The failure of the Great Leap Forward was a political disaster for Mao (see “The emergence of Maoism” 1/18/2018).  By 1958, “many Party leaders came to view Mao and his followers as reckless utopians, forcing radical social change much further than could be sustained by China’s weak economic base” (Meisner, 1999:149).  During the November 28-December 10, 1958 meeting of the Party, when the economic difficulties and popular dissatisfaction with the Great Leap Forward were becoming apparent, the Central Committee of the Party announced that Mao had stepped down as Chairman of the People’s Republic.  Mao retained the post of Chairman of the Party, but he no longer had de facto control of the Party, especially at the highest levels.  Following the official announcement by the Party of the failures of the Great Leap on August 29, 1959, Mao quietly withdrew from Party affairs and political life, although he continued to hold the position of Chairman of the Party.  He seemed to accept the return to power of the non-Mao pragmatic faction as well as the reassertion of the Party and state institutions.  Meanwhile, the people had become apathetic and apolitical.  Mao’s important ally, the spontaneously radical sector the people, with its strong base among poorer peasants, has disappeared from the political scene.  In general, the people acquired an “aversion to Maoist-style mass campaigns,” hoping for economic and political stability and order (Meisner, 1999:229-30, 234, 249-50).

      However, in spite of his loss of political power, Mao still had enormous prestige among the people, especially among the rank and file of the Party and the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army.  The people to a considerable extent were unaware of the conflict at the highest levels of the Party, and the Party leaders could not openly confront Mao without provoking political division and conflict.  As Meisner observes, “Mao had lost control of the Party, but he was hardly powerless” (Meisner, 1999:255).

     Mao emerged from political seclusion in January 1962, when he delivered a speech to 7,000 provincial and district Party leaders.  The speech harshly criticized the bureaucratic tendencies of the Party in the post-Great Leap years.  Mao repeated these views at the Central Committee’s Tenth Plenum in September 1962.  He called for a massive ideological education campaign for Party members and the people.  The Party, deferring to the considerable prestige of Mao among party members and the people, approved his proposal for a Socialist Education Movement.  However, the Movement did not accomplish its goal of raising the revolutionary consciousness of Party members and the people, for it encountered the subversion of high Party officials and the apathy of the people (Meisner, 1999:256-58, 273-79).

     Mao’s proposal stood against the prevailing mood of both the Party and the people.  Party leaders and high state functionaries, behind a façade of radical Maoist rhetoric, “were preoccupied with social order, administrative efficiency, technological progress and economic development” (Meisner, 1999:268).  Accordingly, Party members and state functionaries “increasingly ignored the Maoist political ethic in favor of a bureaucratic vocational ethic” (Meisner, 1999:268).  At the same time, the urban masses possessed a modest consumerism, oriented to the acquisition of such items as watches, bicycles, radios, and sewing machines.  In the countryside, there was a revival of traditional customs, including religious festivals, money marriages, and gambling (Meisner, 1999:268-69, 301).

      In spite of the limited accomplishment of the Socialist Education Program, Mao continued to call the people to action against the Party leadership.  In January 1965, Mao convened a national work conference that emitted a document known as the “Twenty-three Articles,” which called on the people to focus on “people in positions of authority within the Party who take the capitalist road” (quoted in Meisner, 1999, 277).   “We must boldly unleash the masses,” he declared (quoted in Meisner, 1999, 277).   “It was,” writes Meisner, “in effect, a declaration of war against the Party bureaucracy and its top leaders” (1999, 277).  

      Whereas most Party leaders believed that the Party educates and leads the people, Mao believed in the revolutionary spontaneity of the people, such that the Party was both student and teacher of the people.  Viewing the political apathy of the people in the period 1960-1965 as a temporary phenomenon that resulted from disappointments and setbacks of the Great Leap Forward (see “The emergence of Maoism” 1/18/2018), Mao sought to rekindle the revolutionary spontaneity of the people by appealing directly to them, bypassing and standing against the Party (Meisner, 1999:172, 276-77, 279-80, & 282).  

      Mao’s 1965 call to the people launched what Maoists called the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” which was conceived as a war against those high members of the Party and the state who possessed bourgeois consciousness.  As proclaimed by the Central Committee of the Party on August 8, 1966, at a meeting in which many non-Maoist leaders were excluded (Meisner, 1999:319), “Our objective is to struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road. . .  The main target of the present movement is those within the Party who are in authority and are taking the capitalist road” (Asia Research Center, Ed. 1968, 395, 399).  Meisner writes that “the underlying Maoist assumption in the Cultural Revolution was that the existing state and Party apparatus was dominated by ‘bourgeois ideology’ and thus was producing capitalist-type socioeconomic relationships in society at large” (1999:315).  Symptoms of the phenomenon during the Liu government included increasing inequality in income and status between, on the one hand, managers, technicians, professional, intellectuals, and privileged urban industrial workers, and on the other hand, peasants and temporary contract workers (Meisner, 1999:300). 

      As interpreted by the Maoists, the problem was an enemy within, and even worse, at the highest levels.  Poisonous weeds were destroying the socialist state and Party, and thus the socialist society.  The solution was the mobilization of the people and the raising of political consciousness, restoring socialist ideals and proletarian ideology, so that the people could identify the poisonous weeds and uproot them.  By uprooting the poisonous weeds, the socialist party, state, and society could be purified and renewed (Meisner, 1999:307-8, 315; Asia Research Center, Ed. 1968, 89-204).  

      Students were the first to respond to the call to organize and mobilize and to expose and discredit the “capitalist roaders” within the Party.  The Maoist inspired rebellion began on May 25, 1966 at Beijing University, when students led by a young philosophy professor posted a manifesto on campus walls denouncing the university president.  Mao proclaimed his support for the action, and soon “rebel student groups were organized with extraordinary rapidity and in bewildering variety at schools throughout the country” (Meisner, 1999:316).  

      The student rebellion quickly divided into two factions, both of which shouted Maoist slogans and proclaimed fidelity to Mao.  On the one side, there were the most radical Maoist critiques of bureaucratic privilege formulated by youth whose families were from the pre-revolutionary ruling and privileged classes.  They resented the favored position with respect to political office and educational and employment opportunities of others of their generation whose families were from the peasant and working classes.  On the other side, there were rebel student groups organized by the majority faction of the Central Committee of the Party, which had sent organizing teams to the universities.  The Party-supported student rebel groups, many of them the children of persons in high positions in the Party and the state, sought to deflect the rebellion away from the “power holders” and to target instead “bourgeois authorities,” that is, individual professors, intellectuals, and writers.  And the Party-supported groups attempted to redirect the attack toward students with “bad” class backgrounds, that is, whose families were from the landlord and capitalist classes or from the well-to-do sector of the peasantry.  Students from working class and peasant families whose parents had not attained a high position in the revolutionary order tended support equally the two factions (Meisner, 1999:315-18).

     The struggle, sometimes violent, between the two factions of the student rebellion continued through June and July of 1966, with the Party-sponsored groups having the upper hand.  In late July, Mao, over the objections of Liu Shaoqi, ordered the withdrawal of the Party organizing teams from the universities and schools.  With less dictates from the Party, the students organized “Red Guards,” which did not leave behind, however, the political-social divisions among the students.  The Red Guards spread rapidly.  “In early August of 1966, young students wearing armbands bearing the characters for ‘Red Guard’ appeared on the streets of Beijing.  Within a few weeks, and with the encouragement of Maoist leaders in the capital, Red Guard groups were organized in virtually every university and middle school in the land” (Meisner, 1999:318).  On August 18, a million youth arrive at Tiananmen Square, where they were received by Mao, who thus became the “Supreme Commander” of the Red Guards. From that date until November 26, twelve million Red Guards traveled to Beijing to be welcomed by Mao in eight mass rallies (Meisner, 1999:318-23).  

In the subsequent months of 1966, Red Guards unleashed a violent, indiscriminate, chaotic, and anarchistic crusade in many cities.  Meisner describes the phenomenon:

     Liu Shaoqi, the Chairman of the People’s Republic, and Deng Xiaoping, the General Secretary of the Party, were among those identified as “capitalist roaders” and discredited.  Liu was not seen in public after November 1966, and he was placed under arrest.  He was expelled from the Party in 1968 and died of pneumonia in 1969.  Deng was sent to work in a tractor factory in the province of Jiangxi, but in 1973, he was recalled to Beijing and restored to the high positions that he previously held.  Following a second political fall in 1976, during which he fled to South China, he reemerged that same year and subsequently would lead the nation in the “opening” of the 1980s, as we will discuss in a subsequent post (Meisner, 1999:320, 430-521). 

      The Red Guards had been useful to the Maoists, for they facilitated a purge of the pragmatists from the Party.  But Maoist leaders in Beijing had not anticipated the disorder and division that resulted from the Red Guard movement, which as it unfolded constituted a threat to the established socialist order.  Accordingly, taking into account “the almost total lack of discipline, the violent factionalism, the vandalism and sometimes outright hooliganism” of the Red Guards, Maoist leaders at the end of 1966 concluded that “the Red Guards had become a political liability.” They therefore took steps in 1967 to constrain the Red Guards (Meisner, 1999:323-24).

      Coinciding with the wave of attacks and violence of the Red Guards, revolutionary organizations of urban industrial workers also emerged, inspired by the call for a Cultural Revolution.  Workers had unequal employment conditions, in that contract and temporary workers lacked the social welfare benefits and job security possessed by permanent state employees.  As events unfolded, factional differences among workers emerged, with the contract and temporary workers being more radical in their demands.  In Shanghai, a coalition of revolutionary workers’ organizations seized power and removed public officials in January 1967, proclaiming the Shanghai People’s Commune on February 5.  However, by this time, with many key pragmatists already removed from the Party, Mao and the Maoists in Beijing had become more concerned with the restoration of order.  They therefore proposed the transformation of the newly proclaimed Shanghai Commune into a revolutionary committee, in which the mass organizations, the Party, and the Army would be represented.  Such a tripartite structure was beneficial to the Beijing Maoists, inasmuch as it gave control to the provincial parties and the People’s Liberation Army, both of which were solidly in the Maoist camp and, in addition, were disciplined followers of the Chairman.  In contrast, the newly constituted mass organizations were uncontrollable, inasmuch as they were factionalized between conservative mass organizations and those led by local radical Maoists.  Mao’s proposal for a revolutionary committee on the basis of a “triple alliance” was implemented not only in Shanghai, but also in the resolution of popular power seizures in January in two other cities in the provinces of Shaanxi and Manchuria (Meisner, 1999:324-32).  

      In accordance with Mao’s concern for order, on January 23, 1967, Lin Biao, Minister of Defense and protégé of Mao, instructed the Army to enter into local political conflicts in support of the revolutionary Left, but with an orientation to the maintenance of order.  As the Army entered factories and communes, it found itself unable to distinguish among the bewildering multitude of groups claiming to be the true followers of Mao.  As a result, the Army generally intervened on the side of the organizations that appeared most capable of restoring order and maintaining production.  In this way, the Army began to play an increasingly important role in the political conflicts of the nation, displacing the Party and the state (Meisner, 1999:333-35).

     The restoration of order proceeded apace in the first three months of 1967, as “Mao moved to eliminate the anarchistic tendencies he had unleashed the year before,” seeking to constrain local radical Maoists (Meisner, 1999:335).  The Army forcibly disbanded radical student and worker organizations, killing and arresting thousands.  Harsh measures were decreed for assaults on Party members and state officials.  A de facto alliance emerged involving the Army, the Party, and the more conservative mass organizations, with the intention of reestablishing the functioning of the state apparatus (Meisner, 1999:334-35).  

     But the conflict between the Party and the local radical Maoist organizations continued.  Reacting to the repression of the radical mass organizations by the Army, a wave of popular violence broke out in May.  Leftist organizations attacked the ministries of the state, and Red Guard organizations conducted raids on the offices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  Meanwhile, armed conflict between contending mass organizations emerged in factories, schools, and streets (Meisner, 1999:336).

     In late August, with China sinking into anarchy and a possible civil war emerging, Mao concluded that the Cultural Revolution must be brought to an end.  On September 5, 1967, conjointly with the highest officials in the Party, the state, and the Army, Mao issued a directive instructing the Army to restore order and prohibiting interference with the Army or attacking the Army or the government.  To ensure compliance, public executions were carried out against instigators of violence.  In July 1968, Mao summoned student leaders and informed them that the Red Guards should dissolve themselves.  Subsequently, many students were sent to the countryside for reeducation, as were some Party members and state officials who had been most resistant to the Cultural Revolution from the beginning, to balance the political ledger (Meisner, 1999:339-42, 345).  

      An estimated 400,000 people were killed during the Cultural Revolution, with most of it on the hands of the Army during the 1968 repression of Red Guard and radical workers’ organizations.  In addition, there were enormous psychological scars.  Meisner writes:

     The Cultural Revolution had a dramatic negative impact on higher education.  Intellectuals especially had been targeted as bourgeois during the Cultural Revolution, and academics became the political scapegoats of all factions.  Many were sent to do menial labor in the countryside, (although they usually retained their academic ranks in their previous institutions and continued to receive their salaries).  By the mid-1970s, college enrollments were one-third of what they had been in 1965.  Morale among faculty and students was low, and research in science, social science, and the humanities had virtually ceased (Meisner, 1999:367-68).

     After September 5, 1967, the fundamental tasks were the reestablishment of the authority of the state and its ministries, under the direction of the Chairman of the People’s Republic, Zhou Enlai; and the rebuilding of the Party.  After that date, Mao and Zhou cooperated in the efforts to rebuild the Party and the state as the institutions necessary to guide the country back to stability and order.  By 1970, ninety-five percent of Party members who had been purged during the Cultural Revolution were restored to their positions.  On the other hand, the purge of “ultra-Leftists” continued during the following years, inasmuch as they were blamed for the chaos of the summer of 1967 (Meisner, 1999:340, 343, 367, 371, 379-86).

      During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s key political opponents, Liu and Deng, had been removed from power, so that Mao regained political power.  As a result, social policies during the period 1967 to 1976 had Mao’s political stamp, with an orientation to the reduction of inequality.  In the countryside, there were greater restrictions on production by private family plots and on the free trade of peasant agricultural products in local markets.  In addition, there was a program for rural industrial development oriented to agricultural production, renewing one of the programs of the Great Leap Forward.  There emerged in the countryside small enterprises for the production of farm machinery, tools, and chemical fertilizers as well as food processing industries.  By 1976, local rural industries were producing half of China’s chemical fertilizers and a significant portion of farm machinery.   Moreover, small rural factories were producing cement, pig iron, construction materials, electricity, pharmaceuticals, and various consumer goods.  More than 20 million peasants were converted into full-time or part-time industrial workers, greatly reducing the problem of rural unemployment (Meisner, 1999:346, 348, 352, 353, & 358-59).  

     Moreover, the period of 1967 to 1976 was characterized by the expansion of rural medical care.  In the early 1960s, in the aftermath of the Great Leap disaster, 70% of China’s rural health clinics were closed.  But after 1967, medical clinics and medical teaching institutions were established in rural areas, with a reduced program of study focusing on preventive medicine.  In addition, the educational system was restructured, creating more opportunities for rural youth and the urban poor.  There was a dramatic expansion in rural school enrollment, with a policy of local community control.  Tuition fees and entrance examinations were abolished, and the part-time and work-study programs of the Great Leap were revived.  In the universities, admission was based not only on entrance examinations and on academic qualifications, but also on social and political factors, such that preference was given to poorer peasants, workers, soldiers, and lower level Party members (Meisner, 1999:359-63). 

     Mao Zedong died in 1976, at the age of 82, following a long illness.  With the post-1978 emergence of Deng Xiaoping to a position of de facto head of the Party and the state, the Party turned to an evaluation of the legacy of Mao.  In a resolution prepared with the participation of four thousand party leaders and theoreticians during a period of fifteen months and emitted by the Party on June 27, 1981, Mao’s leadership of the revolutionary struggle and in the socialist transformation of the first seven years of the People’s Republic were recognized and appreciated.  At the same time, the resolution maintained that that from 1957 to 1976, Mao made ultra-Leftist, utopian, and unscientific political errors, which were responsible for the economic disasters of the Great Leap and the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution.  It affirmed that Mao’s contributions far outweighed his political errors, taking into account the fact that his leadership of the revolution had liberated the Chinese nation from foreign imperialism and had established the foundation for economic modernization (Meisner, 1999:291-92, 439-46).

​References
 
Asia Research Center, Ed. 1968.  The Great Cultural Revolution in China.  Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Co. 
 
Meisner, Maurice.  1999.  Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, Third Edition.  New York: The Free Press.
 

     As we have seen, Mao and the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party were divided in 1955 over the pace of agricultural collectivization.  Mao prevailed in the political debate by appealing to the provincial Party leaders, and rapid collectivization proceeded during 1955-56 (see “The Chinese transition to socialism” 1/11/2018).  Generally, in disagreements among revolutionary leaders concerning strategy, subsequent developments demonstrate the greater wisdom of one strategy as against another.  In this case, however, the results did not clearly confirm one side or the other.  Mao was right in arguing that the peasants were prepared politically for rapid collectivization, and it had no adverse effects on production.  On the other hand, the Central Committee majority also was right, in that rapid collectivization did not facilitate an improvement in agricultural production, as a result of the fact that, given the limited industrial development of the nation, collectivization did not make possible the introduction of new agricultural technologies and thus the improvement of agricultural production.

     During the period 1955-58, a split emerged in the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party on another issue as well.  A majority on the Central Committee favored continuing to follow the Soviet model of industrialization that had been implemented during the previous four years in China.  The Soviet model emphasized investment in heavy industry.  In contrast, Mao favored an alternative model of rural industrial development.  In Mao’s vision, rural labor would be mobilized to develop labor-intensive, light, and small to medium industry, which would be connected to agricultural production (such as crop processing, tool manufacturing, small chemical and fertilizer plants), and which that would produce inexpensive consumer goods for peasant consumption.  Mao’s proposal projected a radical decentralization of the economy that would favor the development of relatively autonomous local communities, in which peasants and workers themselves would master modern technology.  And it implied as well a reduction of urban-rural inequality (Meisner, 1999:162, 169-70, 178, 198-99, 207-9, 212, 358-59).   

     In 1956, Mao called for the abandonment of the Soviet model, in order to break the bureaucratization that it had fostered (Meisner, 1999:156, 161).  He criticized the Party’s proposed Second Five Year Plan, scheduled to begin in 1958, for its emphasis on heavy industry and urban industrialization, which, he believed, “implied a further expansion and proliferation of bureaucracy and the solidification of professional and bureaucratic elites, an increasing gap between the modernizing cities and the backward countryside, . . . and a further decay of ideology” (Meisner, 1999:169). 

     However, Mao in 1956 was no longer in control of the Party.  Thus, Mao again, as he did in 1955 in order to attain agricultural collectivization, went outside normal Party channels.  This time he turned to non-Party intellectuals, seeking to use them against the Party and against the bureaucracy.  Mao argued that the class struggle continues under socialism, in the form of the struggle of the people against the bureaucratic elite.  The Party is not immune to bourgeois ideological influences, he maintained, and the people may know more than the Party.  In late 1956, as a result of Mao’s challenge to the Central Committee majority, “Maoist” and “non-Maoist” factions were beginning to emerge (Meisner, 1999:166-174).  

     In calling the intellectuals to a critique of the Party and the bureaucracy, Mao’s intention was to reform the Party.  However, many intellectuals wrote and spoke in defense of “freedom” and “democracy” as conceived in bourgeois democracy.  Such Rightist criticism confirmed the worst fears of the Central Committee majority, and it took Mao aback.  In response, the Party launched an anti-Rightist campaign against the intellectuals.  Mao, however, was able to turn the campaign against the Party itself, and a purge of Rightist members of the Party took place.  As a result, the Maoists took control of the Party during 1957 and 1958, and thus they were able to launch a program based on Mao’s vision, known as the Great Leap Forward (Meisner, 1999:178-81, 186-88).  

     The Great Leap Forward began in late 1957 as a drive to increase productivity in agriculture, rural small industry, and heavy industry.  Meisner writes:

     An important component of the Great Leap Forward was the formation of Rural People’s Communes.  By the end of 1958, twenty-four thousand communes had been formed through an amalgamation of 750,000 collective farms, with the size of each commune varying from 5,000 members to more than 100,000 members, and with an average of 30,000.  The communes were based on Marx’s vision of the characteristics of the future communist society.  Accordingly, they progressed toward the abolition of the division of labor, with all persons learning to do a variety of productive and administrative task, both manual and mental.  And the communes moved toward the total abolition of private property and personal possessions (Meisner, 1999:218-23).  

     The Communes had not been conceived in the original formulation of the Great Leap Forward.  Rather, they were developed on the basis of the initiative of radical local activists.  They were developed at a frantic pace, fueled by “the spontaneous radicalism of rural cadres and poor peasants from below” and “the radical utopianism of Mao and Maoists from above” (Meisner, 1999:218).  “The movement grew without official Parry sanction and with little central direction, but it received powerful ideological encouragement from Maoist leaders” (Meisner, 1999:218).

     The Great Leap Forward also included the development of large production brigades of several thousand peasants as well as smaller work teams, formalizing and extending structures that previously had been developed.  The brigades and teams were dedicated to agricultural production, newly established communal industries, and large-scale construction works.  In addition, the Great Leap Forward included a new educational policy, based on the combination of education with industrial production, including part-time educational programs and work-study programs (Meisner, 1999:222-25).

     Although the Great Leap Forward contained evident positive elements, it was undermined by the manner and pace of its implementation.  Many projects were developed with haste on the basis of spontaneous and improvised decisions, and there were inefficiencies as a result of a lack of national economic planning.  In addition, agricultural production was undermined by the mobilization of peasant labor for industrial, irrigation, and construction projects.  Moreover, there was an unrealistic extension of the working day in order to meet impractical production goals (Meisner, 1999:217, 226, 228).

     By late 1958, as a result of economic and organizational chaos, food shortages emerged, industrial production fell, and peasant morale declined.  At a meeting of November 28 to December 10, 1958, the Party reduced the authority of the communes and sought to reduce their radical character.  In July 1959, Mao admitted that communization had proceeded with too much haste.   At the Eighth Plenum of the Central Committee on August 2, 1959, the Party officially acknowledged the failures of the Great Leap Forward, which it attributed to the absence of central planning and direction.  Subsequently, the retreat from the communization continued, and the pre-Great Leap mutual aid teams were restored.  In addition, private markets reemerged, and material incentives were adopted again.  The emphasis was on the provision of immediate economic needs in the face of spreading food shortages.  “The previous year’s utopian fervor and popular enthusiasm withered as the struggle to achieve communism turned into an elemental struggle for basic subsistence and sheer survival” (Meisner, 1999:233).  By the end of 1959, Mao accepted the inevitability of dismantling the Great Leap Forward (Meisner, 1999:228-33, 264).  

      In 1960, the difficulties caused by the Great Leap Forward were compounded by natural disasters: typhoons and flooding in South China; drought in the lower reaches of the Yellow River; and plagues of pests in many areas of the country.  In addition, the Soviet Union, in a context of declining relations with China, abruptly withdrew 1,400 Soviet scientists and technicians working in 250 Chinese enterprises.  With two successive years of organizational chaos and natural calamity, hunger and famine became widespread.  The difficulties were compounded by the “wind of exaggeration,” as local state officials, under pressure to produce spectacular results, reported inflated figures of production, so that national authorities were unaware of the extent of the calamity (Meisner, 1999:234-38).  

     Scholars estimate that from 1959 to 1961 there were fifteen to twenty million famine-related deaths (Meisner, 1999:237; Díaz, 2010:24).  “The Great Leap Forward, which began with such great expectations in 1958, thus ended in 1960 with an economic and human disaster for China” (Meisner, 1999:238).  

      With the failure of the Great Leap Forward, the Party turned to the economic pragmatist Liu Shaoqi, who directed the nation in the formulation and implementation of a New Economic Policy during the period 1960 to 1965.  In response to the difficulties in the distribution of food, the state bureaucracy reasserted its authority and implemented an efficient system of rationing and transportation.  In order to reverse three years of decline in agricultural production, urban Party members, soldiers, students, and unemployed urban residents were sent to the rural villages to engage in agricultural work.  Other forms of emergency aid were sent to the rural areas, including insecticides, chemical fertilizers, and farm tools.  Peasants were encouraged to reestablish small private family plots and to claim uncultivated lands.  Rural markets were re-opened, and peasants could sell their products on a free market basis.  The People’s Communes were reduced considerably in size, and they were placed under the direction of state functionaries who were directed by the policies of the central government.  Many inefficient rural industries established during the Great Leap were closed.  Industrial production was organized, placed under centralized planning, but with a degree of autonomy for state-owned factories and enterprises (Meisner, 1999:260-66).

     Liu’s pragmatic policies brought rapid economic recovery and renewed economic growth.  Meisner writes:

​Whereas industrial production had declined 40% in the period 1959 to 1962, it was stabilized in 1962, and it grew at an average annual rate of 11% during the period 1963 to 1965 (Meisner, 1999:264, 266).  The introduction of differential wage rates in the factories was a factor in facilitating recovering in industrial production (Meisner, 1999:253).  Accordingly, Meisner concludes, “Through a combination of the restoration of centralized controls over production and a renewed emphasis on material incentives for the producers, the leaders in Beijing, relying primarily on the organizational effectiveness of a reinvigorated Leninist party, succeeded in reviving the national economy in a remarkably short time” (Meisner, 1999:252).  

     With the failure of the Great Leap and the success of the New Economic Policy, it seemed that Mao and the Maoists had suffered a fatal political defeat.  However, they would reemerge as a decisive political force in the period 1962 to 1967, with disastrous consequences, as we will see in the next post.

​

​References
 
Díaz Vázquez, Julio Aracelio.  2010.  China: ¿Otro Socialismo? (LX aniversario).  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. 
 
Meisner, Maurice.  1999.  Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, Third Edition.  New York: The Free Press.
 

     Maurice Meisner, in Mao’s China and After, maintains that the commitment of the Chinese Revolution to industrialization led to the bureaucratization of the state, the economy, and the Party.  He notes that industrial factories required technological and administrative specialists, and they required labor discipline and managerial control.  In addition, as industrialization proceeded, the bureaucratic apparatus of the state had to expand in order to control the development of the economy and to respond to the social problems that are consequences of economic development.  As a result, many members of the Party became specialists and administrators in industry or the state.  Moreover, as the Party expanded, it increasingly recruited from the growing industrial and state bureaucratic apparatus, and the Party itself increasingly had to develop bureaucratic structures, requiring discipline from its cadres (Meisner, 1999:114-15, 119-20).

      As a consequence of the process of bureaucratization, a new bureaucratic elite emerged, according to Meisner.  He writes:

​Thus, new forms of inequality emerged, involving inequality in political power as well as inequality in income and material rewards.  “For China’s rapidly growing proletariat, “socialist transformation” brought increasingly repressive social and political controls over their lives and an increasingly harsh labor discipline in the factories” (Meisner, 1999:157).

      Meisner sees the problem of the emergence of a bureaucratic elite as a general problem in socialism, in that it occurred in both the Soviet Union and socialist China (1999:55, 157).  He writes:

     Writing in the early twentieth century, the German scholar Max Weber defined bureaucracy as a form of social organization characterized by a hierarchy of positions, in which each position has its defined duties.  He maintained that bureaucracy is a relatively efficient form of organization, in that it facilitates the coordinated action of a large number of people in the carrying out of tasks and the implementation of goals.  He considered that bureaucracy flourishes and has its most advanced expression in modern industrial capitalism (Gerth and Mills 1946:66-68, 196-99, 214-16).

       The leaders of the Chinese Revolution were committed to economic modernization and development, because economic development would be necessary to protect China from foreign imperialism and to provide for the social and economic needs of its immense and growing population.  Although Weber focused on the greater efficiency of bureaucratic organization in a capitalist market economy, it is reasonable to think that a revolutionary socialist state, committed to the efficient production and distribution of goods and services, also would find advantages to bureaucratic organization in the implementation of its goals.  In the context of the development of socialist theory, one could view the growth of bureaucracy as capitalist penetration that undermines the socialist project, as did Mao.  Alternatively, one could see it as a necessary and integral dimension of the advance of the revolution in the implementation of its goal of economic modernization and development, as did the Central Committee majority.  In casting the expansion of bureaucracy as a violation of Marxist theory, Meisner is taking sides in this difficult question, and he does so from a social context removed from the real struggle to construct socialism in the context of determined national political, economic, and social conditions.  From 1949 to the present day, the Chinese Revolution has maintained that it seeks to develop socialism with Chinese characteristics.

      There cannot be doubt that, as a modern bureaucracy displaced the traditional Chinese bureaucracy during the 1950s, a new bureaucratic class came into being, composed of high and upper-level officials in the state, the Party, and industry.  It follows that the members of the new bureaucratic class have interests different from those of peasants, industrial workers, and small-scale capitalists, even though there is a consensus within each and among all of these sectors with respect to affirmation of the basic principles and achievements of the revolution.  The new bureaucratic class cannot be understood as having an economic and social position analogous to the power elite and capitalist class in the powerful nations and advanced economies of the modern world-system, inasmuch as the Chinese bureaucratic class manages a system that is controlled not by transnational corporations but by the Chinese state.  

      But who controls the state in China?  Meisner maintains that the Party controls the state.  However, he does not provide evidence in support of this central claim.  He mentions in passing that the National People’s Congress elects the Chairman of the People’s Republic, which is the highest office in the state, but he considers this a mere formality (Meisner, 1999:68, 267, 395).  He does not describe the actual structures of political power.  He does not explain how the National People’s Congress is formed, if it is elected by the people or by elected delegates of the people, or if the Party selects its members.  Yet such questions are central to the validity of Meisner’s claim that the Party controls the state.  In this regard, I should note that Tian Yingkui, Department of Economic Sciences of the Central School of the Communist Party of China, writes that China today has a system of indirect elections, in which elected representatives elect representatives from level to level, until finally the deputies of the National Popular Assembly, the highest political authority of the country, are decided (Tian, 2008:182-83).  If the acceptance of the recommendations of the Party is a formality, it may be a result of the fact that a solid majority of the National Popular Assembly supports the recommendation of the Party.  I also should note that a similar process of indirect elections is used to constitute the National Assembly of Popular Power in Cuba, and the system enjoys legitimacy and exceptionally high levels of voter participation.  (For more on the Cuban political process, see The Evolution and Significance of the Cuban Revolution, Pp. 130-42).

     At the same time, Meisner blurs the distinction between the Party and the state, thus further mystifying the reader with respect to the actual structures of political power in China.  He notes that there is a distinction between the Party organization and the administrative organs of the state, but he believes that “the distinction is a thin one” (1999:63), because Party leaders also hold key positions in the state.  He refers to “Party bureaucrats,” by which he apparently means high officials of the Party or Party members who are high officials in the state (1999:123).  Accordingly, he refers to the “Party-state apparatus” (1999:245) and the “Party-state bureaucracy” (1999:267).  On the other hand, at one point he implicitly recognizes that the distinction between Party and state is more than a thin line or a formality, when he observes that factory managers who are Party members are primarily responsible to the economic demands of the state ministries rather than to the demands of the Party (Meisner, 1999:117).

      Meisner also maintains that the high bureaucracy in China enjoys privileges, and that the bureaucratization of the revolution has led to levels of economic and status inequality that are similar to the major capitalist powers of the world-system.  He describes economic inequalities between managers and workers, city and country, state workers and contracted workers, and rich peasants and poor peasants.  However, his book does not describe efforts by workers, rural residents, contract workers, and poor peasants to demand and obtain greater materials rewards for themselves, giving the impression that such struggles have not emerged.  The book describes two types of radical Maoist movements: students seeking to discredit and purge “capitalist roaders” in the high ranks of the Party and the state; and movements by workers in three cities to develop alternative structures of city and industrial management, in accordance with Marx’s interpretation of the Paris commune.  And his account describes critiques from the Right by intellectuals, demanding bourgeois reforms with respect to freedom of speech.  But he does not describe efforts by the people to utilize mass organizations and structures of popular power to seek reforms with respect to unequal distribution of rewards, as one would expect in conditions in which the majority feel that the distribution of rewards is unjust, and that the country is dominated by a materially privileged bureaucratic elite.  The absence of such discussion of dynamics within the mass organizations and the assemblies of popular power is a manifestation of the invisibility of these political structures when the process is viewed from a vantage shaped by the assumptions of bourgeois representative democracy.  

      The issues that divided Chinese communists are complex and important, and there have been debates in socialist Cuba from 1959 to the present on these themes, taking the form of discussions of “moral incentives” versus “material incentives,” acceptable levels of inequality, and the relative weight in the economy of state ownership, cooperatives, private capital, and foreign capital.  In Cuba, the Party listens to the people, who express themselves in mass organizations, formalized popular consultations, and assemblies of popular power.  However, on the basis of the debate, the Party forms a consensus, and presents its recommendations to the National Assembly of Popular Power and the people.  There never has occurred in socialist Cuba what happened in China from 1958 to 1967, when the historical leader of the revolution waged ideological battle with the Party leadership, with both sides seeking to mobilize the people, especially students.  We will look at this social and political conflict between Maoists ideologues and pragmatic modernizers in the next two posts.

​References
 
Gerth, H. H. and C. Wright Mills, Eds.  1946.  From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology.  Translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills.  New York: Oxford University Press
 
Meisner, Maurice.  1999.  Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, Third Edition.  New York: The Free Press.
 
Tian Yingkui.  2008.  Camino Chino: Concepción científica del desarrollo.  Beijing: Ediciones en Lenguas Extranjeras.
 

     When Mao Zedong, on October 1, 1949, proclaimed the People’s Republic of China, he declared not a bourgeois republic but a people’s republic, led by the working class and based on a worker-peasant alliance.  At that historic moment, China was characterized by an extremely low level of industrial development, a technically backward system of agricultural production, high levels of poverty, and extreme inequality.  In response to this situation, the revolutionary government of China initiated programs and measures that were designed to defend the needs and interests of the people, setting aside previous accommodation to bourgeois and foreign interests.  Their goals were to establish greater equality in the distribution of property and income, and to increase the general standard of living through economic modernization and development (Meisner, 1999:58).  

      In the countryside, the landed gentry was liquidated as a class, and land was distributed to individual peasant proprietors.  The Agrarian Reform Law of 1950 confiscated the property of landlords, who had comprised four percent of the population and had owned thirty percent of cultivated land.  It also confiscated institutional lands belonging to village shrines and temples, monasteries, churches, and schools; much of which was controlled indirectly by landlords.  The confiscated land was distributed to landless and poor peasants.  Middle peasants and “rich peasants,” on the other hand, were allowed to keep their lands and to continue renting to tenant farmers and employing labor, to the extent that the land worked by tenants and hired labor did not exceed what the peasant owners cultivated themselves.  These measures were designed to promote more equality in land distribution in a form that did not disrupt agricultural production.  Although they left distinctions among poor, middle, and rich peasants, the differences in land holdings and income were relatively small.  The measures were conceived as a first step; the full and wholesale collectivization of agriculture was planned, necessary to facilitate more technically advanced forms of agricultural production (Meisner, 1999:90-101, 129-31, 146-47).

     From the 1950 to 1955, the collectivization of agricultural was a voluntary and gradual process with three stages.  First, the formation of mutual aid teams of six or more households that would assist each other in work on their individual farms.  Secondly, the combination of mutual aid teams into lower cooperatives, which involved the pooling and cooperative farming of land alongside the preservation of individual private plots that each household would continue to own.  Thirdly, amalgamation into advanced cooperative farms, with the elimination of privately owned farms.  By 1955, sixty-five percent of peasant households had joined mutual aid teams, and fifteen percent had formed lower cooperatives (Meisner, 1999:129-32, 134).

      In 1955, Mao pushed for an acceleration of the process of collectivization.  He encountered resistance from the Central Committee of the Party, which believed that industrialization had not advanced sufficiently, and therefore, in the context of low industrial development, the collectivization of agriculture would not have beneficial effects with respect to production, and it could disrupt production.  Mao, however, believed that the peasants possessed a spontaneous and active desire to advance more in the socialist road, and that the formation of cooperatives would stimulate the further development of industry.  Mao was able to overrule the Central Committee by appealing to regional and provincial Party leaders.  The Party announced the accelerated program proposed by Mao in October 1955.  The voluntary formation of cooperatives occurred at an extraordinarily rapid pace during late 1955 and 1956, consistent with Mao’s sense of the revolutionary spontaneity of the peasantry.  By the spring planting of 1957, 100% of peasant households belonged to advanced cooperatives; and private ownership of land was eliminated, except for small plots for consumption or for a limited private market.  Production was not disrupted, and it continued to advance at a slow but steady rate (Meisner, 1999:135-48).  
     
     Similar decisive steps in the socialist road were taken with respect to industry.  Beginning in 1949, the commercial enterprises, banks, and industries of the Chinese comprador bourgeoisie, which was tied and subordinated to foreign capital, were confiscated without compensation and were nationalized.  On the other hand, the national bourgeoisie, owners of smaller companies that represented a more autonomous form of capitalist development, were permitted to retain ownership, and they were encouraged to expand under strong state regulation that included the setting of prices and wages and control of trading.  Such expanding space for private capital was necessary for increasing production, and it reached culmination in 1952-53.  However, after 1953, the state nationalized the enterprises of the national bourgeois private sector, with compensation, such that the national bourgeoisie ceased to exist as a class.  Following that date, with both the comprador and national bourgeois classes* eliminated, private capital was confined to small-scale enterprises, such as self-employed handicraft workers and petty shopkeepers.  The nationalization of industry was effective in promoting rapid industrial growth.  Between 1952 and 1957, annual industrial growth was either 16% or 18%, depending on the measures used (Meisner, 1999:83-85, 113).

     In addition, important steps in the socialist road were taken with respect to the organization of society.  Autonomous mass organizations of workers, women, students, and peasants were formed, building upon and transforming preexisting organizations.  In addition, resident committees and people’s militias were formed (Meisner, 1999:63, 80, 84, 96, 267).

     Looking at the Chinese revolutionary organization of society from the vantage point of the premises of representative democracy, Meisner views the mass organizations as a mechanism of control from above by the Party and the state.  He writes, “These organizations were in essence arms of the neutralized state apparatus, dominated by the same Party that controlled the national government” (1999:80).  However, if were we to look at Chinese revolutionary social organizations from the vantage point of the premises of socialism, we would see that they are consistent with basic socialist concepts, which envision the replacement of representative democracy with alternative structures of popular democracy.  In popular democracy, mass organizations are formed in order to enable the various sectors of the people to formulate their interests; they constitute an important mechanism for the expression of popular will.  The workers’ organizations, for example, participate in the management of the state-owned companies.  In socialist political theory, mass organizations complement the work of the Party, which is formed by a vanguard from the people; and the state, which is under the direction of assemblies of popular power, indirectly elected by the people.  

     In a manner similar to the Chinese socialist revolution, the Cuban revolution also expanded and created mass organizations following its triumph in 1959.  In Cuba today, the mass organizations are central to Cuban civil society.  The leaders of the mass organizations of workers, students, women, and neighborhoods, elected by their members, have a prominent presence in Cuban public discourse.  The great majority of the elected leaders of mass organizations are members of the Cuban Communist Party, of which fifteen percent of the people are members.  Inasmuch as members are selected by the Party on the basis of their good qualities as citizens and revolutionaries, Party members tend to be committed, disciplined, and hardworking, and the Party itself has been at the vanguard of the struggle to defend sovereignty of the nation and the social gains that benefit the people.  As a result, the people hold the Party and its members in high regard, and the election of its members to leadership in mass organizations is a logical outcome of such respect.  The prestige of the Cuban Communist Party is a dimension of the political reality of Cuba.  (For more on the Cuban political process, see The Evolution and Significance of the Cuban Revolution, Pp. 130-42).

     The enemies of the Cuban revolution say that the mass organizations are controlled by the Party, inasmuch as the great majority of the leaders of the mass organizations are Party members.  But this counterrevolutionary claim converts the people’s high regard of the Party into a sinister anti-democratic phenomenon.  The mass organizations elect their own leaders, who may or may not be Party members, depending on the results of the election.  Although the members of the mass organizations freely elect a leadership comprised mostly of Party members, the mass organizations are legally and constitutionally independent of the Party and of the government, and neither the Party nor the state leadership directs the mass organizations.  

      As independent organizations, the mass organizations call upon the Party, the government, and the people with respect to their issues of concern.  If a political reality were to emerge in which one or more of the mass organizations were to acquire an interest in a direction different from that of the Party and/or the government, the structures of popular participation are in place to facilitate the expression and mobilization of popular will.  But this would be a surprising development, since the Party and the government have systemic structures for taking into account the perspectives of the mass organizations on an ongoing basis.  This is why Cuban socialism is dynamic and constantly evolving.  The mass organizations are an integral part of a process of communication from the bottom-up as well as from the top-down.  Such two-way communication involving the organizations of the people functions as a dimension of popular democracy, which has been designed as a socialist alternative to bourgeois representative democracy.

    The Cuban experience of mass organizations provides me with a perspective from which I read Meisner.  From such a vantage point, I see that Meisner does not tell us how the leaders of the mass organizations in China are selected, elected, or determined.  He leaves this issue aside, referring to Party control of mass organizations in an ambiguous and loose sense.  It seems to me that “Party control” of the mass organizations, in the loose sense in which Meisner describes it, does not necessarily mean any more than the support of the people, through their mass organizations, of the Party as the vanguard of their revolution.  In the socialist concept of democracy, the development of mass organizations are integral to the expanding of structures of popular participation, and they constitute an important dimension of the transition to socialism, for socialism includes the substitution of structures of representative democracy with those of popular democracy.

     Thus, we can see that the Chinese revolutionary leaders implemented a transition to socialism within eight years, doing so in stages.  In agriculture, they at first took land from the landholders and distributed it to individual peasant households; then they moved to agricultural cooperatives.  In industry, they first nationalized the companies of the comprador bourgeoisie, and then they moved to nationalization of those of the national bourgeoisie.  At the same time, they developed mass organizations to facilitate that the people would have organized political voice and structures of political participation.

     When the Chinese Revolution triumphed on October 1, 1949, it proclaimed its twin goals of socialist transformation and economic modernization.  During the subsequent eight years, it delivered on the promises that it made to the people: it liquidated the ruling classes in the countryside and in the city; it established agricultural cooperatives and state ownership of industry; it reduced inequalities in land distribution and income; and it formed popular organizations.  Subsequently, its leadership became divided over how to balance the twin goals of socialist transformation and economic modernization.  On the one side, the Maoists accused persons in positions of authority of being “capitalist roaders” who sought to take the revolution in a capitalist direction.  On the other side, a majority on the Party’s Central Committee believed that Mao and the Maoists were reckless utopians.  Establishing the social and political context of the conflict was the bureaucratization of the revolution, which we will explore in the next post.

*  On the distinction between the comprador bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie, see (Mao, 2009:133-35).  

​

​References
 
Mao Zedong.  2009.  Collected Writings of Chairman Mao, Volume One: Politics and Tactics.  Edited by Shawn Conners,  Translated by Foreign Language Press, Peking.  El Paso, Texas: El Paso Norte Press, Special Edition Books.
 
Meisner, Maurice.  1999.  Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, Third Edition.  New York: The Free Press.

     As we have seen, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was formed in 1921 by Chinese intellectuals who had recently converted to Marxism (“The nationalist origins of Chinese Marxism” 12/18/2017).  They conceived their task as the organization of the Chinese working class for a socialist revolution.  They had successes, taking advantage of the inhumane living and working conditions of the workers.  Within a few years, Party members had organized labor organizations with a total of half a million members (Meisner, 1999:20-21).

      Conditions in China, as well as directions from the Communist International in Moscow, led to the establishment of a formal alliance between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party in January 1924, which required reconciliation to the nationalist agenda and less emphasis on the socialist goals of the Party.  The alliance enabled the CCP to grow rapidly; its membership expanded from 500 in 1924 to 58,000 in 1927 (Meisner, 1999:21-25).

     The CCP-Nationalist alliance was uneasy, because the Nationalists sought national unity and a form of independence that accommodated to Western interests, whereas the CCP sought full sovereignty that would permit a social transformation emancipating workers from factory owners and peasants from landlords.  Acting in accordance with this conflict over political goals, the Nationalist Army, led by Chiang Kai-shek, unleashed a bloody repression of the CCP and their affiliated workers’ organizations and peasant associations in 1927.  The membership of the CCP was reduced to 10,000, with its leaders and members scattered and disorganized (Meisner, 1999:25-27).

     Inasmuch as the CCP had been crushed by military force, surviving CCP leaders concluded that the revolution had to include a strategy of military struggle.  In October 1927, Mao Zedong, who had been a member of the Party from the beginning, led the remnants of a defeated military force to a remote mountain area, and a force led by Zhu De joined them in 1928.  Through the recruitment of local peasants on the basis of a proposed radical program of land redistribution, the Mao-Zhu army grew in numbers, such that by 1931 it had attained military predominance in the southern part of the Southern province of Jiangxi, where the Chinese Soviet Republic was proclaimed.  From 1931 to 1934, the Chinese Soviet Republic implemented a land reform program, and it successfully administered a territory of 15,000 square miles with a population of three million (Meisner, 1999:28, 31-33).

      The Chinese Soviet Republic was conquered by the Nationalist Army in the fall of 1934, forcing the Communists to abandon their base.  In October 1934, Mao led 80,000 men (and 35 women) in a trek to the North, in what later would be celebrated as “the Long March.”  Fewer than 10,000 survived the 6,000-mile, yearlong ordeal, which included regular battles with Nationalist troops and warlord armies.  But a remnant did reach the northern province of Shaanxi in October 1935, and other forces soon joined it, such that by late 1936 the Red Army numbered 30,000, which, however, was much smaller then Nationalist forces (Meisner, 1999:33-36).

     The Japanese invasion of China in 1937 greatly benefitted the communist cause.  The Nationalist Army was forced by the advancing Japanese army to abandon the major cities and retreat to the west; and in the countryside, the landlord gentry class, allied with the nationalist government, fled to the cities.  Meisner writes:

      The surge of popular support for the Chinese Communist Party during the war “was based on patriotic appeals for national resistance to the foreign invaders” (Meisner, 1999:38).  In addition, it was based on its agrarian reform program of rent and tax reductions for tenant farmers as well as partial land redistribution.  Meanwhile, the Nationalist government was discredited by its incapacity to effectively resist the Japanese invasion; and by its alliance with the landlord gentry class (Meisner, 1999:38-41).  

      The Sino-Japanese War of 1937 to 1945 established the basis for an uneasy truce between the CCP and the Nationalist government, based on common opposition to Japanese occupation.  When the Allied victory in World War II ended the occupation, civil war broke out in China.  The Nationalists had four times as many soldiers as the Communists, and the Nationalists possessed superiority in military technology, mostly supplied by the United States.  However, the Communists enjoyed much more popular support, as a result of its patriotic resistance to the Japanese occupation and its land reform program (Meisner, 1999:50).  

       Popular support facilitated a relatively rapid victory for the Communists.  On October 1, 1949, Mao Zadong arrived in Beijing to proclaim the People’s Republic of China.  So began a rapid transition to socialism, as we will see in the next post.
​

​Reference
 
Meisner, Maurice.  1999.  Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, Third Edition.  New York: The Free Press.