China and Socialism: China's Economic Transformation

Abstract

When the leaders of China's Communist Party announced their program of market socialist reforms in 1978, they argued that it was necessary to overcome the country's growing problems of economic stagnation and waste caused by the Mao era's overly centralized state systems of planning and production. China's rapid growth and industrial transformation during the 1980s encouraged many on the left, both inside and outside of China, to view market socialism as an attractive vehicle for achieving sustained growth, an egalitarian distribution of goods and services, and new forms of democratic participation in economic decision making.

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