2/5
Comrade Jiang Zemin and comrade Hu Jintao are often grouped into a single era as both governed within the same broad historical stage: the maturation of the reform and opening up line after its decisive consolidation under Comrade Deng Xiaoping. This the long middle period in which the socialist market economy inherited from Deng was expanded, institutionalized, stress-tested, and pushed to its limits. If the Deng era was the breakthrough in direction, the Jiang-Hu era was the period in which that path was implemented at full scale across a huge and uneven country, producing extraordinary gains but also serious excesses, distortions, and errors.
To understand why those excesses emerged, it is necessary to begin with the inheritance they received. The reform line established under Deng had already made a decisive theoretical move: socialism in China would not be built through mechanical equalization of poverty or through a rigid administrative model sealed off from the world economy. China would instead develop the productive forces through a socialist market economy, under Communist Party leadership, with public ownership retaining the commanding heights while market mechanisms, foreign capital, local experimentation, and non-state sectors were permitted as instruments of development. This was closely related to what is often called the “birdcage economy” idea associated with Chen Yun: the market could operate, but only within the cage set by socialist planning and Party-state command. The bird was allowed to move, but it was not supposed to break the cage.
That metaphor captures the core contradiction of the Jiang-Hu period. Once the bird was allowed much greater room to move, growth accelerated dramatically, but so too did the danger that the market would begin pressing against the bars of the cage, distorting policy, reshaping social relations, and generating new class forces. Jiang and Hu did not invent this contradiction; they inherited it from the strategic turn of the Deng era. Their historical role was to manage it while pressing forward with modernization under conditions that were far more complex than those of the initial reform period. In that sense, their era should not be judged abstractly, as though they had a clean slate. They were governing a socialist country trying something historically unprecedented: using markets at great scale to develop a still relatively poor society under communist political leadership without surrendering sovereignty or dissolving into the capitalist camp.
This is why the period has to be understood dialectically. It was neither simply a triumphant success nor merely a story of betrayal. It was an era of genuine socialist developmental advance carried out through highly contradictory means. China industrialized at breathtaking speed, entered global production chains, expanded infrastructure on a historic scale, raised productive capacity, strengthened its technological base, and materially improved the lives of hundreds of millions. But the very mechanisms through which this was accomplished also generated serious errors and excesses: widening inequality, corruption, speculative tendencies, regional imbalance, labor exploitation, weakening of older collective protections, ideological drift, and the increasing social weight of private capital. These problems were serious contradictions produced within a new road of socialist construction that had no exact precedent.
Under Comrade Jiang, the central task was to consolidate the post-Deng line and prevent hesitation or reversal. The early 1990s were a moment of enormous uncertainty. The Soviet Union had collapsed, the world balance of forces had shifted in favor of imperialism, and liberal triumphalism was everywhere. In that context, to continue reform and opening up while preserving Communist Party rule was itself a major strategic choice. Deng’s Southern Tour in 1992 had politically reaffirmed the reform path, but Jiang’s leadership had to turn that reaffirmation into durable institutions. The socialist market economy was formally established as the framework of development. Fiscal reforms, financial reforms, enterprise restructuring, and deeper integration into world trade all aimed to create a more coherent national economic structure capable of sustaining rapid growth.
This process, however, came with sharp social costs. State-owned enterprise reform, while often necessary from the standpoint of productivity, competitiveness, and rationalization, involved layoffs and insecurity for many workers, especially in older industrial areas. Decentralization and competition among localities spurred growth, but also encouraged corruption, opportunism, and reckless developmentalism. The opening to global capital accelerated industrialization, but also introduced stronger profit pressures and intensified exploitation in labor-intensive sectors. Coastal development surged ahead, while interior regions often lagged behind. In political economy terms, the state was using market forces to modernize, but those same market forces were simultaneously eroding older egalitarian arrangements and generating new forms of class differentiation.
The theoretical formulation most associated with Jiang, the “Three Represents,” has to be read in this context. It was, in part, an attempt to explain how a communist party should lead a society in which reform had already produced new economic strata, including private entrepreneurs, managers, professionals, and technical elites. The Party could not pretend these strata did not exist. Nor could it simply hand them political power. Jiang’s answer was to insist that the Party must represent advanced productive forces, advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority. In one sense, this was an effort to subordinate emerging non-state forces to the Party rather than permit them to cohere as an independent bourgeois political bloc. In another sense, it undeniably reflected a period in which class boundaries became less clear, and in which the Party’s relationship to capital grew more complicated and more dangerous.
This is one reason the era deserves sharp criticism. There were real excesses. Not just “imbalances” in the abstract, but developments that at times went too far in the direction of commodification, private enrichment, and loosened socialist discipline. Some cadres became entangled with moneyed interests. Corruption expanded beyond what could be dismissed as isolated misconduct. Certain sectors saw a weakening of the socialist ethic in favor of narrow economism. Some local governments pursued growth in a reckless, numbers-driven way, with inadequate regard for workers, peasants, social welfare, or ecological consequences. The market was still officially a tool, but in practice there were times and places where the tool began behaving like a commanding logic. To say this plainly is the only serious way to assess the contradictions of the period.
At the same time, criticism must remain historically concrete. These were not the excesses of a country that had simply embraced neoliberal capitalism in a straightforward way. China remained under Communist Party rule. Public ownership still retained decisive force in the strategic heights. The state still directed long-term development. Land was not fully privatized in the capitalist sense. Finance was not handed over to an unrestrained oligarchy. Industrial policy remained active. National sovereignty remained non-negotiable. So even where capitalist tendencies expanded, they did so inside a structure that had not yet been politically captured by the bourgeoisie. This matters as the danger was not that China had ceased to be socialist in every respect, but that the contradictions within the socialist market path had become sharper and more difficult to govern.
If Jiang’s period was the era in which these contradictions were normalized and scaled up, the Hu Jintao period was the era in which they became too visible to ignore. By the time Hu assumed leadership, the developmental achievements were enormous, but so were the strains: widening income gaps, harsh rural-urban inequality, major regional disparities, corruption, degradation of the environment, speculative behavior, labor unrest, and public concern over weakening social guarantees. This was the point at which the leadership increasingly had to confront the fact that rapid development alone could not resolve the contradictions of the reform path. Growth had created wealth, but it had also generated dislocation, resentment, and a perception that some of the socialist content of development was being diluted by the unchecked side effects of marketization.
Hu’s ideological formulations, especially the “Scientific Outlook on Development” and the call to build a “harmonious socialist society,” were attempts to respond to exactly this problem. They represented a corrective impulse within the same overall era. Development was no longer to be measured solely by speed or gross output. It had to be more balanced, more socially inclusive, less regionally lopsided, and less ecologically destructive. Policies in this period moved toward relieving burdens on the peasantry, expanding social welfare, investing in poorer regions, and restoring some measure of social equilibrium. These reflected real recognition inside the Party that the earlier phase of reform had produced serious distortions.