From the mid-1950s right through the late 1970s jobs in urban China were largely treated as a welfare benefit; life-time employment was the norm and there was neither a buyer's market nor a seller's market for labour. In the state sector hiring was done on the basis of annual quotas established by national level ministries which in turn allocated openings to subordinate offices and factories within each bureaucratic chain of command. For those entering the labour force for the first time, job seeking was defined as “waiting for an assignment” (dai ye) and placement was usually handled within secondary schools by classroom teachers. For those already employed by a state unit, moving to a new employer was a “transfer” (or diao dong) and required appeals to at least two supervisory levels within the firm, and then approval from the administrative supervisors for both new and old employers. For CCP members there were additional sanctioning bodies in the Party hierarchy.

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, Beijing has engaged in foreign arms transfers. Transfers during the early period went almost unnoticed because they were on a very small scale, were almost invariably gratis, and had little or no impact on the world's arms trade. This low profile changed during the 1980s as China became one of the world's major arms dealers. Beijing estimates that income from arms exports is about US$1.34 billion annually, but other sources estimate that it is over US$2 billion. This dramatic increase attracted attention in October 1987 when Chinese Silkworm missiles fired from Iran badly damaged oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, including American-reflagged Kuwaiti tankers. Only then did the international community recognize that China had become a major arms supplier to the Third World.

The 14th Party Congress heralded a victory for Deng Xiaoping's programme of rapid economic transformation accompanied by tight political control. His name and policies were lauded in Jiang Zemin's “Work Report” to the Congress and the theory of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” became the cornerstone of the revised Party Constitution. The overhaul of leading personnel has provided a clear Politburo majority in favour of the increasing marketization of China's economy. Thus, the Party has created perhaps one last chance to position itself at the forefront of reform rather than appearing as an antique body engaged in increasingly irrelevant ideological polemics.x Whether it will be able to ride this newly re-released tiger of economic reform will depend on its capacity to deal with the social and political consequences of its strategy, many of which will be unpredictable. In essence, the easy part of reform was completed in the 1980s and the difficult stage will now begin. Citizens will be hit as rents and pricesrise, and the state will have to offer employment or welfare to those who lose their jobs if enterprises are forced to become genuinely efficient. It will take a trustworthy, competent and imaginative leadership to sell this programme to the Chinese people, a task made even harder by the credibility gap that has widened enormously in recent years. The mandate for change is there, but whether it will be exploited effectively remains to be seen. Past experience suggests that despite the commitment to bold changes, the Party will slow down the pace of reform once it senses potential unrest.

This article uses the 14 stories from “Strange Tales from Strange Lands” (Yixiang yiwen) by Zheng Wanlong to discuss the problematic relationship between depictions of primitivism and the search for essential Chineseness within what has become known as “root-seeking literature” (xungen wenxue). It shows that the dichotomous relationship between primitivism and Han civilization presented by Zheng reflects an alienated notion of essential Chineseness and human existence. Since Mao's death, Chinese intellectuals have expressed concern about the emergence of a “faith crisis” and described younger people as the “lost generation.” The article reveals that one stream of root-seeking literature, in its attempts to mitigate this crisis, has instead reflected and indeed perpetuated it.

Many scholars have analysed bargaining between supervisory bureaucracies and Chinese large and medium-sized factories. Walder identified a web of informal, semi-bureaucratic relationships that structures negotiations over revenues, payments and subsidies. Granick and Tidrick pointed out that divided bureaucratic control increases the parties to bargaining, while conflicting interests present opportunities to play supervisors off against each other. Huang found collusive behaviour that occurs when local government agencies and firms rob the state treasury by increasing central subsidies and reducing central exactions in exchange for fees that go directly to local coffers. Numerous authors have noted that the focus of bargaining has shifted from material to financial transfers and have used (or questioned using) Kornai's “soft budget constraint” to explain the persistence of bargaining since the onset of reform.