ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the nature of the "primary stage of socialism" as a stage scheme and then present random observations and brief comments on some of the highlights of the thesis, with the hope that they might help to see the thesis in perspective. It argues that the problem of ownership of the means of production is the core issue of mainland China's economic problem; that the separation of ownership and management and the leasing of publicly owned enterprises and land to private operation would not solve the basic problem of economic inefficiency. The reform policy since 1980 is essentially to reintroduce elements of a private sector into an economy which since 1956 has already been a socialist one, in the sense that all major means of production are publicly owned. There are, of course, technical conditions for agricultural development, but under any given technical conditions, private ownership is always more efficient than public ownership.
