Strategies of Change in Paternalistic Socialism: The Case of China

The origins of the Chinese Cultural Revolution are to be found in the means used to restore growth in the Chinese economy in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward. Between 1962 and 1965, according to Maurice Meisner, “while the policies of Liu Shao‐ch'i brought economic recovery and renewed growth, the social and ideological results were less salutary. There was a social price to be paid for economic progress and the price was the emergence of new forms of inequality.” For Mao Tse‐tung and his followers this was “the road back to capitalism”(l). It was the desire to reverse this tendency which gave rise to the upheavals of the late 1960s.