The United States and China in Power Transition - Strategic Studies ...

prove the Chinese people’s standard of living gave the
CCP legitimacy for its continued rule of China. Third,
since socialism was supposed to be a higher stage of
development than capitalism (according to the Marxist
teaching), it was all right for China to make up the
lessons of capitalism that it was unable to take during
the war-torn years prior to 1949 and ill-advised to
skip in the first 30 years of the PRC. Finally, the CCP
also claimed that this early stage would be a long one
(in the Chinese philosophical sense, that is, open ended).
This means that the CCP can practice capitalism
in China under a socialist cover as long as it deems
necessary. All of the above were covered under the
disguise of “socialism with Chinese characteristics (中
国特色的社会主义).”
This “breakthrough” helped the CCP get the economic
reform started. But its ideological requirement
continued to demand that every reform measure be
politically correct. Notwithstanding Deng Xiaoping’s
pragmatic “Cat Theory—it does not matter whether
the cat is white or black, it is a good cat if it catches
mice,” Chinese reformers had to tell whether their intended
reform measures were for “Mr. S (Socialism)”
or “Mr. C (Capitalism).” Indeed, to this date, China
still has to put a label on its much-changed economy
and greatly-developed private business—it is called a
“socialist market economy.”
John King Fairbank (费正清) has long ago pointed
out that the Yangwu officials’ “halfway Westernization,”
in tools but not in values, was a fallacy. Chinese
scholar Luo Rongqü [罗荣渠] also has a highly respected
and widely quoted (by Chinese analysts) observation
that modernization is a worldwide historical
process in which industrialization pushes traditional
and agrarian societies towards modern industrial so-
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