Xue Muqiao was an eminent Chinese economist and politician.
25 Facts About Xue Muqiao
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Xue Muqiao was instrumental in introducing and implementing economic reforms that transformed China into a socialist market economy by participating in the development of the ideological concept of a primary stage of socialism.
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Xue Muqiao served as the director of the National Bureau of Statistics of the People's Republic of China in the 1950s.
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Xue Muqiao was a fellow of Chinese Academy of Sciences and a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
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In 2005, Xue Muqiao received the first Outstanding Achievement Award of Economics in China.
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Xue Muqiao was born into an educated family of a formerly wealthy clan experiencing both social and economic decline.
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When Xue Muqiao was a child, his father committed suicide because of the family's overwhelming debt burden.
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Xue Muqiao joined the Chinese Communist Party at age 23, and studied Marxism and economics while imprisoned by the Nationalist forces for his activism in the railroad workers movement.
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In 1943, Xue Muqiao became a major part of the CCP's economic work in Shandong.
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Xue Muqiao argued that the party should instead manipulate market forces to oust the Nationalists' currency.
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In 1948, Xue Muqiao's work focused on the creation of a planned economy.
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Xue Muqiao continued his work on price stabilization following the failure of the Great Leap Forward.
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Xue Muqiao was sent into the countryside for "reeducation by labor" in 1969.
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Xue Muqiao published his reformist economic thinking in the late 1970s, particularly his influential volume China's Socialist Economy.
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Xue Muqiao introduced the term "underdeveloped socialism" in his book China's Socialist Economy.
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Xue Muqiao wrote that within the socialist mode of production there were several phases and for China to reach an advanced form of socialism it had to focus on developing the productive forces.
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Xue Muqiao proposed a theory in which the basic laws of economic growth were those in which "the relations of production must conform to the level of the productive forces".
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Similar to Stalin, Xue Muqiao considered the productive forces to be primary and that the relations of production had to conform to the level of the productive forces.
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Xue Muqiao believed that this was a fundamental universal law of economics.
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Unlike Stalin, Xue Muqiao believed there were principles that guided the socialist transition, the key one being the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his work"; this principle would guide socialist development, even when China had reached advanced socialism, and would be replaced with "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" only when there existed general abundance.
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Xue Muqiao based his arguments upon the economic policies pursued during the Cultural Revolution, which he believed had led to "the most severe setbacks and heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People's Republic".
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Xue Muqiao believed the relations of production were determined by ownership in the economy.
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Xue Muqiao said that since the productive forces in China were "backward", the relations of production were at a comparable level.
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Xue Muqiao's suggestions were abandoned at the 6th Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee held in June 1981 because they failed to solve the problems facing agriculture.
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Xue Muqiao referred to the changes underway in the agricultural system as the creation of a new mode of production and called it the socialist commodity economy.