The logic - and limits - of Chinese socialist development

In many ways 1949–1955 was a golden age of Chinese socialism because progress in cooperation was achieved with minimum violence. When the pace was forced after that, peasant mistrust grew. Successes in the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution were short-lived, illusory, or at best in the earlier period there were fewer zig-zags in ideology and in economic policy of the sort which came with the Great Leap. However, wild swings of this kind are apt to divert us from the continuities which come out of the power structure, the class structure and the decision to promote a rapid rate of economic growth. These include the institutional transformation of the economy; economic planning; expanded state welfare functions; the effort to avoid foreign dominance; elimination of exploitation and of certain kinds of social inequalities. The limits to socialist development appear to be set by the size of agricultural surplus that can be extracted without exacerbating tensions and the high rate of investment that industrialization requires. On the political front, the limits are set by peasant attitudes to government policy, the power of structural hierarchies (and their associated vested interests) and excessive Party interference in areas of social life best left to more democratic decision-making processes.