[Editor’s note: Prof. Craven’s lengthy but critical paper was originally delivered in September, 2004 at International Symposium on the Reform of Property Rights and Enterprise Development in Transitional Countries at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.  Later this paper was published in Volume 1 No 4 of the World Review of Political Economy the Journal of the World Association for Political Economy. It was also produced by Chinese Academy of Social Science and Pluto Journals. The 4th Media, however, believes this paper is still very much relevant to today’s world in many aspects, particularly for the upcoming 18th CPC Congress in October, 2012.]

“Every nation in the world has its own history and its own strengths and weaknesses. Since earliest times excellent things and rotten things have mingled together and accumulated over long periods. To sort them out and distinguish the essence from the dregs is a difficult task…Of course this does not mean that we do not need to learn from foreign countries. We must learn many things from foreign countries and master them…We learn foreign things because we want to study and develop Chinese things…We must not be like the Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi who blindly rejected all foreign things. Blindly rejecting foreign things is like blindly worshipping them. Both are incorrect and harmful…In learning from foreign countries we must oppose both conservatism and dogmatism…To study foreign things does not mean importing everything, lock, stock and barrel…We must give our attention to the critical acceptance of foreign things, and especially to the introduction of things from the socialist world and from the progressive people of the capitalist world…” (Chairman Mao Zedong, “Talk to Music Workers”, pp. 85-88, in Chairman Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters 1956-1971, Stuart Schram ed., Pantheon Books, N.Y. 1974)

Introduction

The People’s Republic of China stands as one of the major political-economic powers and social formations in the world today; it ranks about sixth place in terms of most economic aggregates commonly used to rank-order different economies in size and influence in the global economy. For a nation that had been kept backward, fragmented, feudal and colonized by foreign imperial powers and internal contradictions until the People’s Revolution in 1949, and, for a nation that has been subject to imperial encirclement, threats of nuclear annihilation, destabilization campaigns and demonization and ostracization in the global economy for many years, with a large population of 1.4 billion people with myriad wants and needs awaiting fulfillment, the present level of development and standing of China is no small achievement And there is no doubt, in the opinions of many observers, that “socialist values and consciousness”, created and reinforced by the developing “social capital” of Chinese socialism, have constituted a significant and material force in those achievements—often against overwhelming odds and against technologically-sophisticated and vicious foreign forces bent on isolating, demonizing, destabilizing and sabotaging socialist construction in China.
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