| China's open door policy, proclaimed at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in December 1978, ended two decades of relative autarky. Implemented with a unique degree of continuity, the policy was extraordinarily successful at transforming China from a closed economy to a major trading nation.;The theme of this study centers on political leadership in policy making and implementation. The main research objective is to explain why China's open door policy deepened and developed incrementally despite vast challenges and difficulties, yielding significant growth in foreign investment and trade during the 1980s and early 1990s. What is interesting in the case of China's open door policy was that formal and actual policy coincided, and that the "implementation gap" was far narrowed. Why this was so is an important focus of the research. I argue that Deng Xiaoping's commitment to the primacy of economic construction, political craftmanship, and coalition building from top-down and bottom-up sustained the strategic continuity of the open door policy.;The course of the open door policy was unstable, but ultimately proved durable. It evoked powerful condemnation but could not be easily dismantled. As a principal leader, Deng Xiaoping successfully created an ideological, institutional, and personnel context hospitable to the implementation of his policy initiative. He was policy initiator, advocator, and architect. But, he was frequently blocked and frustrated by other conservative leaders, and he was not always "in command." Deng exercised his political skills, building coalitions both from the top-down and the bottom-up to defeat conservative criticism.;The case of China's open door policy demonstrates that the elite's constancy, attention, and incremental building of supportive constituency are essential for successful policy making and implementation. Equally important, this case is one marked by a surprisingly high degree of congruence between formal policy and implemented policy. The "implementation gap" was narrowed because state elites at the top and bureaucrats from the localities benefited directly from the policy. |
