by Nat Winn
“Our country at present practices a commodity system, the wage system is unequal, too, as in the eight-grade wage scale, and so forth. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat such things can only be restricted. Therefore, if people like Lin Piao come to power, it will be quite easy for them to rig up the capitalist system.”“Our country at present practices a commodity system, the wage system is unequal, too, as in the eight-grade wage scale, and so forth. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat such things can only be restricted. Therefore, if people like Lin Piao come to power, it will be quite easy for them to rig up the capitalist system.” Mao Zedong (1975)
It must be noted that China had a choice about development. After the death of Mao in 1976, those who Mao struggled against, took the opportunity to seize the reins of power in China. We can point out the most salient of the economic and political reversals that followed:
1. First, the violent change of state power — carried out with the bloody crushing of the very revolutionary forces mobilized around Mao to prevent restoration. This included the mass arrest of his supporters, killing of many key Maoist communist cadre and leaders, the direct military defeat of armed worker militia in Shanghai, followed by a countrywide “settlement of accounts” against those at the frontlines of the cultural revolution. This counter-revolution culminated in massive 1978 changes in the core productive relations at the base and then in 1980 with the public trial of Mao’s closest supporters — (a trial where Jiang Qing in particular risked death and torture to sharply called out the counterrevolutionary reversal by the capitalist roaders).
2. The break up of peoples communes, and restoration of rural private property under the notorious Dengist slogan “Get rich!” This unleashed rapid inequality in the countryside, and created conditions for the vast forced urbanization of Chinese farmers as exploited proletarians. (Documented in William Hinton’s detailed work, The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978-1989).
3. The creation of “anything goes” SEZs that started “opening” China to direct exploitation by foreign capital. These included so-called “free trade zones,” export processing zones, and industrial parks. And after initial experimentation, these zones expanded to include the country as a whole. Features: special “incentives,” government protection of imperialist profit, state capitalist “partnership” in exploitation and profit, implementation of established imperialist modes of production and social relations, and special privileges (including tax breaks, duty-free imports, and rewriting of socialist laws…) streamlined procedures, to attract investment and promote specific economic activities. .)
4. The creation of a defacto U.S.-Chinese military alliance during the rapidly intensifying U.S. war preparation (created during the reactionary Deng trip to Washington DC and Disneyland.) This came right on the heels of the reactionary Chinese revisionist attempt to invade Vietnam in 1979.
5.The destruction of the socialist relations in production (both in the state enterprises and in new imperialist partnerships and SEZs). This included shutting down vast Chinese enterprises which were considered not profitable enough. And the destruction of the “iron rice bowl” — meaning that the rights of workers under their own socialist system were dismantled, with state capitalist masters now free to lay off workers, fire them at will, etc. etc.
After these changes China may have become just a subservient cog in the world imperialist machine, however it did not. It rose to become a major economic power, second in the world in GDP and a rising rival to United States imperial hegemony. This may be a surprise result but does it necessarily make China ant-imperialist or socialist. Is the achievement of development and economic growth antithetical to capitalism in its current stage? We would have answer, emphatically, that the answer to these questions is no.
It is the long-standing approach of aspiring bourgeois all over the world that “development” doesn’t need revolution or liberation or social transformation or new production relations, or a dictatorship of the oppressed, or “taking the socialist road.”
If capitalism means decay, decline, and crisis (in ways that some people make into a mechanical thing) — how can the explosion of Chinese production be a result of capitalism and counterrevolution?
Yes, there has been a shift of labor-intensive capitalist production to China, and (seen superficially) that SEEMS to be “successful economic development.”
Let’s break that down: Is China today “a rare story of successful economic development.”
I don’t think so — unless we adopt a classless (i.e. bourgeois) definition of ” successful economic development.”
Successful? By what class standards? From what class viewpoint?
We communists have fought for “economic development” that was rooted in LIBERATION, and a process that uprooted oppression as much as possible at each point. (I.e. the profound slogan, “Grasp revolution, promote production.”)
More, is China’s current path really a “rare story”? Isn’t the history of capitalism replete with stories of rapid development (when capitalists have access to markets, investment and abundant “cheap labor”)?
Is the story of China’s restored capitalist expansion all that different from the openly capitalist processes of South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan?Is it like them link hand-and-foot to the world capitalist circuits?
If China expanded manufacturing, and the U.S. experienced a rustbelt — is it because their social systems are different? Or is it because imperialist capital chose to SHIFT key productive sectors in “low wage areas” of the world?
If we approach “development” purely from the perspective of accumulation of wealth, expansion of production, and successful competition (for profit and markets) on the world state — well, in that “classless” (but really bourgeois!) analysis, China’s revisionists have been “successful.”
But we need to approach it from the class stand of the proletarians and poor farmers internationally: The last half century in China has been a counterrevolutionary horror — especially those pinned into the vast lower classes of workers and farmers). Figures like Deng (and his successors) stand as perhaps the most reactionary and brutal actors in world history. (What is Thier’s crushing of the primitive Paris Commune compared to Deng’s crushing of Chinese socialism that served the whole world and directly served a quarter of humanity?)
Here too, we should sum up the outlines:
- The “opening” of hundreds of millions of Chinese people to massive exploitation (at the very bottom of imperialism’s world order). Look at all the “jokes” on SNL about children assembling iPhones, and ask: “Is this unfair, or painfully applicable?”
- Certainly vast wealth has been generated and concentrated by the expansion of Chinese production, but what has happened to that wealth? Like all capitalism, it has generated vast gulfs of inequality, generating a filthy rich billionaire class of Chinese rulers (overwhelmingly sprouted from the “princeling” spawn of revisionist capitalist roaders.) It has created vast “modern” shantytowns in both new and old cities — of the kind that Mao, in particular, fought to prevent (i.e. the very model of capitalist “modernization” so familiar around the world).
- It has produced vast resistance among the Chinese people, that is systematically and brutally suppressed. And that is denied public exposure by violent state suppression (some estimates say that modern China has as much as 100,000 “incidents” of mass resistance a year — though hard data remains unobtainable for obvious reasons.)
- They have exercised a brutal class dictatorship (that the world saw clearly in the wake of the Tiananmen events — where the once-beloved PLA was deployed to crush popular resistance and discussion.)
- And with capitalism have returned many of the worst social plagues — including the reemergence of prostitution. (I remember when western journalists reported, excitedly, about first seeing the sale of women appearing openly on Shanghai streets — after all, they correctly saw this as a profound reversal of Maoist socialism and the achievements of the GPCR, and a blossoming of the very bourgeois norms they championed.)
- The ruling party has replaced socialist ideology (and the living aspiration of helping humanity attain communism) with a raw revanchist form of aggressive nationalism wedded to the worst of “traditional” Confucianism. Nursing the memories of a “century of humiliation,” is used to justify virtually any form of bullying of neighbors (Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand etc.) and infiltration of distant states (Sudan, Greece, etc. including via the new Silk Road, and special “commercial enclaves — just like the old colonialists imposed on China!)
- The ruling class insists on maintaining a strict domination by its party — and to preserve that they maintains a cynical, hypocritical, lipservice veneer of “socialism, MLMT, etc.” — just as the Soviet revisionists did for decades before they initiated the wholesale “enfranchisement of the nomenklatura” (i.e. converting state capitalist property to juridically private property — with virtually the same rulers still in place — even promoting a former police operative like Putin to modern Tsar!)
There is one more point to add
There is an assumption in Kadri (for exampleis that China has raised “the living standard of ordinary working people…” And that assumption is a key premise of such arguments.
But is it true? I don’t think we should let that slide unchallenged.
On paper it was often written that Chinese people were very poor under socialism. Sometimes it was reported that people, on average, lived on $250 a year. And now the media coverage stresses that China’s national per capita income is about $6,000.
This seems like a “open and shut” case of “rising living standard.”
But…
First, the fact is that for vast stretches of socialist China, many rural people lived largely outside the “cash economy.”
Their food, medical care, education, etc. were generally not distributed in commodity form and so it was not “counted” as part of anyone’s CASH income.
In other words, socialist China had a significant “social wage” that was OUTSIDE the calculation of cash income. And most of the stark improvements in socialist china came in THAT form (barefoot doctors, communal food production, new schools, etc.)
I don’t know how to quantify all that… but I assume someone revealed that somewhere. And I’m not denying the very real poverty of China’s people as they emerged from thousands of years of feudalism and from a hundred years of brutal warlord civil war and invasion.
However, if you take rural farmers (who can raise their own foods collectively, and live without rent, etc)… and you herd them into cities… SUDDENLY they NEED cash for all of their NOW-commodified life needs.
Glowing media reports say things like: “Urban private employees earned an average of 65,237 yuan (approximately $9,279 USD) annually.”
But that hides a great deal of reality:
- First, one of the features of Chinese capitalism is the extreme degree of income inequality. Talking of “average” income hides the fact that “the rich got crazy rich, and the working poor are desperately poor.” (I won’t raise the “emergence of a modern middle class” — of professionals etc. except to note that what emerged is the capitalist system’s class DIFFERENCES between the working poor and those who became relatively privileged middle strata.)
- It is officially reported that rural populations make about $3,000 annually… and that is rarely trumpeted in the western press. There too there is vast inequality in income… so that the masses of rural farmers make much less in the absence of “social wages” — there is not much of a “miracle” for the majority of Chinese people.
- More… great efforts were made (in the socialist period) to close the vast historic gap between rural and urban China. (It was often described as virtually “two different countries” — where rural feudalism kept hundreds of millions in the most desperate grinding poverty, sickness, debt, illiteracy, defenseless in crisis or famine, and subject to endless warlord madness.
* * * * * * * *
Finally, it is rarely pointed out that a key foundation for the so-called “modern miracle” of Chinese development is (PRECISELY!) the achievements of SOCIALIST China — literacy, central government, ending of internal civil war, promotion of innovation and change, breaking of rigid feudal tradition in the educated strata, etc.
We are told that the “development” of modern China was the fruit of Deng’s rejection of “Maoist idealism, voluntarism etc.” — that this development is proof of Dengist strategies (of calling off revolution,combining domestic Chinese state partnership with blood-soaked imperialist vultures, etc.) and proof of the “failure” of communist projects.
But, there is a reason that capitalist “development” of revisionist China was so much more rapid than the parallel attempts in nearby India, or Laos, or Malaysia (none of which had revolutions or socialist periods, obviously).
So it should be clear that yes China did develop, but this development was not socialist development, it was capitalist and that this was a conscience choice of the current Chinese leadership.