Schematic Chronology of the Chinese National Epic

2006 Introduction:

Beijing has been transformed within a few short years into a city packed with skyscrapers. The building sites are busy 24 hours a day, and at night workers continue building at an astonishing pace under poor electric lighting, hardly ever even wearing overalls. Huge projects like the Three Gorges Dam astound by their sheer scale and audacity. With its industrious working class forming the Chinese bourgeoisie’s main asset, China is today firmly established as a ’superpower’, and the West is getting very worried.

But what the Western philistine bourgeois cannot understand is why Mao continues to this day to be worshipped in China as a hero and father of the nation. Surely Mao a reactionary? Shouldn’t the reformers, starting with Deng Xiaoping, take all the credit? What they fail to realise is that today’s China is the product and consequence of the triumph of Mao’s party back in 1949. From the communist and proletarian perspective, Mao was a reactionary, yes, and he did nothing for the communist and proletarian cause by calling himself a Marxist revolutionary. But on the other hand, he was a great bourgeois revolutionary, even if devoured by his own revolution in the same way as the great revolutionaries of the French revolution. It is to Mao and his party that the honour is really owed of having shaken off the imperialist plunderers, and establishing the independence of the Chinese nation.

The recent history of this emergence of one of the world’s great ancient civilizations, from a largely rural base to today’s modern capitalist powerhouse, is covered in the present article. Originally written in the Spanish language in 1997, hopefully it will, along with other party studies on the Chinese situation, eventually form a solid foundation for future studies to be undertaken by a yet to be formed Chinese section, within our one, world communist party.

The death of the last of the ’great helmsmen’ of the Chinese national epic, in itself insignificant, provides us with a good opportunity to sum up the tortuous historical cycle China has passed through, transfixed by the reputations of these great helmsmen of the Chinese Communist Party. As events unfolded, the process was subjected to a detailed analysis in our party publications and studies. As always these remained faithful to the Marxist postulate which situates the real motor of history in the economic and material interests of classes within given modes of production, and in their social struggles. Circumstances determine the appearance and achievements of particular individuals on the historic stage, and not the contrary. Since 1949, when the present party took power, the mysterious oleographs of the heads of the Chinese State, and then their inglorious retractions and condemnations, have provided us with abundant evidence that it is History which determines what individuals do, and not the other way round.

Gestation and revolutionary anguish

China, which now stands forth as a global capitalist power, will soon be capable of competing with the old powers which arrived at the same stage centuries ago. And yet, at the beginning of the 20th century, and due to the restrictions imposed by the imperialist States after the Opium Wars, conditions were appalling, and bankruptcy, and an ever increasing exploitation of the peasantry, seemed intractable. We do well to remember that before the European Renaissance, before capitalism came to dominate the West, China was the most advanced civilisation on the planet.

The vast majority of the population was made up of peasant farmers. Half of them owned no land and as well as paying taxes they had to hand over a percentage of their crop to the landowner as rent for their small-holdings. In 1911, the Republic of China was proclaimed by Sun Yat-sen, who would later on found the Guomindang or nationalist party. This was the first significant event of the bourgeois revolution. Behind Sun there stood the Chinese big bourgeoisie, still very weak. This bourgeoisie, which under the Empire had collaborated to no small degree with the foreigners, enriching itself in the zones open to commercial contact with westerners where capitalist production and a modern proletariat could be found, was nevertheless capable of equipping itself with the unitary national character needed to bury the empire; aided no doubt by the extreme, longstanding corruption and decrepitude of the latter’s apparatus. And yet it didn’t win any popular support. If the revolutionary Tai Ping and Boxer movement of the 19^th century had popular support but lacked an organised structure, Sun’s republic, which was putting an end to the millenary empire, didn’t manage to mobilise the masses.

The three principles put forward by Sun: nationalism, democracy and bread for the people, were the same as any other bourgeois revolution taking place in a country lacerated by imperialism, and lagging way behind western capitalism in terms of its forms of production. However the father of the Chinese nation was certainly naïve to hope he could count on the more advanced nations to turn China into a modern nation.

In China at that time, pregnant with bourgeois revolution, two unavoidable tasks were on the agenda: 1) achieving national independence, 2) pushing through land reform, the premise for industrial development. Whether it would be the bourgeoisie or the proletariat to achieve these tasks remained an open question. As in Russia, the extreme weakness of the bourgeois class meant it was powerless to mobilise the huge mass of peasantry to expropriate and divide up the land of the large landed proprietors, and thus put an end to the unspeakable oppression of the peasantry. This was too big a task for a bourgeoisie which had arisen in very different historical and international circumstances than those faced by the French bourgeoisie of the Great Revolution in the 18^th century. Indeed, so much was this the case that despite it governing the republic it had installed, the situation in China, as far as relations with the colonial powers and the social situation at home was concerned, didn’t really change at all.

Scarcely a year had passed before Sun found himself obliged to renounce the presidency of the republic in favour of General Yuan Shikai, the military commander under the old regime, whose control of the army meant that it was in his hands that the real power lay. On the latter’s death in 1916 the various military leaders divided China up into various spheres of influence, each controlled by a different foreign country by way of agreements supporting the respective military leaders. This marked the beginning of the period of the ’war-lords’, brought to a close in the 20’s with the accession to power of the Guomindang and Jiang JieShi. This gave a certain level of stability and homogeneity in China, a state of affairs required by the foreign powers in order to continue their looting of the country. Meanwhile, the indigenous big bourgeoisie, to which the four notorious families of Song, Kong, Chen and Jiang belonged, weren’t prepared to prevent the foreigners from exploiting China because putting it into practice would have meant arming and mobilising the peasantry.

Throughout the world, particularly after the First World War, communists hoped that the working class, organised in its own independent party, would place itself at the head of the democratic revolution and transform it into its own dictatorship. This is what happened in Russia, where a minority class, the proletariat, managed to take hold of the country by taking power in the main cities. Some thought it might be possible to do the same thing in the important coastal cities in the east and south of China. Certainly it is to the Stalinist counter-revolution that we owe the liquidation of such a prospect.

So, we’re talking about a double revolution, the objective of which is to leapfrog the stage of bourgeois power. In Russia, Lenin’s party achieved this not by allowing the Constituent Assembly to consolidate, but by dissolving it; precisely what the assembly was intending to do to the Soviets in fact. Just as in Russia, the essential weakness of the bourgeoisie was evidenced by the fact that its parties, the social revolutionaries and Mensheviks in Russia just like Sun’s Kuomintang in China, were compelled to flirt with socialist notions.

In 1923 Sun postulated friendly relations with the USSR and an alliance with the communists, an aim which was to be realised, after his death in 1925, in the first national government, which included representatives of both the Kuomintang and the CCP. In the period between 1924 and 1927, having established itself as the dominant force within the party in power in Russia and within the International, Stalinism would order the proletarian party in China to form an alliance with the bourgeoisie and the Kuomintang. Thus would the necessary independence required to achieve the double revolution would be lost. Later on the CCP would be persuaded to transform itself into a peasant party led by Mao Tse-tung.

Anti-imperialist Revolution – Anti-communist Counter-revolution

With the International’s support, the Kuomintang’s internal and military organisation would be strengthened. In 1926, setting out from Canton where the Guomindang had mustered their forces whilst Sun was still alive, Jiang JieShi launched his Northern Campaign at the head of a heterogeneous coalition, and in 1927, after crushing the Shanghai Commune, the generalissimo installed his dictatorship.

Following the bloody suffocation of the Shanghai Commune by the Guomindang, in close collaboration with Stalin, an alliance which Stalin had to abandon after the events of 1927, the Communist Party was disbanded and dealt its death blow. The proletariat was now without a party of its own, and the definitive separation between the working class and the CCP can be dated back to this period. Mao now readopted Sun’s principals and converted the CCP into a real nationalist party, into the ’real Guomindang’; but his followers were drawn from the poor peasantry, and it was with their support, and therefore without the need to depend on the faint-hearted bourgeoisie, that it would embark on achieving its unique and ultimate objective, the democratic-national revolution. Thus Stalinism prevented from happening in China the double revolution they had had in Russia. Mao would adopt Stalin’s line, and follow faithfully in Sun Yat-sen’s footsteps. Mao was Stalin’s direct descendant. It was necessary for them not only to crush the proletariat but to betray it as well, and for the party to strictly regiment the poor peasants so the revolution didn’t stray off the democratic path.

Once the Chinese proletariat, same as the Russian, had been separated from its sole ally, the proletariat in the advanced countries (whose victorious struggle was the only thing which could save the Chinese and the Russian revolutions) it was compelled to seek terms with the bourgeoisie, thereby compromising the possibility of a revolutionary victory and postponing it indefinitely. In the 20s, it wasn’t a case of the two peoples, the Chinese and Russian, having to unite in the face of Western pressure, a policy which Stalinism would later try to spread to the rest of the world. Quite the reverse. What the proletariat of both countries needed to do was fight to the bitter end to achieve a revolution in the West: either that, or both the Chinese and Russian proletariat would be defeated. China and Russia had a common destiny: either a successful revolution, or the long and painful process of establishing national economies under their respective bourgeoisies.

Soon after Jiang JieShi had consolidated himself in power, having initiated a decade of relative financial stability, Japan invaded Manchuria. This was something the Chinese government considered inevitable since the area had already been penetrated by Japanese capital, and it concentrated instead on suppressing the peasant unions organised by the CCP; which despite the effective decapitation of the party in 1927 nevertheless continued to refer to itself as such. The execution of Li Dazhao, in a zone still controlled by the war lords in Beijing in 1927, and the expulsion two years later of Chen DuXiu (who would be blamed for the disastrous outcome of the collaborationist policy which had been imposed on him, against his will, by Moscow) is the closing chapter for the founders of the Chinese Communist Party. The baton of party leadership would be passed on to the peasant revolutionaries Zhu De, Mao Zedong and Zhou EnLai, etc, who whilst retaining the typical phraseology of Stalinism relating to communism, to Marxism, to the working class and the struggle against exploitation, would nevertheless continue as constructors of the great capitalist fatherland.

Despite all this, Moscow would pay no attention to the CCP’s movement in the countryside; not until the peasant armies started getting the better of the Guomindang after the Second World War.

Following the campaigns by the nationalist armies against the ’communist bandits’ in the early thirties, those powers who wanted to stop Japan, including Russia, started to favour a union between the Guomindang and the CCP against the invading enemy. Thus between 1937 and 1939 the Chinese government would receive 250 million dollars from Russia, even though the country wasn’t conducting a particularly vigorous struggle against the Japanese. Indeed, in response to a stepping up of the Japanese invasion, which affected coastland regions of China, the Chinese government could find no better remedy than retreating further inland.

On finding that the Japanese were preparing to pull out of Manchuria, Stalin’s Russia, the ’benefactor’ of poor people like the Chinese oppressed by imperialism, sent in troops to occupy the country on the pretext of ’driving the Japanese out’; although in fact profiting from the situation by dismantling the modern factories and railways built by the Japanese and sending them back, piece by piece, to Russia.

1949: The birth of the Popular Republic

The Japanese defeat at the end of the Second World War seemed to reinforce the position of the Guomindang, but in fact it was not so. China’s problems were still the same as they were at the start of the century. It has been calculated that 55% of the rural population in 1939 were composed of landless peasants. Next in order of importance were the peasant proprietors who owned a parcel of land barely sufficient to scrape a living, and then came the middle and rich farmers, who were nevertheless subject to requisitions from the army. In addition, the victorious powers were once again preparing to sink their teeth into China. To prepare the way for this, given the certainty of an imminent civil war between the ever more numerous and disciplined peasant militias and the Guomindang armies, the Yalta agreement prescribed a coalition government for China which would have rendered it incapable of adopting the energetic reforms and the necessary centralisation needed to free itself from foreign imperialism.

Although we continue to define the CCP as reactionary for abandoning the tactic of the double revolution and the master-line which would have ensured a proletarian victory, the eventual victory of the CCP and the installation of the People’s Republic of China nevertheless constitutes a gigantic step forward from the point of view of the installation of modern capitalism, which would allow, although only after a long and difficult process, the appearance of the modern proletariat, its future grave-diggers; which when it next rises up against its oppressors it will no longer be a weak and minority class, but the most numerous in the world. This merit must be afforded to the party of the Chinese bourgeois revolution, given that China is practically the only ’undeveloped’ country which managed to mount a victorious uprising against the West, shake off the yoke of imperialism, and overturn the conditions condoning the looting of the old imperialist powers which the latter had succeeded in imposing on other countries.

Following the flight of the Guomindang forces to Taiwan, and the installation of the People’s Republic of China on the 1^st October, 1949, the way was left open for the autonomous accumulation of capital in China and the consequent economic autarchy. This was no mean feat in an era in which imperialism dominated the world. In the 50’s, Zhou Enlai declared that the increase in customs duties favoured the creation of big industry in China: foreigners were unable to invade China with their cut-price commodities because the keys to the market were held by the Chinese and not by foreigners. The imperialist powers were much keener on the collaborationist and corrupt Guomindang than they were on the CCP; not because the latter were ’communist’, as the USA would have us believe, but because by arming the peasantry they had created the national market, expelled the foreign companies, and proclaimed all those other revolutionary measures typical of the birth of an independent bourgeois nation in a country which had pre-capitalist relations of production in the process of decomposition.

For us communists, democracy ’cannot exist’. By this we mean that the existence of the State indicates the presence in society of different classes, with opposing and irreconcilable interests. Historically the bourgeois has claimed democracy was possible in order to divert the insurrection of the oppressed classes into one supporting their own ascent to power. The democracy installed by the People’s Republic of China was therefore the triumph of bourgeois national democracy. The one objection of the petty-bourgeois intellectual philistine in the West is that there are… no elections. He doesn’t think that this masterpiece of equilibrium between the classes, between the poor, middle and rich peasantry, the national bourgeoisie and the proletariat, all joined together in the CCP to pursue the national interest, is sufficient for China to be considered a capitalistically modern nation. In fact it could be said that when it was first installed the People’s Republic of China was a lot more democratic than the so-called democracies in the West; which notwithstanding all their electoral circuses are under orders from a bunch of bankers who control everything. Nevertheless, China has never experienced socialism, neither a dictatorship of the proletariat nor of the proletariat and peasantry; the Chinese proletariat, defeated, has been sacrificed to achieve economic objectives at the national and business enterprise level, the latter including that owned by private capital.

Even before it took power the CCP had changed course, having decided to establish a ’People’s Republic’ rather than a ’Workers and Peasants Republic’. The peasant armies of the CCP would feel like fishes out of water in the cities. When they entered as victors and announced what steps would be taken, they would enforce a respect for private property on the workers and forbid any immoderation. Ever present in the CCP’s writings and speeches is the condominium of the four classes: workers, peasants, and the petty and national bourgeoisie. Meanwhile it was proclaimed that capitalism wouldn’t be destroyed because it could be beneficial and useful, as long as boundaries were set to it. And that is why, when the People’s Republic was proclaimed, it didn’t set about making indiscriminate expropriations, but just nationalised the large banks and the businesses of ’bureaucratic capitalism’, despite the fact these had already been nationalised by the Guomindang under the control of the ’four families’. Here again the real scandal doesn’t lie so much in having arrived at a pact and compromise with the Bourgeoisie, who controlled the technical and administrative means of running businesses, but in presenting this as the ’building of socialism’.

Mao feared a workers’ insurrection more than anything, as the only thing which could prevent his victory. Certainly the working class, left to its fate in 1927, would greet the arrival of the CCP militias with supreme indifference.

Despite the proclamations against immoderation, between 1947 and 1952 there was a reign of terror directed against the landowners and rich peasants as a reaction against the terrible exploitative regime which had been suffered by the poor; who were now armed and mobilised. The CCP, rather than proclaiming the class struggle, did everything in its power to prevent it.

The colossal agrarian problem

At the beginning of the 1950s, the entire country depended on agricultural production. Bringing social stability to the countryside was an urgent matter. Repartition of the land would benefit both the rich and poor peasantry, at the expense of the landowners, Buddhist and Taoist temples, the Christian church and other collectivities. Two to three mu of land (1 mu = 1/15 hectare, 1 hectare = 2.47 acres) was assigned to each person over 16 years of age. The middle and rich peasants were allowed to keep both their land and their surplus product; thus there was a failure to keep to the promises made to the poor peasantry in 1947 when their mobilisation had been required. Dividing up the land was a colossal task. Almost half the land under cultivation (47 million hectares) was divided amongst 300 million peasant farmers, a division also involving more than 3 million draught animals.

Notwithstanding the CCP’s aim of turning China into a modern industrialised nation, it was still a petty bourgeois country composed of peasant farmers, and there remained no option but to pass through this stage. Nevertheless, an immediate start was made on the accumulation of capital for investment and for the development of industry. And it was here that China came up against those problems which would cause internal divisions within the CCP as to how to resolve them: the huge extent of the parcelling out in the countryside into small family concerns which were barely able to support their peasant owners and their families was holding up the flow of capital between town and country and within the countryside itself; so how and when was this situation to be resolved?

In 1952, production caught up with pre-war levels and the phase of reconstruction was declared achieved, in the sense that self-sufficiency in food was attained and famine was no longer a threat. The party-State had less problems bringing about a concentration of industrial capital than agricultural capital since the CCP depended totally on the support of the peasantry which had placed it in power. With the State holding the monopoly of the distribution of raw materials, the bourgeoisie found it difficult to oppose state control. Also, the bourgeois proprietors, who were officially employees of the State, retained control of their enterprises as well as a block of shares (the rest belonging to the State) the dividends of which they cashed in each year. At the end of 1952, the State, either as sole share-holder, proprietor or owner of part of the shares, controlled 76% of industrial production with national private capital falling from 56% to 17%. Most of the treasury bonds were owned by industrialists and traders.

Heavy industry was a creation of State policy, as in Russia, ensuring strong industrial growth and guaranteeing national security. But the rest of the economy wasn’t able to keep in step. Agriculture needed to produce a surplus, both in order to provide sufficient raw materials for industry and food for the cities, and in order to invest in the mechanisation of agriculture, where extremely primitive technical instruments were still in use; likewise, however, an industry capable of providing modern machinery couldn’t develop if the national economy didn’t provide the necessary surplus: this was the vicious cycle within which China was caught. Having recourse to help from abroad would however mean compromising national independence, since none of the countries capable of procuring such goods would be prepared to help for nothing. In 1949 the presence of foreign capital in the various economic sectors was virtually zero. The bourgeoisie had fled with the Guomindang to Taiwan, taking all the capital they could with them and most of the merchant marine.

The one country with which China had an interchange of technical instruments against agricultural produce was Russia, which, of course, wasn’t going to give anything away for nothing. In order to keep China on its side during the cold war, and for other reasons, it suited Russia to keep China dependent on it. However, the determination of the Peking leaders to defend its role as an independent nation would cause Russia to pull out its technicians in the 1950s. China thus found itself completely isolated in the world before it had accomplished the difficult task of developing its own means of production, which it set about achieving through the use of the only capital it had available – manpower-capital.

With the attainment, in 1957, of the five year plan for agriculture and industry initiated in 1952, growth achieved maximum velocity: industrial production grew by 141%, which, in comparison with the 25% growth in agriculture, exposed China as guilty of capitalism; of offering more iron than bread to the human species.

The CCP was aware that the agricultural reform had created many small peasant proprietors who were barely self-sufficient, and that this was preventing capitalist accumulation and development, as much in the cities as in the countryside. Two tendencies would soon emerge within the CCP, although actually the only thing which really divided them was the speed at which it was intended to assist the development of agricultural capital, whether through the use of salaried workers or machinery. It isn’t true (despite the bearded intellectuals and young firebrands of the West falling for it) that there was one tendency, Liu ShaoQi’s, which was pro-capitalist, and the other, Mao’s, which was pro-communist. Both were for developing agricultural capital, but the boundless Chinese peasantry meant that first the land had to be divided up before new reforms could be undertaken to bring about an accumulation and concentration on a grand scale. This is why, up to the second half of the 1970s, Mao’s tendency would predominate over Liu’s and Deng XiaoPing’s, although not without momentary setbacks and defeats. Mao knew that his party was totally reliant on the peasantry, and the untrammelled development of the second phase of the bourgeois revolution, of expropriation and concentration, would have caused class struggle within the peasantry itself.

In order to obtain capitalist accumulation in the most rapid way possible in a backward country like China, the most progressive measure which a communist revolution headed by the proletariat could have taken wasn’t dividing up the land, but nationalising it. The government would thus have been allowed the power of decision and control in the countryside which otherwise it would be lacking. This is what the Russian revolution, a revolution led by the communist proletariat of the cities, would do in its early stages, whereas the Chinese revolution was a peasant revolution fought out in the countryside.

Thus in the early part of the 1950s China was faced with a pressing need to increase agricultural production, whilst at the same time it didn’t want to allow the forces of the market and competition to develop to the point of provoking a rapid expropriation and proletarianization of the poor peasants, with the attendant risk of creating millions and millions of vagrants throughout the country which the incipient industrial development was not yet able to absorb; and with the consequent threat to the stability of the young State and its party. Faced with this alternative, the Chinese leaders opted for ’collectivisation’ in the hope that agricultural production would be increased, and at the same time the peasant would be separated from his patch of land in a less traumatic and gradual way. Collectivisation consisted of favouring the creation of mutual aid teams and co-operatives from 1953 to 1957, and the People’s Communes in 1958-9.

The mutual aid teams consisted of 4 or 5 families united together in order to share scarce tools and draught animals, and their labour as well, with a view to alleviating the chronic lack of technical means.

The lower-stage agricultural producers’ co-operatives, referred to as semi-socialist, consisted of 20 to 30 families, each retaining a small plot of land for their individual use whilst renting out the rest to the co-operative along with animals and tools, thus retaining their property within the co-operative. Members still received some income on the basis of the amount of land they contributed. The co-operative was organised according to a set plan.

Within the advanced or ’socialist’ co-operatives, which encompassed the entire village and were composed of between 100 to 300 families, there was no private property in land or in the main instruments of production which were acquired by the co-operative. Income shares were based solely on the basis of the amount of labour contributed.

By 1957 the co-operative system had shown that it wasn’t up to the task of increasing agricultural productivity: whatever was earned from any small surpluses which were sold was used by the peasant families on their small plots and farmyard animals to the detriment of the co-operative. To this was added the inability of the State to control the level of production and the crops which would be planted. All that the State could do was use the lever of taxes and price manipulation.

This loss of impetus of the co-operative system – along with the break with Russia, which left China totally isolated – was the reason why Mao was so keen on the Great Leap Forward campaign and the creation of the popular communes. It was nothing other than a voluntarist attempt to increase production by calling on the masses to mobilise and make sacrifices; an attempt to substitute abundance of ideology for lack of technology.

Initially the State didn’t find it difficult to set up the communes as the peasants were already very predisposed toward the idea. Each commune consisted of a self-governing group of co-operatives, divided in their turn into teams and brigades, which coincided respectively with the first and second type of co-operatives. Each commune grouped together around 4,000 families and generally coincided with the geographical limits of the xiang. The co-operatives had to surrender all their instruments of production to the commune. Land and water resources belonged to the commune. The use of privately owned instruments became sporadic and family barriers were broken down. To begin with reports appeared in the press which cited examples of peasants who were so swept away in the enthusiasm that they donated personal domestic items, such as crockery, for communal use, and others who even dismantled their houses so that the resulting materials could be used in the building of the collective canteens, offices, shelters etc., whose functions were being reinforced by the Commune. Another objective the commune set itself was the internal development of industry. It was calculated that the harvest could be brought in with two thirds of the available agricultural workforce, the rest of which could be utilised for major infra-structural projects such as roads and canals. Since to accomplish the latter only the most basic tools were available, and hardly any machinery, the whole laborious enterprise came to resemble nothing so much as a giant anthill.

The creation of the popular communes, with their much vaunted autonomy, shouldn’t be interpreted as the apotheosis of the popular State: the higher authorities within the commune were party-State cadres who functioned as a transmission belt with the higher echelons. They directed the life of the commune, set production targets, determined how wages would be distributed to the commune members, and so on and so forth. The Marxist interpretation is this: the social mobilisation of the Great Leap Forward was founded on the solid base of the faithful executive cadres who had the capacity to organise the rest of the population; the State was therefore demanding the reintroduction and maintenance, in time of peace, of the iron organisational discipline of an army at war. If apologia there was it was in defence of the dictatorial, rather than the populist, State. It follows that the peasant would lose any freedom he had (control over time, work, methods, choice of crop) and the individual, in the measure to which life was lived in the collective canteens and other initiatives of this kind, would cease to belong to the clan or family in order to enter into the service of the State. In other words, the State was faced with the necessity of following a similar plan in agriculture as the one it was following in industry.

Our party has never let itself be dazzled by the myth of collectivisation as a post-capitalist form: it has never described capitalism as a private form of production, considering that the latter can entirely dispense with the lords of capital. The road to socialism is characterised in essence by the development of given productive forces and by the international revolution. Neither of these factors could be said to apply to China.

The communes, as originally conceived, would not succeed. The main reason for this was because they were an idealist attempt to modify the productive forces by applying the lever of will. Problems cropped up in the communes from the outset. Originally Peking allowed them a free hand and its directives concerned neither the organisation of the commune nor the requisition of privately owned peasant property. The peasants were unhappy about the requisition of the private plots. The communes ran the risk of not being able to pay wages. Already by August 1959 there were the first attempts to rectify the situation but still the problems showed no signs of being resolved. The stubborn resistance of the peasant proprietors along with the resulting production difficulties meant that the communes in their original form would have to be broken up. Finally it was agreed that the commune’s fundamental unit was the co-operative. This was the basic level of organisation within which losses and gains could be calculated and decisions made about how to divide up what had been produced; and all this to the advantage of the private plots of land, which by the end of 1959 constituted 15-20% of the village’s economy. Also in 1960-61, climatic factors would have a devastating effect on the harvest and millions of people would die in the PRC’s worst ever famine.

In 1962, having been emptied of any content by the reforms, the function of the communes was reduced to being an instrument of control and co-ordination, continuing merely as proprietors of undertakings which concerned the overall jurisdiction of the communes and of state industry, whose penetration into the inland regions gathered force during the ’50s, going some way to make up for the lack of communications routes with the coastal zones. In agriculture it continued to be the co-operatives who took control and made the decisions.

Struggles inside the Party-State

The emergence Liu ShaoQi’s and Deng Xiaping’s current in the realm of State policy would be marked with the introduction of sanziyibao; the ’thirty liberties and a contract’. The thirty liberties were the restoration of the private plots and the possibility of their extension by bringing uncultivated land under the plough; the possibility of selling the products which didn’t end up in the hands of the State in the rural markets; and the freedom to form small family enterprises which were able to assume full responsibility for their losses and gains. The contract referred to the setting of production quotas on a family rather than on a Team basis. Deng’s famous saying, “it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice,” goes back to this period.

As the latter provisions started to bear results, Mao’s policy started to be opposed within the higher echelons of the party. Due to the increase in production the reforms would be much more popular than Mao’s Stakhanovism. In industry as well there was a marked recovery following the agricultural crisis of 1960-61, which had hit industry hard due to the lack of raw materials and basic foodstuffs.

Between 1966 and 1967 the Maoist tendency, in a desperate attempt to ensure its survival within the Party-State, launched the watchword of struggle against treacherous revisionism. Mao’s sole support lay in the world of students and teachers, but nevertheless the events of the Cultural Revolution certainly cannot be explained by their support alone: the purges of the party carried out by Maoism only happened on the scale they did because the army, which still considered Mao their leader, supported them as well.

Once underway, the Cultural Revolution didn’t claim to be anything other than a dispute between factions within the party apparatus, albeit a bloody and bitter one; as long as the workers and peasants weren’t drawn in the productive life of the country was unaffected. The workers certainly didn’t see the Spartan proposals put forward by the Red Guard students as representing their interests, indeed the latter had nothing at all to say about the exploitative conditions in the factories. The Red Guards, who with the support of Peking and the army felt omnipotent, were despatched to the provinces to cleanse the local party committees of bourgeois and counter-revolutionary members. The cadres would be purged with assassinations and suicides.

Confronted with this situation the local committees could see no other option but to organise the working masses against the Red Guards. Social discipline was breaking down, and since the workers didn’t identify with either of the contending parties they would seize the moment by instinctively making their own demands, calling for higher wages and improved living standards. Strikes became widespread and affected the country’s production. With the power and discipline of the Party-State diminished, the peasants decided to appropriate the entire harvest and the State granaries were left empty. The prevailing disorder and anarchy induced the army to take power and the control of all civil life into its hands: but only with repression by fire and sword did it manage to restore order. It was the Maoist faction which appeared to have emerged victorious, however it was the military which occupied most of the key positions of State.

In 1972 Deng XiaoPing, who had been forced into the background during the Cultural Revolution, was rehabilitated; and bit by bit, other followers of the ’openness’ line would be rehabilitated as well. This is the moment when diplomatic relations are re-established with the USA and China starts to play an important part on the international stage. Following Mao’s death in 1976, after years of physical decline, the Gang of Four would try and regain power in a last stand for ’anti-openness’, but it is defeated. The confirmation of Deng XiaoPing as head of State signals the beginning of a phase of economic reforms and openness to the rest of the world which continues until the present day; it is a long and complex period of intense activity which does honour to the proverbial patience of the Chinese; for in China, with its huge population and vast territories the cycles of change take much longer.

The agricultural reforms introduced by Deng, the liberalisation of prices, the ending of the Communes and the empowering of the family enterprises has resulted in a considerable increase in agricultural productivity in China. The figures are however still well below those in the Western countries, where the proportion of labour power involved in agriculture is minimal and rarely exceeds 10%, whilst in China it is estimated that it is still 58% of the total.

China becomes part of the imperialist chess-game

As to Maoism’s fears that openness would consign the country to the foreigner, it is impossible even today to say how well-founded they are, and if so, to what degree. At present there is a gigantic struggle going on between China, which is fighting for its aspirations to be a global superpower, and the old and already established imperialisms, headed by the USA. China needs to enter into contact with Western capital and Western technology but it wants to compromise its autonomy as little as possible whilst old imperialism, with its international institutions and its global economic order, wants China to accept the place assigned to it and not rock the boat. The tensions generated by this conflict show up from time to time in the trade disputes between China and the USA, in the shows of strength by both sides around the Taiwan question and in the Western denunciations of violations of ’human rights’ (as though the Chinese government had some kind monopoly of these violations and the United States was as pure as the driven snow).

The main card which China can play in this contest, which for the moment is fought out solely on the economic-diplomatic-political level, is the potential of its internal market of more than 1,200 million people, something which really brings a glint to the eye of capitalists everywhere. This drooling expectation is what allows China to place restrictions on foreign investment which wouldn’t normally be accepted. The multinationals investing in China often complain about bureaucratic obstacles, a biased legal system, promises not kept to, etc, etc, but many of them have nevertheless opened an office in China as a base from which they hope, one day, to establish complete freedom of movement. Statistically 3/5 of the foreign investment flowing into China from abroad between 1979 and 1995 came through Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, which leads one to the conclusion that to operate in the Chinese business world you need to know the language, maintain contacts and have the right connections if you don’t want to get excluded. The Chinese, who have had to put up with the West’s technical superiority, have had plenty of time to hone the arts of deception, although, when it comes to the crunch, they can always draw up the heavy guns as well.

In order to analyse the evolution of this conflict between international capital and China, with the former wishing to contain China and the latter wishing to establish itself as a great power, we need to keep track of the economic data on borrowing, investments, balance of trade, etc, and also the military policy which so worries the western bourgeoisies.

On the other hand the Chinese proletariat must be concerned about the ineluctable dynamic of the capitalist mode of production, be it Chinese, American, European or Japanese, with its tendency to drive working class living conditions to the worst extreme. Without a class-based alternative, at the very least at the trade-union level, it will find it impossible to halt capital’s insatiable lust for proletarian sweat and blood; for with or without suffrage, the requirements of capital remain the same. Proletarian emancipation will be attained through the destruction of capitalism, through setting up its own political regime which remains independent and dedicated to that end, through the necessary direction of the Communist Party in the proletarian revolution.