Socialist Construction in China 1956-1958

Paper Summary:

The paper examines how these years in China marked a transition from what had proved a reasonably stable and successful period of "socialist transformation" between 1953 and 1956, to the gradual dawning of a greater impatience with the pace of revolutionary change, culminating in the relative disaster of the so-called Great Leap Forward in 1958.

From the Paper:

"The Chinese Communists, however, had not only the theories of Marx, but also the legacy of Soviet interpretations of that theory. By the 1930s, Soviet Marxists were beginning to regard this principal theme in Marx's work as no longer relevant to their society. Once the fundamental material pre-conditions for a socialist economy had been established " and they argued that this was the case " then contradictions between productive forces and relations of production would be a thing of the past. Contradiction would be replaced by correspondence. Some conservative elements within the Chinese leadership in 1957 were perhaps motivated by this same sort of conviction that base and superstructure corresponded in some essential way, and that a harmony of development rather than contradiction would exist between the two. The history of the development of such an orientation begins in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. During these years, completion of the construction of a new fully socialist economy was announced by Stalin, together with his well-known fabulous claim that there were no longer any exploiting classes in Soviet society (3)."

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