354 { China’s Quest
unit” (danwei) system that had controlled people’s housing, medical care,
education, travel, and ration coupons, making people virtual serfs of their
danwei during the Mao era, was dismantled step by step. People became free
to change jobs without higher-level approval. Individuals (at least those with
“urban” residence permits) increasingly decided where to live, where to work,
and where and what their children should study. People could travel freely
within China and abroad, limited in most cases (again, at least for people
with urban residence permits) only by their economic capabilities. By the
Twenty-first century, Chinese tourists were flooding famous sites around the
world. Religious observance (if not proselytization) was increasingly tolerated.
Gradually, religion came to be deemed a social stabilizing and moral leaven-
ing force. Chinese scholars were gradually freed from ideological straitjackets
and allowed to again become part of their respective international epistemic
communities. A vast range of private activity—in art, personal interests and
hobbies, fashion, and courtship, as well as simple frivolous behavior—that
had previously been suppressed as bourgeois or even counterrevolutionary
was now ignored by the state.
As markets gradually expanded, so too did the ability of individual
Chinese to form businesses and use their own creativity to grow those
businesses, to change lines of work, to contract with others under mutu-
ally agreeable terms—the myriad small freedoms of individual choice that
make up a dynamic market economy. Eventually, two or three decades into
market-oriented reform, this process of marketization would overwhelm and
eventually displace the old central planning system deriving from the Soviet
economic model adopted in the early 1950s.^9 Discarding the Soviet model
economy was not the aim of most reformers in the late 1970s–early 1980s.
Indeed, a large number of prominent leaders of Deng’s broad reform coalition
saw the stable and methodical planning of the pre–Great Leap Forward 1950s
as the golden era to which China should return.
The breathtaking scope of the emancipation of the Chinese people after
1978 is sometimes not adequately appreciated by Americans, who compare
the scope of freedom in China to America’s, rather than to China’s own recent
past. When a Chinese standard of judgment is used, the expansion of indi-
vidual freedom in China under Deng Xiaoping must be recognized as one of
the great expansions of human freedom in modern history. More immedi-
ately relevant to the theme of this book, the blossoming of freedom after 1978
gave many Chinese hope that the evolution of the PRC now underway would
continue, eventually culminating in civic freedoms protected by rule of law.
The rapid expansion of individual freedom after 1978 led to rising expecta-
tions about the trajectory of that process. History indicates that revolutions
and rebellions occur not when conditions are most dire, but when things are
getting better. That was the case in China in the 1980s. Within eleven years of
setting out on a new course under Deng Xiaoping, China witnessed (during