This book studies the forces promoting underdevelopment in China prior to 1949 and the character of the development that has occurred since then. It presents a unified perspective for grasping the development process as a whole, for relating this to the class structure of China, and for considering development in the context of Chinese efforts to carry out a transition to socialism. The arguments in this work will challenge many conventional assumptions about Chinese economic development and break new theoretical ground in the debate over China's development policies.