Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the Chinese debates and differences in conceptions of economic policy that are followed by extensive accounts of East European and Japanese economies in order to furnish the background against which the recent developments in China are to be evaluated. The Chinese divide their political history into periods of switches in policy and their complementary campaigns – a process of the start and re-start of divergent lines of political development. In policy debates in China, and indeed in socialist economies of Eastern Europe, a number of themes and alternatives constantly recur. Debates about economic policy have not been debates among professional economists alone. In China the notion of the enterprise as the community of immediate producers entails the election of leading enterprise personnel by the workforce.