Making Sense of Joan Robinson on China

Pervez Tahir

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030288242
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030288259
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Joan Robinson was a member of the famous Keynes Circus of young economists at Cambridge in the 1930's. She was a theorist par excellence, making outstanding contributions to the understanding of competition, aggregate demand and capital. At the same time, she developed an interest in underdeveloped economies and alternatives to capitalism that eventually produced a long list of writings on China between the 1950's to the 1970's. These writings were neither theoretical nor empirical, but a series of opinion pieces and reports. Yet it is these writings that arguably cost Joan Robinson the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics. 

This short book reviews those writings and comments on what has happened since with regard to China's development, Joan Robinson's interpretation and predictions, and how her 1950's lectures in China match up to China's policies since Mao.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in how the history of economic thoughtcan inform and progress development economics.

© The Author(s) 2019

P. TahirMaking Sense of Joan Robinson on ChinaPalgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thoughthttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28825-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Pervez Tahir¹

(1)

Islamabad, Pakistan

Pervez Tahir

Keywords

AdvocacyCapital accumulationChinese developmentSocialist economy

End Abstract

Joan Robinson’s views of Maoist China do not make sense to many in the economics profession. Some find these “scandalous” (Turner, 1989, 170), others “completely uncritical”, even “totally unreliable”.¹ She paid eight visits to China—in 1953, 1957, 1963, 1964, 1967, 1972, 1975 and, finally, 1978.² The whole experience is seen to be “reminiscent of the Webbs’ late love affair with the Soviet Union”.³ If a sympathetic Samuelson is puzzled as to how an independent mind like hers “waxed successively enthusiastic about Stalin’s Soviet Union; Mao’s China; North Korea; Castro’s Cuba; American students’ new leftism” (Feiwel, 1989, 862), a friendly Harcourt (1982, 319) has to admit that her “writing in this area contains a deliberate leaven of advocacy”. Development economists are sharply critical, too. Streeten believes that “she was wrong about Mao” (Feiwel, ibid.). In an interview with the author, Chakravarty stated that Joan Robinson’s interest in, and writings on, China were a less interesting aspect of her contributions. Economists with a specialist interest in the development of China hold a similar view. According to Riskin , “her writing about China was probably the least interesting aspect of her work, except in that it revealed views and attitudes that might throw light on her other concerns”. But he hastened to add that “being Joan Robinson, she could not write about anything completely without insight”.⁴

It might be said in Joan Robinson’s defence that the leaven of advocacy was a way of countering the propaganda of those whose own writings contained a bias in favour of capitalism (Harcourt, 1982, 359). It might also be said that she was not alone in looking at the Chinese experience as a successful strategy of development.⁵ A convenient approach would be to dismiss her writings as traveller’s tales, which are not expected to contain serious analysis anyway. None of these courses is adopted here. China was isolated and quite misrepresented as well. Who would know better than Joan Robinson that there is no substitute for information and analysis? Even those extremely critical of her other works do not deny her acute analytical prowess. She was thus not expected to respond to propaganda in kind. Further, it is a fact that she shared the illusions about Maoist China with many others. That does not render her position less vulnerable than it is. Further still, her explorations in China and its development were by no means a sideline activity. Some of her main works discuss China as an economy where development was actually taking place (Robinson, 1962b, 1968h, 1970g, 1979b; Robinson and Eatwell, 1973).

The main objective of this volume is to focus on the insights by separating analysis from advocacy. Joan Robinson’s influence in the developing world exceeded the extent of her serious contribution to development economics. At a time when theories and models of development are being subjected to intense re-examination in view of the accumulation of a considerable fund of experience in the developing countries as well as the availability of more reliable information about socialist economies, it is instructive to look afresh at the insights as well as prejudices acquired by a theorist of the stature of Joan Robinson.

Joan Robinson had “no special knowledge of Chinese history and none at all of the language” (Robinson, 1977b, 7). It is obvious that a writer in her situation is dependent upon interpreters. Observation makes up for the inability to communicate directly only to the extent that the sample being observed is fairly representative of the population. She did not write anything on China in the scholarly economic journals, except for some book reviews. Most of the writings appeared in journals of politics and social issues. Many of them were described variously as “reminiscences”, “letters”, “notes”, “conversations”, “reports” and so forth. While Joan Robinson’s China connection has been severely attacked by the right as well as the left,⁶ no attempt has been made even to write up her work in a thorough and informative way. This volume is an attempt to do so.

Chapter 2 sets out the main contributions which Joan Robinson made in her work on China. The material—which is enormous, some of it unpublished and most of what is published is in periodicals ranging from the well known to the hardly known or in the form of pamphlets—is organised with a view to getting a grip on the main economic arguments. It is possible to look at her work in three broad phases. The first phase comprises her thinking and writing before the third visit in 1963. As is shown in Chap. 3, despite tremendous enthusiasm for the Chinese experiment, she had her own set of views on how China should develop as a socialist economy. The two field trips served the purpose of gathering some evidence in support of her views. The study of China appears to have provided for Joan Robinson, at least until her third visit or during what is called here the first phase, a laboratory to intuitively test her own thinking about economic development in the backward overpopulated economies. Her ideas in this first phase were broadly similar to the views of the right in China—a high rate of capital accumulation, achieved without an intolerable sacrifice of consumption, profit-oriented industrial management to avoid bureaucratic tendency, use of prices with moral supplements, population control, reward by work done and the extraction of agricultural surplus through gradual collectivisation. Inequality, according to her, is associated with private property. With its elimination, she assumes the prevalence of justice in the nonagriculture sector, though the tax-free collective property differentials in agriculture are seen to be a source of inequality. On the whole, she finds the planning arrangement in China to be working well in industry, but still feels uneasy about the suitability of socialism as a system for agriculture due mainly to the difficulties of organising labour on a large scale.

In the second phase, she takes a sharp turn to the left. Between the Great Leap Forward and the cultural revolution, a period of statistical and informational blackout, she argues that the problems of socialist organisation lie in industry not agriculture. The communes are considered to have resolved the dilemma of organising labour in agriculture, whereas Soviet-type industrial management (even in its reformed decentralised form) is criticised for its profit motivation and a hierarchical structure resulting from differentials caused by intellectual property—an unfortunate outcome of equal-opportunity education. Thus the planning system is plagued not only by its inherent bureaucracy, but also by the inequity of the property system. In the cultural revolution she percei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Contributions
• 3. The First Phase: Thoughts on Socialist Development in a Backward Overpopulated Economy
• 4. The Second Phase: A “Starry-eyed” Joan Robinson
• 5. The Third Phase: Self-criticism
• 6. Concluding Observations
• Back Matter