A Comprehensive Balance Should Mean Overall Balance in the Process of Social Reproduction

We have been talking about comprehensive balance in almost every one of the twenty years since the First Five-Year Plan. What comprehensive balance really means, however, remains unclear. This indicates the difficulty in recognizing an objective economic law or breaking away from conventional ideas. Recently a heated discussion about this issue has been going on among economic theoreticians and those involved in economic work. Newspapers and periodicals have also published many articles on comprehensive balance. The authors who criticize the unrealistically high production targets and the gaps in economic plans uphold the idea of balancing the two major categories of production in society and correctly handling the relations between agriculture, light industry, and heavy industry, and between accumulation and consumption. They advocate integration of planning with market regulation. Beyond any doubt, these are the major contents of comprehensive balance. It is not the purpose of this article, however, to go into detail about the above issues. I will confine my discussion to some preliminary ideas on overall balance in the process of social reproduction, an issue seldom touched upon.