China's New Rich and Its Crisis of Values

摘要

Ever since the late 1970s, when China began the process of reforming and opening up its economy, Western observers have struggled to make sense of the country's rise and to predict the future path of Chinese society and politics. Early in the reform period, most China experts in the West-along with some members of China's leadership-assumed that economic development would inevitably lead to political reforms. As Chinese citizens grew wealthier, the thinking went, they would conform to the predictive models of political science and demand a government that better represented their interests and protected their newly acquired assets.