World Development
Volume 4, Issues 10–11, October–November 1976, Pages 883-888
Can we learn from the Chinese people?☆
Author links open overlay panelJohanGaltung FumikoNishimura†
Abstract
Based on their analysis of China after the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution the authors make an attempt to answer the question stated in the title. Their answer is along six lines: (1) The Chinese have made great progress in reducing vertical division of labour, not only in the sense of arriving at greater economic equality, but in arriving at greater equality in creativity, in access to problem-solving work. (2) The Chinese have to a large extent introduced patterns of local self-reliance, creating the paradox that the biggest nation in the world has the smallest economic units, thus potentially making individual human beings greater. (3) The economic cycle is used as work organization rather than, as in the West, one particular farm, factory or firm located on the economic cycle. (4) The Chinese are extremely sensitive to the political implications of technology, and stimulate research and innovation of technologies that do not unnecessarily reintroduce old patterns of division of labour and division of economic cycles. (5) The Chinese have devised patterns of work that serve to include everybody — the very young and the very old, women, minorities, the crippled and otherwise handicapped, and so on. (6) Schooling is used for participation, not for sorting—examinations are played down, integration of schooling with social life outside schools played up. The article discusses to what extent patterns such as these can be introduced without revolutionary changes in predominantly capitalist economies, and tends towards the answer that these changes would be that revolution.
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