Joan Robinsonâs views of Maoist China do not make sense to many in the economics profession. Some find these âscandalousâ (Turner, 1989, 170), others âcompletely uncriticalâ, even âtotally unreliableâ.1 She paid eight visits to Chinaâin 1953, 1957, 1963, 1964, 1967, 1972, 1975 and, finally, 1978.2 The whole experience is seen to be âreminiscent of the Webbsâ late love affair with the Soviet Unionâ.3 If a sympathetic Samuelson is puzzled as to how an independent mind like hers âwaxed successively enthusiastic about Stalinâs Soviet Union; Maoâs China; North Korea; Castroâs Cuba; American studentsâ new leftismâ (Feiwel, 1989, 862), a friendly Harcourt (1982, 319) has to admit that her âwriting in this area contains a deliberate leaven of advocacyâ. Development economists are sharply critical, too. Streeten believes that âshe was wrong about Maoâ (Feiwel, ibid.). In an interview with the author, Chakravarty stated that Joan Robinsonâs interest in, and writings on, China were a less interesting aspect of her contributions. Economists with a specialist interest in the development of China hold a similar view. According to Riskin , âher writing about China was probably the least interesting aspect of her work, except in that it revealed views and attitudes that might throw light on her other concernsâ. But he hastened to add that âbeing Joan Robinson, she could not write about anything completely without insightâ.4
It might be said in Joan Robinsonâs defence that the leaven of advocacy was a way of countering the propaganda of those whose own writings contained a bias in favour of capitalism (Harcourt, 1982, 359). It might also be said that she was not alone in looking at the Chinese experience as a successful strategy of development.5 A convenient approach would be to dismiss her writings as travellerâs tales, which are not expected to contain serious analysis anyway. None of these courses is adopted here. China was isolated and quite misrepresented as well. Who would know better than Joan Robinson that there is no substitute for information and analysis? Even those extremely critical of her other works do not deny her acute analytical prowess. She was thus not expected to respond to propaganda in kind. Further, it is a fact that she shared the illusions about Maoist China with many others. That does not render her position less vulnerable than it is. Further still, her explorations in China and its development were by no means a sideline activity. Some of her main works discuss China as an economy where development was actually taking place (Robinson, 1962b, 1968h, 1970g, 1979b; Robinson and Eatwell, 1973).
The main objective of this volume is to focus on the insights by separating analysis from advocacy. Joan Robinsonâs influence in the developing world exceeded the extent of her serious contribution to development economics. At a time when theories and models of development are being subjected to intense re-examination in view of the accumulation of a considerable fund of experience in the developing countries as well as the availability of more reliable information about socialist economies, it is instructive to look afresh at the insights as well as prejudices acquired by a theorist of the stature of Joan Robinson.
Joan Robinson had âno special knowledge of Chinese history and none at all of the languageâ (Robinson, 1977b, 7). It is obvious that a writer in her situation is dependent upon interpreters. Observation makes up for the inability to communicate directly only to the extent that the sample being observed is fairly representative of the population. She did not write anything on China in the scholarly economic journals, except for some book reviews. Most of the writings appeared in journals of politics and social issues. Many of them were described variously as âreminiscencesâ, âlettersâ, ânotesâ, âconversationsâ, âreportsâ and so forth. While Joan Robinsonâs China connection has been severely attacked by the right as well as the left,6 no attempt has been made even to write up her work in a thorough and informative way. This volume is an attempt to do so.
Chapter 2 sets out the main contributions which Joan Robinson made in her work on China. The materialâwhich is enormous, some of it unpublished and most of what is published is in periodicals ranging from the well known to the hardly known or in the form of pamphletsâis organised with a view to getting a grip on the main economic arguments. It is possible to look at her work in three broad phases. The first phase comprises her thinking and writing before the third visit in 1963. As is shown in Chap. 3, despite tremendous enthusiasm for the Chinese experiment, she had her own set of views on how China should develop as a socialist economy. The two field trips served the purpose of gathering some evidence in support of her views. The study of China appears to have provided for Joan Robinson, at least until her third visit or during what is called here the first phase, a laboratory to intuitively test her own thinking about economic development in the backward overpopulated economies. Her ideas in this first phase were broadly similar to the views of the right in Chinaâa high rate of capital accumulation, achieved without an intolerable sacrifice of consumption, profit-oriented industrial management to avoid bureaucratic tendency, use of prices with moral supplements, population control, reward by work done and the extraction of agricultural surplus through gradual collectivisation. Inequality, according to her, is associated with private property. With its elimination, she assumes the prevalence of justice in the nonagriculture sector, though the tax-free collective property differentials in agriculture are seen to be a source of inequality. On the whole, she finds the planning arrangement in China to be working well in industry, but still feels uneasy about the suitability of socialism as a system for agriculture due mainly to the difficulties of organising labour on a large scale.
In the second phase, she takes a sharp turn to the left. Between the Great Leap Forward and the cultural revolution, a period of statistical and informational blackout, she argues that the problems of socialist organisation lie in industry not agriculture. The communes are considered to have resolved the dilemma of organising labour in agriculture, whereas Soviet-type industrial management (even in its reformed decentralised form) is criticised for its profit motivation and a hierarchical structure resulting from differentials caused by intellectual propertyâan unfortunate outcome of equal-opportunity education. Thus the planning system is plagued not only by its inherent bureaucracy, but also by the inequity of the property system. In the cultural revolution she percei...