The Transformation Of Chinese Socialism

A significant contribution to both political theory and China studies, this volume provides a critical assessment of the past and future Chinese socialism.

China, socialism, and especially China s three-decades-long experiment in building socialism has been an issue of much interest and debate among scholars as well as practicing Marxists in India and elsewhere. They also confront the realities of post-Mao China and how these have been impacting the lives of the peasants and workers in that society, as well as face the question of today s China being a development model for other third world countries. In mid-2005 several editors of Critical Asian Studies (formerly the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars) convened in a Roundtable to engage the issues raised by Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett in their book China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle (Monthly Review Press, 2005). The articles published in this Roundtable, along with a Rejoinder by Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, appeared in two issues of Critical Asian Studies (37:3 and 4) in 2005. They, along with an Introduction by Hari P. Sharma, are reprinted here in Critical Perspectives on China s Economic Transformation in order to stimulate further discussion. As Hari P. Sharma writes in the Introduction: It is our task to learn the positive and negative lessons from the Chinese experience and carry on with the task of fighting and defeating imperialism and its hold, wherever we live; as well as lend support to the struggles for national liberation and for socialism, wherever they take place.

A history of revolutionary China in the 20th century China under XI Jingping has been experiencing unprecedented change. From the Belt and Road initiative to its involvement in Great Power struggles with the West, China is facing the world once more in the hope of reclaiming a lost Chinese greatness. But is "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" just neoliberal capitalism under another name? And, if so, how can China reclaim the heritage of the Revolution in this its 70th anniversary? In this panoramic study of Chinese history in the twentieth century, Lin Chun argues that the paradoxes of contemporary Chinese society do not merely echo the tensions of modernity or capitalist development. Instead, they are a product of both the contradictions rooted in its revolutionary history, and the social and political consequences of its post-socialist transition. Revolution and Counterrevolution in China charts China's epic revolutionary trajectory in search of a socialist alternative to the global system, and asks whether market reform must repudiate and overturn the revolution and its legacy.

These essays consider the implications for Chinese socialism of the repudiation of the Cultural Revolution and the legacy of Mao Zedong as well as the meaning of the new definition and direction Mao's successors have given socialism. The themes have been selected for conceptual coherence within a socialist problematic of social change. Representing anthropology, art history, economics, history, literature and politics, various inquiries point in a twofold direction - the meaning of socialism for China and the meaning of Chinese Socialism for socialism as a global phenomenon - "meaning" not in some abstract sense but rather as it is constituted in the process of political ideological activity, which articulates and defines social relationships within China as well as China's relationship to the world.

China's rise within global society and politics has brought it into the spotlight - for social scientists, the country's long and dramatic transformations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries make it an ideal case study for research on political and economic development and social changes. China's size, integration and dynamism are impacting on the functioning of the capitalist world system. This book offers a non-conventional analysis of the possible outcomes from China's transformation and provides a dialectical understanding of the complexities and underlying dynamics brought about by the rise of modern-day China. The theoretical and methodological approaches will prove useful for students and researchers of development studies and international relations.

In this concise historical and conceptual analysis of China's evolving position in a world defined predominantly by global capitalist development, Lin offers a critical review of relevant debates and discusses the imperative and feasibility of a socialist Chinese model, reconstructed, as an alternative to standardized modernity at an impasse.