.
what is now
But it does
what happened in the former Soviet Union, nor happening in the States which are successors to it. seem to me that, very broadly speaking, what happened in the former Soviet Union was absolutely the reverse of what
what has happened in China, in other words, that political reform preceded economic reform.
There has been a lot of misunderstanding about what has happened in China. Deng Xiaoping has made it absolutely clear from the time he became national leader in 1978 that political reform, to the extent it took place, was to be the servant of economic reform. He also made it clear that political reform did not in any way mean a weakening of Party leadership, the dictatorship of the proletariat which is strong, if you like over-strong police control of society, or
or a watering-down of attachment to Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedong thought, or of the attachment to what he called the Socialist Road (although this has been equivocal). We should not therefore have been quite as surprised as most of us were by what happened in June 1989.
Turning to the future, I would say this: that economic change - and it is fantastically fast; Sir Alan and I watched it and could also see it growing under our windows is bound to have very profound social consequences. New classes are coming into existence; old classes are developing new aspirations and new expectations and new modes of behaviour. All that will impact on politics. But just as happened in Hong Kong, I suspect - although I do not know, and nobody knows - that what will come first is a widening arena, a widening theatre of social freedom, the freedoms that are enshrined in the Joint Declaration, and only later
later political pluralism either in the sense of a distribution of authority among different institutions within the State, or in the sense of competition for the power to govern those institutions. That is what happened in Hong Kong, and that is the most likely road in China. When it comes to stability, I do not see China either becoming paralysed or falling apart.
Answer: May I add a comment there? I agree. As things stand I do not see China breaking up, and there are
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