Containing China

I first met Janos Kornai in Beijing in 1985 at a conference organised by the World Bank and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), during which we had an audience with Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the major reformer seeking to turn China away from the Plan to the market, as signalled by the paramount leader Deng Tsiao Ping. Kornai then left on a week’s Yangtze cruise on the S S Boshan organised by Zhao through CASS, which was to provide Chinese economists with the views of various invited Western economists on