My understanding is that people like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang were liberal reformers, who were actually allies with Deng Xiaoping against the Old Guard, Li Peng and those bunch. My question is why didn't China follow the same road countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland, who caved into massive protests and became democracies. Even the USSR installed social and economic reform, and it crashed two years later. Why is the case so different with China?
China started reforms earlier that USSR. There's a brief description in this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform and a good visualization here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prc1952-2005gdp.gif
So as you can see, China experienced a grow in 1980s, and Soviet bloc countries experienced overall decline which led to unrests and eventually to democracy.
