Compounding Teng's difficulties is the fact that he cannot sell his reforms direct to the masses. People who live in free countries have quite the wrong idea about totalitarianism. Confusing absolute authority with absolute power, they imagine that the autocrat has only to stamp his foot to set the whole nation a-tremble. In fact Chinese history is rife with examples of emperors who stamped their Celestial feet until the cows came home, to no effect at all. Every society has its own equilibrium state.
China is in equilibrium when the people are getting along well enough with the bureaucracy.
I happened to be in China last year when a new set of regulations on the hiring and firing of workers was announced in Peking. These reforms were not as drastic as those now being mooted, but they seemed to me quite daring. I asked a colleague, a low-level cadre, what he thought their effect would be. Oh, you know, it's just another policy. There is the obstacle in Teng's path.