Abstract
In recent years, the People’s Republic of China, like many underdeveloped countries, has sought to industrialize and to sell more of its manufactured products overseas. Once isolationist, China is now one of the world’s 10 largest trading nations, enjoying a surplus of nearly $25 billion dollars with the USA alone (which puts China second only to Japan in the size of its imbalance with Washington). And while the Western economies have registered recession or only mild economic growth rates, the Chinese economy seems to be on fire, recording an average growth of 10 per cent in the past decade. Attracting nearly $90 billion of FDI in the same period, China is poised to be the largest economy in the world by 2010 according to purchasing-power parity, a measure the World Bank uses to assess the real worth of the wealth of nations.
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Notes and References
The major sources for this chapter are Vivienne Shue, Peasant China in Transition: The Dynamics of Development toward Socialism, 1949–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) and
Andrew Walder’s dissertation, ‘Work and Authority in Chinese Industry: State Socialism and the Institutional Culture of Dependency’ (University of Michigan, 1981).
Essential background reading is Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915–1949, trans. Muriel Bell (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1971) and
William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Random House, 1966).
The land reform is assessed by C K. Yang, Chinese Communist Society: The Family and the Village (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1959).
Another important work on the rural sector is Nicholas R. Lardy, Agriculture in China’s Modern Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
The comparison of economic performance in 1952 and the prerevolutionary period appears in Xue Muqiao, China’s Socialist Economy (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981) p. 22.
The data on income in the agricultural sector are drawn from Shue, Peasant China in Transition, p. 283; her explanations quoted here appear on p. 332. An excellent discussion of relations between the central authorities and local cadres may be found in Ezra Vogel, Canton under Communism: Programs and Politics in a Provincial Capital, 1949–1968 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969).
The incentive system is reviewed in Walder’s seminal study, ‘Work and Authority in Chinese Industry’, passim. The tale of Old Guo is told by Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro, Son of the Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983) p. 184.
On the shortcomings of the Cultural Revolution, see Victor Lippitt, ‘Socialist Development in China’, in Mark Selden and Victor Lippitt (eds), The Transition to Socialism in China (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1982),
especially pp. 131–2. A provocative account is provided by Samir Amin, The Future of Maoism, trans. Norman Finkelstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).
Debates about the sequel to Maoism appear in Stephan Feuchtwang and Athar Hussain (eds), The Chinese Economic Reforms (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1983).
Analysis of the women’s question is based on Ellen R. Judd, Gender and Power in Rural North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994);
All-China Women’s Federation, The Impact of Economic Development on Rural Women in China, Report of the United Nations University Household, Gender and Age Project (Tokyo: United Nations University, 1993); and
Zhang Xian-liang, Half of Man is a Woman (New York: W W Norton, 1988).
Information on economic reforms has been culled from several recent issues of the National Trade Data Bank as well as numerous secondary sources and reports, including Nicholas D. Kristof, ‘China Sees “Market-Leninism” as a Way to Future’, New York Times, 6 September 1993 and
‘Riddle of China: Repression as Standard of Living Sours’, New York Times, 7 September 1993;
‘China: Birth of a New Economy’, Businessweek, 31 January 1994;
David Shambaugh, ‘Losing Control: The Erosion of State Authority in China’, Current History, September 1993, pp. 253–9;
Orville Schell, ‘Twilight of a Titan: China—End of an Era’, The Nation, 17/24 July, 1995;
‘A Survey of China’, The Economist, 18 March 1995;
Jonathan Karp, ‘Greens for the Reds: China Discovers the Golfing Boom’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 29 October 1992;
Orville Schell and Todd Lappin, ‘China Plays the Market’, The Nation, 14 December 1992;
Fuh-Wen Tzeng, ‘The Political Economy of China’s Coastal Development Strategy: A Preliminary Analysis’, Asian Survey, 31 (March 1991), pp. 270–84;
Benedict Stavis, ‘Contradictions in Communist Reform: China Before 4 June 1989’, Political Science Quarterly, 105 (Spring 1990), pp. 31–52.
Discussion of China’s environmental problems relies mainly on He Bochuan, China on the Edge: The Crisis of Ecology and Development (San Francisco: China Books and Periodicals, 1991); and
Qu Geping and Li Jinchang, Population and the Environment in China, trans. Jiang Baozhong and Gu Ran, ed. Robert B. Boardman (Boulder: Lynne Rienner; London: Paul Chapman, 1994).
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© 1997 James H. Mittelman and Mustapha Kamal Pasha
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Mittelman, J.H., Pasha, M.K. (1997). The Exit Option, Withdrawing from and Re-entering Global Capitalism: China under and after Mao. In: Out from Underdevelopment Revisited. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25183-4_7
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