China's post-Mao transition to a market economy is particularly intriguing given that the post-Mao reform was by no means the first time China had tries to restructure its socialist economy.
It was the Long March that began to remake the Chinese Communist Party as a native Chinese party and forged its independence from Moscow.
A striking and ironic feature of socialism is its inherent anti-population. Unlike the democracy, which is forced to be responsive to the average voter, socialist governments can afford to ignore and even harm the interest of the majority, often justifying these actions under some grand but empty banner.
Although Mao crushed the market in ideas and monopolized the realm of thought, he was never a support of centralization in administration. As an unintended consequence of decentralization, Mao could reach provincial government directly, without going through the bureaucracy of various ministries in Beijing. With Mao calling for speedy economic development, local authorities were now well positioned to begin the Great Leap Forward.
Under the commune system, all assets were taken away from households and managed as collective goods. A glittering and disastrous invention that swept rural China in 1958 was the commune canteen.
Administrative decentralization was unfortunate (decentralization without protection of checks and balance is more disastrous) and pushed the Chinese economy back to the central planning.
Some structural flaws in the administrative decentralization of 1958:
(1) anti-market mentality
(2) strict control of domestic migration
(3) state monopoly of media
(4) radical anti-intellectualism
A market economy assumes two deep epistemic commitments: acknowledgement of ignorance and tolerance of uncertainty.
Unlike the Great Leap Forward when the political elites were largely sheltered from the disaster, the Party veterans were squarely at the center of the political struggle during the Cultural Revolution.
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