Editors' Introduction

The six papers presented in this issue of >i>Chinese Economic Studies>/i> were selected by Dai Yuanchen, a senior economist at the Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. All were published in 1990 in various Chinese journals, at a time when discussion of reform and its problems was more constrained than at any time since the early 1980s. In the post-Tiananmen climate, while proposals calling for radical changes in the economic system were no longer published, some scholarly debates nonetheless continued. Among these was the old saw of decentralization and local control. Prompted by the introduction of fiscal contracting between the central and provincial governments in 1988, many economists wrote of the erosion of central control and the rise of "localism" in what they saw as a dangerous trend toward excessive or inappropriate decentralization. One of the most provocative articles on this theme (and included here as the lead article) was written jointly by Shen Liren and Dai Yuanchen, who called it the "formation of âdukedomâ economies" (>i>zhuhou jingji>/i>). Another popular theme in Chinese economic journals at that time was the difficulty of combining the allocation mechanisms of planning and market and discussions of the appropriate division of labor between the two systems within one economy.