ABSTRACT
The thesis of this chapter is that the Chinese reform movement can be traced back to at least three different pedigrees. They are the period of the First Five-Year Plan (1953̵1957), the period of recovery from the Great Leap Forward (1962̵1965), and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966̵1976). "Revisionism" was the epithet used during the Cultural Revolution to characterize the policy platform that was introduced by Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and their followers during the early 1960s to facilitate recovery from the economic problems precipitated by the Great Leap Forward. The reform era began with the rise of Deng Xiaoping to a position of de facto leadership within the Politburo at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee in December 1978. The revisionist-reformist attempt to maintain a functional division of labor between politics and economics, between Party elite and social environment, will probably prove untenable in the long run.
