ABSTRACT
China's society was, of course, a predominantly rural one, in which agriculture predominated and deeply influenced the political and economic evolution of the Communist regime. The Soviet model did have powerful supporters in China, and the conflict between them and Mao became one of the key causes of the wide-scale political struggles that characterized the Maoist period in Chinese politics. Encouraged by the evolution of agriculture, the reformist leaders introduced "urban reform" in 1984. As in agriculture, the state in the early 1960s attempted to restore many of the features of the pre-Great Leap system, but with one important modification. As early as the 1970s, the Chinese leadership had rejected the previous autarkic policies. The gradual, systemic changes that grew out of the many reforms of the 1980s were accompanied by an extensive redistribution of power and income on the social, regional, and sectoral levels.
