ABSTRACT
The reorganization of the rural economy proved to be the cornerstone for economic restructuring. The rapid increase in farm output and sideline production 1978–1984 provided the economic, ideological, and political energy for expanded economic restructuring across the Chinese economy. This chapter explores the different ways neoclassical and Marxist economists, thought about economic events and economic restructuring in the countryside. It demonstrates how Marxist and neoclassical economists fit events in the rural economy into their different conceptual frameworks and pre-existing master narratives about economic development. The chapter compares their different counterfactuals about what could have happened if different policies had been followed and different predictions about the future trajectories of existing policies. It highlights occasions where the paradigms attended to different issues. The gradual substitution of neoclassical for Marxist ways of thinking tended to legitimize market related outcomes and inhibited efforts to reverse the inequalities in China's emerging new class structure.
