The economy of China: a tourist's view

Three American economists visited China for two weeks in September 1972 as guests of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University. The paper reports one visitor's impressions of the Chinese economy and of Chinese economics. The impressions of the economy are organized around a speculative construction of the national accounts of China, designed to make scattered bits of information into a consistent picture of the interrelations of agriculture, industry, and government. The manner in which the countryside is organized in people's communes is described, and income differences within agriculture, within industry, and between sectors are discussed. Finally, the state of the Chinese universities in general, and of academic economics in particular, following the disruptions of the Cultural Revolution is described.