The Industrialization Process in the Chinese Mirror - Continuity and change in transition from collective agriculture to market economy in China

Abstract: The dominant explanation for China's unprecendented rates of economic growth in the last three decades has regarded them as the consequence of the reform policies that, after Mao, the Chinese leaders embarked upon in 1978. The present study, in contrast, argues for continuity between the socialist period and the post-refrom era in China's economic course. Chinse socialism, it is argued, should best be understood as a strategy of industrialization which, in absence of a modern agricultural sector, had t proceed with more stringent institutional arrangements. the particular features of China's socialist agriculture, namely the rural Communes, were crucial for making up for the missing contributions of the agriculatutal sector in the process of industrialization. The Communes, by merging agricultural activity with rural industry, eventually managed to produce the modern agricultural inputs crucial for the increase of productivity in agriculture. Once the technological breakthrough was there, the collectivist institutions of rural China served no purpose in the inductrializatiion process. The transition to market and private agriculture became feasible in the new context of a modern, productive agriculture. The model elaborated here for China's transition has relevance for the study of the industrialization process in other Third World countries which show less stringent forms of deviation from market than the socialist strategy of industrialization in China.