CHINA: It's later than Mao thinks

From the archive

Oct 4th 1969
From The Economist print edition

Interesting flashback now that China has celebrated its 60th anniversary. -HHC

China needs pulling together more urgently than its ageing leader seems to realise. We discuss its problems on its 20th anniversary as a communist state.

Birthdays have a way of coming at the wrong time. The Chinese communists have had their moments of triumph during their 20 years in power. But these have tended not to be when the crowds were filling the Square of Heavenly Peace for a major national day. Peking evidently tried to brighten this week's event by a show of nuclear black magic. There is a strong suspicion that something may have misfired, for neither Monday's explosion in Sinkiang—reported by the Americans to be China's highest megatonnage yet—nor an underground blast monitored last week was officially announced. But even a bigger and better bomb could not have disguised the fact that this 20th anniversary was hardly China's finest hour.

A measure of the unhappy state of China today is how strikingly it parallels the situation on October 1st ten years ago.

Both decennials came in the wake of titanic mass movements intended to achieve instant revolutionary miracles. Then it was the great leap forward, which aimed at making an economic breakthrough by means of mass mobilisation. Now it is the great proletarian cultural revolution, which was designed to transform 700 million Chinese into militant maoists.

Both failed. And both left the country in an advanced condition of disruption, with the economy only partly functioning and the authority of the leadership seriously undermined. But the crucial difference between the two occasions is in the strangely strengthened position of the man who was personally responsible for it all—Mao Tsetung.

In October, 1959, Mao, as chairman of the Chinese communist party, was still the top-ranking leader in the land. But the spectacular failure of the great leap had cost him dearly. Nine months earlier he had relinquished his concurrent position as head of state which later passed to Liu Shao-chi. At the same time, possibly under pressure from his colleagues, he ended his day-to-day involvement in decision-making. Only a few weeks before October 1st, he had sustained the first frontal challenge to his personal authority since the beginning of his reign: a scathing attack on the great leap by his minister of defence, Peng Teh-huai. It became known that the fabulous production increases claimed for the leap had been wildly exaggerated. The policy was going to curb living standards instead of improving them. Mao still managed to line up a majority to overrule Peng and purge him. But by the time he stood on the rostrum at the tenth anniversary celebrations, Mao's image as the infallible leader had been badly tarnished. And, having seen his vision shattered, he himself seemed to be feeling disillusioned and directionless.

In 1969 Mao appears to have emerged from a crisis situation stronger than ever. His cultural revolution was as extravagant and costly an excursion into utopianism as the great leap was. But, unlike the leap, it actually reinforced his own position in the leadership. Through the sweeping purge of the communist party, he eliminated all his major rivals and raised reliable disciples, including his wife, to power alongside him. The downgrading of the Mao cult this summer may conceivably signify some diminution of his status since the peak of the cultural revolution. But the only visible threats to his pre-eminence at the moment are his age (nearly 76) and mortality.

The other source of Mao's present strength is his firm conviction that his revolution is set on a victorious path. The short-term failure of the cultural revolution is plain. The Chinese people are displaying the very opposite of revolutionary spirit in their current obsession with private profit-making and individual comfort. But Mao's perspective has shifted from the here and now to the indefinite future, and from the concrete to the highly abstract. The severe economic losses caused by the great leap could not be overlooked; they denied the validity of this approach to economic development. But spiritual lapses are much harder to measure. Mao would explain them away as a necessary part of the epic ideological struggle that may only be resolved after many decades and many more cultural revolutions.

This optimistic complacency of Chairman Mao, however good it may be for his own ego, could be a serious obstacle to China's efforts to recover a second time from the ravages of a maoist movement. It was precisely because Mao had been humbled in 1959 that the country was able to pull itself together again after the great leap. His party colleagues, untrammelled by his utopian vision, instituted immediate practical steps to rebuild the shattered economy. For the most part this meant an about-face reversal of previous policies: the restoration of material incentives and private plots, and the return to village-sized production teams as the basic production unit (instead of the newly formed conglomerates called communes). Recovery was slowed by bad weather and the withdrawal of Soviet aid in 1960. But by 1963, the new economic policies had begun to push China's economy back towards pre-leap levels. Economic advance and political stability would presumably have continued until today, had Mao not decided to throw everything into the melting pot again with his cultural revolution.

The two key factors in the post-leap reconstruction were a change in leadership, in the sense that Mao took a back seat, and a change of policy.

If Mao does not step back again—and his four months' absence during a hot Peking summer is not proof that he has any intention of doing so—will it still be possible for China to pull itself together? This is the central question as the Communist regime celebrates its 20th year.

In some important respects, Mao himself has already sanctioned a decisive shift in policy. He did so by calling the ninth party congress last April, which put a formal end to the purge of the bureaucracy and the officially sponsored violence of the previous three years. But he remains committed to the grand theory of cultural revolution, and is now in process of implementing a number of radical economic and political policies which flow from it. Some of these are legacies of the great leap forward: like the attempts to decentralise economic decision-making and to create self-sufficient industrial/agricultural units at the local level. Some of them have been a subject of years-long conflict with the now-purged pragmatists in the party: like the plan to put manufacture, repair and ownership of farm machinery in the hands of local communities. Some are old maoist policies carried to a new extreme: like the cultural revolutionary programme to shorten the term of education, combine study with practical work and infuse all kinds of study with maoist thought.

None of these policies, if carried out with caution, need prevent the Chinese economy from getting back into gear. There may be short-term inefficiencies where inexperienced local officials take over the management of factories; and there may be long-term deficits like a shortage of adequately trained technicians and scientists. But there are real advantages for a developing country as huge as China in reducing the bureaucratic distance between the administrator and the unit he administers. And there is much to be said, especially in a country with a heritage of long-finger-nailed mandarins, for reducing the barriers between mental and manual labour.

There is, however, one maoist economic policy which is likely to stick in the Chinese gullet, and could well bring a recovery programme to a halt. This is his opposition to material incentives.

So far there have been few signs, apart from routine rhetoric, that Mao actually intends to eliminate existing incentive systems such as piecework and private plots. But the threat is there; if Mao is not wise enough to avoid it, he may well be confronted by large scale passive resistance or even active rebellion.

Popular resistance to unpopular policies really could get moving in China today. Not only has the authority of the leadership been undermined, as it was also after the great leap; leadership does not really exist at local levels. There are the revolutionary committees, of course; but the recent evidence of widespread indiscipline and continued factional fighting indicates that they have not yet established themselves as forces in command. And the rebuilding of the communist party, promised at the ninth congress, has not progressed at all.

Mao himself may be altogether unconcerned about the speed with which a new party organisation is set up. What matters to him is that it should be the right kind of maoist party, made up of the right kinds of maoist people, however long that takes. But even maoist policies—except for incendiary instructions like “revolution is justified”—require a network of responsible officials to carry them out. So a compromise will have to be made somewhere, if China is not to drag along indefinitely in its current state of demoralised disorder. China can ill afford to wait to make that compromise until after Mao vanishes.

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