Interestingly, Weber traces this development back to before Karl Marx was even born:Thankfully, a handful of young, pragmatic, rural-oriented Chinese reformers led a countermovement to persuade the state’s top economic decision-maker, Premier Zhao Ziyang, to adopt a gradualist dual-track price system (shuanggui zhi). The industrial core of the socialist economy would remain under state price controls, while “nonessential” goods at the margins were gradually commodified, enabling China to maximize its economic potential.
This suggests to me that an excessive focus on "market dynamics" can result in missing out on what is happening with the production of "essential" goods. Perhaps, what it does signal is a continuing break from the West. One thing that seems to have led up to this break, and not discussed in the book review, is the whole question of intellectual property rights. That is a symptom of what China most needed from the West: technological know-how. It is as if the country has reached a point where it has received diminishing returns from its gains on that front and is now ready to turn inward. Trump's so-called "trade war" may have also been a big prompt in that direction.She frames the debates of the 1980s in terms derived from the text Guanzi, from the seventh century bce, which argued that in economic questions, one should distinguish between “light and heavy” goods (qingzhong): that is, between “heavy” essential goods, such as salt, grains, and silk, which the state has a duty to regulate, versus everything else, which officials could leave unprotected from market dynamics.
Admittedly, these comments on my part are a bit speculative as I have not been able to focus on China as much as I might have liked due to the distraction of so many other interesting issues raging across the planet. So, I am trying to keep my mind open to alternative ways of looking at things in regards to China. For those more interested in focusing on China, the two books reviewed in The Nation sound like they may be a good place to start.
Here is a link to that review. I subscribe to The Nation so I don't know if the link is available to those of you who do not:
https://www.thenation.com/article/world ... e-markets/