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resource demand and supplier controls were closely integrated. Self-reliance
under such a socioeconomic structure in which politics, economics, service,
and supply existed together at the unit level created a sustainable society based
on their own resources and needs and under the overall guidance of the state’s
5-year plans.
The 5-year plans or The Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social
Development are national goal-setting economic and policy position papers
derived over a period of 1 or 2 years from high-level and local committees. At the
national government level, the 5-year plans outline national key construction
projects and infrastructure plans as well as administer the distribution of
productive, manufacturing and business sources and growth of academic
and educational institutions along with individual sector contributions to the
national economy. The plans also provide large sums of national funding for
implementation. Aside from giving the nation, business, government, and
foreign interest a “road map” of the Chinese policies, the plans map the general
direction of future development including specific measureable policies and
targets. The last Five-Year Plan was from 2006 to 2010 and officially called the
11th Five-Year Development Guidelines. The current 12th Five-Year Plan or
12-5 year Plan came out officially in March 2011.
In the context of energy, particularly for homes and buildings, self-reliance
also meant that the focus for renewable energy was primarily technologies that
could help in the heating and cooling of buildings. Solar thermal systems were
developed by state-operated companies in the 1990s and then spun off into
private-public-owned firms. Sundra is a case in point with solar thermal
systems that appear on homes all over China (Kwan, 2009). Now their market
has grown worldwide, as examples from colleges in the United States illustrate
(Eisenberg, 2009).
The Chinese choice of a self-reliance and self-sufficiency development
path was projected as a potential “ideological threat” by the capitalist Western
nations, because the central goal of the socialist politics with specific plans
from the central government were seen as an attempt to challenge the capitalist
ideology of competition that would reduce costs but unfortunately also lead to
an inequitable hierarchy in the world order (Downs, 2000, 2004, 2006; Jiahua
et al., 2006; Kaplinsky, 2006; Liu, 2006; Konan et al., 2008; Li, 2010; and
today, US Congress, 2011, among others). Seen from the interpretation of
world system theory, the socialist self-reliance and self-efficiency policy
aimed at transforming the basic logic of capitalism into “social capitalism”
(Clark and Li, 2003). However, in reality it was actually designed toward a
nation-wide mobilization for industrialization for the purpose of catching up
with the core advanced capitalism that rewards people with money, no matter
where the funds came from or by what means the funds were acquired. This
is because socialist states were still operated within the capitalist world
economy, and the dynamics of capitalism was capable of distorting and
limiting national economic planning, leading to the constraints of their policy
options (Chase-Dunn, 1982, 1989). Nevertheless, such a socialist project based