Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 The economic heritage
- 2 Development strategies and policies in contemporary China
- 3 Property relations and patterns of economic organization in China
- 4 The resource-allocating system
- 5 The quest for economic stability
- 6 Economic development and structural change
- 7 The role of foreign trade in China's economic development
- 8 The Chinese development model
- Notes
- Index
6 - Economic development and structural change
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 The economic heritage
- 2 Development strategies and policies in contemporary China
- 3 Property relations and patterns of economic organization in China
- 4 The resource-allocating system
- 5 The quest for economic stability
- 6 Economic development and structural change
- 7 The role of foreign trade in China's economic development
- 8 The Chinese development model
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The setting
Chapters 5 to 8 deal with the different aspects of China's economic performance shaped by the factors discussed in the earlier parts of this book. In a fundamental sense, one could view China's economic development as a dialectic process based on a continuous confrontation and interplay between scarcity rooted in the country's economic backwardness and ideology shaping the new regime's goals and objectives. Scarcity and ideology were both, to a greater or lesser extent, conditioned by the legacy of the past explored in Chapter 1. At the same time, ideology and the aspirations arising therefrom influenced the development strategies examined in Chapter 2. All these then molded the system of economic organization described in the two subsequent chapters.
Expressed in Marxist terms, this development process could be considered the product of both the base and the superstructure, that is, the mode of production and the relations of production on the one hand, and of ideas, cultural style, motivation, and revolutionary will on the other. The effectiveness of these inputs from the past, from ideology, and from the system of economic organization can thus be expressed by measuring its impact on economic stability, on growth and structural change, on international economic relations, and on income distribution.
Within this analytical framework, the degree of economic stability attained in China was appraised in the preceding chapter. Therefore, here we will examine how rapidly the economy grew and some of its most significant growth characteristics. This appraisal will be based on an analysis of aggregate and per capita GNP trends and changes in GNP composition.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- China's Economic Revolution , pp. 191 - 232Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1977