Is China Socialist?

Barry Naughton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2017, vol. 31, issue 1, 3-24

Abstract: It has been 40 years since Deng Xiaoping broke dramatically with Maoist ideology and the Maoist variant of socialism. Since then, China has been transformed. Forty years ago, in 1978, China was unquestionably a socialist economy of the familiar and well-studied "command economy" variant, even though it was more decentralized and more loosely planned than its Soviet progenitor. Twenty years ago--that is, by the late 1990s--China had completely discarded this type of socialism and was moving decisively to a market economy. China today is quite different both from the command economy of 40 years ago, and from the "Wild West Capitalism" of 20 years ago. Throughout these enormous changes, China has always officially claimed to be socialist. Does the "socialist" label make sense when applied to China today?

JEL-codes: O17 O53 P21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
Note: DOI: 10.1257/jep.31.1.3
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (41)

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