Abandoned or Merely Lost in Translation?

The article’s findings show how in the Chinese reform-era of the 1980s and 90s, language control and strategic management of political discourse exercised by cadres in China's communist party propaganda apparatus helped forestall a development along Soviet lines ending with the sudden collapse of the socialist state. The findings indicate that the post-reform future—which in parts of China has, in fact, already arrived—is likely to see the contested disappearance of the traditional symbols and rhetoric of socialism “as we know it,” but that this transformation of discourse must be distinguished from the demise of socialism per se.