ABSTRACT
I have been intending to write this book for more than 20 years. In 1955, the
Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee assigned me the task of writ-
ing a textbook on political economy, together with comrades Yu Guangyuan and
Sun Zhifang. As a warm-up, I co-authored a book called Socialist Transformation of China’s National Economy with comrades who included Su Xing and Lin Zili. This was published in 1959 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of
the People’s Republic of China. After that, I could only research signifi cant issues
of socialist economic development in my spare time, about which I wrote some
twenty essays and ten reports. When asked by the People’s Press last year to com-
pile a collection of my essays between 1949 and the outbreak of the Cultural
Revolution, I selected around a dozen important essays, and incorporated them
into Theoretical Issues on Socialist Economy, a book that was published in April this year. This book is not complete. It now appears that it also falls short in terms
of its ideological level and even may contain some mistakes. Still, it covers all
signifi cant aspects of our socialist economy, and refl ects my understanding at the
time. It presents the starting point of my research on the subject.
