How the Party turned public factories into cadre fortunes—and called it a miracle.

Zhu Rongji’s State-Owned Enterprise Reform and the Privatization of the Powerful

By Hu Ping, first published on August 13, 2026, via the author’s X account (@HuPing1)

English translation of the Chinese original: Eleanor Zhang

“Zhu Rongji has died.” In his essay, Chinese dissident intellectual, Hu Ping, refuses a glorified tribute to the premier who “restructured” China’s state firms and helped engineer the so-called “China miracle”. Economic reform in a communist system, notes Hu, is the near-impossible task of “turning fish soup back into fish”: converting public property into private property and a planned economy into a market one. Any judgment of Zhu, he contends, is a judgment of the reform as a whole. The path China actually took was the one Hong Kong economist Steven Cheung had sketched in the 1980s—hand the factories to the cadres themselves. Zhu’s part, according to Hu, is the operator’s part: he made the painful, asset-concentrating transition happen at scale. Without public consent or open auctions, that “efficiency” was also a transfer of the people’s property to the powerful—and Zhu is the man most identified with carrying it out. Under slogans of efficiency and “management buyouts,” Party secretaries became bosses, public assets became private fortunes, and tens of millions of workers became the expendable generation. The method—first robbery in the name of revolution, then division of the spoils in the name of reform—was, writes Hu, morally “shameless and contemptible,” yet economically expedient. Concentrated ownership avoided the post-Soviet slump and, combined with cheap labor and global capital, produced China’s rapid development and rise to global power. The price, Hu concludes, is an even more arrogant authoritarian state that holds rights and justice in contempt and now menaces freedom beyond its borders.

Independent scholar Hu Ping is a pivotal Chinese dissident intellectual, essayist, and political philosopher who has been a leading voice for modern Chinese liberalism and democratic reform for nearly half a century.

With permission from the author, Hu Ping’s essay is available below in a downloadable format.