Guest Editor's Introduction

"Private property!" "Ownership rights!" "The logic of the market!" "The public order!" Welcome to the new discourse of China's current breed of academics and intellectual commentators. Forty years after Mao Zedong announced that China was on a direct path to communism, thirty years after "capitalist tails" were subject to "merciless blows and resolute struggle," and twenty years after Deng Xiaoping launched China toward economic reform, China's intelligentsia are engaging in a dialogue and exchange of ideas more appropriate to the board rooms of Wall Street and the confines of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank than to a country still officially "socialist." Friedrich von Hayek, James Buchanan, Alfred Marshall, Mancur Olson, John Rawls, and Michael Walzer are now the icons and inspiration for Chinese thinkers grappling with the country's enormous changes and unfulfilled expectations. Marx, Lenin, and Stalin are now not only passé, but worse, irrelevant and a bore. Is it any wonder that Mao's crystal sarcophagus ensconced in the middle of Tiananmen Square is about to implode?