老鼠仓, a rat warehouse, is the popular name for trading on unpublished information obtained through one’s position, other than inside information, in breach of the rules.
The case of Ma Le, a fund manager at Bosera Asset Management, was reported as the largest of its kind in the country. He first received a suspended sentence. On December 11, 2015, on retrial, the Supreme People’s Court sentenced him to three years in prison and a fine of 19.13 million yuan.
In January 2017, the government work report of Liaoning province stated: “The cities and counties under Liaoning province falsified fiscal data in the period from 2011 to 2014.” (辽宁省所辖市、县在2011-2014年期间存在财政数据造假)
A 2018 report in Yicai, citing People’s Daily, said that the inflated figures came to nearly 20 percent of fiscal revenue over that period. According to the same report, Liaoning’s general budget revenue fell by 33.4 percent in 2015.
In July 1957, the economist Ma Yinchu, president of Peking University, published his New Population Theory. He proposed controlling population growth. Mao Zedong, Kang Sheng and others opposed it. From the Anti-Rightist Campaign on, Ma was criticized across the country. In 1960, he was forced to resign as president, and he was placed under house arrest.
He was rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution. In 1979, he was named honorary president of Peking University.
Under the planned economy, when a worker retired, a son or daughter could take over the post. The system was called dingti (顶替), “taking the place.” It began in the 1950s. From the late 1970s, it was applied across the country to ease unemployment among urban youth.
In 1983, a State Council notice set out to regulate and restrict it. A study of the system notes that some parents even retired early, before they met the legal conditions, so that a child could take over.
On March 12, 2026, the National People’s Congress approved the outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan. The Party’s proposals for the plan had been adopted at the Fourth Plenum in October 2025. People’s Daily wrote that carrying out the plan would lay “a more solid foundation for basically realizing socialist modernization by 2035.”
The same article described one line running through all the plans: “From the First Five-Year Plan to the 14th Five-Year Plan, the consistent theme has been to build our country into a modern socialist country.”
In March 1999, Premier Zhu Rongji spoke about China’s long negotiations to rejoin GATT and enter the World Trade Organization: “China has been negotiating to rejoin GATT and join the WTO for 13 years. Black hair has turned white. It is time to end these negotiations.”
On December 13, 1993, the State Council issued the Provisional Regulations on Value-Added Tax (增值税暂行条例). China’s VAT rested on these “provisional” rules for more than three decades. On December 25, 2024, the NPC Standing Committee adopted the VAT Law. It took effect on January 1, 2026, and the provisional regulations were repealed on the same day.
In the 1980s, China used a dual-track price system (价格双轨制) for the transition from a planned to a market economy. The same good had a fixed price inside the state plan and a market price outside it. In May 1984, provisional State Council rules let enterprises price output beyond the plan within 20 percent of the state price. In January 1985, the limit was dropped.
In November 1989, the Party decided to turn “two tracks” into “one track.” The system had also given rise to guandao (官倒): officials or their relatives who used their power to buy scarce goods at the low price and sell them on the market.
On August 26, 1980, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress approved four special economic zones: Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shantou in Guangdong, and Xiamen in Fujian. Official accounts describe them as the vanguard of reform and opening, the first to go ahead and its “experimental zones.”
In early 1980, the Anhui Party committee backed the household contracting begun in villages such as Xiaogang. That spring, Wan Li, who had supported it in Anhui, moved to Beijing as vice premier. A fierce debate followed, in Anhui and across China, and some said that contracting land to households was not the socialist road.
From 1982 to 1984, the Central Committee’s “No. 1 Document” confirmed household contracting three years in a row as a socialist form of responsibility. According to official data, almost all production teams had adopted it by 1984. Grain output rose from 609.5 billion jin in 1978 to 814.6 billion jin in 1984.