ABSTRACT
Chinese Marxism is an economic paradigm and provides economists with a framework, a world outlook, basic methodology, biases – much like Keynesianism or monetarism in the West. The very concept of 'ideological unity' had to be reformed, if the economic theoreticians were to have any function to perform. The outcome was a kind of controlled diversification of the economic-theoretical discourse, or 'hundred flowers' as the Chinese prefer to call it. In the course of 1981, inflation, an unavoidable side-effect of the programme of economic reform, gradually developed into a social problem of prime importance. In December 1981 the State Council decided to take action – the events in Poland must have been perceived as somehow instructive – and declared war on inflation. The debate on the status of the means of production is only one out of a long list of debates.
