Riding the Tiger: The Politics of Economic Reform in Post-Mao China

This book presents an analysis of the political motives and pressures behind China’s market-oriented economic reforms, the politics of the reform policy process and the impact of economic changes on China’s ruling ideology, political and governmental system and state-society relations. The thesis is that the project of market socialism may well be inherently self-contradictory and self-defeating and, from the point of view of the ruling elite at least, creates more political problems than it solves.