The Chinese
revolution
THE
ESTABLISHMENT OF A "Communist" regime in China in 1949 reproduced the
misconceptions of the Russian Revolution thirty-two years previously.
Numbers of people in other countries believed "real" Communism was
being created in China; Mao Tse-tung was regarded as a Marxist and
"Maoism" came into existence. These beliefs are untrue. The achievement
of the Chinese revolution has been to bring China into the world of
capitalism.
Between the first and second world wars the working
class of China were concentrated in a small number of cities. They
numbered 1 per cent of the population, and their condition was like
that of workers in Britain in the early 19th century.
"Some of
the match factories and carpet factories, the ceramics and glass works,
and the old-style silk and cotton factories would well have served as
an inspiration for even Dante's description of the infernal regions . .
. When the time to stop work finally comes, these miserable creatures
doss down in any place they can find — the lucky ones on bales of waste
material or in the attics if there are any, and the rest on the
workshop floor, like chained dogs" (J. Chesneaux, The Chinese Labour
Movement 1919-27, 1968).
The great majority of the population,
then estimated at nearly 500 million, were peasants. Their existence
was characterised by poverty, oppression and early death. They were at
the mercy of landlords, tax collectors and usurers. Peasant
insurrections were a feature of Chinese history. Though conditions
improved a little for some town workers in more modern industries in
the nineteen-thirties, for the peasantry they deteriorated further as a
result of the world depression.
The blame for conditions in
China was placed on western and Japanese imperialism. The history of
the Opium War, the British rush for spoils, the Boxer indemnity, and
the control of customs, finance and key industries by foreigners
produced a nationalist movement. At the end of the 1914-18 war several
of its leaders were influenced by the Bolshevik revolution. Sun
Yat-sen, the head of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), made an
alliance with Russia one of his aims. However, when Sun's successor
Chiang Kai-shek came to power in 1928 he attacked the Communists and
relied on the support of the Chinese bourgeoisie.
The Kuomintang
period lasted from 1928 to 1937. Its attempts at reform and controlling
the economy failed. Technical improvements, irrigation and
reforestation did nothing for the peasants. The government was unable
to destroy the warlords; legislation to reduce land rent was not
enforced; and the total of agricultural production increased less than
1 per cent from 1932 to 1936. Industrial advances affected only a small
section of the working class in towns, and immediately after gaining
power the Kuomintang had many trade-union leaders killed and brought
the unions under government control. The Nationalist Party, after
setting out to make a capitalist revolution, became a reactionary
regime moving towards dictatorship under Chiang.
Mao emerged as
the leader of the Chinese Communist Party at this time. With little
opportunity to win support among industrial workers, the CCP
concentrated on the grievances of the peasant population. In his Report
of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan (1927) Mao
declared : "To overthrow these feudal forces is the real objective of
the revolution." The Communists were more realistic than the Kuomintang
in their view of how to establish capitalism in China. The peasants
offered a mass of discontent great enough to overthrow the old regime.
as well as providing a huge reservoir of labour for exploitation.
In
1931 Japan attacked Manchuria, and it became a full scale war in 1937.
The Chinese Communist Party united with the Kuomintang to fight the
Japanese. With ihe Japanese Imperial Army in possession of all the
major Chinese ports and cities, the Communists organised sccesful
guerrilla campaigns which led to them taking charge of areas in North
China. As the war continued into World War II, the CCP made patriotic
propaganda its monopoly. Presenting itself as the force of popular
resistance to foreign invaders, it created a peasant nationalism which
served its future purpose well. By the end of the war the party had 1.2
million members and was contending for political power.
The war
produced a massive inflation in China, which lasted until 1949. Though
China, with Chiang Kai-shek still the head of state, was officially
proclaimed one of the victorious "Big Five" in 1945 and was one of the
founder-members of the United Nations, discontent ran high. Peasant
grievances against the landowners were renewed, and inflation was
crippling urban workers and small business men. In 1946 the Communists
formed the People's Liberation Army and started a civil war. By January
1949 Chiang, facing defeat, asked his wartime allies — Britain, USA,
Russia and France — to mediate. They refused; Chiang resigned and
retreated to Taiwan (Formosa). The People's Republic of China was
inaugurated on 1st October 1949.
Mao Tse-tung pointed out that
the new society would not be Socialist. In his statement On People's
Democratic Dictatorship (July 1949), which was incorporated into the
Common Programme adopted by the Communist Party, he wrote:
"To
counter imperialist oppression and to raise her backward economy to a
higher level, China must utilise all the factors of urban and rural
capitalism that are beneficial and not harmful to the national economy
and the people's livelihood; and we must unite with the national
bourgeoisie in common struggle. Our policy is to regulate capitalism,
not to destroy it" (Essential Works of Chinese Communism, New York,
1972).
Though private enterprise was to continue, production and
commerce were to be brought progressively under state control.
Theoretically the new political institutions represented a coalition of
classes — the CCP plus minor parties and national minorities; but it
was laid down by Mao that the bourgeoisie "should not have the chief
role in state power" because their social and economic position was too
weak. The "people's democratic dictatorship" was created and had to be
led by the Communist Party.
The enemies of the revolution,
besides the Kuomintang. were the landowners. They were the "feudal
forces" which must be overthrown. In addition, the removal of "abuses"
for which the landowner-tax collector-usurer class was responsible
meant the removal of obstruction to a strong central government. The
land redistribution programme of 1950-53 was designed to increase
agricultural production and bring it under co-operatives and state
trading companies as the basis of the nation's economic development.
Other
reforms had the same motive. The Communist government pushed mass
education and laid emphasis on technical education to train engineers,
agronomists, medical personnel and other skilled workers needed for
economic reconstruction.
In the mid-fifties the movement to
state control of industries accelerated sharply. Mao and the CCP
started to assert that China was socialist. Private capitalists were
bought out on terms described by Yuan-li Wu in The Economy of Communist
China (1965) as follows:
"A nominal 'fixed interest' or
'dividend' of 1-6 per cent a year, payable quarterly, regardless of the
profit or loss of the enterprise in question, was promised to private
stockholders for a period of six years. The amount was subsequently
revised to a uniform 5 per cent per annum."
Smaller capitalists
were offered state agencies on relatively generous terms. By 1956 it
was claimed that the proportion of the "capitalist enterprises" in the
gross value of output of industry had declined to 1 per cent. This
merely repeated the nationalisation schemes used in Germany in the 19th
century, and later in Britain and other countries including Russia, as
a method of organising capitalist production and distribution. It has
nothing to do with Socialism. Dividends and profits are created in one
way only, out of the exploitation of the working class.
After
1961 "open markets" were permitted to develop to try to overcome
defects in the planning system. According to Franz Schurmann in China
Under Mao (1972) this has produced free markets in agricultural and
manufactured goods, advertising, and "the release of a range of 'top
class goods' to retail outlets". At another time the state will seek to
repress what it has licensed and encouraged — leaving the position that
sometimes individual profit-makers can be discerned and sometimes not.
The
"Great Leap Forward" of 1959-61 was a strategy to boost production
without any increase in consumption. It failed: workers toiled to the
point of exhaustion and produced shoddy goods in the factories, while
the peasants were tired, hungry and resentful. The Chinese ruling class
discovered what western ones had previously learned, that they could go
too far in crude exploitation. Natural disasters ended the Great Leap,
but its ending was marked too by the appearance of a split between
China and Russia.
The two governments had signed a thirty-year
Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance in 1950. The
alliance brought economic and technical aid to China, and for a time
Chinese policies reflected the Russian influence. However, the bearing
of "Communist" labels makes no difference to the facts of economic and
political life. To state-capitalist Russia, China with its developing
state-capitalism was a prospective rival. A. M. Halpern says in China
Under Mao, using Chinese documents, that in 1959 the Russian government
"made it clear that they would not actively help the Chinese People's
Republic obtain an independent nuclear capability". In 1960 Russian
technical support was withdrawn from China. Following this, the Chinese
viewed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 as Soviet-American
collusion. Their own atomic bomb was exploded on 16th October 1964.
The
line taken in China was that Stalin's successors had departed from the
principles of Lenin. Mao Tse-tung and Hoxha of Albania were the only
political leaders in the world who continued to sing the praises of
Stalin after the general Communist reaction against him. An editorial
commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Chinese Com¬munist Party
in
1971 said:
"Khrushchev, Brezhnev and company are renegades from
the proletarian revolution, and present-day social-imperialists and
world storm-troopers opposing China, opposing Communism and opposing
the people. It is our Party's bounden internationalist duty to continue
the exposure and criticism of modern revisionism with Soviet
revisionism at the centre and carry the struggle to the end"
(Translated Peking Review, 2 July 1971).
This is ironical. In
1927 Stalin had ordered the Chinese Communist Party to restrain risings
of the peasants and workers, and then sided with Chiang Kai-shek and
the Kuomintang against the Communists.
There has never been any
pretence of equality in standards of living in China. Wages vary
sharply from one area to another and from one city to another, the
highest being in Shanghai — as was always the case. Franz Schurmann
says: "The existence of inequity has not only been admitted, it has
been encouraged". It was estimated in 1964 by Charles Hoffman (Work
Incentives in Communist China) that the wage rates of the highest
grades in Manchurian industry were 2.5 to 3.2 times those of the lowest
grades.
A social security system was inaugurated in 1951,
covering workmen's compensation, medical treatment, cost-of-living
subsidies, etc. This secures a competent and dependable workforce. It
is also a familiar method today throughout the capitalist world of
keeping wages in check. According to an article in a Times Special
Report on 2nd October 1974 a Peking factory worker is paid between
£11
and £13 a month. The writer says: "Because food — even in the
best
restaurants in Peking — is comparatively cheap, the Chinese worker has
money to save for those three most desired consumer durables — a
bicycle, a transistor radio, and a sewing machine". But another article
in the same report described the car industry in China:
"Chinese
car production is running at a meagre 1.500 units a year, rising
perhaps to 5,000 units with the irtnv duction of a new assembly line at
the Shanghai plant. Additional needs are being met by importing a snall
number of Toyotas from Japan. The top Chinese car is the Red Flag
limousine, which has a huge 5.6 litre 220 brake horsepower engine,
automatic transmission arc full air conditioning. It is largely hand
built, at the rate of one a week."
Who rides in the Red Flags and Toyotas while the workers save up for
bicycles?
The
industrialisation of China was stated, in the Preamble to the
Constitution of 1954, to be a "socialist transformation" which would
"eliminate exploitation and poverty". Except to the wilfully blind, it
is plain that what has been developed there is capitalism with its
essential features of wage-slavery and inequality. It is a society of
production for sale and profit. Despite the misleading talk about
socialism, the Communists opposed Chiang Kai-shek because he and his
supporters stood in the way of capitalist development. Mao's statement
of July 1949 said:
"'We want to do business.'" Quite right,
business will be done. We are against no one except the domestic and
foreign reactionaries who hinder us from doing business. Everybody
should know that it is none other than the imperialists and their
running dogs, the Chiang Kai-shek reactionaries, who hinder us from
doing business and also from establishing diplomatic relations with
foreign countries" (Essential Works of Chinese Communism).
According
to the Times Special Report, in 1974 China was trading with more than
150 countries and regions, and had a volume of trade 2.5 times higher
than in 1965. Russia and other 'Communist' countries accounted for
about a quarter of the total, and the biggest gains were made by Japan,
the United States, and Europe. Part of this expansion was armaments
bought from several countries. A report in the Financial Times, 10
September 1974, described the growth of international trade fairs in
China and efforts by the Chinese to expand their own sales abroad.
There are no ideological barriers on any side. For the class which owns
and controls the means of wealth production and distribution in China,
as in all other countries, the necessary aim of "business" is to
realise the surplus-value obtained by exploiting the working class.
One
reason for widespread interest in China has been the rapid changes
affecting a population now 800 millions, approximately a quarter of the
world's total. Certainly it is true that vast numbers of Chinese no
longer die prematurely, that they receive the necessities of life, go
to school and have recreation. These conditions for the reproduction of
labour-power in modern capitalism were established gradually in Europe,
by reforms over a lengthy 90 period. In a large country seeking to
accumulate capital quickly and get into the world of today, the process
has to be telescoped. Thus it appears dramatic and is called naively a
"social experiment", implying some justificative for the regimentation
and political dictatorship.
All this has served to confuse the
Chinese workers as to their position, and dupe many others outside
China. The oppressions and disabilities removed following the
revolution of 1949 were not capitalist ones; they were parts of an
obsolete despotism which had to be eliminated to create the conditions
for capitalist production. The social relationships which now dominate
China are those of wage-labour and capital, the peasant class haying
been turned into rural wage-workers. The great majority of the
population are members of the propertyless working class, forced to
live by selling their labour-power. The capitalists' side of the class
struggle has been wrapped in the mystical aphorisms of Mao Tse-tung,
and the workers' side concealed by lack of information from China;
nevertheless, the struggle exists.
Now that Mao is dead, whoever
rules in China will claim to be his true representative. Some conflicts
over political power have already taken place; the putting-down of the
"gang of four" which included Mao's widow, and the adoption as Deputy
Prime Minister of the formerly demoted Tens Hsiao-ping. These struggles
among individuals and conspiring groups are the substitute, in what is
effectively a one-party state, for rivalry among political parties. As
well as expressing only different capitalist interests, they testify to
the absence of democracy.
The euphoria of the post-revolution
period has died down, and the rulers will undoubtedly find it harder to
manage the working class in the future. The workers en their part have
to learn what system they are living under; that production for markets
leads to crises and war; that the fruits of their labour are taken not
to build Socialism but to maintain a privileged class. With that
knowledge they can help to make not a new China but a new world. |
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