The term socialist market economy indicates the Chinese economic structure, characterized by a mixed system presenting the typical features both of market and planning economies. In this type of system, the political authoritarianism, due to the 1949 socialist regime, matches with a market economy developed by the reform process of the eighties. The similarity can be especially identified in the gradualism with which China has started restructuring a Marxist economic kind of system according to the market rules. This gradualism has undoubtedly been an essential factor in order to achieve any kind of success as a consequence of these reforms, but it has also caused some instability factors. For instance, it has created a system in which private and public companies, market prices and planning prices, protection of private property and communist ideology, competition and state intervention, simultaneously coexist.