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On dismissing official explanations

4/3/2018

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​     There is a widespread tendency, especially among Western academics, to reject government formulations as nothing more than “official” proclamations.  Minqi Li and Maurice Meisner display this tendency in their books on China.  Li dismisses the “socialist market economy” as a “euphemism for capitalism” (2008:64).  For his part, Meisner reports on Chinese Marxist theoretical formulations in a dismissive tone.  He writes:
​An economic system that was rapidly on its way to becoming capitalist, as was clear to all, was officially called “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”  Multitudes of intellectuals . . . were brought forth to construct a Marxian ideological rationale for the regime’s market policies.  They drew upon the rather prominent strands in the original writings of Marx that celebrate the economic dynamics of capitalism and its historical progressiveness.  They repeated Deng Xiaoping’s celebrated 1956 these that the main contradiction in Chinese society was between its “advanced socialist system” and “backward productive forces” (488-49).
​He further writes that the Fourteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1992
​ratified the virtually unlimited adoption of capitalist methods and ideas to accelerate economy growth, although the social result was officially called a ‘socialist market economic system.’  For inventing this oxymoron, Deng was extravagantly praised for making yet another ‘great theoretical breakthrough’ in the development of ‘Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought,’ which incongruously remained the title of official state ideology (518). 
     Let us, for purposes of reflection, imagine a situation in which a popular revolutionary party has taken political power.  Let us further imagine that, once in power, the leaders take what they understand to be steps necessary for the defense of the people and the nation, which would include new measures, regulations, and laws.  Many will question or oppose these steps, some from sincere doubts concerning their correctness, and others as spokespersons for particular interests that want to derail the effort at revolutionary transformation.  In this situation, the revolutionary leadership will explain what they are doing.  We cannot assume that such explanations are not sincere.  They are not necessarily ideological rationalizations constructed to hide an intention of a new ruling class to defend its particular interests, even though they always can be interpreted in this way, with a resourceful mixture of speculation and cynicism.    

     We who live in the representative democracies of the West are accustomed to misrepresentations and rationalizations by governments, for they often are pretending to represent the interests of the people, when in fact they represent the particular interests of private capital and campaign contributors.  But as we seek to understand, we must be open to the possibility that government spokespersons are explaining the reasons for the measures that they are taking.  Indeed, all governments have the right and duty to do so.  We should avoid the tendency to dismiss; we should listen first, and critically analyze next.  

     In the case of China, one of the historic goals of its popular socialist revolution was to protect the sovereignty of the nation, reversing the concessions to the imperialist powers that had reduced a once-great empire to an impoverished nation.  In analyzing the Chinese “opening” from the vantage point of this historic revolutionary goal, we need to know the conditions in which foreign capital was permitted to operate in China.  However, Meisner’s book does not provide this necessary information.  He observes merely that China created in 1978 conditions favorable for foreign investors, which is nothing more than a tautology, because if the conditions were not favorable for their investment, foreign capitalists would not invest.  

     The question emerges, were the conditions established by the Chinese government, in addition to being favorable to capital, also favorable to China?  Chinese Marxist theoreticians and political leaders maintain that the Chinese government is establishing a situation different from the prevailing pattern for peripheral and semi-peripheral countries of the capitalist world-economy, which promotes underdevelopment in the countries where the capitalists are investing.*  They sustain that the Chinese socialist state is requiring capitalist investors to adapt to conditions favorable to China, consistent with a concept of a market directed by the state, and in accordance with the principles of a socialist market economy.  In their view, China is developing conditions that are mutually beneficial to capitalist investment and to the goals of revolutionary China.

     If indeed it is the case that China has developed a strategy of attracting foreign capital, but imposing conditions in accordance with national interests, then China is developing a political-economic system different from capitalism, where the market rules (with state support).  And different as well from the classic socialism of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, in which the state directs, but with regulations that inhibit the development of national productive forces.  If this were to be the case, then China would be developing a new form of socialism, a socialism that responds to Chinese conditions and needs, or a “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which is the “official” claim of the Chinese Communist Party.  

       Taking into account the significant gains of the Chinese reform and opening of 1978 to 2012 in promoting the economic development and sovereignty of China, the Chinese road of pragmatic socialism should not be dismissed.  It should be taken seriously as a subject for research and reflection, and as a possible alternative road for humanity in the context of the increasingly evident unsustainability of the capitalist world-economy.  


* For more reflection on the prevailing patterns of the capitalist world-economy, the various posts in the following categories: The Origin and Development of the Modern World-System, Neocolonialism, and Colonialism, Semi-Colonialism, and Neocolonialism in Latin America.


​References
 
Li, Minqi.  2008.  The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy.  New York:  Monthly Review Press.
 
Meisner, Maurice.  1999.  Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, Third Edition.  New York: The Free Press.
 
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Socialism with Chinese characteristics

3/29/2018

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     In The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy, Minqi Li maintains that with the death of Mao in 1976, there was a coup d’état that resulted in the triumph of a bureaucratic counterrevolution, which made possible a transition to capitalism in China, beginning in the 1980s and consolidated in the 1990s (Li, 2008:55-65).  Similarly, in Mao’s China and After, Maurice Meisner maintains that China after Mao underwent a transition to capitalism.  His chapter on China on the 1980s is entitled, “Market Reforms and the Development of Capitalism” (Meisner, 1999;449-79).

     Julio Díaz, a Cuban scholar and specialist on China and socialist economies, presents a different perspective.  He maintains that the period 1980 to 1984 was a time of awakening of the economic sciences in China, and this period of debate and reflection led to the formulation of the concept of a socialist road with Chinese characteristics.  The concept was affirmed by the Central Committee of the Party in 1984 and at the XIII Congress of the Party in 1987 (2010:76-77).

     Debate and reflection continued, and the Party affirmed further concepts at its XIV Congress in 1992.  It noted that the evolution of socialism in China demonstrates that practice is the foundation of truth; practice has been taking the initiative in China, and economic theory has followed.  It further affirmed that, taking into account the growing material needs of the people, the development of the forces of production and improving the standard of living is the basis for discerning the correct from the erroneous; therefore, the road in course, the Reform and Opening, is the correct way (2010:77-78).

     The 1992 Party Congress also affirmed the concept of a socialist market economy.  Previous theory had assumed that a market economy is inherent to capitalism, and a planned economy is inherent to socialism.  However, China is developing a planned market economy, where planning is primary, and the market plays an auxiliary role.  In a planned market economy, the separation between planning and the market is overcome, in a form in which planning rules, and the plan defines the helping role of the market.  There are various forms of property, but public property is the pillar.  Rejecting both Soviet centralized planning and Maoist collectivist values as ultra-Leftist errors, China has turned to indirect control of the economy by means of macro-economic levers, including mechanisms for the regulation of property, prices, and distribution.  Stocks can be emitted, insofar as doing so plays a positive role in the concentration of capital, overcoming deficiencies in the investment projections of the plan  (2010:78-80, 84-86, 102-3; 2016:75-76, 143).  As expressed by Wu and Wang, in a socialist market economic system, markets play a fundamental role in the allocation of resources under macroeconomic regulation and control (2014:150).

     I remember once overhearing a potential U.S. capitalist investor, who was involved in preliminary conservations in Cuba, in anticipation of the end of the U.S. “embargo.”  He declared that “these people [Cubans] are nuts; they do not have any idea how capitalism works.”  I thought, “Their message to you is that, if you do not like our conditions, you are free to go to some other country, where the government is giving the resources away.  But we do not do that here.”  Cuba has found that foreign investors often adjust to conditions that Cuba has designed to promote economic development and to defend the interests of the nation.  Insofar as Cuba is offering something that other countries cannot offer, and if the project includes return on the capital investment, then foreign investors accept, in spite of atypical Cuban conditions.  It is a question of mutually beneficial investment, benefitting the investor and also the Cuban nation and people.  This is different from both capitalism and socialism as they have historically developed in practice.  It is a pragmatic form of socialism, which permits space for private capital and foreign investment, but in a form that benefits the nation and the people, under the control and regulation of the state.  

    These folks in China and Cuba with their pragmatic socialism that is different from capitalism and classic socialism may be on to something, perhaps the necessary road for the future of humanity.  It is not a third way, different from both capitalism and socialism.  It is socialism, but an intelligent socialism, adapted to the particular economic and political conditions of the nation, and seeing the need for the economic development of the nation, as a necessary precondition for a socialism that is sustainable.


References
 
Díaz Vázquez, Julio Aracelio.  2010.  China: ¿Otro Socialismo? (LX aniversario).  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.   
 
__________.  2016.  China: Economía y democratización.  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales 
 
Li, Minqi.  2008.  The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy.  New York:  Monthly Review Press.
 
Meisner, Maurice.  1999.  Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, Third Edition.  New York: The Free Press.
 
Wu Li and Wang Lei.  2014.  China, 1949-2014.  Beijing: Beijing Times Chinese Press.

​
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China’s Reform and Opening, 1978-2012

3/26/2018

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     In 1978, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party approved a proposal by Deng Xiaoping on the revitalization of the Chinese economy.  It was based on the principle, formulated by the Chinese Revolution in 1949, of the four modernizations (in agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defense), combined with a new dimension, the open-door policy.  The project of the four modernizations plus open door sought improvement in the standard of living of the people in three stages for a period of sixty years (Díaz, 2010:31-32).

     In 1978, China was impoverished, with 100 million people with insufficient food, and it was exhausted by the political conflicts of the Cultural Revolution (see “The Cultural Revolution in China” 1/25/2018).  Although Maoists had been removed from influence in the Central Committee, the Chinese leadership in 1978 did not opt for the Soviet model, which previously had been a source of conflict with Mao (see “The emergence of Maoism” 1/18/2018).  Aware of the limitations of socialism in the Soviet Union, the Chinese leadership rejected the European socialist way, or what could be called the classic socialist model.  Instead, they turned to the example of the Asian tigers, which had forged dynamic economies through a strong state role in an export-oriented economy (Díaz, 2010:33-35). 

     Reforms in agriculture.  The Reform and Opening sought to increase agricultural production by establishing structures that would facilitate the expansion of family farms and that would reward higher levels of production.  The price paid for cereals was increased, and the costs to peasants of fertilizers and pesticides were reduced.  The state introduced family contracts, which granted rights to families for the use of state-owned land, and which specified the crops and their quantity as well as the prices to be paid by the state.  Peasants were permitted to sell any surplus production beyond the contract in an expanded free market for agricultural products.  In 1999, a further reform permitted inheritance of family contracts as well as the use of salaried labor, with a maximum of seven laborers.  These measures struck at the heart of the system of agricultural cooperative, which had been established during 1955 and 1956 as a key part of the transition to socialism.  They were driven by economic considerations, and the urgent need to increase production, taking into account that growth in agricultural production had been stagnant, not sufficient to satisfy the demands of a growing and increasingly urbanized population.  The measures were effective in attaining their goal of expanding production.  There was constant growth in animal and livestock production from 1980 to 2003, and increase in the income of peasants, but with inequality (Díaz, 2010:37-47).

     Restructuring the industrial sector.  Since 1978, the reforms have been oriented to giving state-owned companies greater autonomy, and expanding the space for private capital.  These measures have enabled Chinese companies to adapt to continually changing technical and scientific requirements, and they have been successful in promoting a significant expansion in industrial production.  State companies remain, however, the pillar of the economy.  As of 2012, state companies comprised 63% of the 500 largest national firms, with 90% of the capital of said firms (Díaz, 2010:48-54, 101; Díaz, 2016:119-20, 143; Wu and Wang, 2104:149-50, 190).  

     Expansion of foreign investments in China.  The modernization of the economy required levels of investment beyond the reach of national capacity.  China thus turned to attracting foreign investment, a central component of the so-called “opening” of the economy.  From 1979 to 1995, various structures were established: Special Economic Zones, Zones of Economic and Technological Development, Duty-Free Zones, and Zones of Industrial Development of High- and New Technologies.  These structures have enabled a significant increase in foreign investment, in which 185 nations of the world have participated, in one form or another.  Although direct foreign investment takes various forms, joint ventures formed by the Chinese state with private capital are the most important (Díaz, 2010:55-61).

      Foreign investment created a rapid and sustained growth of the GNP in China.  The government has channeled the resources proceeding from foreign investment toward the creation of a productive base and the modernization of the economy, in accordance with its plan, thus effectively addressing the problem of insufficient funding for modernization.  Moreover, as it employed international capital, China did so in accordance with intelligent long-range guidelines, such as not contracting external debts that would place in danger the capacities of the nation.  The Cuban scholar Julio Díaz Vázquez maintains that China has created an effective system for the absorption of international resources in various stages, unique in the Third World and never imagined in real socialism (Díaz, 2010:61-63; 2016:98).

     Growth in international commerce.  In 2008, Chinese exports were 147 times what they had been in 1978; importations were 104 times what they had been.  As international commerce grew, it was moving away from the peripheral role in the world-economy: Traditional raw materials comprised more than 50% of exports in 1980, but only 10% in 2008; manufactured articles reached 90% of exports in 2008.  This is consistent with trends in the world-economy, where there has emerged during the last fifty years low-wage export manufacturing from peripheral and semiperipheral zones.  However, in the case of China, unlike other peripheral and semi-peripheral nations, the zones of export manufacturing are controlled and regulated by the state, and the state is a joint owner.  As a result, a significant amount of the generated capital does not leave the country, but is invested in the modernization and development of the country, and it is used for the alleviation of inequality (Díaz, 2010:65-68; 2016:100-2).  

     Cooperation in foreign policy.  At the beginning of the twentieth century, the European colonial empires and the American, Japanese, and Russian empires were in competition for control of the raw materials, labor, and markets of the earth.  The quest by all empires for expansion led to two world wars, and the period culminated with U.S. hegemony in a world-system that had evolved to neocolonialism.  During the rise of the United States to hegemony and the global transition to neocolonialism, the world-system reached and overextended the geographical limits of the earth, which created a situation in which the world-system could not be sustained without fundamental structural changes, involving a cessation of competition among empires for control of land, resources, and markets.  Therefore, the world-system today needs a fundamental transformation of the foreign policy assumptions of the global powers.  However, the United States and the ex-colonial powers of Europe continue to pursue the antiquated policies of seeking to expand their spheres of control and influence.

      China is forging a foreign policy that is an alternative to the assumptions and concepts of the foreign policies of the European colonial empires, the ex-colonial powers, and U.S. imperialism; and that is consistent with the objective needs of the world-system today.  Chinese foreign policy, formulated in theory and emerging is practice, respects the full sovereignty of all nations.  It affirms that all nations of the world are free to control their economies, their political systems, and their foreign policies, and they are free to trade among themselves, without interferences and interventions by global powers seeking control of resources and markets.  In accordance with this perspective, China peacefully and silently is challenging the United States and Europe, seeking to ascend in a form that changes the rules, thus moving the world-system toward cooperation and mutually beneficial trade.  Accordingly, China is promoting an approach to international affairs that the Non-Aligned Movement and the more independent governments of the Third World have demanded since the 1960s.  In pursuit of this goal, China has significantly expanded its commercial and diplomatic ties with Latin America since 1980 (Díaz, 2010:97-99, 104-5; Díaz, 2016:7-8, 73, 103; Wu and Wang, 2014:264-65).

     China since 1978, therefore, has become a force in the world, with an expanding economy and an increasingly important role in the world economy, promoting in practice alternative guidelines in international affairs.  But do these reforms in agriculture, industry, international commerce, and foreign policy signify an abandonment of socialism?  We will pursue this question in our next post.


​References
 
Díaz Vázquez, Julio Aracelio.  2010.  China: ¿Otro Socialismo? (LX aniversario).  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.   
 
__________.  2016.  China: Economía y democratización.  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales 
 
Wu Li and Wang Lei.  2014.  China, 1949-2014.  Beijing: Beijing Times Chinese Press.

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Mao: The foundation of the New China

3/5/2018

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     Since 1982, the collective and sustained judgment of the Chinese Communist Party has been that Mao Zedong made political errors in formulating and promoting the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (see “The emergence of Maoism” 1/18/2018; “The Cultural Revolution in China” 1/25/2018).  Nevertheless, the Party also has judged that Mao’s contributions to the revolution and the nation far outweighed his mistakes, for he led the revolution to power and directed the revolution in power to a transition to socialism, which provided the foundation for the sovereignty of the nation and the modernization of the economy.  This recognition of Mao’s contributions is not merely a political concession to the people.  It reflects an understanding of the objective conditions, established by the revolution in power, in which modernization has occurred.  There should not be confusion on this fundamental point.  China today stands on a foundation built by Mao (Meisner, 1999:444-45).

     Mao Zedong was born on December 26, 1893, in the town of Shaoshan, in the southern province of Hunan.  Mao was the son of a well-to-do peasant who was able to pay for his son’s education, including his board in a secondary school in the provincial capital.  Mao took seriously his studies, and he was an avid reader.  But the young Mao lacked direction, such that during 1911 and 1912, he changed from one program to another, including a brief stint in the military.  However, from 1913 to 1918, he found the first steps on his road, at the provincial normal school in a teacher preparation program.  During this period, his political ideas began to take shape, which he expressed in an essay, “The power of the mind.”  He wrote of the need for a strong centralized state, the importance of human will, and the need for Chinese intellectuals to encounter the thought of the West (Díaz, 2016:12-14; Chang and Halliday 2006:3-15).

      In 1917, at the age of 24, Mao was elected student of the year as well as head of the Student Association.  He reactivated a night school for workers, and he organized a group of thirteen students in what later would become the Association of Studies of the New People.  He was critical of some Confucian principles, but unlike many students and intellectuals of his generation, he did not completely reject Chinese traditions.  He sought a synthesis of ancient Chinese customs and Western radicalism.  His ideas were full of a patriotic spirit, and he supported a boycott of foreign goods (Díaz, 2016:16-17).  

     Upon his graduation in 1918, Mao relocated to Peking, where he met Chen Duxiu, who was a professor at Peking University and editor of an intellectual magazine, New Youth.  Chen proposed the total transformation of Chinese culture, basing his projections on a mixture of Western ideas, including liberalism, democratic reformism, and utopian socialism (2016:18).  Upon returning to Hunan in 1919, Mao participated in the creation of the Association of United Students of Hunan, and he drafted a call to protest the Versailles decision to grant German concessions in China to Japan (2016:19).  He published an article, “The great union of the popular classes,” in which he called for the uniting of workers, peasants, students, professors, women, and rickshaw drivers in support of a progressive agenda that would promote reforms at all levels (Díaz, 2016:18-20).

      Articles on Marx and Chinese translations of the works of Marx and Lenin appeared in China in the period 1919-21.  Professor Chan became a Marxist, and he formed a communist group of five members, including Mao.  By 1921, Mao had embraced Marx’s materialist concept of history, which Mao saw as the theoretical base of a new political party (Díaz, 2016:22).

     The Chinese Communist Party was established in Shanghai in 1921 by twelve delegates that represented fifty-seven members, mostly students.  Mao was among those at the founding meeting, one of two representatives of the province of Hunan.  Two representatives of the Communist International in Moscow were present to provide assistance and advice, but there can be no doubt with respect to the Chinese initiative in the process, stimulated by reading of Chinese translations of Marx and Lenin.  Subsequent to the founding meeting, Mao dedicated himself to various activities in Hunan: recruitment of Party members; the organizing and directing of an alternative school dedicated to unifying the intellectual and working classes; and the organization of workers, in accordance with the orthodox Marxist emphasis on the working class (Díaz, 2016:23-24; Meisner, 1999:14-19).

      During 1922 and 1923, there was much debate among Chinese communists with respect to a united front with Chinese bourgeois organizations and parties.  The Communist International was proposing the strategy, but most Chinese communists, including Mao, were not in agreement, believing instead that they should focus on the organization and education of the popular masses.  However, inasmuch as the Chinese Communist Party at its Second Congress in 1922 voted for affiliation with the Communist International, the Party was obligated to adopt the united front strategy.  In spite of his disagreement with the strategy, Mao joined the Nationalist Party of Sun Yatsen, and he was appointed in 1924 to the position of Secretary of the propaganda section of the Nationalist Party (Díaz, 2016:25-27).

      In 1925, now 32 years old, Mao returned to his native town of Shaoshan, where he remained for seven months, conversing with residents with respect to local events.  During this time, he encouraged the poorest of the local peasants to create an association.  This experience led him to his first Marxist heresy.  He arrived to the conclusion that, in the context of Chinese conditions, the peasants would play a central role in the revolution, and an agrarian program would have to be pivotal to the revolutionary project.  In the early months of 1927, Mao wrote a report describing the peasant movement in Hunan and the revolutionary spontaneity of the peasants (Díaz, 2016:28-29; Meisner 1999:26; see “The five heresies of Chinese socialism” 3/2/2018).

     As developed in practice, Mao’s heterodox Marxism involved an armed struggle that began in the countryside and moved to the cities; the political education of the peasant soldiers; and a moderate agrarian reform program in territory controlled by the revolution.  Radical intellectuals, with commitment to social and economic transformation, were the leaders of the revolutionary process.  As we have seen, Mao directed the revolution to triumph, and he led a transition to socialism that would reestablish the sovereignty of China and that would take significant steps toward the protection of the social and economic rights of the people.  (See “The triumph of the Chinese Revolution, Oct. 1, 1949” 1/9/2018; and “The Chinese transition to socialism” 1/11/2018).

     However, further steps in protecting the social and economic rights of the people required the general improvement of the standard of living, which would necessitate the modernization of the economy.  As he developed his thoughts on this issue, Mao found himself not in agreement with the majority of the members of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.  The disagreements were over the pace of the formation of agricultural cooperatives, and over the type of industry that ought to be developed.  Utilizing his support among the people, Mao prevailed in implementing his will.  But the two projects that he promoted, the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, resulted in tragedy, chaos, and division.  After Mao’s death in 1976, they would be criticized as ultra-Leftist political errors (see “The emergence of Maoism” 1/18/2018; “The Cultural Revolution in China” 1/25/2018; “Mao’s ‘ultra-Leftist’ political errors” 2/1/2018). 

      Beginning in 1978, the Chinese Communist Party proceeded on a program of modernization, which it called “Reform and Opening.”  The project was successful in promoting significant economic growth and development, attaining its success on the foundation of the transition to socialism forged by the Mao-directed revolution in power from 1949 to 1957.  However, the success of Reform and Opening would be at a price, particularly in the form of growing social inequality and environmental degradation.  These limitations have given rise to a new stage, launched in 2012, of “New Reform,” which seeks to continue with economic development, but in a form that attends more completely to the social and economic rights of all and that is ecologically sustainable.  We will address these themes in future posts.

     Conventional Marxism envisioned a revolution led by the industrial working class, with the most advanced workers in the vanguard; or a revolution of workers and peasants, led by a vanguard from the working class.  In the United States, such concepts led to a strategic emphasis on the organization of workers, to some extent with a disdainful view of students as part of a non-revolutionary petit bourgeoisie.  These ideas, however, were formulated in a context of revolutions unfolding in Europe, but the popular revolutions in China and the Third World did not develop in accordance with this pattern.  China illustrates the common tendency, in which professors and students conceived and initiated the revolutionary process.  They took seriously intellectual work, reading and writing with an orientation to understanding.  They tied their quest for understanding to the needs of the people and the nation, as they sought to organize and educate the people, and to lead the people to the taking of political power.  They illustrate the key role of the radical wing of the petit bourgeoisie in launching and sustaining revolutionary processes.  

     Are there not lessons here for Leftists in the nations of the North, as they face the challenge of responding to the evident political failure of imperialism and neoliberalism, which is generating the emergence of neofascism?   As we confront this challenging situation, let us set aside romanticized notions of revolutionary guerrillas and ultra-Leftist Maoism, through which we conceive of a revolution in a form that has little to do with us and with our political reality.  Let us focus instead on who Mao was.  As a student, he took seriously the quest for understanding and the importance of reading.  As an organizer, he also was a teacher, and he continued to read and write.  In his reading, he studied books from other lands, but always creatively adapting their insights to national conditions, which he came to understand by listening to the people.  He believed in the wisdom of the Chinese classics; in the virtues of the most humble among the people, whose revolutionary spontaneity did not nullify the fact that they must be led; and in the future of his nation.  With political intelligence, he led a political process that established the foundation for a more just and dignified nation.  In these respects, Mao is exemplary.


​References
 
Díaz Vázquez, Julio Aracelio.  2016.  China: Economía y democratización.  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.
 
Chang Jung and Jon Halliday.  2006.  Mao: The Unknown Story.  New York: Random House, Anchor Books.
 
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The five heresies of Chinese socialism

3/2/2018

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     The Cuban scholar Julio Díaz Vázquez, a specialist on China and socialist economies, notes that the Chinese socialist revolution, in its evolution from 1931 to 2012, formulated four heretical concepts, sacrileges from the vantage point of orthodox Marxist doctrine (Díaz, 2016:74).

       (1)  From the vantage point of orthodox Marxism, the peasantry was viewed as a politically backward class, and it needed to be directed by a proletarian vanguard.  As formulated at the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920:  “Only the urban, industrial proletariat, led by the Communist Party, can free the rural working masses from the yoke of capital and the holders of large-scale agricultural property” (La Internacional Comunista, 2010:138).

      Mao Zedong, however, began in 1925 to formulate a different understanding, on the basis of his organizing work among poor peasants.  He came to believe that the peasants, who held resentments against the landholders, could be organized in a class struggle against the landholding class.  He conceived an agrarian revolution, in which the peasantry would form the basis of the armed forces of the people.  In 1927, in the aftermath of a brutal repression of the Chinese Communist Party by the Chinese Nationalists, Mao formed a guerrilla force in the mountains.  It grew in numbers through the recruitment of peasants, who were attracted by its program of agrarian reform.  It proceeded to control significant territory, such that in 1931, the Chinese Soviet Republic was proclaimed in the southern province of Jiangxi.  On the basis of this achievement in practice, Mao’s view of the revolutionary peasantry became the prevailing view in the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.  In practice, the revolution was unfolding as a popular armed struggle in the countryside, in which the peasants were in the overwhelming majority.  The process included extensive political education, and it was directed in practice by Marxist intellectuals from the Chinese petit bourgeoisie, who were adapting Marx to the semi-colonial and economically backward conditions of China (Díaz, 2016:28-36).

     (2)  Orthodox Marxism believed that socialism must be constructed in stages, and that socialism could not be established until the bourgeois revolution is completed.  Accordingly, the prevailing view in the socialist world was that, when popular revolutions triumph in places where the bourgeois revolution had not been completed, the socialist state ought to focus on the development of heavy industry, as had been done in the Soviet Union.  Mao, however, favored an alternative road that included rural industrial development, in which rural labor would be mobilized to develop labor-intensive, light, and small-to-medium industry connected to agricultural production.  Lacking support for his heretical view in the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao launched a divisive political campaign, which resulted in the removal of his opponents from the Central Committee, enabling him to proceed with his vision in the form of the Great Leap Forward.  The Great Leap resulted in economic chaos and tragedy, and it was a political disaster for Mao (see “The emergence of Maoism” 1/18/2018).

     (3)  The orthodox Marxist view is that the triumph of a socialist revolution ends the class struggle.  Mao, however, believed that bourgeois consciousness continues to survive after the triumph of the popular socialist revolution, so that the proletarian class struggle must continue.  In 1965, he maintained that high officials in the party and the state possessed bourgeois consciousness, and he called upon the people to identify and bring down high members of the Party and the government who were taking the capitalist road.  The result was the Cultural Revolution, a period of intense political conflict and tragedy, which unfolded primarily from 1966 to 1968 (see “The Cultural Revolution in China” 1/25/2018).    

      Since 1981, the Chinese Communist Party has maintained that the first heresy of Mao established the foundation for, first, the independence of China from the penetration by imperialist powers; secondly, the liquidation of the landholding class and the far more limited national bourgeoisie; and thirdly, the subsequent modernization of the economy.  At the same time, the Party has judged the second and third heresies of Mao to have been ultra-Leftist political errors (see “Mao’s ‘ultra-Leftist’ political errors” 2/1/2018).

     (4)  The orthodox view is that a market economy is inherent to capitalism, and a planned economy inherent to socialism.  Departing from this view, China in the period of 1978 to 2012 pursued a program of “Reform and Opening,” based on the concept of a socialist market economy, which overcomes the separation between planning and market.  In a socialist market economy, economic planning is primary, and the market plays an auxiliary role, which is defined by the plan.  Public property is the pillar of the economy (Díaz, 2010:78-79, 84-86; 2016:75).  As expressed by Wu and Wang, in a socialist market economic system, markets “play a fundamental role in the allocation of resources under macroeconomic regulation and control” (2014:150).
     
     Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping were the principle formulators of the Reform and Opening, with Deng serving as the de facto ruler of China from 1978 to 1994.  We will be reflecting on this stage of the Chinese Revolution in subsequent posts.

     (5)  In 2012, the XVIII Congress of the Chinese Communist Party approved a “New Reform,”  which is a new vision of the Reform and Opening.  The New Reform continues with economic growth and modernization, and it seeks to expand further the space for private capital.  However, it intends to place greater emphasis on the expansion of domestic consumption, with less dependency on exportation and foreign investment.  Moreover, it plans to give greater emphasis to social equality and to the protection of the environment (Díaz, 2016:vii, 2-6, 119-21; Wu and Wang 227).  

      The New Reform has been formulated principally by Xi Jinping, current President of the People’s Republic of China and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.  His public discourses appeal to national pride, and he credits the Chinese Communist Party with overcoming the humiliations inflicted on China by imperialist powers in the past and with leading the people toward mastery of their own destiny (2016:6).  He speaks of the attainment of the Chinese dream of the great revitalization of the Chinese nation.  This constitutes the fifth heresy in the history of the Chinese Revolution, in that orthodox Marxism promoted a form of internationalism that disapproved of national pride and patriotism.  We will be reflecting on Xi’s speeches in future posts.

     Conscious of the heretical character of its socialism, the leaders of the Chinese Revolution have continuously proclaimed that they are developing a socialist road with Chinese characteristics.  The gains and success of the Chinese socialist road is evident, and they have been attained on the foundation of the wisdom of the first, fourth, and fifty heresies; and on the lessons learned through the political errors of the second and third heresies.
      
​References
 
Díaz Vázquez, Julio Aracelio.  2010.  China: ¿Otro Socialismo? (LX aniversario).  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.   
 
__________.  2016.  China: Economía y democratización.  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales 
 
La Internacional Comunista: Tesis, manifiestos, y resoluciones de los cuatro primeros congresos (1919-1922).  2010.  Madrid: Fundación Federico Engels.
 
Wu Li and Wang Lei.  2014.  China, 1949-2014.  Beijing: Beijing Times Chinese Press.

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Mao’s “ultra-Leftist” political errors

2/1/2018

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     In 1981, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared that Mao Zedong made “ultra-Leftist” political errors in the period 1957 to 1976.  This view of Mao, which includes affirmation of his important contributions in leading the Chinese Revolution to triumph and in directing the CCP and the Chinese government from 1949 to 1957, essentially remains the view of the Party today.  See, for example, the interpretations of the Mao era written by Tian Yingkui, Head of the Department of Economic Sciences of the Central School of the Communist Party of China (Tian, 2008:13-14). 

     What were the ultra-Leftist political errors of Mao?  Of primary importance was the erroneous political strategy adopted by Mao in the various moments in which he found himself in the minority in the CCP Central Committee.  As we have seen, Mao in 1955 disagreed with the Central Committee majority in regard to the issue of the pace of the collectivization of agriculture.  In 1957, Mao advocated the development of medium-sized, light, and rural industry connected to agriculture, in opposition to the Central Committee majority, which favored the Soviet model of emphasis on investment in heavy industry.  In 1962 and again in 1965, Mao pronounced against the pragmatic policies of the Liu government, maintaining that they represented a capitalist road that was undermining the socialist society.  In the situations of 1955 and 1962, Mao was able to overrule the Central Committee by appealing to provincial and district Party leaders.  On both occasions, the Central Committee conceded to the views of the Party leaders and approved Mao’s proposals.  In 1957, Mao appealed to non-Party intellectuals, who responded with Rightist critiques, provoking the Central Committee to launch an anti-Rightist campaign against intellectuals.  Mao, however, redirected the anti-Rightist campaign against the Party itself, leading to a purge of Rightist Party leaders and enabling Maoists to take control of the Party and implement Mao’s vision.  In 1965, Mao appealed to the people, especially students, leading to a purge of Party leaders and members who were allegedly taking the capitalist road, which resulted in a restoration of Mao’s political power and the implementation of some of his egalitarian proposals.  (See “The Chinese transition to socialism,” 1/11/2018; “The emergence of Maoism,” 1/18/2018; and “The Cultural Revolution in China,” 1/25/2018).

     Mao’s political strategy violated the evolving norms of socialist political practices.  In the construction of socialism, when there are strategic disagreements among revolutionary leaders, correct strategies will show themselves as the revolution evolves.  Therefore, when revolutionary leaders cannot attain a consensus, the best approach is to develop alternative pilot projects, analyzing the economic results and social consequences of each, establishing the possibility for a scientific foundation for decision-making and for political consensus.  In making political appeals outside the political leadership, and especially in appealing to non-Party intellectuals and students, neither of which was well qualified to judge, Mao provoked political conflicts that were a danger to the revolution itself and that led to the unjustifiable public humiliation of targeted persons.  In contrast to Mao’s conflictive approach, the necessary road is the seeking of internal consensus within the revolutionary leadership, which constantly strives to teach and unify the people.

       Secondly, Mao imposed a pace and level of agricultural collectivization for which there was not an adequate economic base.  Lacking an adequate level of industrial support for its cooperative social formation, Chinese agricultural growth in production was low, lagging behind what was necessary and behind industrial growth.  Moreover, the total elimination of private agricultural production had the consequence that those peasants most suited by temperament and capacities to individual production were constrained from contributing more to national agricultural production.  Seeing these limitations, the Party in the 1980s, without describing the collectivization of the 1950s as a political error, called for the partial reversal of collectivization and for the establishment of new possibilities for individual private farms (see Meisner, 1999:460-69).   

     Thirdly, Mao’s vision of rural industrial development, with its emphasis on locally oriented industry and on smallness, has many attractive features.  However, this is a complex issue.  It is not clear if such locally based industry has the productive and technical capacity to drive the modern economic development of a nation as large as China.  The best approach is the simultaneous development of both local light industry and large heavy industry, at a pace that does not overreach capital and labor resources, with scientific analysis of the economic and social consequences of both.  

     Fourthly, Mao encouraged idealistic conceptions, such as a rejection of centralized planning, the abolition of the division of labor, the total elimination of inequality, and a romantic notion of the revolutionary virtues of the poorest peasants.  The experience of the Chinese Revolution from 1949 to the present shows that centralized planning by the state, without rigidity and with appropriate space for local autonomy; functional divisions in work; some level of inequality in income, based on merit; and ideological and pedagogical leadership by political leaders are important components in the long-term development of the nation and socialism. 

       Mao adopted ultra-Leftist positions on issues that are complex, and which of necessity must be politically decided in the challenging context of constructing a socialist society, in which providing for the material needs of the people is a pressing concern.  Technicians alone should not decide such complex technical questions, but neither should they be decided through a conflictive ideological battle that undermines possibilities for constructive consensus.
     
       Ultra-Leftist political errors in China had dramatic negative effects on economic development.  Production fell and rose in a rhythm that paralleled the rise and fall of ultra-Leftist policies.  From 1950-52, following the Agrarian Reform Law of 1950, which took land from landholders and distributed it to individual peasants, agricultural production increased 15% per year.  In contrast, from 1952 to 1976, when cooperatives were developed and there were limited possibilities for individual peasant production and sale, agricultural production increased only 2.3% per year, significantly below the projections of the development plans.  From 1978 to 1984, agricultural production increased 9% per year, in the context of new policies that removed restrictions on rural markets, set high prices for agricultural goods, promoted rural industries related to agricultural, and favored a return to family farming.  As we have seen, as a consequence of the economic and organizational chaos of the Great Leap Forward as well as natural disasters, food shortages emerged in the period 1958 to 1961, and there may have been fifteen to twenty million famine-related deaths (Meisner, 1999:98, 228, 237, 416, 460-69; Díaz, 2010:24).

     Similarly, Chinese industry grew at a rate of 16% to 18% between 1952 and 1957, a period characterized by the nationalization of foreign and domestic industry. From 1959 to 1962, with the Great Leap Forward, industrial production declined 40%.  With Liu’s pragmatic economic policies of 1962 to 1965, industrial production was stabilized in 1962, and it grew at an average annual rate of 11% from 1963 to 1965.  The introduction of differential wage rates in the factories was a factor in facilitating recovery in industrial production, a policy that implied tolerance of a level of inequality among workers, on the basis of merit (Meisner, 1999:113, 253, 264, 266).  

     The Cuban scholar Julio A. Díaz, who has published in Cuba several books on China and on socialist economies, describes the rise and fall of China’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and national income in a form paralleling the zigzag between ultra-Leftist and pragmatic policies.  From 1952 to 1957, during the initial transition to socialism, the GDP grew 20% during the five-year period, and national income grew at annual rate of 9%.  From 1958 to 1962, during the Great Leap, annual growth of national income was 3%, and agricultural production fell 4%.  From 1962-65, with the pragmatic economic policies of Liu, national income grew 15% during the three-year period.  With the conflicts of the Cultural Revolution, production fell 14% in 1967 and 5% in 1968.  Subsequently, with the turn to order and stability, in which Mao and Zhou cooperated, the GDP grew at 6% per year from 1968 to 1972 (Díaz, 2010:21-27).

      To be sure, growth in national production and income is only one factor.  Other dimensions must be taken into account in evaluating the quality of a society and the commitment of its political leaders.  Such dimensions include the level of equality; access to education, health care, culture, and sport; the development of scientific knowledge tied to the needs of the people and to sustainable development; the protection of the sovereignty of the nation; a foreign policy consistent with universal human values, among others.  However, productive growth is an important indicator, especially in a society with a low level of economic development and high levels of poverty.  Revolutionary leaders in China and the Third World must give a high priority to economic growth and development, in order to respond to the material needs of the people.

      Starting in 1978, China was able to overcome its ultra-Leftism and develop a more pragmatic approach to the construction of a socialist society.  We should understand that this was not a turn to capitalism, but a turn to a pragmatic approach, necessary in practical terms for the attainment of revolutionary goals.  Two other important socialist projects, Vietnam and Cuba, also have been characterized by flexible and pragmatic leadership, which has avoided ultra-Leftist errors, for the most part.  They have not been characterized by ideological rigidity, which insists on applying an idea regardless of material and social conditions; instead, they have opted for a flexible approach in the quest for the practical attainment of socialist and revolutionary goals.  As the capitalist world-economy increasingly falls into structural crisis, demonstrating its unsustainability, the pragmatic socialist nations of China, Vietnam, and Cuba increasingly are making evident that pragmatic socialism, adapted to particular conditions in each nation, is the necessary road for humanity.

​
​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.
 
Tian Yingkui.  2008.  Camino Chino: Concepción científica del desarrollo.  Beijing: Ediciones en Lenguas Extranjeras.
 

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The Cultural Revolution in China

1/25/2018

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     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:
Millions of Red Guards, carrying portraits of Mao . . . and waving copies of the Chairman’s “little red book” . . . , marched through the streets of the cities and traveled over the country and through the countryside in a campaign against all symbols of the feudal past and the bourgeois influences of the present.  Museums and homes were ransacked, and old books and works of art were destroyed.  Everything from ancient Confucian texts to modern recordings of Beethoven were sought out and thrown into dustbins. . . .  Hapless citizens wearing Western-style clothes or Hong Kong-style haircuts were attacked and humiliated, as were those possessing old Buddhist and Daoist relics.  The Cultural Revolution soon began to destroy people as well as culture.  As the Red Guard assault moved from uprooting the “four olds” [old ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the exploiting classes] to attacking “power-holders,” Party officials and administrative cadres were “arrested” and paraded through the streets in duncecaps, forced to confess their “crimes” at public rallies, and often physically as well as psychologically abused at struggle sessions.  Not a few were beaten to death or driven to suicide.  The brunt of the attack was borne by intellectuals, who were the most vulnerable and the most defenseless (Meisner, 1999:321-22). 
     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:
​Millions of Chinese limped away from the battles and repression of the Cultural Revolution physically and psychologically scarred.  Many were tortured and beaten in endless “struggle sessions” . . . .  Children were persecuted for the alleged political sins (or social origins) of their parents, and parents were denounced by their children.  Millions were arbitrarily arrested and sent to prisons and labor camps. . . .  Lives were broken and careers destroyed (Meisner, 1999:354). 
     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.
 

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The emergence of Maoism

1/18/2018

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     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:
​The campaign to produce “more, faster, better, and cheaper” . . . proceeded in accordance with the new Maoist economic strategy of “simultaneous development” formally adopted by the Party in October 1957.  A new emphasis on agriculture and small industries accompanied the raising of production targets in the heavy industrial sector.  The centralized bureaucratic economic apparatus was partially dismantled in favor of relative autonomy and decision-making authority for localities and basic production units.  Administrative offices were emptied as officials were “sent down” to engage in manual labor on farms and in factories in the name of “simple administration.”  Ideological exhortations and moral appeals replaced material rewards as the incentive for workers and peasants to work harder and longer, accompanied by the promise that “three years of struggle” would be followed by “a thousand years of communist happiness.”  The social mobilization of the masses for labor rather than the bureaucratic direction of laborers became the central organizational feature (Meisner, 1999:216).
     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:
​In light of the disastrous conditions confronting the government in 1960-1961, the rapidity of the recovery and the renewal of economic growth was quite remarkable.  Agricultural production began to revive in 1962 and increased at a steady, if not spectacular rate, over the following years.  Grain output rose from a low of 193,000,000 tons in 1961 to 240,000,000 tons in 1965 augmented by large wheat purchases from Canada and Australia (Meisner, 1999:266). 
​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.
 
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The Chinese “bureaucratic elite”

1/16/2018

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     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:
​The imperatives of rapid industrial development . . . gave rise to two new bureaucratic elites . . . exercising increasingly formal control on the basis of their respective spheres of expertise.  One was a political elite of Communist leaders and cadres rapidly becoming administrators and functionaries in the growing state apparatus that presided over the industrialization process; the second was a technological elite of engineers, scientists, and managers responsible for the operation of the expanding modern economic sector.  These newly emerging social groups tended to become increasingly motivated by professional and vocational ethics, rather than by Marxist goals and communist values, and increasingly separated from the masses of workers and peasants by virtue of status, power, and material benefits (Meisner, 1999:124-25).
​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:
​The problem of bureaucracy was a reflection of a larger and more general phenomenon, the growing cleavage between state and society.  Socialism, according to Marxist theory, is a historical process whereby the social powers usurped by the state are restored to society.  But in the People’s Republic, as in the Soviet Union, “the transition to socialism” had produced precisely the opposite historic result: the growth of a vast bureaucratic state apparatus that was increasingly alienated from society (Meisner, 1999:157).
     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.
 
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The Chinese transition to socialism

1/11/2018

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     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.
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    Author: Charles McKelvey

    Retired professor, writer,  and Marxist-Leninist-Fidelist-Chavist revolutionary

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