Mao and the Chinese rural economy

The essay argues that Mao's economic ideas, though often couched in misleadingly ideological terms, are based on practical experience and can be described and analysed in familiar economic terms. It argues that these ideas had their precedents in the Soviet industrialization debate of the 1920s among Stalin's opponents; their parallels can be found in theories and policies developed in India and elsewhere in the 1950s; and their practical precedents can be observed in the pre-1949 Communist Border Regions, where conditions put a premium on labour-intensive construction, intermediate technology, and community development. In particular, these ideas owe a great debt to the achievements of the non-Communist Chinese Industrial Cooperatives of the late 1930s and 1940s. They stress the human factors in economic development, and seek to provide a specific process of social change and economic growth which will spontaneously develop mass consciousness of new economic possibilities. The essay concludes that if the Chinese economy is analysed in terms of the expectations implied in Chinese theory, rather than in terms of the economic expectations of advanced industrial countries, quantitative analysis of the Chinese economy may be possible.