Planning theory in China: its development and state of the art

Abstract

It is generally agreed that the development of Chinese planning theory study since the establishment of People’s Republic of China could be divided into two stages by the year 1978. In this year China launched its economic reform and the opening-up policy, which have dramatically changed the zeitgeist of the whole country. In the first stage, from 1949 to 1978, China was greatly influenced by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) model. The second stage, much more intricate and complicated than the first one in theory research, is from 1978 to the present. We focuses on exploring the development trajectory of planning theory research in the second stage despite the “chaos, ambiguity, conflict and complexity” (Cao and Hillier, 2013) of the theory evolution course. Until now, Chinese scholars have developed different opinions on phase division of this stage in accordance with the social, economic, political and cultural context as well as the academic trends (Wang, 1999; Wei, 2005; Zhang, 2009). We generally distinguish three developing phrases in Chinese planning theory which partially overlap with each other in their time span: from the 1980’s, since 1997 and since 2000.