he Economist (1998, September 19) said: "the Chinese constitution's high-minded guarantees of free speech and association are not taken seriously" (Could, p. 55).
In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the regime headed by Mao Ze-dong committed gross abuses of human rights and killed many millions of its citizens. Mao's version of Marxist Leninist orthodoxy peaked during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s which Hsu (1990) described as "a decade of civil strife that drove the country into bankruptcy" (p. 702).
Mao died in 1979. His ultimate successor, Deng Xiaopeng (Deng) (1904-1997), became China's undisputed leader in 1982. Deng gave overriding priority to the modernization of the Chinese economy which required access to Western technology and trade. Schaller (1990) said Deng believed that "economic growth, not class struggle, must become China's priority" (p. 199). Deng, however, never wavered from his belief that China must continue to follow his Four Cardinal Principles, first announced in 1979, which included the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the Party and conformity with Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought (Fairbanks, 1992, p. 408).
During the 1980s and subsequently, the PRC permitted a significant relaxation of controls over artistic, literary and other intellectual expression. Thousands of students studied abroad. They and their counterparts who remained at home enjoyed a degree of freedom and family prosperity which had never before existed within the Orwellian system of thought control which had characterized China since 1949. During the 1980s and 1990s, fueled by internal structural reforms and foreign investment, Chinese annual GDP growth averaged more than 10 percent. Nevertheless, Deng and his associates were determined not to repeat the mistake which they believed Mikhail Gorbachev had committed in the Soviet Union of promoting political reform before the economy was on solid ground. They esse...