"Economy of the vassal states" for a straight translation. But "Regional economies that compete against each other" makes more sense.
BTW the author provided a simple explanation, I'll quote what ChatGPT translated for me:
> The phrase "诸侯经济" was first put forward by Hu Angang. Simply put, it's like siblings starting their own households after a family split. Besides making contributions to the "patriarch" (the amounts and calculation methods vary by province, but each has a fixed value that can be found on the Ministry of Finance's website), they hoard the rest for themselves.
The context is that at the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution, the leaders gave a lot of autonomy to regional governments. My hunch was that they won through a coup d'état thus lacked legality, so they had to give a way a lot of power to the people who controlled the provinces. Anyway, this created a booming economy (in general) for the next 30 or so years, but brought upon other issues that the Chinese could no longer ignore after the 2008 financial crisis.
Thanks for the translation, and that's very interesting. I would have guessed that in the Cultural Revolution the central government destroyed its own capacity to govern, by killing or otherwise losing senior and competent personnel, and lost its legitimacy.
(Can we compare it to the US currently?)
After, what I've read of Deng Xiaopeng's reforms was that they opened up the economy, starting by privatizing agriculture in some ways, and continuing by privatizing much of the economy and spurring capitalism. And of course eliminating many of Mao's / Gang of Four's economically destructive policies was the lowest-hanging fruit. Deng said "To get rich is glorious", which was not something that the Mao-era CCP would have advertised.
I don't recall reading about devolving power to provincial government as a cause of economic growth.
> I would have guessed that in the Cultural Revolution the central government destroyed its own capacity to govern, by killing or otherwise losing senior and competent personnel, and lost its legitimacy.
Yeah, more or less. The people were inspired at the beginning but lost the steam towards the end. Many researchers believe the Cultural Revolution only lasted about 3 years, from 1966 to 1969, and definitely ended when Lin Biao was killed in the plane crash.
> After, what I've read of Deng Xiaopeng's reforms was that they opened up the economy, starting by privatizing agriculture in some ways, and continuing by privatizing much of the economy and spurring capitalism. And of course eliminating many of Mao's / Gang of Four's economically destructive policies was the lowest-hanging fruit.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. The Gang of Four did have a plan to open up the economy, not from Shenzhen, but from Shanghai, as late as 1975. And Mao did normalize the relationship with the US in 1972, which paved the way for any opening up afterwards. People also argued that the Gang of Four was not entirely against opening up the economy or allowing some private elements, while some colleagues of Deng were actually more "conservative". So I guess it was not a question of whether China should open up, but the questions of who should do it and how to do it.
> I don't recall reading about devolving power to provincial government as a cause of economic growth.
The central government relaxed ideological constraints, regulations and kept their eyes looking to the other way, so that local governments can do whatever they wanted. Basically everyone wanted to get rich, and get rich really fast. Many elder politicians and military leaders, removed and shamed during the Cultural Revolution, managed to claw back because of their support during the coup d'etat in 1976 (which was why it went so smoothly), and in turn they were promised immense amount of autonomy.
I wish I could provide more concrete proofs to all I said, but unfortunately a lot of the material was in Mandarin and TBH a lot of them are my guesses and other researchers' guesses.
