The Decline of Communism in China : Legitimacy Crisis, 1977–1989

This 1994 book examines the relationship between the Communist political elite and the largely anti-Communist intellectual elite during the decade of reform (1977–89) by showing how intellectuals gained control of state institutions and organized resistance to the Deng Xiaoping regime.

This 1994 book examines the relationship between the Communist political elite and the largely anti-Communist intellectual elite during the decade of reform (1977–89). The author, who was a participant in these events, shows how the Deng Xiaoping regime precipitated a legitimacy crisis by encouraging economic reform while preventing political reform, and how the intellectual elite used this situation to increase its own power. The book also offers a theoretical model to explain how a political resistance movement could gain power in a nation that does not have a well-developed civil society. The concept of 'institutional parasitism' shows that rather than developing separate institutions, the anti-Communist intellectuals occupied state structures from which oppositional activity was carried out. The book will be of interest to both scholars of China and students of comparative Communism.