1: The Broader Chinese Context

Deng Xiaoping led the move away from the earlier period of Chinese isolationalism to its interaction with the modern world, resulting in membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and a policy commitment to Informatization. Both are impacting on the country to force it through transformational change. The transformational change of China is indicated in Figure 1.1, and is creating a social revolution. This term is not meant in the Trotskyist sense of a top-down political process that has the intent to reorganise all of society. Rather, the term is meant as originally used by Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist who, in the early 1900s defined it as the reorganization of industrial/ economic life and consequently also of the entire structure of society. Such a change can only be accompanied by a shift in cultural belief systems: that is the collection of values, attitudes, beliefs and behavioural norms, and their interaction. This eventually affects collectively the way that people in the culture think and behave.