Chapter 3 starts the chronological review by looking at the role of law during the Early Reform Era (1978–1989). In this era, the Party-state vested economic decision-making authorities with its local governments, giving them a relatively free rein to experiment with and administer economic activity by limiting central law-making. The chapter tracks how such political–economic relations were bolstered by the Party-state’s choices with respect to the use of law. It also shows how, as the era progressed, the law was used to carve out and legitimize politically palatable forms of market activity.

Using previously untapped Chinese sources, this chapter builds on recent scholarship to provide additional insight into Deng Xiaoping’s handling of relations with the United States in the wake of the Tiananmen crackdown of June 1989. Confronted with the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as well as with Western sanctions, Deng had the tough job of balancing between conservatives and reformers in China’s leadership circle. Unlike the conservatives, who were ascending, and who blamed the United States for all of China’s troubles and would not have hesitated to break relations with Washington, Deng wanted to “keep the US door open.” But at the same time, Deng did not want to show any softness in dealing with Washington. Deng’s foreign policy directive, “avoiding the limelight, and getting some things done,” saved communist rule in China. After three years of dedicated diplomacy, China gradually broke Western sanctions and regained international acceptance, including a White House welcome for the Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen. Had the Bush administration been tougher on China after the Tiananmen crackdown, it might have delayed China’s economic rise, but it wouldn’t have brought down the Chinese communist regime.

Chapter 8 focuses on Wang Yuanhua, a Party scholar and celebrated initiator of the intellectual liberation and New Enlightenment movements of the 1980s. In the 1990s Wang was active in Party ideological debates as intellectuals rebounded from the repression after Tiananmen. Wang’s assessment of intellectual life in the Party comes out in his discussion of historical figures:

Du Yachuan (a conservative during the May Fourth era) and the famous late Qing reformers Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. Writing inside China and under Party rule, Wang holds these historical examples up as contrasting models for intellectual integrity under authoritarian regimes. Wang’s own path from Christian schoolboy to Marxist revolutionary to moderate liberal offers a characteristic example of the winding path of Chinese intellectuals over the course of the 20th century. Wang’s formative years were at Tsinghua University in Peking, where his Japanese-educated father taught English. Having joined the Party in the 1930s, Wang fell from grace during the anti-Hu Feng campaign in 1955, and his refusal to implicate the disgraced writer as counterrevolutionary put Wang in the political doghouse for two decades. Yet he returned to Party service after Mao’s death, but became an advocate for thought liberation in the 1980s and for Chinese liberalism in the 1990s.