During the 1980s, bracketed by the Third Plenum in 1978 and the suppression of the democracy movement in 1989, China edged, step by step, away from the orthodoxies of the Cultural Revolution, and each reversal excited a certain amount of commentary both within and without China. As time passed, and the list of reintroduced institutions and practices grew ever longer, habituation reduced the surprise of succeeding announcements. But the reintroduction of advertising, a cental totem of advanced capitalist culture, occupied a particularly significant place on the list because its reappearance in China forced the Chinese to reconsider distinctions that had formerly been drawn between capitalist and socialist societies. For most of its history, the People's Republic had castigated advertising as the apotheosis of the capitalist religion of consumption. This was especially so in the late 1960s during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Afterwards few commercial billboards or newspaper advertisements interrupted the skein of relentlessly political messages that crossed public space. When advertising was officially reintroduced in 1979, and its sanctioned scope expanded beyond industrial goods, the state faced a daunting ideological task: rebuilding a case for advertising in a socialist system that had long defined itself as one that did not need commercial exhortation. In essence, it had to sell the legitimacy of selling.

Although scholars have examined the struggle between Mao Zedong and the Internationalists associated with Wang Ming and Bo Gu for control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in some detail, they have ignored the final battle between the two groups. That confrontation did not take place in the Central Committee or at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945. Rather, new source materials from the People's Republic and a close reading of the newspaper itself show that it took place in the Party's primary propaganda organ, the Liberation Daily (Jiefang ribao).

One of the central concerns in a study of the political economy of reforms in China is to determine the factors that affect the pace and the direction of reforms and to see if the objectives of the reformers can be obtained within a realistic time period. In the current literature on the political economy of reforms, much attention has been focused upon the orientation, decisions and interests of the Chinese top and regional leadership and central economic bureaucracies. For example, Harry Harding, in his recent book, has written extensively about the debates that took place between the moderate and radical reformers within the Chinese leadership on the two contrasting approaches to speeding up economic growth. On local governments and economic bureaucracies, much attention is paid to the conflicts of interest between the centre and the locality, and between different bureaucracies. Christine Wong has argued that with the substantial gain in allocation power, local governments are able to behave in ways detrimental to central objectives. Dorothy Solinger and Susan Shirk have described different ministerial responses to inflation control measures and reform initiatives.