The Post-Communist Personality: The Spectre of China's Capitalist Market Reforms

TLDR: For example, this article pointed out that China's social problems seem to come as much from the failure to establish a viable capitalist social order as from the success in introducing a capitalist free market.

Abstract: Since the start of the reform era in the late 1970s, China has seen the gradual but unmistakable emergence of a host of phenomena that mark a capitalist society: the commodification of labour, privatization of the means of production, the rise of an entrepreneurial class, and so on. These social and economic changes have hastened the collapse of the "communist" moral order of the Maoist era and with it the personality structure that was an integral part of that order. Quite alarmingly, two decades have passed and no new moral order has arisen to fill the gap left by the demise of the old order. Especially conspicuous is the almost total lack of a new type of person whose values and motivations can help sustain China's emerging capitalist society as the Maoist type of person did the old "communist" order. It is of course debatable whether the introduction of a capitalist market economy in China is a good thing, but there is no denying that the advent of the free market without the simultaneous emergence of a sustaining moral order is a recipe for social problems of gigantic proportions. Nothing better represents such problems than the sheer scale of corruption and the ineffectiveness of all measures to keep it in check. Whatever the intrinsic flaws of capitalism as a social system, China's social problems seem to come as much from the failure to establish a viable capitalist social order as from the success in introducing a capitalist free market.