COMPARING THE CHINESE AND VIETNAMESE REFORMS ：AN INTRODUCTI(4)

　　In addition ，the socialist era arrived in China and Vietnam at a differentpoint of their economic development than in most of the Warsaw bloc.Even decadeslater ，at the point of the introduction of reforms in the early 1980s ，mostof the population in both Asian countries lived in villages and farmed mainly byhand.This contrasted with a country like Russia，where by the 1980s only a relativelysmall proportion of the workforce remained in the countryside ，and where the agriculturaleconomy was mechanized and bound almost as tightly into the central ？command economyìas industry was.In sharp contrast，Chinese state employees never reached 20per cent of China's total workforce ，whereas in the USSR over 95per cent of theworkforce were essentially employed in the state sector.[1]Almost all were coveredby the net of state public services ：not so in China and Vietnam，where onlythe minority who lived in urban areas were covered and where local villages andrural families were responsible for their own welfare.All of these factors affectedthe prospects for a return to family farming.With a history of local rural economicinitiative and of self-reliance in welfare services ，and in circumstances wheresmall labour-intensive family farms could be viable ，the countrysides of the twoAsian socialist states held similar distinct advantages over the former Soviet Unionand most of the other East European states.