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The relationships among ideology, policy and economic performance: Mao Tsetung, Liu Shaochi and the economy in China
Abstract
Since the establishment of the new socialist government in 1949, the People's Republic of China has experienced unusual economic and political fluctuations. It is often assumed that these fluctuations reflect large ideological swings among the Chinese leadership from 1949-87. The purpose of this study is to examine those potential relationships between ideology and economic performance. To achieve this task, we used both political and economic approaches. First, in the political approach, we divided the period of our study, 1953-87, into five subperiods. We then specified Mao Tsetung's and Liu Shaochi's ideology over those periods based on their announced policies. Then, in the economic analysis, for each of the identified subperiods, we examined the behavior of eight primary economic indicators in order to explore the performance differences of these indicators between subperiods identified as "idealistic" or "materialistic" according to ideological criteria. We were particularly interested in investigating performance variation during the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) as representative of "idealist" ideological periods. Finally, we set up 26 regression equations which reflected the inter-relationships of the eight economic indicators. We statistically analyzed the performance differences of the eight economic indicators by using dummy variables to represent the ideologically dissimilar periods. We also used the Mann Whitney U test to complement the regression analysis results. On the basis of that analysis, this dissertation concluded that there were insignificant economic performance differences between the idealistic Cultural Revolution and the various materialistic periods. The results showed some statistically significant differences between economic performance in the Great Leap Forward and the materialistic periods. But, this significance was due to the impacts not only of the GLF idealistic policy, but also of the weather, the Soviet Union's withdrawal of economic aid in 1960, and Liu's policy change in 1961. Additionally, we conclude that, contrary to many assumptions, Mao Tsetung, Liu Shaochi and Deng Xiaoping each exhibited both idealistic and materialistic ideological preferences at various times. This conclusion modifies the one sided position frequently taken concerning the political-economic influence of each.
Subject Area
Economics|Political science|History
Recommended Citation
Liu, Shin Il, "The relationships among ideology, policy and economic performance: Mao Tsetung, Liu Shaochi and the economy in China" (1991). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9211476.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9211476