ABSTRACT
As shown in the preceding two chapters, the SRI was created as a new kind of research entity that would produce research of a different kind. It was devoted to the professionalization of economics and the effort to create more comprehensive, sophisticated approaches to crafting reform policy. In the 1980s the SRI and its various associational and publishing activities started a process of attempting to create a way to discuss, research, and write on any number of issues facing contemporary China without having to submit to, or be absorbed by, a politicized bureaucracy. The focus of the 1980s on getting within to gain autonomy was replaced in the 1990s by a focus on struggling to remain outside to claim autonomy. The SRI’s legacy lived on in a new institutional form, the research and consulting company (yanjiu yu zixun gongsi). Similarly, as I review below, the publishing efforts of the 1980s reemerged in the early 1990s with an express focus on being minjian (nongovernmental). I begin with an overview of the publishing environment in the 1980s, with specific focus on the series craze (congshu re), and then discuss four journals with which the SRI was involved. The “craze” of serials publications oriented toward the young (qingnian), and the young adult (zhong qingnian) was started by the production of Toward the Future, a book series created by young thinkers that briefly expanded to produce a magazine of the same name. The Young Economist, which published only the work of those forty years of age and below, provides an example of how the young economists promoted their generation and sought to provide reference materials for future generations. The last two economics journals reviewed, Young Adult’s Economic Forum and Development and Reform, offer a glimpse into how the young reformers initiated the process of promoting their vision of reform, the development of professional association among young economists, and their relationship with older economists in the 1980s.
