The United States and China in Power Transition - Strategic Studies ...

system modernization (although the CCP had made
some reluctant political changes to accommodate
economic development in the last 30 years). Sound
familiar? It is like Yangwu all over again. Thus for all
the years since 1860 when the Yangwu started, China’s
modernization has been marching in place (原地踏步).
Genuine progress is yet to come.
The current economic reform, however, is much
more difficult than the Yangwu movement 150 years
ago. Unlike their Yangwu predecessors, the PRC reformers
carried a heavy ideological burden—every
reform measure must be set to improve, but not to undermine
socialism and the CCP’s rule of China. This
was almost a mission impossible, for the defining character
of China’s opening and economic reform was to
attract foreign capital, technology, and management
skills and to turn the dysfunctional command economy
(the mainstay of socialism) into capitalist market
economic operations. The CCP leaders knew it well
from their ideological prescriptions (i.e., Marxism)
that there is a law-like relationship between the economic
foundation (经济基础) and its corresponding
political superstructure (上层建筑), i.e., democracy is
associated with market economy, and communism
is defined by command economy, respectively. How
could the CCP carry out the economic reform but still
preserve socialism and its legitimate rule of China?
The answer was a tricky one. Early in the reform
drives, the CCP passed a Party resolution to designate
China as a “socialist state at its early stage (初级阶段社
会主义)” and promised to use whatever means to turn
it into a prosperous socialism. This resolution may
sound simple, but it had many implications. First,
it made China’s economic backwardness and other
shortcomings excusable. Second, the promise to im-
48