Conclusion

Through the decade of the 1980s, despite periodic professions of intent to introduce more democratic and efficient reforms into the Party leadership system, each round of reform was in fact aborted by leadership struggle. In every instance reform leaders perceived and acted on the prior imperative to consolidate control of the central Party apparatus, thereby rendering "reforms" meaningless in terms of the secondary priority of improved governance. In early 1990 the leadership publicized new regulations that strengthened Party control over the "multiparty cooperation" system in a transparent and cynical effort to justify a halt to serious political reform. These setbacks along the way jeopardized the prospects for maintaining the gains of economic reform. But the collapse of similar Leninist political structures in Eastern Europe fueled not only a growing conviction within the bureaucratic elite that only a fundamental change in this system could offer hope for China's future, but also a fearful determination in the leadership never to let that happen.