Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.5, 2017

Chinese Economic Reform Makes a Breakthrough in a Fundamental Problem of Socialist Political Economy

(Abstract)

Liu Wei

In the basic economic system of the primary stage of socialism, public ownership is the mainstay of the economy and develops alongside diverse forms of ownership in conjunction with the market mechanism’s decisive role in resource allocation. How to realize the effective combination of the two is a fundamental problem in constructing a socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics. Western bourgeois economics and the traditional understanding of classical Marxist thought deny the possibility of uniting the two, and Central and Eastern European practical and theoretical experiments with their union in the course of economic transformation all ended with the abandonment of public ownership. The fundamental property of the practice of socialist economic reform with Chinese characteristics is adherence to the organic unity of the two. This has achieved significant progress, but at the same time faces a new series of problems.