History and Socialist Transition in China: Introduction to Special Section

In the mid-1950s in China, a few years after the Communist Party seized state power through decades of war and revolutionary mobilization, a serious discussion began over the process and philosophies of “socialist transition.” Carried out in the Marxist idioms of the day, these discussions were launched to contest the party-state orthodoxy of the time, which held that China could only realize socialism by ruthlessly subordinating transformations in social relations of production to the enhancement of the forces of production—that is, by subordinating revolution in social class power to a brutal economistic logic. This inherited Stalinist orthodoxy—implacably stage-ist and narrowly focused on measurable/countable growth parameters—had been implemented through the First Five-Year Plan, after land reforms ended in 1952. A few short years later, by the mid-1950s, this Stalinist dogma was being subjected to critique not only by Mao Zedong himself (at first mildly and then boldly), but notably also by intellectuals who often operated, at that time, outside the confines of Party orthodoxy. Some of these intellectuals subsequently moved to the center of Party policy, but only once they had succeeded in helping change the Party’s own direction in the 1960s. Some, therefore, participated in the Cultural Revolution period (1966–1976), which was still a decade away from the time of the debates around “socialist transition” that we take up in the following special section.