ABSTRACT
As an important part of the intellectual heritage of China’s postrevolutionary leadership, Marxian theory is one of the factors shaping (via public policies and practices) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, averaging nearly 10 percent per annum for almost a quarter century, including the years of the Asian economic crisis of 1997-98. Neoclassical orthodoxy cannot explain this growth, indeed would have (and did) predict something considerably less spectacular (Todaro 1977). For the entire span of this extraordinary growth, many orthodox economists predicted disaster just around the corner (Zheng 1997; Wolf et al. 2003). Many continue to argue that policy makers in China are making serious mistakes, not moving fast enough to “liberalize” the Chinese economy and failing to recognize the limitations of state intervention. Neoclassical orthodoxy has proven inadequate to the task of either making sense of the dynamics of the Chinese economy or the complex decision-making processes within the Chinese leadership (and bureaucracy). This failure is, in part, the consequence of an underlying logic and methodology in orthodox economic theory that presumes simplicity, homogeneity, and stasis where complexity, heterogeneity, and dynamic change in social processes, institutions, economic agents, and theories (including the type of Marxian theory that informs Chinese public policy) must be recognized to grasp the conditions driving the type of dynamic economic growth occurring in China. Just as critically, this failure in orthodox theory extends to its inability (due to the specific nature of the neoclassical form of essentialism, with its foundation in a simplistic notion of decisionmaking and minimalist view of social and environmental context) to recognize the dramatic nature of the internal transformation in Chinese society or the global implications of that transformation. This is a transformation that touches every aspect of social life and the natural environment. It is not just the Chinese economy that is in transition. The transformations in economic relationships shape and are shaped by simultaneous transformations in cultural processes, including preferences, notions of the self, and understandings of the nature and role of the market; political processes, including internal rules governing the Communist Party of China (CPC), the differential authority of local versus national government, laws relating to property and contract law (and related rules governing transactions); and environmental processes, including transformations in the physical terrain of China, extraordinary growth in air transportation (in total numbers of aircraft and the speed at which they move people and objects), diversion and control of flood waters, and construction of the world’s largest dam.
