CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Liu, Qianqu |
|---|---|
| Title | Reforming Lifestyle in China's Economic Reform in the Early 1980s: Consumption and the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign |
| Summary | This thesis studies one economic factor, the consumption, as an important force in shaping the social transformation in the early stage of China’s economic reform. It reviews the developing process of consumption activities in China starting from 1978 and the interactions between consumption and political movements in the first half of the 1980s. From the sociological theory on the function of consumption and the history of political movements, this thesis argues that the development of consumption in its early stage was influenced by the political decisions made by the Chinese Communist Party, and the further development of consumption gradually formulated a force to pushing the social transformation in China. By studying the case of “Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign”, I demonstrate that the development of consumption in China was once regarded as a potential threat to the ruling communist government. However, the party failed in stopping the process to establish a commodity economy in China, so they changed their strategies to balance the economic reform and the political reform. This work also attempts to evaluate the relationship between economic development and political liberalization in China’s reform era. It argues the separation of economic reform from the political reform resulted in a long-term hurt to the comprehensive social transformation. |
| Supervisor | Li, Ju and Siefert, Marsha |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/liu_qianqu.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University