ABSTRACT
This chapter explores China's unique path to economic development in two chapters. The chapter presents the formation of the socialist economy in the early and mid-1950s, discuss the shock of the Great Leap Forward, the stabilization of growth in the early 1960s, the stagnation of the Cultural Revolution and the suppressed development of the early 1970s. China's economy in the 1950s until the early 1980s was a fully-fledged socialist economy, and thereafter it has increasingly turned into a mixed economy, which officially is called a 'socialist market economy'. The Chinese Communist Party's political mission is to establish a communist society in China, a society which does not allow exploitation of people by other people - a genuinely classless society characterized by an equal distribution of wealth and opportunities. The Marxist theory regards the advance of history as determined by the way in which social production is organized.
