The term entered was first established by Deng Xiaoping in 1982 and was largely associated with Deng's overall program of adopting elements of market economics as a means to foster growth using foreign direct investment and to increase productivity (especially in the countryside where 80% of China's population lived) while the CCP retained both its formal commitment to achieve communism and its monopoly on political power.
[3] Deng said "We must integrate the universal truth of Marxism with the concrete realities of China, and blaze a path of our own and build a Socialism with Chinese Characteristics".
[9] In the early 1950s, economists Yu Guangyuan, Xue Muqiao and Sun Yefang raised the question of socialist transformation in which China's economy of low productive force was in a transitional period, a position which Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, endorsed briefly until 1957.
When discussing the necessity of commodity relations at the 1st Zhengzhou Conference (2–10 November 1958), for example, Mao said that China was in the "intitial stage of socialism".
[11] The article was written by members in the State Council's Political Research Office led by economist Yu Guangyuan on the orders of Deng Xiaoping so as to "criticize and repudiate" the beliefs of the communist left.
[12] After reading it, Deng himself authored a brief memo saying that it was "well-written, and shows that the nature of distribution by labor is not capitalist, but socialist [...] [and] to implement this principle, many things are to be done, and many institutions to be revived.
[13] The term reappeared at the 6th plenum of the 11th Central Committee on 27 June 1981 in the document "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of our Party since the Founding of the PRC".
[14] It was not until the "Resolution Concerning the Guiding Principle in Building Socialist Spiritual Civilization" at the 6th plenum of the 12th Central Committee that the term was used in the defense of the economic reforms which were being introduced.
[14] At the 13th National Congress, acting General Secretary Zhao Ziyang on behalf of the 12th Central Committee delivered the report "Advance Along the Road of Socialism with Chinese characteristics".
The main failure of the communist left was that they held the "utopian position" that China could bypass the primary stage of socialism in which the productive forces are to be modernized.
[17] This represents, says Ian Wilson, "a severe blight on the expectations raised during the early 70s, when the old eight-grade wage scale was being compressed to only three levels and a more even distributive system was assumed to be an important national goal".
On 25 October, Zhao further expounded on the concept of the primary stage of socialism and said that the party line was to follow "One Center, Two Basic Points"—the central focus of the Chinese state was economic development, but that this should occur simultaneously through centralized political control (i.e. the Four Cardinal Principles) and upholding the policy of reform and opening up.
[14] General Secretary Jiang Zemin further elaborated on the concept ten years later, first during a speech to the CCP Central Party School on 29 May 1997 and again in his report to the 15th National Congress on 12 September.
[18] The third point—building socialist culture with Chinese characteristics—meant turning Marxism into the guide to train the people so as to give them "high ideals, moral integrity, a good education, and a strong sense of discipline, and developing a national scientific, and popular socialist culture geared to the needs of modernization, of the world, and of the future".
[18] When asked how long the primary stage of socialism would last, Zhao replied "[i]t will be at least 100 years [...] [before] socialist modernization will have been in the main accomplished".
[30]: 181 Ma and Kang write that in its foreign relations with other Global South countries, China does not attempt to export the ideology of Socialism with Chinese characteristics.
[31] According to party theorists, since China adopted state ownership when it was a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country, it is claimed to be in the primary stage of socialism.
[31] Because of this, certain policies and system characteristics—such as commodity production for the market, the existence of a private sector and the reliance of the profit motive in enterprise management—were changed.
[32] However, according to party theorists, the existence and growth of private ownership does not necessarily undermine socialism or promote capitalism in China.