Reworking Marxism: The Making of the National Economy in 1980s China

Bowen Li, Northwestern University

This paper examines how reform-era China redefined what counted as “the economy” through its 1980s transition from the Soviet-style Material Product System (MPS) to a GDP-centered national accounting framework. Drawing on statistical journals, policy documents, pilot materials, and interviews, I argue that this shift was neither a straightforward technical replacement nor a simple diffusion of Western standards. It was a reorganization of the epistemic principles through which the state classified economic activity, produced aggregates, and rendered economic life governable. Under MPS, the economy was bounded by the distinction between “productive” and “non-productive” labor, a Soviet Marxist reformulation that confined national income to material production. By the early 1980s, mounting urban employment pressures and chronic shortages in commerce and services made this boundary increasingly difficult to sustain, as the state faced growing pressure to incorporate non-material activities into economic administration. Scholarly debates peaking in 1982 did not resolve the issue theoretically, but they destabilized the epistemic position of “productive labor” as the economy’s organizing principle. What followed was a pragmatic and experimental process that bypassed debating: reformers selectively incorporated elements of the System of National Accounts (SNA), institutionalizing categories such as tertiary industry, gross national product, value added, and sectoral accounts through pilot projects and provisional reforms. These categories redistributed classificatory and aggregative functions previously concentrated in “productive labor,” making it possible to represent the national economy as a coherent, measurable, and governable totality. China’s adoption of GDP was thus simultaneously the construction of “the national economy” as a new object of knowledge and state power, and the epistemic condition for the later rise of GDP-centered developmental governance, as local officials came to embrace growth statistics as a key language of administration and political achievement.

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 Presented in Session 85. Macrohistorical Dynamics