This article argues that China's current industrial development after four decades of capitalist "reform and opening", as well as the profound social reversal following the rise of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, would be unthinkable without the industrialization of the socialist period. This process was a two-pronged struggle: the modernization of an economy that had been gripped by feudal backwardness and the domination of the great powers, and the foundation and development of new and more egalitarian modes of organization and of labour and social motivation. The new industrial "great leap" after the reversal of 1978 would have very different social bases, with other managers and other beneficiaries.