The Shadowy Second Stage of China's Ten-Year Plan: Building Up Regional Systems, 1976-1985

Abstract

I N A SPECULATIVE research note written in the fall of I977, not long after the first public announcement of the existence of a regional plan in China, I sketched out the economic and political context in which this plan was born and the administrative arrangements with which it was linked.1 The present article is concerned with some of the tactics being employed by the Chinese leadership to implement this regional plan, and tries to assess its present scope and possible future directions. More specifically, it examines the following issues: what part the regions are to play in the evolving two-stage economic plan which China is presently enacting, and how the notions behind these regions compare with those of twenty years ago; in what sense and along what dimensions regions exist at the present time; what administrative strategies are being used to build up intra-regional interaction among the provinces; and what the nature of the fully developed regional economies will ultimately be. The data for this study have been drawn primarily from translations of monitored Chinese radio broadcasts between April I977 and July I978.