How has China been able to maintain high-speed economic growth during the last thirty-plus years and successfully transform itself from a poor, backward, and developing country to become the world's second-largest economy? What are the challenges that China faces today and how will she deal with them in order to continue moving toward a truly prosperous and modern society? Standing at a crossroads today, what future direction should China choose: a free market economy or state capitalism? In a series of penetrating dialogues, Wu Jinglian, China's most celebrated and influential economist, and Ma Guochuan, chief commentator of Caijing Magazine, attempt to address the following question: "Where is China going?" This volume offers critical insights into the historical evolution of China's ongoing economic and social transformation. Strongly reflecting Professor Wu's views on the future prospects of the economic reforms, the book provides readers with a deep and lucid understanding of the social and economic issues now confronting China, analyzes their underlying causes, and examines the serious challenges to implementing further reforms. Professor Wu argues that the only way to escape the various social ills in China today is to restart the economic and political reforms, which began thirty years ago but have slowed down during the recent decade, and to move China in the direction of a market economy, the rule of law, and democracy.

Whither China? presents an in-depth and wide-angled picture of Chinese intellectual life during the last decade of the millennium, as China struggled to move beyond the shadow of the Tiananmen tragedy. Because many cultural and intellectual paradigms of the previous decade were left in ruins by that event, Chinese intellectuals were forced in the early 1990s to search for new analytical and critical frameworks. Soon, however, they found themselves engulfed by tidal waves of globalization, surrounded by a new social landscape marked by unabashed commodification, and stunned by a drastically reconfigured socialist state infrastructure. The contributors to Whither China? describe how, instead of spearheading the popular-mandated and state-sanctioned project of modernization, intellectuals now find themselves caught amid rapidly changing structures of economic, social, political, and cultural relations that are both global in nature and local in an irreducibly political sense. Individual essays interrogate the space of Chinese intellectual production today, lay out the issues at stake, and cover major debates and discursive interventions from the 1990s. Those who write within the Chinese context are joined by Western observers of contemporary Chinese cultural and intellectual life. Together, these two groups undertake a truly international intellectual struggle not only to interpret but to change the world. Contributors. Rey Chow, Zhiyuan Cui, Michael Dutton, Gan Yang, Harry Harootunian, Peter Hitchcock, Rebecca Karl, Louisa Schein, Wang Hui, Wang Shaoguang, Xudong Zhang

DIVChinese cultural and intellectual politics waned after the Tiananmen Square incident. This volume explores their revitalization in the 1990s./div

DIVChinese cultural and intellectual politics waned after the Tiananmen Square incident. This volume explores their revitalization in the 1990s./div

This weighty monograph offers a thoughtful assessment of one of globally raising China’s most profound political issues—democratization since the 1989 Tiananmen Incident. Not exactly a “looking back” retrospective nor a typical commemorative work, this book harbors a more forward prospecting approach with 13 substantive chapters yielding informed analysis and insightful interpretations of various key issues. The core subjects range from legal foundation of Chinese democracy, middle-class politics, Internet based-democratization debates and pro-democratic mobilizations, civic society activism, to the external and international media’s inputs, democracy and China’s ethnic minorities; and PRC-Vatican interface. Published by City University of Hong Kong Press. 香港城市大學出版社出版。