A Review of China's Economy in 1970

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Abstract
The writer on Chinese economic affairs may be forgiven for recalling an incident from early schooldays when the headmaster, introducing his pupils to The Odyssey, mused about its author: “Nobody, he said, knows for certain whether Homer ever lived; what is known, though, is that he was blind.” Turning to China, the student of contemporary affairs is similarly uncertain of his facts. He is facing the most populous, yet one of the industrially least advanced and statistically least well documented countries in the world. At the same time, China not only succeeded within two decades in developing its own nuclear striking force, but at the end of this short period of development it launched its first earth satellite. We are thus confronted with an entirely new situation, the study of which requires certain adjustments of the techniques of analysis usually applied. Today's “China-watchers” find themselves where 20 years ago the analysts of the Soviet scene were when they had to guess Stalin's intentions and successes on the strength of misleading indices related to unknown starting dates.

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