Utilizing key Central Committee and State Council documents, this chapter explores the
elite complex learning process and the decision to embark upon outwardly oriented development
by the late 1980s. Elites had confronted anomalies in the long-term revolutionary development
paradigm, which sought to establish a strong independent China by achieving three interrelated
goals: security, prosperity, and the Party’s comprehensive control of the state; when applied to
China’s development, elites had focused on establishing a self-sufficient economy by utilizing
either semi-autarchic or import substitution industrialization. Based on the success of the SEZs
and the nascent coastal development strategy in the 1980s, elites agreed that China should join
the rest of the East Asian economies in adopting an outwardly oriented development regime,
which regarded foreign capital, technology, and markets as tools to empower China. Elites thus
initiated the GATT accession process, established the fifth special economic zone on Hainan Island,
and publically announced the coastal development strategy. Henceforth, a new generation
of technocratic elites would institute a new technocratic regime, whose long-term goals were security,
prosperity, and the Party’s partial control of the state.
