheds new light on the discontent that culminated in the massacre in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, and ends with a gripping first-hand account of that watershed in recent Chinese history. William Hinton is an internationally renowned authority on Chinese agriculture and is himself a farmer. He is the author of the classics "Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village" and "Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village".