ABSTRACT
The Chinese Communists also took the Soviet system as their model after they seized power. Industry was nationalised, a system of central planning and administered material allocation was introduced, and extended in practice even to urban local and cooperative industry. Human losses were substantial too, there being famine in both countries. In both countries, ‘many people came to associate cooperation and particularly collectivisation not with mutual prosperity but with permanent sacrifice and belt-tightening’, to cite Mark Selden's remarks on China's experience. In the Soviet Union too there is consciousness of the inadequacy of the inherited system of centralised planning, and the failure of the 1965 reforms has stimulated a number of schools to devise more coherent alternatives. The shift in China from collective work, whether organised by a brigade or a team, to the ‘household responsibility system’, is evidently a quite fundamental change in what Marxists call the relations of production.
