Economic growth and rising incomes have tended to quiet dissent in China, although not completely or consistently. In this sense, the Left viewed legitimation as requiring more than simply generating economic growth. For the Left, socialism meant more than the simple political primacy of the Party and the Party's guidance of the economy towards more rapid technological advance and economic growth, but had also to involve psychological and cultural aspects. If it was possible to motivate the Chinese population to act in the social interest without material incentives, then there could be no justification for economic inequality. Inequality would then become self-reinforcing.
Wealth confers power and power provides more access to wealth.
Those with accumulated wealth could command the labor of others and live a parasitic existence. For the Left, the 1949 Revolution had been fought to end this sort of social structure. The Leftist view that all children should be born into a society in which they are relatively equal remains popular in China. It would not be difficult to identify large numbers of people who equate socialism with the public distribution of resources in such a manner as to afford relatively equal access to all citizens. These diametrically opposed views of of the interaction of social welfare with economic growth would prove to be a major point of debate within the Chinese leadership, the intelligentsia, and the larger society over the years from the 1949 Revolution up to and including the current period.