Chapter 68 Lecture 11 Reform and Opening Up (Part 1): Reform without a Blueprint

When the Chinese Communist Party decided to shift the focus of its work from class struggle to economic construction, the first socialist country had already existed on earth for sixty years.In the past sixty years, communists in various countries have explored two models of economic governance. First, the Stalin-Mao style command-based planned economy model.It bans any form of private ownership, ignores the law of value, and emphasizes the state's control over all resources. From 1949 to 1976, China took this path, and the facts have proved that this path does not work. Second, the model of market socialism.It respects the law of value and tries to establish a price system based on cost accounting within the state-owned economic system, but it does not allow the existence of private enterprises. This is what Brezhnev's "new economic system reform" and Eastern European countries are doing. For one thing, the CCP is represented by Sun Yefang’s theory. He proposed “monopoly of large powers and decentralization of small powers” ​​to give enterprises autonomy in daily operations while maintaining the state-owned economic system and the state’s planned management of investment. In December 1979, the Chinese government secretly invited two of the most famous market socialist theorists in the world at that time, Poland's F. Bruce and Czechoslovakia's Sik to Beijing—they had left their respective countries and became defectors. The author, Bruce and Sikh, told the comrades in China that the experiment in Eastern Europe was actually a failure.In his later years, Sun Yefang tried to write a textbook when he was suffering from cancer, but he still couldn't finish it until his death.

Neither of the two established economic models in the socialist camp will work, forcing China, which is eager for change, to a path of independent exploration and full of uncertainties. From this, we can understand from a theoretical level why there is a "China characteristic socialist market economy". In the first ten years of reform and opening up, the leaders of the Communist Party of China, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun, formed their own views on economic governance. Chen Yun is recognized as a "master of planned economy". His thoughts in his later years were similar to market socialism, and he advocated "birdcage economy", that is, to give state-owned enterprises full operating autonomy within the "big cage" of planning. For the resurrection of the group, he has always been cautious and vigilant.

Compared with Chen Yun, Deng Xiaoping was more pragmatic and utilitarian.He is willing to try all new possibilities as long as it can make the economy develop.He used a few vivid words to standardize the action program of the upcoming economic movement: he said "crossing the river by feeling the stones", and publicly announced that there is no roadmap for this reform, no timetable, only one direction to "cross the river", and There is no boat to ride on, no bridge to walk on, and you have to jump into the water to take a risky cruise; he said "let some people get rich first", which broke the idea of ​​"equalizing the rich and the poor" and egalitarianism to eat "big pot rice"; he said " It doesn't matter whether the cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice, it is a good cat"—this sentence was once ridiculed by Mao Zedong, but now it has become the best declaration of utilitarianism; he said, "Be bolder and walk faster", This suggests the urgency of reform; he said "no debate", which shows that the new reform measures have encountered unprecedented resistance in the ideological field and cannot be justified within the original socialist theoretical system. Change again".

Of course, while promoting reform in the economic field, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun also reached a high degree of consensus on the stability of the regime and the maintenance of the ruling status of the Communist Party.They proposed to adhere to the "four basic principles" and "stability over everything else." These two sentences delineated the political boundary of this economic reform, that is, to maintain the existing authoritarian and unified political governance model. For nearly thirty years, these words of Deng Xiaoping formed a strong social consensus, and then outlined several basic characteristics of this reform: utilitarian and pragmatic, passive and gradual, unbalanced, and incomplete.