Industrialization and Technological Progress

Abstract

China had been a typical agrarian society with more than 90 per cent of its population living in rural areas before the PRC was founded in 1949. Thereafter, the Chinese government abandoned the old political and economic systems through socialist transformation of the capitalist industry and commerce. Between 1949 and 1956, some 123,000 capitalist enterprises were transformed into 87,900 industrial units under joint state-private ownership and, at the same time, many small workshops run by individual labourers were reorganized as collectives.¹

A man of the state of Song was worried about his seedling growing too slowly. He pulled up the seedlings one by one and came home exhausted, saying to his family ‘I am tired out today by helping the seedlings to grow’. His son hurried to the fields and found that all the seedlings had shrivelled up.

Mencius (372–289 BC)