Planning in the Shadow of China

Abstract

Abstract This article considers the influence of Maoist China on Tunisian development theory in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The shadow—or brilliant light—of the Chinese experience was evident in Tunisia by the late 1950s, where wide-scale agrarian reform within the People's Republic and the use of cooperatives and labor-intensive agricultural technologies to rationalize the use and allocation of labor were immensely impacting foreign technical attaches, young Tunisian economists and agronomists, and people at the periphery of state planning and within the state-funded university system and research centers. In reading these proposals against the grain, this article situates them in their social and political context and the constraints that context imposed: a hewing away from outright enthusiasm for Communist China within the state-funded research centers, and a warmer embrace within more independent fora. It also situates those discussions amid a Tunisian milieu wherein China was increasingly embraced for its support of Algerian national liberation, its own national liberation war, with its experience seen as a third way for the Third World against the industrial-heavy experience of the USSR.