Were Deng Xiaopings reforms not a matter of political choice but of economic necessity?
The choice was how to survive and prosper. Preserving the leadership of the CCP was given. The answer was to allow limited private enterprise, first in the country side in order to alleviate the food shortages resulting from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. That worked, and the experiment continued. Deng foresaw what would doom the USSR, and its East European satellites, a decade or more before the Russians. China had always paid close attention to the Yugoslav break from Stalinist orthodoxy, and closely studied the Hungarian innovations as well. Deng chose to liberalize China’s economic sphere in order to preserve the rule of the CCP.
