Arguing that an understanding of the similarities and differences among communist countries provides valuable insights into their momentous transformations, this comprehensive volume compares recent changes in China and Vietnam. Exploring the economic, political, and social effects of reform programs, the chapters pair leading Vietnam and China scholars in a genuinely comparative analysis. Finding similarities--and unexpected differences--the authors conclude that Vietnam often has forged its own path rather than following the Chinese model.

A significant contribution to both political theory and China studies, this volume provides a critical assessment of the past and future Chinese socialism.

The immense process of economic and social transformation currently underway in China and Vietnam is well known and extensively documented. However, less attention has been devoted to the process of Chinese and Vietnamese legal change which is nonetheless critical for the future politics, society and economy of these two countries. In a unique comparative approach that brings together indigenous and international experts, Asian Socialism and Legal Change analyzes recent developments in the legal sphere in China and Vietnam. This book presents the diversity and dynamism of this process in China and Vietnam-the impact of socialism, constitutionalism and Confucianism on legal development; responses to change among enterprises and educational and legal institutions; conflicts between change led centrally and locally; and international influences on domestic legal institutions. Core socialist ideas continue to shape society, but have been adapted to local contexts and needs, in some areas more radically than in others. This book is the first systematic analysis of legal change in transitional economies.

Examines the dramatic transformation of Asian communist countries-China in particular-to vigorous market economies

China, socialism, and especially China s three-decades-long experiment in building socialism has been an issue of much interest and debate among scholars as well as practicing Marxists in India and elsewhere. They also confront the realities of post-Mao China and how these have been impacting the lives of the peasants and workers in that society, as well as face the question of today s China being a development model for other third world countries. In mid-2005 several editors of Critical Asian Studies (formerly the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars) convened in a Roundtable to engage the issues raised by Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett in their book China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle (Monthly Review Press, 2005). The articles published in this Roundtable, along with a Rejoinder by Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, appeared in two issues of Critical Asian Studies (37:3 and 4) in 2005. They, along with an Introduction by Hari P. Sharma, are reprinted here in Critical Perspectives on China s Economic Transformation in order to stimulate further discussion. As Hari P. Sharma writes in the Introduction: It is our task to learn the positive and negative lessons from the Chinese experience and carry on with the task of fighting and defeating imperialism and its hold, wherever we live; as well as lend support to the struggles for national liberation and for socialism, wherever they take place.