Professor Eckstein's book is a study of China's efforts to achieve rapid modernization of its economy within a socialist framework. Eckstein begins with an examination of economic development in pre-Communist China, specifically focusing on the resources and liabilities inherited by the new regime in 1949 and their effects on development policies. He then analyses the economic objectives of the Communist leadership - narrowing income disparities, maintaining full employment without inflation, and achieving rapid industrialization - and argues that the implementation of these goals required a...

In this book, Alexander Eckstein turns his years of research and investigation to the task of exploring one of the most significant economic developments of the twentieth century: China's task of modernization and industrialization in the context of a socialist system. Eckstein asserts that China's economic development since 1949 can be best understood by centering it on the continuous confrontation of the country's Communist Ideology with its often harsh economic realities. Through analysis of this conflict, the tensions and its products, one might better understand how other countries might...