SOCIALISM AND THE QUEST FOR MODERNIZATION: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CHINA'S DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY (COMMUNISM, ECONOMIC, POLICY-MAKING)

Communist revolution has occurred in underdeveloped countries where preconditions for such revolution, as Marx sees it, hardly exist. The ideological irrelevancy points up all the more poignantly the utopian character inherent in Marxism which has come to plague the effort by underdeveloped countries at modernization. It is true that both economic development and socialization are goals of a socialist regime, but the ultimate concern with the general development of society makes economic development more a means to achieving socialization, the final goal, than a goal in itself. What socialization aims at is the elimination of the division of labor, the narrowing down of income differentiation, and the equalization of intellectual and physical labor. On the other hand, in order to achieve rapid increase of production, it is necessary that the scarce resources be effectively utilized. In order to train managerial and skilled workers, material incentives and differential pay scale have to be in force. These developments will eventually pose a very serious threat to socialization. The conflict often puts policy makers in a difficult situation: whether to accommodate economic reality and shelve ideological principles, or to uphold ideology in disregard of economic reality.;Taking this as a starting point, this dissertation explores the political economy of China's development strategy, with a special attention to the conflicts between economic development and socialization. It deals with the formulation of China's agricultural policy and the ideological struggles involved; it looks into China's effort to break away from the Soviet model and create its own, as well as the gestation of Mao's concept of "continuous revolution;" it discusses the policies adopted by China's moderate policy makers to rescue China from the economic rubble left by the Great Leap Forward; it looks at Maoism in action during the Cultural Revolution and the problems it created; and finally it attempts to summarize what Maoism seeks to accomplish and the causes of its failure.