By the end of the 1970s state communism was everywhere in retreat. In the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and even in Vietnam, communist leaders found themselves leading economies that could neither compete in international markets nor satisfy domestic expectations. And so, first in Eastern Europe and then in China and the Soviet Union, party leaders were compelled to devise fundamental departures from the economic procedures and structures they had confidently installed at the outset of their revolutionary victories. In each country these economic reforms marked a distinct break with past practice. But perhaps no country departed more rapidly "from the institutional core of the preexisting economic order than China. (See Appendix for chronology.)