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South-East Asia. Economic development was seen as a means to
these ends rather than as an end in itself. Furthermore, the actual
developmental path taken seems to
fit with the aim of preventing
the formation of any coherent capitalist class power bloc within
China itself. Heavy reliance upon foreign direct investment (a
completely di
fferent economic development strategy to that taken
by Japan and South Korea) has kept the power of capitalist class
ownership o
ffshore (Table 5.1), making it somewhat easier, at least
in the Chinese case, for the state to control.
4
The barriers erected
to foreign portfolio investment e
ffectively limit the powers of
international
finance capital over the Chinese state. The reluctance
to permit forms of
financial intermediation other than the state-
owned banks –– such as stock markets and capital markets ––
deprives capital of one of its key weapons vis-à-vis state power.
The long-standing attempt to keep structures of state ownership
intact while liberating managerial autonomy likewise smacks of an
attempt to inhibit capitalist class formation.
But the party also had to face a number of awkward dilemmas.
The Chinese business diaspora provided key external links and
Hong Kong, reabsorbed into the Chinese polity in 1997, was
already structured along capitalistic lines. China had to comprom-
ise with both, as well as with the neoliberal rules of international
trade set up through the WTO, which China joined in 2001. Polit-
ical demands for liberalization also began to emerge. Worker pro-
tests surfaced in 1986. A student movement, sympathetic to the
workers but also expressive of its own demands for greater free-
doms, climaxed in 1989. The tremendous tension in the political
realm that paralleled economic neoliberalization culminated in the
massacre of students in Tiananmen Square. Deng’s violent crack-
down, carried out against the wishes of party reformers, clearly
indicated that neoliberalization in the economy was not to be
accompanied by any progress in the
fields of human, civil, or
democratic rights. While Deng’s faction repressed the political it
had to initiate yet another wave of neoliberal reforms to survive.
Wang summarizes these as follows:
monetary policy became a prime means of control; there was a signi
ficant
readjustment in the
foreign currency exchange rate, moving towards a
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