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Conditions and Prospects for Economic Growth in Communist China*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
Extract
In general terms, by the end of 1952, mainland China's productive capacity was reactivated and its institutional framework transformed to such an extent that the regime felt the time was ripe for launching an ambitious and comprehensive program of economic development. However, the announcement of a Five-Year Plan for China does not seem to have been preceded by a major debate on issues, methods, and problems of industrialization such as occurred in Russia in the 1920's. It would appear that Chinese Communist thinking and policy, as it has emerged, is almost completely hypnotized by the Stalinist model of economic development, with Preobrazhenskis and Bukharins absent from the scene.
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- Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1955
References
1 For an excellent analysis of the Soviet industrialization debate, see Erlich, Alexander, “Preobrazhenski and the Economics of Soviet Industrialization,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, LXIV (February 1950), pp. 57–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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* In the concluding section of this article, to be published in April 1955.
10 See Estimates of the Capital Structure of American Industries, 1947, prepared by James M. Henderson and others, Harvard Economic Research Project, June 1953 (hectograph).
11 See the section on the Five-Year Plan below.
12 The agricultural and all other value products in this article were estimated in terms of Chinese Communist currency (JMP) and then converted into dollars at the official rate of exchange. Therefore, they reflect the 1952 price relationships in mainland China, with their peculiar institutional distortions. For this reason alone, if for no other, these value products are not internationally comparable.
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30 The new bond issue valued at six trillion JMP (about US $240,000,000) was launched in December 1953. See New York Times, December 10, 1953, January 23 and February 9, 1954.
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36 U.S. Federal Power Commission, Steam-electric Plant Construction Cost and Annual Production Expenses, Washington, D.C., 1950.Google Scholar
37 Input-output studies for the US economy, conducted by the Harvard Economics Research Project, would tend to indicate that about one-third of the new investment required per unit of increased output in steel and power production would consist of complex types of equipment. It was assumed that this equipment could not be manufactured in China and would, therefore, have to be imported from the Soviet Union.