REFORM IN CHINA: A MID-COURSE ASSESSMENT Harry Harding China today is dominated by a single issue: the fate of the reform program that is being undertaken under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. Every since Deng's consolidation of power at the Third Plenum at the end of 1978, China has experienced a period of trans- formation every bit as sweeping as the great mass movements of the Maoist period. Virtually every institution and policy in the country-- from the communes to the universities, from the Party to the Army, from literary policy to industrial policy--has undergone thorough reexamina- tion and extensive change. On October 20, 1984, the Third Plenum of the 12th Central Com- mittee adopted a decision to accelerate the reform of the urban econ- omy, so as to build upon prior successes in countryside. ~ This milestone provides a convenient opportunity for an interim assessment of the ac- complishments of, and prospects for, this ambitious program of reform. To that end, this article addresses four fundamental questions about reform in contemporary China. First, what is the nature of the reform program that Deng Xiaoping has introduced? Second, what degree of support and opposition do the reforms face? Third, how successful have the reforms been to date'? And, finally, what can we expect of China's future? WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE REFORMS? 2 Reforms of this scope are not amenable to a brief survey discussion. Nonetheless, they can be grouped, for purposes of analysis, into six broad categories: (1) political relaxation, (2) intellectual revitalization, (3) economic readjustment, (4) economic reform, (5) organizational restructuring, and (6) international reorientation. If there is a single element that links them together--and no dimension can adequately account for all the aspects of this vast reform program--it is liberaliza- tion: the emancipation of the Chinese economic, political, and social order from the constraints imposed by the organizational structures and doctrinal principles of the past. Harry Harding is a Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Program, The Brookings Insmution. He is the author of Organizing China: The Problem of Bureaucracy, 1949-1976 (1981) and the editor of China's Foreign Relations in the 1980's (1984), He is currently working on a book on reform in Post-Mao China.