A Political Economic Introspection of the National Development of Mainland China

Abstract

Adopting Marx's Historical Materialism Theory, I will discuss the interaction between the Market Economic System and the Ideology of Mainland China, treating the former as the bottom structure and the latter as the upper structure. I used the concept of double head structure of by Seliger and split Mainland China's official ideology into a core concept and a perimeter concept, in order to analyze the changes in the PRC's ideology. In addition to this research approach, I developed four introspections on Mainland China's political economy, namely from the perspectives of (1) the institutional economic school, (2) the Marxist political economy, (3) the classical liberal political economic school (Hayek as a representative), and (4) the modern liberal school (Dahl and Rawls as representatives). I will conclude, first, because the Chinese Communist Party adopted a Stalinist type of economic central planning during the Mao's ruling time, the trade cost of the central economic planning system was then bigger than the market economic system. As a result, a transformation was inevitable. Second, from the perspective of Dahl's and Rawls' works, the Chinese Communist Party's ideology or policy of social justice, in its recent stage, was still far from the authorized definition of distributional justice. Third, while the Chinese Communist Party claimed it represented the proletariat and owned the true democratic system, it did not even achieve the basic voting fairness target. Thus, how can it claim that it owns the true democratic system?