The Renewal of Chinese Marxism: Debates over the Character of the Political Economy

Abstract

This is a study of those Chinese political economists and political philosophers in the early 1950s who sought to distance China's transition to socialism from the Soviet model for development. Writing for the leading economic and philosophical journals, Xin Jianshe [New Construction] and Xuexi [Study], these theorists attempted to apply Mao's 1937 call for a sinified Marxism to their contemporary reality by insisting upon a national strategy for socialist construction. Their arguments provided a source for the later break with the Soviet command economy. And it is the emphasis upon Chinese solutions to national problems that forms a line that connects this past with China's present.*