[Militant No. 819, 17 October 1986, p. 10]
The Queen’s visit to China symbolises a profound change in the capitalists‘ attitude. Before, the media painted a picture of a regimented population, political thought-control, and unrelenting ‚Communist‘ austerity. Now they present a new China, enlivened by a blossoming market, with political ‚liberalisation‘ and a rapid adoption of a western life-style by growing sections of the population.
Behind this rosy new picture, which is just as superficial as the former gloomy portrait, lies a ravenous appetite for Chinese profits reawakened by the far-reaching economic reforms introduced under Deng Xiaoping.
Beginning in 1978/79, the leadership has introduced a series of reforms. In the countryside households have been allowed to manage their own farming, sell their surpluses on the market and run their own manufacturing and commercial enterprises. In industry, management has been given much more scope for initiative, and many controls on private enterprises have been lifted.
Above all, China has adopted an „open-door“ policy to the capitalist world, allowing in foreign capital, borrowing much more from Western banks and importing modern equipment and technology. This has been accompanied, of necessity, by a „liberalisation“, allowing more initiative to the managers, technocrats and business people required to operate such reforms.
The attraction of the vast potential profits was recently summed up in the right wing journal Economic Affairs (June/July 1986): „If each of the billion Chinese can be anticipated to consume only one dollar more, to produce goods worth one dollar extra, or to save one dollar additional, the results will be staggering.“
They warn that there may be many barriers and risks. But , „trade or investment based on a huge market offers huge possibilities.“
Some of the spokesmen of capitalism, carried away by their first impressions of Deng’s reforms, have even raised the question of a possible restoration of capitalism. At the same time, a few writers who still espouse Maoist thinking, both in China and the West , have raised the spectre of China turning back down the „capitalist road“.
In reality, Deng’s attempt to stimulate the economy through „market methods“ resembles similar reforms in Russia and Eastern Europe, though the Chinese leadership has perhaps moved more suddenly and sharply in this direction.
Periodic lurches in policy are the inevitable product of the attempt by a bureaucratic leadership, based on a privileged elite, to direct a nationalised, centrally planned economy (still with a predominant agrarian sector) involving a workforce of over 400 million and required to meet the needs of over 1,000 million people. In spite of all the upheavals, the planned economy, with all the limitations imposed by China’s economic backwardness, has proved its superiority over capitalist relations. India was on a comparable level in 1949. But China has outstripped India in many vital fields of production, and because of the much less uneven distribution of wealth, living standards in terms of food, housing, and income, are incomparably higher for the vast majority of Chinese workers and peasants.
For this reason alone, the Chinese revolution, which actively involved millions of toilers and decisively smashed landlordism and capitalism, must count as a monumental event, second only to the Russian October revolution in its historical significance.
Yet isolation in an impoverished country, which had suffered from centuries of barbarous exploitation by both Chinese rulers and predatory imperialists, meant that the social transformation took a distorted form. From the outset , the new regime under Mao Zedong was constructed on the model of Stalin’s Russia. With the working class excluded from the leadership and the Red Army chiefs basing themselves on the peasant masses, power was concentrated into the hands of a privileged bureaucratic layer.
Contradictions
Even under the conscious socialist direction of the working class, the problems of development would not have been negligible. What should be the balance, given the paucity of resources. between agriculture and industry, between investment and consumption, between building factories and producing consumer goods, between creating greater equality and providing incentives for skilled workers and specialists?
In addition, there is the crucial problem of relations with the capitalist world market, indispensible for modernisation, but involving all the dangers of capitalist penetration.
But in the hands of an undemocratic apparatus, these problems have produced an unending stream of policy contradictions. The attempt, until the current reforms, to solve the problems within national limits, even those of China, have sharpened all the conflicts. This is why the Chinese leadership, under Mao and after, have twisted and turned from one expedient to another in their efforts to consolidate the economic and social basis of their power.
To a far greater extent than in Stalinist Russia, moreover, the conflicts over policies have been bound up with struggle between contending factions or coalitions of factions within the bureaucracy. For this reason, the leadership has been torn by a series of convulsive upheavals.
The most explosive and notorious of these was the so-called „Cultural Revolution“, launched in 1966. This violent political spasm neither changed anything fundamental nor raised the level of culture. But the factional turbulence and its bloody aftermath profoundly disrupted Chinese society.
The current supremacy of the Deng leadership is, in fact, the culmination of a long-drawn-out, very uneven reaction to the Cultural Revolution , and Deng’s policies must be seen in that context. The Cultural Revolution began essentially as a purge launched by Mao against top leaders like Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and the group which dominated the apparatus at that time. They had excluded Mao from direct power after the failure of his „Great Leap Forward“ (1958-60). The personal Bonapartist power of Mao was no longer compatible with the interests of a consolidated mature bureaucracy.
But when Mao mobilised students, peasant youth, and the unemployed into the Red Guards under radical „anti-bureaucratic“ slogans, he undammed a seething reservoir of discontent.
All the factions in the leadership tried to manipulate the rebellious youth for their own ends. But once in action, the radicalised youth went far beyond Mao’s aim of dislodging his rivals. The spontaneous but politically crude movement exposed the privileges and corruption of the bureaucracy.
Red guards who hauled bureaucrats out of their houses found valuable antiques, luxurious gardens, servants‘ quarters, expensive imported clothes, perfumes and liqueurs. and other luxuries. Later, when the radical leaders associated with the „Gang of Four“ were toppled, they were found to enjoy a similar lifestyle. far removed from the conditions of the vast majority.
However, the Red Guards‘ demand for a democratic control from below threatened the very existence of the bureaucracy.
Mao himself was forced to dam the tide. Compromising with his rivals, Mao gave his authority to the use of the army and the militia to subdue the Red Guard. In many regions, factional clashes led to violent, armed conflicts, and tens of thousands, possibly millions, perished in the bloody suppression of the movement.
In the period after the Cultural Revolution, up until Deng’s new supremacy, the party leadership rested with an unstable coalition of factions, with Zhou Enlai as a key balancing figure. Economic policy oscillated between reform, emphasising modernisation, imported technology, incentives to managers and entrepreneurs, and return to tighter controls over the economy and the state machine exercised from above by the top leadership in Beijing.
However, the leadership was still dominated by a struggle for control of the apparatus between the „radical leftist“ newcomers, who had gained positions during the Cultural Revolution, and the „old guard“ bureaucrats. Step by step, the old guard around Zhou Enlai and Deng reconquered control.
Life sentences
Lin Biao was ousted in 1971 . After Mao’s death in 1976, the „leftist“ Gang of Four around Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing, were put on trial and given life sentences. There was not a murmur of mass protest, which belied their claims to mass support after the Cultural Revolution.
After a transitional period under the „compromise“ leader, Hua Guofeng, Deng restored the grip of the old guard bureaucrats.
In his struggle for control, Deng with great caution, used a similar tactic to Mao. Beginning with the Tiananmen incident in 1977, when tens of thousands commemorated the first anniversary of Zhou Enlai’s death, Deng encouraged mass pressure on his rivals. This led to the so-called „democratic movement“, partly orchestrated by the Deng faction, but also spontaneously expressing the real grievances of young workers, uprooted youth from the countryside, and unemployed school leavers.
The movement involved very mixed social forces, with largely inchoate demands. There was support for the stability and prosperity apparently promised by Deng’s reform policy. But to Deng’s „four (economic) modernisations“ the movement added a „fifth modernisation“, democracy. Some of those involved undoubtedly raised liberal capitalist ideas, but others were groping towards the idea of socialist democracy.
Though falling far short of a clear programme for the overthrow of the bureaucracy and the establishment of workers‘ democracy, some of the currents posed an unmistakable threat to the bureaucracy. Predictably, having used the protest movement for his own purposes, Deng moved to suppress it, jailing some of its leading figures and banning its publications.
Such expressions of mass protest, for all their limitations, are a significant pointer for the future, when a new generation based on a strengthened working class and a much higher level of culture, will challenge China’s ruling bureaucracy. Closer ties with the world market, moreover, will mean that movements of the working class internationally will have far more effect on China in the future.
For the time being the Deng leadership is in the ascendant. But those enthusiastic commentators in the queen’s entourage who are hailing Deng as a man with original solutions forget that the 82-year-old veteran is starting once again from where his old boss, Liu Shaoqi, left off before the Cultural Revolution, applying similar reforms to present-day conditions.
Deng does not represent a fundamentally new stage of the Chinese revolution-merely a new episode in the career of the bureaucracy, although one which will have many repercussions for China’s proletariat.
Next week: the meaning of the economic reforms.
For Chinese names the article follows the People‘ s Republic ’s official pinyin system of romanisation, now in current use, rather than the old system traditionally used in Britain: Beijing (Peking), Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung). Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai). Lin Biao (Lin Piao). Liu Shaoqi (Liu Shao-ch ‚i). Jiang Qing (Chiang Ch’ing – „Madame Mao“). Deng Xiaoping (Teng Hsiao-p’ing). Hua Guofeng (Hua Kuo-feng). Tiananmen Square (T’ien An Men). Etc.
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