ABSTRACT
Dwight Perkins’s doctoral thesis examined how the Communist government had combined planning and the free market to obtain more grain while imposing collective controls upon rural society. In an assessment of economic studies of China, Perkins contended that most economists did a pretty good job of understanding Communist China’s economic development. On the basis of quantitative estimates by US economists of economic growth and sectoral development, Perkins argued that they had produced estimates that were very similar to the official Communist figures. The analytical and empirical studies by Chinese Marxist economists that were produced shortly after Mao Zedong’s death give a very different overview of mainland China’s economic development. Chinese Marxist economists rarely have admitted that their economy shared the same characteristics as the Soviet Union’s during its most inhumane phase of rapid industrialization. Most US economists studying China’s economy shared the general positivist philosophy of social scientists trained in the United States after World War II.
