ABSTRACT
Nobody has a right to complain that China is very capable of surprising us Westerners - conservative or radical, liberal or Marxist, both or neither. 1 China has always had this capacity because of our penchant for trying to understand China on our terms. Whether dubbed "inscrutable" or "mischievous," dominated by "oriental despotism" or the "Asiatic mode of production," China still usually refuses to make sense. Sometimes it seems so scrutable and obvious, and then, suddenly; the veil is drawn - not necessarily over China, but over our Western eyes. This author certainly does not claim to be an exception. The Western veil is probably there regardless of many efforts at least to become aware of its structure as a cognitive filter. Consequently, the following should be read as one person's effort to scrutinize the inscrutable. 2
After a Cultural Revolution that delighted the Western left, both because of its egalitarian rhetoric and because of its many important social experiments, China now seems to be embarking on a capitalist road3 not very different from that which was so violently denounced during the Cultural Revolution. The step from a distribution-oriented system, distribution of both power and material goods for consumption, to a growth-oriented system, for the production of material goods and services, seemed to be a very quick one indeed. Why? When China was so clearly on the correct path, the Western left asks, how could it so suddenly make "the great leap backward" (Bettelheim), embarking on the wrong path? The right asks, how could a society so hopelessly lost in rigid "dogmatism" suddenly become so beautifully "pragmatic"? A possible anwer: perhaps because the Chinese have a different concept of what constitutes a "path" and, for that reason, an entirely different concept of what constitutes a development strategy. Why should their underlying concept of development be similar to ours, so clear-cut and contradiction-free?4 This is the idea to be pursued.
