The sorcerer's spells.

• Author: Meisner, Maurice
• Position: The Transformation of Chinese Socialism - The Writing on the Wall: Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy - The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression - Book review

The Transformation of Chinese Socialism

By Lin Chun

Duke University Press. 370 pages. $23.95.

The Writing on the Wall: Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy

By Will Hutton

The Free Press. 432 pages. $28 .

The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression

By James Mann

Viking. 144 pages. $19.95 .

O ne of the strangest incongruities in modern world history has unfolded before our eyes over the past quarter-century. Three decades ago, no one could have imagined that the most massive process of capitalist development in world history would take place under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party. Nor did the leaders of Chinese Communism foresee that result. When Deng Xiaoping initiated his marker reform policies in 1978, he did so with socialist goals firmly in mind. The means of the capitalist market, he assumed, would hasten the building of the economic preconditions for socialism. If political power remained in the hands of the Communist Party, Deng counseled, a socialist society would eventually emerge from "the development of the productive forces." It was an orthodox Marxist assumption in a historical situation unanticipated in Marxist-Leninist theory. But it has proven one of the most striking examples in world history where the means employed overwhelmed the ends that were sought.

The economic results of China's market reforms have been stunning. On the basis of an already sizable industrial plant laboriously built during the Mao era, China's GDP has grown at an average annual rate of more than 9 percent over the last thirty years. It is a long-term pace unprecedented in modern world history, and it has made the Chinese economy the world's second largest, as measured by purchasing power parity. It has also made China "the workshop of the world," a title first claimed by nineteenth century England, and then relinquished to the United States in the twentieth century.

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T he frenetic advance of Chinese capitalism recalls the sense of astonishment that moved Karl Marx to write that the bourgeoisie "has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together." Yet Marx's celebration of the productive powers of capitalism was accompanied by a foreboding of its unruly nature and terrible human costs. "A society that has conjured up such mighty means of production and exchange," Marx warned, "is like the sorcerer who can no longer...