A crucial element in China's modernization effort is the control of population growth. Months before the historic Third Plenum of the 11th Communist Party Congress in December 1978, the leadership decided that only a drastic limitation of fertility would ensure achievement of its economic goals for the year 2000. The policy to encourage all couples to limit themselves to one child was announced in January 1979. In September 1980 the Party Central Committee took the unusual step of publishing an “Open Letter” announcing a drastic programme of 20 to 30 years’ duration to restrict population growth, and calling on all Party and Youth League members to take the lead in having only one child. Thus was launched the world's most ambitious family-planning programme.

The purpose of this article is to compare and contrast China's approaches to regional industrial development in the Maoist and post-Mao periods. By focusing on patterns of investment and regional shares of gross value of industrial output (GVIO), this article will argue that China's regional industrialization strategy has changed to one of uneven regional growth in the post-Mao period from the Maoist emphasis on eradicating regional industrial disparities through interior–orientated investments. In short, the post-Mao Chinese leadership has not only relaxed its Incantation of the Golden Hoop, or strait-jacket on the coastal region but has come to rely on the coastal region to provide the “engine of growth” for China's economic development.

For the sake of simplicity, I will call the development strategy of the 1953–78 period the “Maoist development strategy.” Though it varied in degrees in different sub-periods, the Maoist strategy dominated China's industrialization efforts until it gradually faded out in the late 1970s. It relied on heavily redistributive measures in an attempt to equalize regional economic development, emphasized- Extensive rather than intensive modes of economic growth, and allowed no foreign direct investment in China.

In contrast, the post-Mao Chinese leadership has gradually, but decidedly, reversed the Maoist model and come to adopt a new development strategy. This new strategy, which, for lack of a better term, I shall call the “uneven development strategy,” represents another attempt to bring China out of economic backwardness. Focusing on economic results, the new strategy emphasizes regional comparative advantage, accepts regional disparities as inevitable, encourages foreign investment and international interaction, and seeks to foster technological innovation.

Conditions for research on the foreign relations of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have changed dramatically over the past decade in ways that deserve underscoring as well as applauding. Those changes now make possible a more wide-ranging research strategy one that includes inner-Party documents, memoirs from abroad range of prominent Party personalities, and articles and books based on privileged access to archives and interviews with individual leaders. These kinds of materials can today be set alongside those long-time staples of research, the contemporary Party press and the selected works of Party leaders.

Thus armed with greater evidence than ever before, the students of the CCP can now advance towards a broader and deeper understanding of the Party's foreign relations. Certainly, there is nothing equivalent in fullness or ease of access to the U.S. Department of State's documentary series, and the likelihood of being able to walk into the Central Party Archives in Beijing to ask for documents 30 years old or even older as one can do at the Public Records Office in London is still but a hopeful glimmer in the scholar's eye. But compared to the extremely limited opportunities of the past, a new era is here. This survey is intended to draw attention to new sources and old problems in the study of the CCP's international relations, and to serve as a guide for those interested in moving into that field of research.

This report is based on impressions and materials collected in China during the spring and summer of 1989.

The way in which to analyse and subsequently eliminate the vast inequalities that structured Chinese society was a major concern of Communist Party officials when they took power in 1949. During the 1950s and 1960s a number of political campaigns were launched which sought to reduce class differences as well as to eradicate the discriminatory practices of the Han Chinese towards peoples identified as national minorities, such as Tibetans and Uighurs. The successes and failures of these campaigns have been the subject of numerous studies by western scholars, who have described and attempted to analyse the persistence of social inequality in the decades since 1949. Yet the analyses of Chinese officials and western scholars alike, focusing on class and ethnicity, have overlooked a form of inequality that is perhaps most basic to China's largest urban centre, Shanghai, namely that based on native-place identification.

Throughout the 20th century, social inequality, discriminatory practices and popular prejudice in Shanghai have been largely based on or correlate to a distinction between people of different local origins. Sometimes local origins have coincided with class, as people from one district tended to dominate the elite while natives of another area constituted the majority of the poor. But often native-place identity has itself been the basis of prejudice and inequality. This pattern has persisted in the decades since 1949, not because government campaigns attacked the problem and failed, but rather because the problem has largely been ignored, neither fitting the officially recognized categories of class nor of ethnicity.

A People's.Daily editorial of 24 August 1989 heralding the early return of students to university campuses, blamed the events of May-June 1989 on students's lack of appreciation of “national essence!” (guoqing) and the fact that bourgeois liberal ideas from the west had flooded in to fill an ideological vacuum created by the lack of serious attention to education in Marxist-Leninist thought on Chinese campuses in recent years. In a long speech given before a national higher education meeting in mid July and published on 30 August, Li Tieying, head of the State Education Commission, specifically linked bourgeois liberalism and what he called “democratic individualism” with “certain courses in the social sciences” that had uncritically introduced bourgeois social theories. The suggested solution to the problem was to strengthen Party leadership on university campuses and reassert political education and education in patriotism and national identity.

The actual response has been much harsher than that. Regular undergraduate enrolments for autumn 1989 were cut from a planned 640,000 to 610,000, with these cuts mainly affecting social science and humanities specializations and national comprehensive universities directly under the State Education Commission. It was these universities which pioneered new work in the social sciences over the past decade, and many of their students took a leading part in the democratic movement. There is thus little subtlety in the attack now being made upon them. To give some specific examples, Fudan's enrolment was cut from a planned 2,000 to 1,200, Nankai's from a planned 1,200 to 800 and Beida's from a planned 2,000 to 800.