We depart this year from our usual practice for MR’s July–August double issue. Instead of a collection of articles on a common theme, we are devoting the issue to a single manuscript—a study of China and economic development theory by Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett that will be published in book form by Monthly Review Press early next year. Although there are numerous books on China, this one is especially worthy. It is a careful, clear, well-grounded Marxist study of how a major post-revolutionary society turned away from socialism. In addition, the current transformation in China throws light on why capitalism, by its very nature, creates poverty, inequality, and ecological destruction in the process of economic growth. | more…
China and socialism…during the three decades following the 1949 establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), it seemed as if these words would forever be joined in an inspiring unity. China had been forced to suffer the humiliation of defeat in the 1840-42 Opium War with Great Britain and the ever-expanding treaty port system that followed it. The Chinese people suffered under not only despotic rule by their emperor and then a series of warlords, but also under the crushing weight of imperialism, which divided the country into foreign-controlled spheres of influence. Gradually, beginning in the 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong organized growing popular resistance to the foreign domination and exploitation of the country and the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek. The triumph of the revolution under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party finally came in 1949, when the party proclaimed it would bring not only an end to the suffering of the people but a new democratic future based on the construction of socialism | more…