Travaux d'infrastructure des champs et lutte au sommet en Chine depuis la mort de Mao Zedong

The author of this article has availed himself of "Pekinology" (by reference to "Kremlinology") to analyse the advent of a new economic policy with regard to infrastructure field work in China. His account, while shedding light on the political customs of the Chinese (top-level factional struggles, antagonisms among the leaders...), describes a decision-making process for economic policy. In fact, apart from the one question of interpersonal rivalry, there is a very real problem of economic development theory: what capacities in the agricultural sector are to be accumulated and what importance is to be attributed to the piercing should one be able to accomplish it? The answer given by the " moderate " tendency, victors at the outcome of this confrontation, is that the agricultural sector in today's China has only very weak chances of accumulation and that it would be more suitable for the agricultural production units to promote a series of small rural workshops (not to be confounded with the " five little" (wu xiao) industries which were the spear-heads of small rural industrialisation during the cultural revolution and have been challenged since the death of Mao Zedong). These small workshops should allow the agricultural production units to finance their own development and, in particular, their infrastructure work in the fields, however, provided the most profitable workshops do not demand a great investment which would make them inaccessible for a majority of the production units.