China's top leadership. Nevertheless, even if the succession were marked by far-reaching political instability, it is improbable that this would lead to a major upheaval and breakup of the country. However, during this succession period and particularly in a postMao-Chou era, power struggles and policy disputes including economic policy differences-could become seriously aggravated. Therefore, it may be particularly difficult to forecast the future course of China's economic policy. Nevertheless, barring a repetition of Great Leap Forward-or Cultural Revolution-type measures or China's involvement in a major international conflict, the country should be in a position to sustain over the coming decade approximately the same average rate of economic growth as in the past 25 years. This would mean that be the end of this century China's gross domestic product could be quadrupled. In terms of total size it would still lag far behind the United States and the Soviet Union, but could easily be among the five largest economies in the world.

Nevertheless, just as in the past, it will be no easy task to sustain a 6 percent rate of growth. Based on past performance, this will require a rise in farm production of about 2 to 3 percent a year assuming (1) a continued commitment to basic self-sufficiency in food supply, and (2) a rate of population growth of not less than 1.5 to 2 percent a year. This will necessarily pose a major challenge to Chinese agriculture. Over time it will require very large investments in the farm sector and its far-reaching technical transformation. It is far from clear whether such a major transformation can be accomplished within present patterns of economic organization and employment in agriculture. This range of issues will necessarily constitute one of the continuing problems facing the Chinese Communist leadership for the rest of this century and probably beyond.

The successor generation in China will also have to face up to the challenge of sustaining the Revolution, its values and spirit, in the face of rapid economic growth. As industrialization proceeds the processes of production are bound to become more complex. Technical training requirements may also be expected to grow, thus posing a number of dilemmas. Will the educational system as reorganized after the Cultural Revolution be capable of training the advanced engineering, scientific, and technical manpower required for an industrial society? If not, can that system be reshaped in such a way as to continue producing "reds" and "experts"? Can status and income differences be fairly narrowly confined in the face of the growing specialization, division of labor, and functional differentiation associated with industrialization?

Another and closely related range of questions revolves around consumer aspirations. With a fairly rapidly rising product, can househousehold purchasing power in the cities and in the countryside be kept stable or rise only quite slowly and gradually? Alternatively, will increasing product be gradually translated into increasing consumer appetites? Can consumerism be contained and the spirit of frugality and self-abnegation be preserved?

It is also very unclear whether China can maintain a 10 percent rate of industrial growth for several decades with a preponderantly rural population. This of course will crucially depend on the pattern of industrialization, that is, the technologies used, the scale of plant, and the degree of capital intensity. It may also depend on whether it

is possible to design a highly decentralized pattern of industrial development in China that would economize on transport and be partly regionally based. Such a pattern might slow down the rate of urbanization and at the same time alleviate some of the dilemmas posed above.

In essence, the fundamental challenge confronting China's leaders in the coming decades will be to maintain the tempo of economic growth, to build a strong and modernizing China, while preserving socialist values and not only socialist forms of organization. It remains to be seen whether China can become a modern industrial state without perpetuating the "new class" that has been gradually emerging since the 1950's and without following the "revisionist" road. If China's far-reaching experiment were to succeed, it would indeed be a historic contribution to the process of modern economic growth.

C. 1958-59.

D. The break..

E. 1962 to the present.

IV. Some recurring themes in the critique of e_onomic policies..

A. Mao "The Economist”.

B. Absence of material incentives_

C. Deficiencies in planning and management..

D. Militarization of the economy--

V. Performance of individual economic sectors..

A. Population - - - .

B. Agriculture

C. Industry

D. Transport

E. Measuring China's economic performance.

F. A few comments...

VI. Interpretive inquiry into the state of Soviet sinology.

A. Politics and sinology..

B. Strengths and weaknesses of contemporary China studies_

I. INTRODUCTION AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES

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It may seem strange to open with something considered a closinga bibloigraphic note. In this instance, however, there is a valid reason for such deviation: in order to understand the content and context of this paper, it seems especially important to appreciate the nature of the literature on which it is based. As the title indicates, the purpose of this study is to present the Soviet views and interpretations of China's economic development as expressed in their publications and to let the interested individuals decide for themselves just how valid or delusive Soviet perceptions of China might be. It must be admitted, however, that while 90 percent of the material presented represents Soviet sentiments, the author has found it impossible to keep his own "two cents" out of the analysis. Hopefully, such opinions and comments will be clearly apparent and therefore easily ignored by the reader looking for the unadulterated Soviet viewpoints.

*I would like to thank the following colleagues for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper: William R. Dodge, John P. Hardt, Howard Klein, Francis J. Romance, and Gilbert Rozman. I am especially grateful to Dorothy Clark who does not edit out all my idiosyncracies.

**Leo A. Orleans is a China Research Specialist in Research Services of the Library of Congress.

One learns to read Soviet publications on China just as one learns to read Chinese materials on the Soviet Union. In both countries there is certain prescribed rhetoric and there are standard views that find their way into all the writings. With a little experience one learns what to skip, what to skim, and what to focus on. The problem becomes more difficult when Soviet authors decide to discuss China in terms of Marxist-Leninist polemic. For example, in his Economic "Theories" of Maoism, Korbash writes that:

Development continues to be rooted in objective conditions, while socialist society merely has the opportunity to avoid the waste resulting from uncontrolled development by consciously directing social development in concert with the objective conditions and the economic and social laws of socialism.1 One can only hope that the comprehension of such statements, which are quite common in Soviet writings, is not vital to understanding Soviet perceptions of China's economic development.

There is a kind of sameness and dullness about the post-1960 Soviet publications on the People's Republic of China. In part, it is simply their physical similarity: most books are the same size, with dense print, small margins, few subheadings, minimal white space and, of course, no indexes. Anyone who relies on visual memory to help in identifying passages or bits of information for future retrieval, soon finds himself spending inordinate amounts of time shuffling books and leafing through pages in search of something that blends into a forest of words. Much more important, however, is the sameness of content. Soviet Sinologists have to contend not only with a paucity of data (a problem familiar to all China specialists), but also with the ideological and political constraints, which limit their freedom to deviate from the generally accepted opinions and conclusions-at least in open publications available for domestic and foreign consumption. But more about that later.

It is because of the consistency of both themes and economic evaluations that I decided against the standard footnoting procedures. Crediting a specific publication would imply that its author was saying something different or especially perceptive, or that the source has greater stature or authority, while actually the same information or view is available in any number of other sources which are just as official.' Instead, I have listed below some of the more comprehensive and more useful publications, while limiting the footnoting essentially to commentary. Although statistics included in the tables are footnoted, in most cases the same or very similar figures could have been cited from other sources. The few differences that may exist between figures in individual sources were not considered to be significant enough to warrant a table of alternate estimates.

Had I completed this project a few months earlier, the commentary would have ended with the preceding paragraph. When I was well into the writing of the report, however, a new Soviet publication came into my possession: A. I. Petrov and L. I. Molodtsova, eds., Ekonomika KNR: vozmozhnosti i real'nosť (The Economy of the PRC: Possibilities

1 A similar evaluation is evident in Rozman's conclusion that "Soviet sinology should be amenable to a general overview which would be inconceivable for the more amorphous American sinology. Centralized control and coordination of training, employment, and publication produces unanimity on essential points, consistency on basic points, and disagreement within well-defined although by no means stationary perimeters." Gilbert Rozman, "Soviet Reinterpretations of Chinese Social History: The search for the origins of Maoism," Journal of Asian Studies, November 1974, p. 50.

and Realities) (Moskva: "Nauka" Publishers, 1976), 235 pp. While Petrov is the editor in chief (but not an author) and four of the nine chapters are the work of other contributors, two thirds of the text and virtually all the sections relevant to this report were written by Molodtsova, which explains the use of her name in future references to this work. This book is undoubtedly the most important and the most scholarly Soviet publication dealing with China's economy. It is short on polemic and long on analysis not only of Chinese data but of pertinent Western estimates, which it cites and discusses. Whereas all other Soviet publications take every opportunity to denigrate China's economic performance, Molodtsova revises upwards most of the estimates previously used by Soviet specialists. Curiously, this publication is not the product of the Institute of the Far East, which is considered to be the foremost center of Soviet work on contemporary China; the authors are members of another institute under the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., the Institute of Economics of World Socialist Systems. Could this explain why the mention of Petrov and Molodtsova to members of the Institute of the Far East produces little more than rather strange and vacant looks? Is it socialist competition, or jealousy, or something more significant? They insist it is only my imagination.

The book raises still other questions about Soviet studies of China's economy. Could the higher estimates of China's economic performance be more representative of the "in-house" figures used by the Soviet Government and not previously available to outsiders? Or is this the first serious product of the greater freedom extended to Soviet Sinologists as a result of a decision to improve and give greater emphasis to the studies of contemporary China? Did the Soviet leadership finally realize that it was not getting the full value from its specialists on China's economy by imposing on them both constraints and conclusions? Are we likely to see a greater diversity in Soviet work in the future? Although, at this time, answers to these specific questions would be mere guesses, in her introduction, Molodtsova does make a few interesting comments about the publication and the upward revision of estimates of China's economic performance. She discusses some of the well-known characteristics of Chinese data, such as their paucity and poor quality, and gives reasons for Chinese secrecy and how it serves the needs of the leadership. Most interesting, however, is that after admitting Peking's tendency to exaggerate, and the penchant to fabricate by local administrative organs, she justifies the upward revisions of China's industrial production by assuming that China's statistical system does not fully incorporate the production of those branches of the economy which are involved in military production. Molodtsova concludes with the statement that the new research, based on all available material from China and all available analyses by Soviet and Western specialists, makes it possible, in the future, to incorporate "corrections into our calculations.'

It will be interesting to keep an eye out for the "corrections" in future Soviet publications. But since one book cannot reverse a pattern of decades, the generalizations in this report about Soviet studies of contemporary China, do not take into account the possible changes that Molodtsova's comment (or the book itself) may harbinger.