Bureaucracy, Economy, and Leadership in China: The Institutional Origins of the Great Leap Forward
Cambridge University Press, 4/26/1991
EAN 9780521402750, ISBN10: 0521402751
Hardcover, 288 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
In this book David Bachman examines the origins of the Great Leap Forward (GLF), a programme of economic reform that must be considered one of the great tragedies of Communist China, estimated to have caused the death of between 14 and 28 million Chinese. While standard accounts interpret the GLF as chiefly the brainchild of Mao Zedong and as a radical rejection of a set of more moderate reform proposals put forward in the period 1956 to 1957, Bachman proposes a provocative reinterpretation of the origins of the GLF that stresses the role of the bureaucracy. Using a neo-institutionalist approach to analyse economic policy-making leading up to the GLF, he argues that the GLF must be seen as the produce of an institutional process of policy-making. This book offers a reinterpretation of one of the most important episodes in the history of the People's Republic as well as a framework with which to analyse the role of institutions more generally in the political economy of the PRC.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chronology
1. Introduction
Part I. Historical Background and Conceptual Approach
2. Overview
Chinese politics and economy, 1956–7
3. Institutions and policy in China
Part II. The Institutional Origins of the Great Leap Forward
4. The financial coalition
5. The planning and heavy industry coalition
6. The Party as agent of social transformation
7. The views of the top leadership
8. The Third Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee and the Great Leap Forward
9. Conclusions
Appendix
the constraints on Mao
Bibliography
Index.