First Published: Frontline, Vol. 4, No. 10, November 10, 1986.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Ten years since the death of Mao Zedong, just about every major “socialist” thesis promulgated by the Great Helmsman in the course of what Mao considered his most important contribution to Marxist theory and socialist practice – the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – has been undone. Nevertheless, as it reaffirmed at its recently concluded Central Committee meeting in Beijing September 28, the Communist Party of China (CPC) still proclaims itself a party based on Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought – and there is good reason to think that Mao himself would not have been completely unhappy with the path which present leader Deng Xiao-ping has charted for China’s future.
The changes the CPC, at Deng’s initiative, has wrought on the course of China’s development have certainly been dramatic, and, at times, startling. Often overlooked, however, is a marked degree of continuity with many policies and a broader ideology going back some 30 years and embracing almost every faction in a party whose internal disputes have become legion.
Economically, the major policies designed to carry out Mao’s drastic Cultural Revolution are dead. “The principle of taking class struggle as the key link,” declared the Central Committee resolution at its September plenary, was “a decade of domestic turmoil.” The new assessment, unanimously affirmed by the CPC’s leading policy body, asserts that “economic development ... [is] the key link.” This major line alteration – in effect placing main emphasis on developing China’s forces of production – has been operative for at least the last five years and is the foundation for Deng’s far-reaching program of economic reforms aimed at effecting a qualitative boost in China’s productive capacity by the end of the century. It replaces Mao’s view that gains in production would come about by the radical and forced implementation of thoroughly egalitarian class practices in every aspect of life. Despite this shift, Mao’s perspective of developing China’s socialism outside the economic mechanisms of the socialist camp and world socialist system remains a cornerstone of CPC policy.
Internationally, the xenophobic isolation of the Cultural Revolution period has been discarded. Where the CPC once viewed walling off both the capitalist West and the socialist east – as well as China’s own past – as exemplary virtues of a “pure” socialism, today China is multiplying its economic and political interactions with other nations and parties at an almost dizzying pace. Particularly striking are the growing economic ties with the Soviet Union and a new degree of openness to several Eastern European communist parties. But while the CPC nominally seems to be striving for a measure of equidistance from both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, in practice Mao’s own marked tilt toward the West continues to characterize Beijing’s international role.
Ideologically, the CPC has dropped most of the critical theoretical constructs through which Mao’s claim on having made strikingly original contributions to Marxism-Leninism was based. Principles which were once advanced as having a universal application to the struggle for socialism have been quietly forgotten and Mao Zedong Thought is now pretty much reduced to the late Chairman’s “concrete application of Marxism-Leninism to the actual conditions of China” – except, of course, for those “applications” which proved disastrous and have since been discarded. Nevertheless, the fundamental thrust of Mao’s world outlook – a fierce nationalism principally expressed through the unfolding of policies designed to ensure that, above all, China’s socialism would be “independent” of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp – remains the basic ideological underpinning of the CPC under Deng’s leadership.
Politically, the main changes in China have been in the effort to root out of the party and government infrastructure the bulk of those leaders and cadres who rose to prominence during – and as a result of – the Cultural Revolution. Deng has also tried to refashion the top party leadership in his own image, seeking to replace an older, more “orthodox” leadership with somewhat younger, pragmatist-oriented individuals. While Deng has succeeded up to a point, there is apparently still a battle between those whose overriding emphasis is on getting the job done and those who are concerned that in the drive for economic development China’s socialism might be weakened and ultimately lost.
Deng’s push for economic growth started in the late 1970s with the “Four Modernizations,” a call for dramatic advances in the areas of agriculture, industry, science and technology and defense. Beginning first with agricultural and then shifting to industry in 1984, the reforms have utilized extensive de centralization and various market-oriented mechanisms in an effort to propel the massive but severely underdeveloped economy forward. Today, material incentives, commodity markets, stock exchanges and advertising are part and parcel of the Chinese economy. One of the most startling shifts has been the abolition of the “iron rice bowl” system of permanent employment for workers at state-owned enterprises. As of October 1, all new workers for state industries will be hired under labor contracts, phasing out the guarantee of lifetime employment and requiring China to introduce a system of unemployment insurance for the first time since 1949.
Many of the reforms, particularly in agriculture, have been quite successful, offering a number of long overdue correctives on the ruinous policies of the Cultural Revolution’s emphasis on ideological ferment Largely based on the abolition of the communes and the implementation of the production-responsibility system which made households the basic agricultural-production unit, China has become a net exporter of grain, reversing a long history of being one of the world’s major grain importers. In 1984 the Chinese harvested 407 million tons of grain, a world record.
But there is another side to the reforms. In agriculture there have been wide fluctuations in the supply and demand of many important commodities, partly due to a sharp decline in the amount of acreage in China being devoted to grain. Under the new post-Mao slogan – “To be rich is glorious” – many peasants have been shifting land away from rice and wheat and are growing more cash crops such as fruit and vegetables. In addition, many peasants are farming less and enjoying it more; the agricultural reforms have given a green light for peasants to pursue other “individual specialties,” a development that has taken land out of farming to build private workshops and rural factories.
In the industrial sector, a period of uncontrolled growth from the second half of 1984 through 1985 gave Beijing a firsthand look at a capitalist boom-brake cycle extraordinaire. As centralized planning and control were eased and the “market” given a freer rein, China’s economy was hit by excessive capital spending, raw materials shortages and inflationary trends.
China’s flirtation with capitalism has also produced problems of another sort: Chinese society has been tainted with the reappearance of prostitution, pornography and black markets.
As the catastrophic consequences of the Cultural Revolution came clear to Deng and the post-Mao leadership, the CPC increasingly began looking to the West as the key to achieving its goal of rapid economic modernization. In Deng’s calculations, it was the West – principally the U.S., but Japan and Western Europe as well – which offered the best prospects for investment capital, markets and technology. Since then, more than 2,700 joint economic ventures with a net worth of $16 billion have been launched. Western produced consumer goods have been flowing into China at a growing rate and Chinese manufactures (principally textiles) have begun making their way into western markets. China has also obtained access to some advanced U.S. military technology.
But the economic results have proven to be far less substantial than Deng had hoped. Problems of foreign exchange, inadequate infrastructure and the norms of even a minimally socialist society have, in many cases, turned initial investor enthusiasm into caution. The ailing U.S. textile industry has not been happy about a potential flood of Chinese imports and has thus far succeeded in curtailing Beijing’s potential market-thereby reducing its ability to acquire hard currency. And even limited integration into the world capitalist economy has subjected China to problems of inflation, unemployment and the anarchy of production.
To reverse this trend, Chinese leaders waged a diplomatic blitz across Europe, promising to cure the pains of foreign investment. In addition, Beijing has submitted its long awaited application to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a step that further draws China into the mainstream of world capitalist trade.
Part two of this article, dealing with Sino-Soviet ties and ideological charges in the CPC, will appear in Frontline’s next issue.