ABSTRACT
The basic Stalinist political system and economic development model adopted by China in the 1950s was a highly centralized version of the Leninist system similar to Lenin's own war communism of 1918 vintage. The geopolitical Sino-Soviet alliance was the basis for China's resulting economic, political, and cultural dependence on the USSR. The alternative, more moderate effort to reform China's Stalinist system, modeled after Lenin's New Economic Policy and various post-Stalin Eastern European reform experiments, was identified with Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun. With the US bombing of North Vietnam in early 1965, Mao argued that China should be divided into "three great fronts." In the 1980s, one of China's senior economists claimed that up to $100 billion may have been wasted in infrastructure development since 1949; the bulk of it would have to have been in the third front.
