The Cold War divided East Asia. Beginning around 1978, the communist People’s Republic of China implemented market-based reforms that unleashed spectacular economic takeoff, but which were not accompanied by corresponding political reforms. After a bloody war, Korea has remained divided between an impoverished and isolationistic communist regime in the north and the non-communist south. Japan’s postwar “developmental state” economy boomed, and by 1981 Japan had become the world’s largest automaker. Trade wars with the U.S. led to a sharp increase in the exchange value of the yen, however, and the bursting of the Japanese bubble economy in 1990. In Vietnam, after the defeat and withdrawal of French colonial forces, massive American military intervention in support of the non-communist south became deeply controversial. Eventually the U.S. disengaged, and Vietnam was reunified by communist northern forces in 1975. The Cold War therefore ended, somewhat surprisingly, with communist regimes still entrenched in East Asia in mainland China, Vietnam, and North Korea.

With the end of the Cultural Revolution and the downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976, China entered the “Golden Age” of reform, which ended tragically within a decade in 1989. Deng’s Southern Tour launched economic reforms without its political counterpart, and created huge interest groups that have benefited from the authoritarian system, further hindering political reform. The Initiative for Building Consensus on Reform advocated comprehensive constitutional reforms to be taken for China to return to healthy economic development. Without political reform that makes the ruler accountable to the ruled, no matter how much freedom, wealth or half-baked rule of law enjoyed by the ruled, it can be taken away from them overnight, as the zero-Covid policy showed in 2020– 22.

Chapter 5 gives an overview of the Chinese Communist Party’s many campaigns against corruption throughout its history up to 1990. As with Taiwan and South Korea in previous chapters, authoritarian anti-corruption success in China has depended on a strongly motivated leadership with discretionary power driving reforms and a capable party-state implementing them. This combination of factors allowed Chairman Mao’s Three Antis–Five Antis Campaign (1951–53) to curb corruption and help the new communist regime penetrate and reform China’s complex urban areas. However, the disastrous failure of the Great Leap Forward (1958–62) triggered a rise in bribe-taking and embezzlement, especially among rural cadres, and later campaigns under Mao aimed at controlling corruption ended in failure. After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping prioritized liberalizing economic reforms and proved unwilling to jeopardize these reforms by cracking down on the corruption that had come with them. The party leadership conducted a large-scale purge of allegedly corrupt officials to assuage public discontent after the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square, but it ultimately had little effect.