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19 - China’s External Economic Relations during the Mao Era

from Part II - 1950 to the Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 February 2022

Debin Ma
Affiliation:
Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo
Richard von Glahn
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Summary

When considering the question of China’s external economic relations during the Mao era, the dominant narrative in the literature underscores the following view: Mao’s China pursued a foreign economic policy that was autarkic, isolated from the global economy, and locked into a Soviet-inspired planned economy that provided limited incentives for economic interdependence with the outside world. For some, China’s isolation from the global economy was the result of its position in the Soviet bloc, which was “heavily biased against foreign trade,” and from its adoption of a centrally planned, socialist economic model that prohibited private interests from pursuing foreign investment or trade. For others, Mao-era policies of autarky were inspired by a form of xenophobia that stemmed from the country’s experience of Western predations during the nineteenth century, resulting in fear of economic dependence on foreign powers. Finally, others emphasize the role of Mao’s revolutionary ideology in explaining China’s isolation from the global economy; Mao’s tendency to view major international economic institutions and norms as counterrevolutionary and “hostile” to the Chinese state led him to disengage from international trade and other economic opportunities.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

Further Reading

Cheng, Y.-K., Foreign Trade and Industrial Development of China: An Historical and Integrated Analysis through 1948 (Washington, DC, Washington University Press, 1956).Google Scholar
Eckstein, , A., Communist China’s Economic Growth and Foreign Trade (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1966).Google Scholar
King, A., China–Japan Relations after World War Two: Empire, Industry and War, 1949–1971 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Kirby, W.C., “China’s Internationalization in the Early People’s Republic: Dreams of a Socialist World Economy,” China Quarterly 188 (2006), 870–90.Google Scholar
Lardy, N.R., “Economic Recovery and the 1st Five-Year Plan,” in Macfarquhar, R. and Fairbank, J.K. (eds.), Cambridge History of China, vol. 14, The People’s Republic, part 1, The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1949–1965 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 144–83.Google Scholar
Liu, T.-C., and Yeh, K.-C., The Economy of the Chinese Mainland: National Income and Economic Development, 1933–1959, vols. 1, 2 (Santa Monica, CA, RAND Corporation, 1963).Google Scholar
Mah, F.-H., “Foreign Trade,” in Eckstein, A., Galenson, W., and Liu, T.-C. (eds.), Economic Trends in Communist China (Chicago, Aldine, 1968), pp. 671738.Google Scholar
Mitcham, C.J., China’s Economic Relations with the West and Japan, 1949–1979: Grain, Trade and Diplomacy (London, Routledge, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Price, R.L., “International Trade of Communist China, 1950–65,” in Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress (ed.), An Economic Profile of Mainland China (New York, Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), pp. 579608.Google Scholar
Reardon, L, The Reluctant Dragon: Crisis Cycles in Chinese Foreign Economic Policy (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Zanier, V., “‘Energizing’ Relations: Western European Industrialists and China’s Dream of Self-Reliance. The Case of Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (1956–1965),” Modern Asian Studies 51.1 (2017), pp. 133–69.Google Scholar
Zhang, S.G., Beijing’s Economic Statecraft during the Cold War, 1949–1991 (Washington, DC and Baltimore, Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Zhang, S.G., Economic Cold War: America’s Embargo against China and the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1949–1963 (Washington, DC, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Zhang, Y., China in International Society since 1949: Alienation and Beyond (Basingstoke, MacMillan Press in association with St. Antony’s College, Oxford, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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