From Logisticians to Managers: Generation Changes in CCP Economic Management Elites and a Paradigm Shift in China’s Economic Reform, 1978-1992

Yanjie Huang, National University of Singapore

China’s economic reform has often been described as a transition from a planned to a market economy. However, this linear narrative could not cover the complexity and nuances of China’s economic change, such as the continuance of state power and the transformation of planning thinking. Focused on the generational shifts in the CCP’s economic management system, especially the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission, from the 1970s to the early 1990s, this paper proposes a new way to understand China’s early reform period as a paradigm shift in the thinking of its top cadres. Drawing on various CCP biographical and organizational documents, this paper shows that a new generation of managerial elites, trained in the Socialist Bloc and in Mao-era state-owned factories, replaced an older generation of military logisticians with formative experiences in the revolutionary wars of the 1940s in the long 1980s. As a result of this generational shift, the CCP’s approach to reform shifted from bold experiments, decentralization, and mobilization to a new strategy characterized by corporate restructuring, central state-building, and macroeconomic fine-tuning. In the meantime, the generational shift also contributed to a fundamental change in the CCP’s key referent for economic reform from the Eastern European socialist market economy to the Asian developmental state model.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 150. The Chinese Reform as Social Science History (I): A Hundred Protagonists