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China’s route to advanced socialism
ANDREW MURRAY recommends that rare thing - a study of the country’s economy that comes from China
COMMON PROSPERITY: Assembly and testing of fibre optics [Steve Jurvetson/Creative Commons]

China’s Economic Dialectic 
by Cheng Enfu
International Publishers, £25.99

AS THE late Giovanni Arrighi stated: “If China is socialist or capitalist it is not like any previously encountered model of either,” and there are few more important endeavours for the international left than understanding China’s extraordinary development and its meaning for world socialism. 

Such work is often bedevilled by an over-reliance on Western-generated analyses of China, as if the studies and understandings of Chinese scholars and the Communist Party of China themselves were of little use.

Cheng Enfu’s book is extremely helpful in this context. Cheng is a leading Chinese Marxist academic who has clearly thought deeply about China’s development as a socialist state.

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