... universities and setting them up in companies making large profits by semi-legal or illegal means, and generally living it up - flash cars, golf-club membership, the best restaurants etc. And very visibly, just when everyone else was starting to worry about maybe taking a second job to make ends meet, losing work-unit housing, not getting a pension and so on. So, considerable discontent building up, and expressed increasingly in industrial action - strikes, sit-ins etc - from c.1987. Loss of faith in government's ability to take China through transition without irreparably damaging social fabric - fear of rising crime also in cities (blamed on migrants). A situation in which people might well push for more of a say in policy-making, or at least for some effective means of preventing officials and their families from lining their pockets at public expense - so demands for political reform likely to resurface. Did so first in ...

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