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1
China at the Death of Mao
When Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China and Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party since 1943, died on September 9th, 1976, China was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, which Mao had initiated a decade earlier.1 This was meant to be the first of a series of revolutions to rejuvenate socialism, ridding it of capitalist corruption and bureaucratic rigidity.2 The Cultural Revolution had been preceded by a series of social and political campaigns relentlessly prosecuted by Mao to push China toward the promised paradise of socialism. Mao believed that China could shrug off poverty and jump on to the “golden highway” to socialism if, and only if, the Chinese people, united in thought and action, threw all their talents and energy behind the collective cause.3 Unselfish and property-less, the Chinese people would be reborn. Having shed the burden of history and Chinese feudalism on the one hand, and without the distraction of material interests and western capitalism on the other, the Chinese people would respond to nothing but the call of socialism. However, instead of paradise, Mao’s deeply flawed ideology and ill-thought-out revolutions not only brought to the Chinese people the most lethal famine in human history, but also cut them off from their cultural roots and the progress of modern times.4 An enterprising people were quickly reduced to lifeless cogs in the socialist machine.
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It can be a hard truth to accept, but the disaster Mao inflicted on the Chinese people was matched only by his ineradicable accomplishments. “In the final reckoning,” wrote The Economist, “Mao must be accepted as one of history’s great achievers: for devising a peasant-centered revolutionary strategy which enabled China’s Communist Party to seize power, against Marx’s prescriptions, from bases in the countryside; for directing the transformation of China from a feudal society, wracked by war and bled by corruption, into a unified, egalitarian state where nobody starves; and for reviving national pride and confidence so that China could, in Mao’s words, ‘stand up’ among the great powers.”5 While The Economist was seriously mistaken about the absence of starvation in Mao’s China, few could deny the inspiration and influence of Mao’s revolution on both China and the rest of the world. Richard Nixon, who reopened diplomatic relations between China and the United States in 1972, called Mao “a unique man in a generation of great revolutionary leaders.”6 Pakistani Premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the last foreign statesman to see him before his death, called Mao “the son of revolution, its very essence, indeed, its rhythm and romance, the supreme architect of a brilliant new order shaking the world,” adding, “Men like Mao come once in a century.”7
With this conflicting legacy, China started its post-Mao journey, with no roadmap in hand and no destination in mind. It was beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings that, within three decades, the People’s Republic of China would celebrate its sixtieth anniversary as a dazzling market economy. We cannot possibly understand this incredible transformation or the path that China had traveled to get there without a clear notion of where it started – China under Mao.
China’s post-Mao transition to a market economy is particularly intriguing given that the post-Mao reform was by no means the first time China had tried to restructure its socialist economy. In 1958, Mao himself had instigated a bold campaign to decentralize the Chinese economic and political system.8 But Mao’s eager attempt to steer China away from Stalinism ended in the disaster of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961). After a brief interim of retreat and recovery in the early 1960s, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), during which he again attempted to decentralize the Chinese economy and political structure.9 Both attempts failed miserably.
As far as the Chinese government was concerned, the post-Mao reform was intended to be a continuation of the great cause that Mao had started. On March 28th, 1985, in a meeting with a delegation of the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party, Deng Xiaoping for the first time introduced the latest Chinese economic reform as China’s “second revolution”10 – the first being the one led by Mao, which culminated in the founding of the People’s Republic. Deng, widely acclaimed as “the architect of the Chinese economic reform,” would later repeat this term on many occasions, and it became part of the official terminology used to refer to the post-Mao economic reform. In calling the economic reform a “second revolution,” Deng must have believed that the first revolution fell short, despite its achievement in reunifying China after more than a hundred years of turmoil and war. But if the second revolution was meant to complete the unfinished business of the first, what exactly had Mao left undone? What prevented Mao from accomplishing it? What were the defects and limitations of the first revolution that Deng wanted to overcome?
I
In Tiananmen Square on October 1st, 1949, when Mao resolutely pronounced with his characteristic Hunan accent that the people of China had stood up, the whole nation was electrified with joy and exuberance. Hu Feng, a famous literary critic and writer who had recently returned from Hong Kong, wrote a long poem of more than 4000 lines, “Time Has Begun,” to celebrate this historic moment.11 After the lengthy, violent, and humiliating fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, decades of internecine fighting between warlords, a hideous eight-year war of resistance against Japan, and a bloody three-year civil war, China was at last reunified as an independent nation. Having suffered nearly a century of warfare and turmoil, the Chinese people were anxious for peace and a better life.
But their pursuit of peace and prosperity would follow a treacherous path. Like many other countries that won their independence after the Second World War, when the winds of socialism blew strong, China fell prey to this doctrine. Ideologically, the Chinese Communist Party had embraced communism since its inception in 1921 when it was founded with the help of the Communist International based in Moscow.12 But the relationship between Moscow and the Chinese Communist Party was always a mixed blessing.13
In the beginning, Moscow favored the Nationalist Party of China (Chinese Kuomintang), an older, bigger, and self-proclaimed revolutionary party founded by Sun Yat-sen in 1919, and urged the Chinese Communists to join the Kuomintang, which, under the leadership of Sun, opened its doors to the Communists. But after Sun died on March 12th, 1925, his successor, Chiang Kai-shek, was far less enthusiastic in accommodating the Chinese Communist Party. Less than two years earlier, Chiang had spent three months in Moscow studying the Soviet system. He had met Leon Trotsky and other Russian leaders, and had reached the conclusion that the Soviet model was not suitable for China.14 In 1927, while consolidating his power base in Kuomintang, Chiang turned against the Communists. A year later, he established the Nationalist government in Nanjing, which forced the Chinese Communist Party underground. Moscow then instructed the Chinese Communist Party to organize urban riots, in line with the teaching of Marxism and the Bolshevik revolution. This, however, turned out to be a suicidal strategy, as Chinese cities were heavily guarded by government military forces. The Communist movement survived only in a few “soviet bases” – areas controlled by the Chinese Communist militia – scattered in remote mountainous areas difficult for the Nationalist army to reach. In October 1934, the Communist troops lost one of their biggest and longest-surviving rural bases in Jiangxi province, where they were directed by Otto Braun (known in China as Li De), a military advisor sent by the Communist International, who assumed a commanding position in the Chinese Communist Party.15 Compelled to flee, the surviving Communists spent the next year on a long, treacherous journey from South to North China, passing through areas heavily guarded by the Nationalist army, other areas controlled by hostile ethnic minorities and warlords, and still others hardly visited by human beings, including snow-covered mountains and wetland. After it ended in Shaanxi in October 1935, Mao was quick to dub this journey of survival the “Long March.”16 A year later, Mao was joined by two troops of Communist soldiers. They then took Yan’an, an old dilapidated town in northern Shaanxi, as the seat of their government; Yan’an would rise as a symbol of hope for many progressive-minded young Chinese students as well as western sympathizers, and remain the center of the Chinese Communist revolution until 1948.17 It was during the Long March that Mao rose to take command of the Party in January 1935 after the Zunyi Conference, ousting Braun over his failed military leadership. Although Mao became the undisputed leader of the Chinese Communist Party, he would never be favored by Moscow. Isolated and defiant in the caves of Yan’an, Mao was mocked by Stalin as a “cave Marxist.”18
It was the Long March that began to remake the Chinese Communist Party as a native Chinese party and forged its independence from Moscow.19 Mao rarely challenged Moscow directly, but the Comintern could no longer dictate the operation of the Chinese Communist Party after Mao’s rise to power. Mao lost more than 90 percent of his Red Army during the Long March, but the survivors were dedicated, determined, and triumphant; they would later become the stalwart soldiers of the Chinese Communist revolution.20 Furthermore, the Communists gained a much larger space for expansion in northern China. Unlike the remote mountainous areas in the south where they had fought before the Long March, places in northern China provided a wider platform on which to compete with Chiang Kai-shek. The Communists could now reach and recruit from a much bigger population. Close to China’s northern border, they were also able to build a secure line of communication and support with the Soviets. Moreover, the strong presence of local warlords in the north meant the government military force there was not as dominant as it was in the south. Most important, Japan’s invasion of China put the Nanjing government on the defensive and later on the run, giving the underground Communists a rare opportunity to grow both militarily and politically. After Japan surrendered in 1945, Chiang Kai-shek quickly found his old rival much stronger than before and far better prepared for the civil war that followed. With a corrupted government bureaucracy, a dispirited army, and a poorly managed economy, Chiang was defeated in three years and had to flee to Taiwan, losing the mainland to Mao.
The relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and Moscow did not change noticeably until the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. After that, Stalin could no longer ignore Mao, nor advance Soviet interests by driving a wedge between the Communists and the Kuomintang. Barely two months after the founding of the People’s Republic, Mao eagerly took his first ever trip abroad, to Moscow in mid-December 1949.21 He would meet Stalin, for the first and the last time; the man who had, in the past, preferred to work with Chiang Kai-shek, and had refused to recognize Mao’s leadership in the Chinese Communist Party. With the civil war approaching its end, a devastated economy, and an inhospitable international environment, Mao was anxious to acquire a political and military ally.22 This was the primary motive for Mao’s visit, but his host was less enthusiastic. Even though Stalin began their first face-to-face meeting with a conciliatory gesture, Mao had to stay for two months to persuade Moscow to make a diplomatic alliance with Beijing. Eventually Stalin relented, and the two sides signed a comprehensive Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance on February 14th, 1950. Mao returned in triumph, probably without realizing that in exchange for this Treaty, China would tie itself to Stalinism; the painful efforts to break away from its influence would preoccupy Mao for the rest of his life.
Nonetheless, in the first three years of the People’s Republic of China (1949–1952), order was quickly restored, aided by a disciplined and dedicated governmental bureaucracy, and a strong mixed economy. China was experiencing a robust economic recovery, despite a hate-filled and violent campaign of land reform, in which the new regime aggressively provoked class divisions in rural society. But the following economic reconstruction was hampered by the doctrine of communism, a result of the vanguard role played by the Chinese Communist Party in leading the Chinese revolution, out of which the People’s Republic was born. With the gradual installation of socialism, the new government experienced the full strength of centralized power in mobilizing resources and brisk growth during the first Five Year Plan (1953–1957), which was modeled after the Soviet economic central planning and aided by Moscow.23 But collectivization chained peasants to the land and workers to work units, abruptly ending a short-lived burst of free enterprise in both rural and urban China. In the following years, the fatal defects inherent in central planning – the lack of incentives and initiatives for people at the bottom of the social pyramid, and the lack of information and accountability for those at the top – were compounded by the inevitable errors in learning and operating a new and all-inclusive social system, as well as by envy and rivalry in the pursuit of power on both the domestic and international stage.
Most tragically, the Chinese leaders’ blind commitment to a foreign doctrine turned it into a fossilized dogma, which they accepted without criticism as a panacea. Even a statesman as defiant and independent as Mao fell into this trap, embracing communism as the only vehicle to take China to the land of peace and plenty. Their unconditional commitment to, and later close identification with, communism gradually turned the Chinese Communist Party from a messenger to a pawn of an ideology. At the same time, communism transformed itself from an instrument, intended to bring peace and prosperity to China, into an ultimate non-negotiable goal.24 This self-inflicted double alienation dragged the Chinese Communist Party, and with it the Chinese people, into the dark tunnel of a closed ideology. It was only after the death of Mao that the pragmatic root of Confucianism, the practice of “seeking truth from facts,” brought light to the Party, which had jettisoned all Chinese traditions with contempt in its eager conversion to Marxism.
Still, as an old Chinese idiom puts it, a starved camel is bigger than a horse. Even the disaster of the Great Leap Forward – when millions of peasants died of starvation – and the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution could not totally wipe out the economic infrastructure laid down in Mao’s time; this was the foundation on which the post-Mao reform was built.
The assessment of China’s economic record during Mao’s time remains a contentious issue among academic specialists.25 Conventional accounts take Chinese economic reform as a total rejection of what went on before under Mao. One author, for example, called the post-Mao reform “the great reversal.”26 To its credit, a revisionist view has brought to light the hidden or overshadowed continuity between Mao’s economy and post-Mao reform. By this process, China’s economic achievements during Mao’s era have been duly recognized.27 Nonetheless, there is a massive gulf between Mao’s economic record and the promises he made to Chinese peasants and workers in the name of socialism. As Mao Zedong lay on his deathbed, ruminating on power succession and the fate of the Cultural Revolution, the once sky-high morale was quashed, a once believed clear vision of socialism had become blurred, and a once vibrant social dynamism had withered from within. While the vast multitude seemed content living a life of inertia and indifference, their disappointment ran deep. If they could not articulate an alternative, they certainly had a ready ear for one. At the same time, among the most thoughtful, both within the ruling class and outside, some were asking themselves: “If this new China is not what we and our comrades-in-arms fought for, where should China head next?”
II
A striking and ironic feature of socialism – both its advantage and, if not managed well, its fatal flaw – is its inherent anti-populism. Unlike democracy, which is forced to be responsive to the average voter, socialist governments can afford to ignore and even harm the interest of the majority, often justifying these actions under some grand but empty banner. In his classic defense of the economic logic of socialism, The Economics of Control (1944), Abba Lerner opened with the simple statement that “the fundamental aim of socialism is not the abolition of private property but rather the extension of democracy.”28 This was not the reality of socialism in Mao’s China. The largest social class in China was the peasantry, making up more than 80 percent of the population in Mao’s time. Yet, it was the peasants who endured the worst consequences of collectivization. The unified procurement of agricultural products adopted in 1953 allowed the Chinese government to subsidize industrialization.29 The 1958 introduction of the household registration system, or hukou, largely ruled out population mobility, in particular rural to urban migration.30 Both these policies hit the peasants hard. The only populist policy pursued by the Chinese Communist Party was the short-lived land reform policy (1947–1952), whereby land was taken by force from rich landlords and given to poor peasants in exchange for their political support for the new regime.31 But the government began gradually to re-collectivize land almost immediately after the end of land reform. Peasants lost their land, first to rural cooperatives and later to the communes. In 1956, Mao spoke cheerfully of “the high tide of socialism” sweeping rural China.32 But 30 to 40 million peopled starved to death during the Great Leap Forward, a tragedy overwhelmingly concentrated in rural areas. Since then, if rural China became less chaotic under the commune system, what was unchanged was the ubiquity of hunger. As Yang Jisheng, a senior Xinhua (the state news agency) correspondent, observed, since the implementation of the unified procurement of grain, most of the Chinese peasants “no longer filled their stomachs.”33 As a result of these and other social and economic policies with a blatant anti-peasantry bias, two-thirds of peasants in 1978 had an income lower than that in the 1950s, and one-third had an income even lower than that in the 1930s before the Japanese invasion of China.34
Despite their colossal number, the hunger-stricken, disgruntled, but powerless peasantry did not worry the authorities too much. However, another group, which was equally, if not more, frustrated with Mao’s policies, stood right at the center of Chinese politics. During Mao’s various political campaigns, waves of army and party veterans were purged and lost their rank. Many were imprisoned and some lost their lives. Many of these disgraced officials were the victims of power struggles with Mao or with those close enough to Mao to be able to pursue their own agendas in his name. Some were courageous enough to voice opinions that differed from Mao’s position and a few even confronted Mao directly; some of Mao’s policies were so extreme that it must have been painfully difficult for any independent person not to voice their disagreement. Since tolerance was not a quality valued by Mao, or even allowed by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, millions of “rightists” or “capitalist roaders” were created.
Liu Shaoqi, second only to Mao in the Party hierarchy in 1949 and Chairman of China at the start of the Cultural Revolution, found himself defenseless when he was labeled as the “number one capitalist roader.”35 The “number two capitalist roader” was no less than Deng Xiaoping, then General Secretary of the Central Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party, who would re-emerge after Mao’s death as China’s paramount leader to welcome the market back to China.36 Confronted with a mob of “Red Guards” eager to crush any enemy of socialism, Liu held in his hand a copy of the Constitution to defend his rights, but to no avail. Without trial or hearing of any kind, Liu lost his position and was placed under house arrest before being secretly transported out of Beijing and imprisoned. After repeated physical abuse and no access to medical treatment, Liu died unattended under a pseudonym on November 12th, 1969, in Henan province.
Zhu Rongji, the future Premier of China (1998–2003), was labeled a “rightist” and lost his job in the State Planning Commission in 1958 for criticizing the Great Leap Forward.37 Zhu didn’t return to his job until 1962, only to be purged again in 1970 during the Cultural Revolution, spending the next five years exiled to the countryside. Zhu would not be rehabilitated until 1978.
Many top party leaders lost their lives during the Cultural Revolution. Six of the ten Chinese Marshals (the highest military rank in the People’s Libration Army) did not survive, including Peng Dehui, the first Defense Minister of China (1954–1959). Those purged officials who did manage to survive did not want to see Mao’s policies continue. After witnessing the broken promises of Mao’s ideology, they had every motive to vindicate their “rightist,” capitalist, or other approaches that had been denounced and rejected by Mao. They had risked their lives to join the Chinese Communist Party in the hope of bringing peace and prosperity to the Chinese people; with the death of Mao, they now sensed that their chance was approaching. After wasting two decades in political campaigns and class warfare, it was time for China to refocus on the economy. During one of his first visits to China in the early 1980s, Steven Cheung met a group of government officials at the Central Party School of the Communist Party in Beijing. He was surprised by how strongly his audience agreed with his admonition: “You guys have messed up the country. Now, you have to fix it.”38
III
Probably no group endured more humiliation and suffering under Mao than the intellectuals. The intelligentsia in Imperial China, a highly meritocratic but open group whose members had passed the civil service examination, was an integral part of the ruling hierarchy. The Chinese Communist Party’s embrace of socialism and radical anti-traditionalism ensured that the new government would have a stormy relationship with its most educated members. And Mao’s personality certainly did not help.39 A voracious reader and gifted self-learner, with a proud and defiant mind, Mao never hid his distrust of formal learning. In his late teens, Mao once dropped out of high school for half a year and spent most of the time in the provincial library reading a large number of books, having compiled the list himself.40 Twenty-four when he first came to Beijing, Mao worked as an assistant librarian at Peking University, checking out newspapers and magazines at a reading room for university professors. Curious and bold, he did not waste any opportunity to raise questions or simply initiate conversations with those professors whom he served. Few of them, however, showed much respect for a young man who could barely speak standard Mandarin. This dispiriting and frustrating experience with the university professors did not give Mao a positive impression of Chinese intellectuals or of the system of formal education that they represented.41 In adulthood, Mao’s power struggle for the Party’s leadership against Wang Ming and others who had studied Marxism in the Soviet Union only reinforced his doubts about, and contempt for, academic learning and its embodiment, modern intellectuals.
At the birth of the People’s Republic of China, many of the educated elites chose to stay on the mainland, not out of their belief in Marxism, but because of their disappointment with the corrupt and fleeing Nationalist government.42 A number of Chinese scientists educated in the West returned to the newly founded People’s Republic, including Qian Xuesen, the founding director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech, who would later become the father of China’s rocket and space program.43 But from the very beginning, the Communist Party was uneasy with the Chinese intelligentsia.44
Historically, China had been heavily influenced by Confucianism. The educated elites occupied a central and privileged social status.45 As interpreters and messengers of Confucianism, they played a critical role in legitimizing political order and maintaining the moral compass in society. As civil servants, they directly exercised political power in the imperial court, representing an institutional counterbalance to the royal power of the emperor. In addition, they stood as the core of what was called the “gentry class,” which provided local public goods and maintained social order at the sub-county level, beyond the reach of centralized imperial power. But under socialism, all these functions were appropriated by the Chinese Communist Party.46
Armed as he was with socialism, which was hailed as omnipotent and infallible, Mao saw only a limited role for the intellectuals in socialist China. Nonetheless, the new government initially tried to build a working rapport with them, since their potential contribution to economic reconstruction was recognized. At the same time, the intellectuals felt inferior and shameful as they celebrated the end of war and welcomed Mao and his army to Beijing.47 Their non-participation in the liberation of the nation and the fighting of the revolutionary war made many feel impotent and guilty in the presence of their liberators, something they endeavored to offset by devoting themselves to China’s post-war reconstruction. This led many to embrace the new government too eagerly and stifle their own independent judgments. Most intellectuals jumped on the bandwagon of socialism. Only a few independent minds were as courageous as Liang Shuming; the Chinese philosopher and leader in the Rural Construction Movement of the early twentieth century confronted Mao in public about China’s new economic policy in 1953.48 Chen Yinke, one of the most talented Chinese historians of the twentieth century, adhered to the principle of intellectual independence, which he had memorably put as “thoughts of freedom, spirits of independence”; a professor at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, Chen refused to move to Beijing to head the Institute of History Study at the Chinese Academy of Science.49 Another notable dissenter was Hu Feng, who was attacked as a “rightist” as early as 1955 for advocating writers’ freedom and independence from political ideology.50 But these few independent minds could not mount a meaningful resistance to the rising tide of socialism.
The simmering tension between the educated elites and the Communist government finally boiled over with the launch of the Anti-Rightist Movement.51 By the end of 1956, a mixed economy had been replaced by socialism. With the elimination of private enterprise and the concentration of political power, weaknesses in the over-centralized bureaucracy soon arose. In spring 1957 Mao decided to launch a rectification movement in the Party, hoping to identify and eradicate its defects. The intellectuals were invited to voice their criticisms and recommend ways to make the Party and government work better. But Mao was not prepared to hear what he had requested. While most criticisms were meant to help the Party and new government improve their work, some directly challenged the legitimacy of the Party’s monopoly of political power and questioned Mao’s leadership. Offended and alarmed, Mao rounded on his critics, labeling them “rightists.” A rectification campaign meant to improve the Party had quickly turned into a movement against the Party’s critics, with dire consequences for both the intellectual community and the Party itself. As far as the intellectuals were concerned, the Anti-Rightist Movement officially defined their status as the class enemy of the regime. As a result, China’s most educated members and the scarcest element of production were denied their right to participate in the development of socialism. For the Party, the label of “rightist” would become a powerful and convenient weapon to use against anyone who dared to criticize or deviate from the official line. Years later, Bo Yibo (1997) wrote, “For the twenty years between the start of [the] Anti-Rightist Movement and the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee (1978), what Chairman Mao called ‘lively political life’ was lost.”52 This is a euphemistic way of saying that Mao became the only voice in and of the Party, with no room for any other opinions.
At a critical juncture when the Chinese Communist Party transformed itself from a revolutionary to a ruling party, and began to rebuild a new China from the ashes of war, China eliminated the most educated members of its population. This movement of self-destruction severely emasculated China’s access to both its cultural heritage and modern science and technology. Under the banner of an omniscient ideology, the socialist state penetrated both rural and urban society to a degree never attempted by any previous Chinese ruler. With the authority of the traditional social order and Confucian moral code discredited, there was little left as an external social force or internal moral discipline to balance the coercive power of the state. At the same time, as a victorious but young political party, the Chinese Communist Party had not had time to develop a system of institutional checks and balances. Led by a defiant and increasingly self-assured leader, it was turning into an invincible political Frankenstein.
IV
Although Mao crushed the market in ideas and monopolized the realm of thought, he was never a supporter of centralization in administration. Unlike Lenin or Stalin, who considered political and economic centralization essential for socialism, Mao throughout his life fought hard against centralized administration. Decades of guerrilla war experience had taught him that it was suicidal to put all one’s eggs into one basket, no matter who looked after the basket. During its rise to power, the Chinese Communist Party had always had multiple scattered bases, each fighting independently for its own survival, with only intermittent communication with the Central Committee and even less with each other. This combination of central command and local autonomy had worked quite well.
Even after the founding of the People’s Republic, Mao was rarely free of the fear of impending war. In the 1950s the danger came from US-backed Taiwan. But, after the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the threat from Taiwan in the south was replaced by a much more menacing threat from the north – the Soviet Union. China’s relationship with the Soviet Union began to disintegrate after the “secret speech” Khrushchev gave on March 5th 1956, when he revealed the horrors committed under Stalin and openly denounced the cult of personality around Stalin. This angered China greatly since Stalin was still highly respected as a leader of the Communist movement and his portrait was displayed all over China, along with those of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao. Mao and other Chinese leaders viewed Khrushchev’s vilification of Stalin as a calculated attack on socialism. Later, the rivalry between Mao and Khrushchev for the leadership of the socialist world, their substantially different views on the relation between capitalism and socialism, and territorial disputes between China and the Soviet Union led to the final split between Beijing and Moscow.53 Tensions and hostilities continued to build, escalating into the military clash of 1969 along China’s northeastern border.
The fact that Mao’s China rarely felt secure in its borders had a lasting impact on domestic economic policy. For Mao, the constant preparation for war perpetuated his way of thinking formed during wartime and served as a forceful deterrent against administrative centralization. This meant that, while Lenin imagined the socialist economy as one single giant firm, Mao’s economy was an ocean of self-sufficient, more or less identical subunits. For Mao, the commune came close to perfection as a basic social unit in his ideal society. Each commune was inclusive in its economic and social functions, containing production teams in agriculture, commune and brigade enterprises, daycare and schools, its clinics staffed with barefoot doctors, and even its military brigade. Communes were independent of each other, with little horizontal interaction. As a result, a social economy consisting of an integrated and interdependent national economy, coordinated by the market and/or central planning, did not exist in Mao’s China.
Centralization did exist once in Mao’s China, but only briefly. The political and economic system installed after the socialist transition (1952–1956) was more centralized than any other in Chinese history. But it did not take long for Mao to sense serious problems with centralized administration. In his talk, “On the Ten Major Relationships,” delivered in April 1956, Mao deemed “of vital importance” the balances between the state, the production units (factories in cities and production teams in the countryside), and the workers and peasants, as well as the balance between central and local authorities.54 On the former, Mao commented:
It’s not right, I’m afraid, to place everything in the hands of the central or the provincial and municipal authorities without leaving the factories any power of their own, any room for independent action, any benefits. We don’t have much experience on how to share power and returns properly among the central authorities, the provincial and municipal authorities and the factories, and we should study the subject. As a matter of principle centralization and independence form a unity of opposites, and there must be both centralization and independence.55
In concluding the section, Mao wrote:
In short, consideration must be given to both sides, not to just one, whether they are the state and the factory, the state and the worker, the factory and the worker, the state and the co-operative, the state and the peasant, or the co-operative and the peasant. To give consideration to only one side, whichever it may be, is harmful to socialism and to the dictatorship of the proletariat.56
On the relationship between the central and local governments, Mao warned:
Our territory is so vast, our population is so large and the conditions are so complex that it is far better to have the initiative come from both the central and the local authorities than from one source alone. We must not follow the example of the Soviet Union in concentrating everything in the hands of the central authorities, shackling the local authorities and denying them the right to independent action.57
And he continued:
To build a powerful socialist country it is imperative to have a strong and unified central leadership and unified planning and discipline throughout the country; disruption of this indispensable unity is impermissible. At the same time, it is essential to bring the initiative of the local authorities into full play and let each locality enjoy the particularity suited to its local conditions.58
At the end, Mao recognized the problem of centralization throughout the whole spectrum of administrative hierarchy, not just confined to the central government.
The central authorities should take care to give scope to the initiative of the provinces and municipalities, and the latter in their turn should do the same for the prefectures, counties, districts and townships; in neither case should the lower levels be put in a strait-jacket. Of course comrades at the lower levels must be informed of the matters on which centralization is necessary and they must not act as they please. In short, centralization must be enforced where it is possible and necessary, otherwise it should not be imposed at all. The provinces and municipalities, prefectures, counties, districts and townships should all enjoy their own proper independence and rights and should fight for them. To fight for such rights in the interest of the whole nation and not of the locality cannot be called localism or an undue assertion of independence.59
Mao’s deep distrust of centralization led to his first attempt to reform the economic system, steering China away from the orthodox Stalinist model of socialism. A reform proposal was passed at the Third Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee in October 1957, to be implemented in 1958.60 The core of this reform was a redistribution of power in favor of local authorities. As a result, local governments obtained more autonomy in economic planning, resource allocation, fiscal and tax policy, and personnel management. In addition, the administration of most state-owned enterprises was devolved to local governments. About 88 percent of the state-owned enterprises previously affiliated with various ministries and departments of the central government were transferred to the control of local authorities.61
As an unintended consequence of decentralization, Mao could now reach provincial governments directly, without going through the bureaucracy of various ministries in Beijing. Local authorities in Shanghai, Sichuan, and Hubei were particularly receptive to Mao’s ideas and policies. At the same time, local authorities now had more autonomy in running the local economy, but bore few responsibilities for the success or failure of their decision-making. With Mao calling for speedy economic development, local authorities were now well positioned to begin the Great Leap Forward.
V
In retrospect, the Great Leap Forward was a man-made tragedy.62 It did not come out of the blue. With a handful of exceptions (such as Chen Yun), most Chinese leaders, especially at the early stage, were just as enthusiastic about the Great Leap Forward as Mao.63 While Mao was the passionate initiator and unflinching general, the Great Leap Forward enjoyed wide support and was fortuitously aided by the decentralized administration recently installed by Mao.
Chinese leaders – and Mao in particular – had been thrilled with the country’s economic performance since the founding of the People’s Republic. To their pleasant surprise, Mao and his comrades witnessed a swift economic recovery and smooth transition to socialism; this was in spite of the Korean War and their total lack of experience in running a national economy. Proud of their achievement, they were emboldened; indeed, their confidence became so inflated that it led them to believe that further achievement was constrained by nothing but their imaginations. On August 27th, 1958, the People’s Daily ran an article entitled “The land will surrender as much grain as we endeavor.” This quickly became a popular slogan, promulgated nationwide to motivate peasants, as if the dismal law of diminishing marginal returns had ceased to exist.64
At the same time, peasants were exhorted to rush into communism. After agricultural collectivization, Chinese leaders thought the communist utopia was just around the corner, if only peasants would simply embrace it. Rural cooperatives gradually gave way to communes, which were seen as China’s fast track to communist success. Under the commune system, all assets were taken away from households and managed as collective goods. A glittering and disastrous invention that swept rural China in 1958 was the commune canteen.65 Originally conceived as a way to save time and facilitate coordination in farming, the commune canteen was promoted and defended as the precursor of communism. Grain was not allotted to each household as had been the case previously, but was all left to the commune canteen. Peasants were allowed to eat as much and as often as they wished in a commune canteen. Not surprisingly, everyone ate as if there were no tomorrow. For a very short time, the commune canteen afforded Chinese peasants a glimpse of communist utopia.
The appeal and supposed economic potential of communism was greatly reinforced by exaggerated reports of agricultural production submitted to Beijing by the local governments in the fall of 1958.66 Decentralized and without effective supervision, local governments were virtually consumed by an escalating contest of fabrication. One after another, local governments pronounced spectacular harvests of grain production. On September 18th the People’s Daily reported that average grain productivity per mu (a mu is equal to 660 square meters) in Guangxi had reached 65,000 kilograms (a realistic estimate would be less than 500 kilograms).67 While all local officials knew the truth, few dared not to follow the precedent. From their perspective, they were simply telling Beijing what it wanted to hear. Disappointing Beijing was the least these officials could afford to do if they wanted to stay in office, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the Anti-Rightist Movement. And that campaign had already eliminated most of those who might have stood up to speak the truth about the Great Leap Forward.
In addition, with all newspapers and media strictly controlled by the state, there was no outlet for dissenting voices, had they existed. At the same time, in a society where information was strictly controlled, whatever was transmitted through the state-controlled media was taken as authoritative and authentic. China’s most famous and respected scientist, Qian Xuesen, published an article in China Youth on June 16th, 1958, stating that theoretically rice and wheat production could be as high as 25,000 kilograms per mu as long as the plants absorbed 30 percent of the solar energy they received.68 With little debate, Qian’s article was received by Mao as a theoretical proof of the viability of the Great Leap Forward in agriculture. With its strictly controlled media effectively silencing dissenting voices, Beijing was now a victim of its own efficacy. Naively accepting the production data submitted from local governments, the Agricultural Ministry forecasted that grain production in 1958 would increase by almost 70 percent. Mao and other leaders in Beijing were led to believe that they should start to worry about how to store and dispose of the superabundance of grain.69 Not surprisingly, the state took much more grain from peasants in 1958 and still more in 1959. Grain exports jumped from 1.93 million tons in 1957 to 2.66 million in 1958, 4.16 million in 1959, and 2.65 million tons in 1960, before China started to import grain in 1961. In 1959 when Mao announced that grain output had reached 375 million tons in China, the actual output was probably about 170 million.70 Nothing could be more tragic and senseless than that when millions of Chinese peasants were starving to death, China was aggressively exporting grain.
Another tragic aspect, probably the most vividly remembered initiative of the Great Leap Forward, was the push to make steel in backyard furnaces across China, which greatly reduced grain output and thereby increased the death toll from starvation. In November 1957, Mao went to Moscow for the second and last time, to attend the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution. As the most senior and charismatic leader in the communist camp, Mao was revered by leaders of other communist countries. Even his Soviet host, Khrushchev, who was not known for his modesty, was compelled to show him respect. But Mao was embarrassed, if not ashamed, by the backward, agrarian nature of the Chinese economy. China may have stood up as a political giant, but it remained an economic dwarf. Something had to be done, and done quickly, to ensure China’s economy caught up with its political status. At the time, steel production was widely regarded as a reliable index of industrialization. So when Khrushchev pronounced that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in steel production within fifteen years, Mao was impelled in his speech to commit China to overtaking Britain – the second largest capitalist economy – in steel production within fifteen years.71
This overambitious plan was far beyond China’s productive capacity. When it became obvious that existing steel mills could not possibly fulfill the production quotas, steel production became everyone’s job. The staffs of all factories, schools, and production teams all over rural China were recruited to the race to make steel. Even during harvest, grain was left to rot in the fields, as peasants were busily engaged in making steel in their backyard furnaces. It should surprise no one that the majority of this steel was useless. But a more devastating flaw was that this improvised steel production was leading to an egregious misallocation of labor. A recent study put resource diversion from farming as the most important factor responsible for the decline of grain output between 1958 and 1961.72
Even after starvation was first reported in Henan province, local governments did their best to cover it up for fear of punishment. A critical but short window of opportunity to act decisively was lost. At the same time, peasants were chained to their land and banned from leaving their villages even when they were starving. Any exodus of peasants would be treated as a sign of the ineptitude of the local authority. Moreover, with private commerce effectively eliminated, no grain could be moved to where it was urgently needed. Had a free market been allowed, private enterprises would have developed to buy grain from less affected areas where prices were low and sell it in the most affected areas where prices were higher. Adam Smith, founding father of modern economics, may have had this situation in mind when he wrote that “In an extensive corn country, between all the different parts of which there is a free commerce and communication, the scarcity occasioned by the most unfavorable seasons can never be so great as to produce a famine.”73 With the movement of grain, people, and information all banned, no government could have combated such a famine. When local authorities cared more for their policies’ compliance with Beijing’s instruction than their actual effect on the ground, the Chinese peasants had no chance at all.
But without the breakdown of communication between central and local governments that resulted from administrative decentralization, the Great Leap Forward would not have ended so tragically. For this reason, administrative decentralization was unfortunate. The disastrous results of the Great Leap Forward and, by association, decentralization pushed the economy back to central planning. At the very least, central planning was able to restore order, and the economy was recovering by the mid-1960s. This experience led many Chinese leaders, particularly Chen Yun, who, together with Deng Xiaoping, would preside over China’s economic reform from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, to view central planning as sacred and indispensable.
But several deep structural flaws predated the administrative decentralization of 1958; without these the Great Leap Forward would probably not have happened and the death toll would not have reached millions. These flaws included an anti-market mentality, strict control of domestic migration, state monopoly of media, and radical anti-intellectualism. None of these policies had anything to do with decentralization. It is a pity that discussions of the Great Leap Forward, first within the Chinese government and later in academia, have been largely influenced by, and confined to, the original dispute between Mao and Liu Shaoqi, in which Mao claimed that the Great Leap Forward was mainly (70 percent) a natural disaster (bad weather) and to a lesser degree (30 percent) a man-made mistake, while Liu claimed the opposite.74 Evidence available then clearly indicated that it was mainly a man-made disaster, and this view has since been borne out by later quantitative studies. This disagreement between Liu and Mao would later sow the seed for Mao’s ruthless attack on Liu during the Cultural Revolution. It had the unfortunate consequence of focusing the debate too narrowly on the implied personal responsibility of decision-makers, leaving unexamined the structural flaws built into the socialist system by successive misguided policies. As a result, many of these factors, which allowed the Great Leap Forward to happen in the first place and later greatly exacerbated the ensuing disaster, were further entrenched by the restoration of administrative centralization and the revival of the Five Year Economic Plan.
Few regimes could have survived a disaster as stupendous, as tragic, and as senseless as the Great Leap Forward – Mao and the Chinese government should have been grateful that peasants did not revolt but instead allowed them a second chance to govern. In retrospect, the Great Leap Forward should have served as a wake-up call for the Chinese government to fully and thoroughly re-examine the whole political, economic, and social system to ensure that the deaths of millions of peasants had not been in vain and that no such disaster should happen in the future. Regrettably, administrative decentralization was singled out as an easy target and convenient culprit. For those who did not agree with Mao, the failure of the Great Leap Forward only served to validate administrative centralization and enshrine economic planning. In this way the Chinese government lost a vital opportunity to examine their mistakes and learn from them.
Mao’s economic policy after 1949 was greatly influenced by his wartime experience. But he failed to recognize that in wartime each base area was fully responsible for the consequences of its actions. A serious mistake could easily, and often did, lead to death. Such harsh constraints did not exist for provincial and sub-provincial authorities even after decentralization. It was rare for local officials to lose their positions due to economic mismanagement. Moreover, strict centralized control of the media and communication within government made it impossible for any local government to voice a dissenting view, let alone mount any meaningful challenge to Beijing. Mao’s decentralization did not allow genuine local autonomy – nor did Mao see any need for it. After China’s quick transition to socialism, which contrasted with Stalin’s lengthy and bloody campaign of collectivization, Mao came to believe that China had stumbled upon a blessed “golden highway” to communism. Local authorities were simply required to show their enthusiasm and willingness to obey orders. But it was the Chinese peasants who shouldered the burden when the utopian vision went sour.
The tragedy of the Great Leap Forward illustrates that the differences between a command and a market economy reflect a deep difference in mentality and attitude. A market economy can only be tolerated when no one is confident enough to claim omniscience. A point stressed by Hayek, the far-reaching implications of which have yet to be fully recognized, is that the most critical advantage of a market lies less in its allocative efficiency, and more in its free flow of information.75 But the flow of information would not make much sense, indeed it would seem wasteful, if the problem that it helps to solve is not recognized. A market economy assumes two deep epistemic commitments: acknowledgement of ignorance and tolerance of uncertainty. It was hard for a defiant Mao and a triumphant Chinese Communist Party to accept either, even in the aftermath of the disastrous Great Leap Forward.
VI
After the Great Leap Forward, China enjoyed a return of social order and economic recovery in the early 1960s, only to see it end abruptly with Mao’s launch of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The complexity of Mao’s motives for carrying out the Cultural Revolution has been scrutinized in an extensive and still growing literature.76 It is clear that Mao’s instinctive hostility toward centralization could not tolerate a return to central planning for long. A central objective of the Cultural Revolution was to eliminate government bureaucracy, which Mao considered self-serving, and to allow the people to take charge. Since he was even more hostile to market principles and never fond of the rule of law, Mao failed to recognize that an attack on central planning in a social system where local autonomy was ruled out and law did not exist would inevitably lead to chaos rather than to genuine democracy, as Mao had wished. The Chinese economy was to become trapped in a vicious circle of centralization, rigidity, decentralization, and chaos for many years to come.
Internal party politics and Mao’s ideology of continuous class struggle ensured that the Cultural Revolution was even more radical in ideology than the Great Leap Forward. To preserve the purity of socialism, protecting it from capitalist encroachment on the one side and feudalist erosion on the other, Mao’s Red Guards – mostly high school students and other teenagers – were urged to destroy all institutions and artifacts bequeathed from the past. These were condemned as the “four olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. As a result, temples, books, paintings, and other cultural relics were burned and demolished. During the second half of the 1960s, the only books available to readers in China were the collected works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, and a few books designated by the government to show off the triumph of socialism. All other books were banned and all libraries were closed. Teachers and professors, particularly those who returned from abroad, were subject to humiliation and abuse, resulting in many deaths and suicides. Education suffered heavily as academic learning became a target of derision and parody. “Knowledge is useless” was a popular slogan. Since most of the educated elites were denounced and many imprisoned as “rightists,” knowledge itself became an often deadly political liability. At this time, all economic contact with Japan and the West was cut off and the Chinese economy was further isolated from modern technology. The brutal attack on Chinese cultural traditions, both physically and intellectually, was probably the most ironic and tragic feature of the Cultural Revolution. Its radical anti-traditionalism and extreme examples of cultural self-negation and self-destruction – which amounted to nothing less than total de-Sinification – were probably unprecedented in human history. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, when China was almost defenseless in the face of western economic, military, and cultural ascendancy, Chinese intellectuals had become increasingly critical of their own cultural heritage. But their critique of Chinese culture was always mediated by their deep emotional attachment to the very object of their attacks. Raised under socialism, most Red Guards had little respect for, and certainly no attachment to, their own cultural traditions. Juvenile rebellion was clothed in revolutionary precepts, flaring into widespread violence and becoming a deadly political weapon against the existing political system and cultural order. The political and intellectual establishments were its two major victims.
Preoccupied with the class struggle, which was deemed a constant and insidious threat to the survival of socialism, Mao let radical politics dictate economic management. Mao’s subjugation of the economy to politics led to another round of economic decentralization during the Cultural Revolution, as he declared war on the central bureaucracy.77 Economic decentralization was probably the most important, but little recognized, factor in sheltering the economy from political turmoil during the Cultural Revolution. As a result, even though China was racked by widespread political violence during the Cultural Revolution, the economy did not suffer as serious a blow as it had during the Great Leap Forward. Except for the first three years of the Cultural Revolution, when the economy was severely disrupted, production was able to grow faster than the population, even as fertility rates peaked between 1969 and 1972. With a continuing bias against consumer goods, however, the economy remained driven by state-centered investment projects and the living conditions for most Chinese remained stagnant or even deteriorated. With little improvement in welfare, a growing population, and a continuous call for class struggle, more and more people became disillusioned and began to ask themselves, “Is this the socialism we fought so hard for?”
At the same time, the Party and state apparatus suffered unprecedented damage. Unlike the Great Leap Forward when the political elites were largely sheltered from the disaster, the Party veterans were squarely at the center of the political struggle during the Cultural Revolution. The whole political structure and administrative machine was severely weakened. A rigid, centralized bureaucracy staffed with strictly disciplined but dispirited bureaucrats, which had been a defining feature of Stalinism, was certainly not among the assets Mao bequeathed to his successors. China, no doubt, remained a socialist economy – no private property or free market was allowed. But the Chinese economy had much less central planning than the name socialism might suggest.
In the West, Chinese socialism was, and probably still is, commonly perceived as more or less a copy of what was practiced in the Soviet Union. Since China was largely cut off from the rest of the world during much of Mao’s time, little information was available about Mao’s China. The outside world thus got to know China through the label of socialism rather than through the reality on the ground. China was seen from the angle of Stalinism and misunderstandings were bound to arise.
It is worthwhile pointing out that even though Mao was directly responsible for the decentralization of the Chinese political and economic system, other forces, more elusive but no less decisive, were also at work. The size of the Chinese continent would make life difficult for any central planner. As an age-old Chinese axiom puts it, “Heaven is high and the emperor far away.” Some local autonomy was therefore inevitable. Historically, the tension between administrative centralization (or what is called junxian in Chinese literature) and decentralization (or what is called fengjian) has been an absorbing issue for China’s rulers ever since the First Emperor of Qin unified China in 221 BC.78 Even though Imperial China is remembered for its administrative innovation, a centralized bureaucracy staffed by civilians who were selected through the civil service examination, centralization coexisted with decentralization. Centralization may be the best-known aspect of traditional Chinese politics, but the political system was kept in order by balancing the competing forces of centralization and decentralization, like the Yin and Yang in Tai Chi.
Even though China under Mao had built up, mostly from scratch, an impressive nationwide industrial base, its economic performance was an agonizing disappointment. But while Mao left behind poverty and a poorly functioning economic system, he also created much discontent among a large number of people, most of whom were desperate for change. At the end of Mao’s rule, China was left with a fractured society, a fragmented economy, and a confused and disoriented politics, crawling along what was once believed the golden highway to socialism. With the end of Mao’s era, China was bound to open a new chapter.
