Critical Perspectives on China’s Economic Transformation

Book excerpt: 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.