Xue Muqiao, perhaps China's leading economist, in the introduction to his 1981 book, recognized the danger of ideological dogmatism in the determination of economic policy. He argued:
Socialism is a new system. In studying the laws of motion of the Socialist economy, we must always base our work on actual conditions... Marx and Lenin showed us the laws governing the transition from capitalism to communism through socialism... However, the classics they authored are insufficient for a study of the socialist economy because socialism never actually existed in their lifetime... We must never take what is said by Marx, Engels, and Lenin in their works as dogma or as a panacea.
This view was also reflected in a 1981 article by two prominent economists, Tian Jianghai and Zhang Shuguang. They argued as follows:
The problems regarding balance and regulation, economic structure and setup, however, happened not only in China, but in other socialist countries as well. What then is the reason? We hold that, from an epistemological point of view, it is because people had a dogmatic understanding of Marxist views on socialism for a long period of time, which has resulted in negating the existence of a commodity economy within the socialist economy; writing off the relative independence and right of socialist enterprises to manage their own affairs, taking the model of a highly centralized planning economy practised in the Soviet Union under Stalin as the sole socialist economic model, taking plans as the only means of organizing and regulating the development of socialist economy, trying to depend on one planning center to organize the production of hundreds of thousands of different products and direct the economic activities of the entire society, and negating the regulating role of the market mechanism in the socialist economy.
The views of these economists received official approval in an authoritative article in the Communist Party's theoretical journal, Red Flag on 1st October 1984 and in editorials in the Peoples' Daily on 7 and 8 December 1984. The front-page commentary in Peoples' Daily stated:
There are many things that Marx, Engel and Lenin never experienced or had any contact with, and we cannot depend on the works of Marx and Lenin to solve all our modern day questions.
from Organizations and Growth in Rural China by Marsh Marshall
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