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In January 1935, three months after the epic Long March was under way, the Chinese Communists captured the second largest city in Guizhou province, Zunyi, and held an enlarged Politburo conference there. The importance of the Zunyi Conference in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history and, particularly, in the late Chairman Mao Zedong's political career has aroused the interest of both Chinese and western scholars; their reflections on this episode have in turn greatly enhanced its importance, perhaps too much so.
According to recent accounts of Chinese economic reforms since the fall of the “gang of four,” many changes have taken place in how. industrial enterprises operate. “Responsibility” systems have now been introduced. Enterprises are now accountable for their profits, and losses, starting first with “experimental” plants, parallel to similar changes in the agricultural sector, and in late 1984 generalized to the urban economy.
The orthodoxy of the day is that Chinese politics is now pragmatic. The China that was once the ultimate in ideological politics in both the intensity of her passions and the follies of her principles has vanished as by the wave of a conjurer's hand. The primacy of ideology, the hallmark of Chinese Communism under Chairman Mao Zedong, has been replaced by the no-nonsense philosophy of Deng Xiaoping who does not care about the “colour of the cat” so long as it catches “the mice.” With near unanimity scholars of contemporary China welcome the change. It promises not only liberation for the Chinese people from the heavy hand of doctrinal politics but also the prospect that analysis of Chinese developments can emerge from the realm of murky esoteric interpretation into the fresh air of reasoned policy evaluation.