Idealogy and Economic Reform Under Deng Xiaoping 1978-1993

Wei-Wei Zhang, Zhang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780710305268
• eBook ISBN: 9781136166495
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1996.  Is ideology still relevant in post-Mao China? Deng Xiaoping's wide-ranging economic reforms have led to declarations that ideology in China is merely a cynical sham or already dead, but a closer look at China seems to suggest a constant conflict of different ideologies associated with the profound transformation of the Chinese society since 1978. This study is an attempt to explore the interactions between major ideological currents and economic reforms.

Chapter One

IDEOLOGY AND CHINA’S MODERNIZATION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

A Overview

Ever since the mid-19th century, generations of the Chinese have endeavoured to modernize the country under the guidance of different ideologies. In the aftermath of a series of humiliating defeats inflicted by the Western powers in the 19th century, Zeng Guofan, Zuo Zongtang and Li Hongzhang initiated China’s first major attempt for ‘self-strengthening’ under the slogan of ‘Chinese learning as the essence, Western learning for utility’ (zhongxue weiti, xixue weiyong) from the 1860s to the 1880s. They recommended strong warships and guns, established language schools, arsenals and dockyards, and sent students to Europe and the United States. But the whole process ended up in failure largely due to the flawed strategy of transplanting advanced foreign techniques while maintaining the conservative official ideology and anachronistic institutions, both of which stifled new ideas, creativity and individual initiatives.

The second major attempt, led by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, stood for significant institutional reforms including the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, parliamentary system and industrialization. Their Hundred Day’s Reform was aborted in 1898 in the face of the fierce ideological and political resistance from the conservative Manchu aristocracies. But the Qing Court was shaken and had to adopt certain reforms three years later which, unfortunately, led to a chaotic decentralization.

Dr. Sun Yat-sen symbolized the third major attempt for modernization with the idea of democracy and republicanism. But Sun’s parliamentarianism was crippled by military interventions and corruption. The period from the collapse of the Qing in 1911 to the Guomindang’s coming to power in 1927 was chaotic with warlord governments controlling different regions of China and no nation-wide modernization effort was possible. Amid general disillusion with democracy, Chiang Kai-shek came to power, representing the fourth attempt to establish a modern and unified China, guided by Confucian ideology and elements of fascism. But his rule was weakened internally by civil wars with the communists and challenged externally by Japan. Though tremendous efforts were made, Chiang was unable to promote a full-scale modernization of China. It is worth noting that there has been a clear utilitarian purpose for advocating democracy or dictatorship in Chinese modern history, and the advocates’ point of departure is always whether a doctrine can first make China economically strong and militarily powerful rather than the fulfillment of individuals. This constitutes an important feature of Chinese political culture which remains true today.

The prolonged state of turmoil and war hindered economic development as well as effective state action to assist modernization. According to S. Swamy, China’s overall economic growth was extremely slow with per capita GNP growing by just 3.3 per cent per decade from 1870 to 1952.¹ However, there was a visible growth of certain modern industrial sectors under indigenous Chinese ownership or foreign ownership, especially in Shanghai and surrounding areas, and in the treaty ports and Manchuria.

The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 created the national unity and state power necessary for a comprehensive nation-wide modernization programme. In this context, Mao Zedong represented the fifth attempt for modernization. Under Mao’s radical version of Marxism and Leninism his efforts produced mixed economic and political results and culminated in the disastrous Cultural Revolution. Since 1978, Deng Xiaoping initiated China’s sixth attempt for bringing this huge country into the mainstream of modern life. The goal of his reform programme is to make China an efficient modern economy by the middle of the 21st century within the framework of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.’ Against this general historical background, let us look more closely into the ideology/policy relationship during the pre-Deng period from 1949 to 1978.

B The Soviet Model (1953–1957)

From 1949 to 1952, tremendous efforts were made to restore the war-destroyed economy. A relatively prudent ideological line was followed which stressed a gradual ‘transition from the new democracy stage to socialism’ rather than a rush to socialist industrialization. The government carried out a sweeping and fairly successful land reform which provided poor peasants with land and promoted the recovery of the rural economy. The Chinese leadership encouraged private entrepreneurs and used their managerial, commercial and technical expertise to effect economic recovery.

With this recovery completed and the Korean War ended, the Chinese leadership initiated the First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957), during which, China rapidly constructed an economy based on the Soviet model. A socialist economy required replacing the anarchy of the market with central planning. Hence, a highly centralized administrative system was established in which all key economic and social organizations were nationalized. The whole economy was run as a single party-state bureaucracy with political-economic-social functions. Pursuing a Stalinist modernization strategy with priority given to the rapid growth of heavy industry, central planners determined all significant resource allocation and production targets, including enterprise inputs and outputs and their prices.

China’s adoption of the Soviet model was primarily due to the fact that China utterly lacked experience in large-scale industrial development. The Soviet experience was attractive to the Chinese communists in several ways: It was ideologically sound and compatible with the communist aspiration of the Chinese political elite; the Soviet Union achieved its industrialization on the basis of a large and relatively backward country; the Soviet Union was also isolated from outside assistance and threatened by external forces. The prospect of equally rapid industrialization strongly appealed to the Chinese leadership.

The First Five-Year Plan produced impressive results: industrial output value grew at an annual rate of 18 per cent, while agricultural output value rose by an annual average of 4.5 per cent.² Despite the initial economic achievements, the Stalinist mode of modernization soon revealed its problems: the replacement of market with central planning led to the absence of competition and the growth of excessive bureaucracy; and extraction of resources from agriculture for growth in heavy industry hindered rural development. The top-down system was marked by poor feedback, inefficiency and waste. All this made continued high growth very difficult. During this period, two competing revisions of the Soviet model gradually emerged, namely, the Maoist model and the moderate Leninist model.

C The Maoist model I: The Great Leap Forward (1957–1960)

Sharing much of the Stalinist view of rapid industrialization, Mao Zedong invented his version of a more radical approach to modernization. Influenced by his guerrilla and mass-line experience, Mao was not satisfied with the Stalinist excessively centralized bureaucratic control of the economy. Nor was Mao content with the political ‘revisionism’ in Eastern Europe and the USSR set loose by Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin.

The two distinctive features of the Maoist approach were the role of ideology and the massive labour mobilization. Mao abandoned his original plan of a gradual transition to socialism. Instead, he completed the ‘socialist transformation of agriculture, industry, commerce and handicrafts’ by 1956. Mao reversed the Hundred Flowers movement of 1956 and initiated the Anti-Rightist campaign. He also abandoned the line of the 8th CPC Congress which had declared the end of large-scale class struggle in China. He then accelerated the pace of collectivizing the rural and urban economies. With the establishment of the commune in 1958, Mao shelved the more moderate Second Five-Year Plan (1958 -1962) and started to promote ideological uniformity and the Great Leap Forward. Mao’s deviation from the Soviet model was aimed at reestablishing China as the centre of world socialist revolution and moving rapidly towards a prosperous communist society through an ideologically inspired transformation of ‘production relations.’ Mao encouraged the political activists to amalgamate China’s 700,000 collective farms into just 24,000 people’s communes with centralized accounting and hierarchy to achieve the economy of scale and, by doing so, virtually eliminated the ‘private plot’ and income differences between villages within the commune.

During the Great Leap Forward, quality and variety were neglected for the sake of greater quantities. With planning in chaos and market forces suppressed, much output was of very low quality. The most serious losses were in agriculture, where the Leap led to ‘an averaging annual fall of 9.7 per cent’ in agricultural production³ and a major famine that caused the death of about 15 million people. ‘In terms of loss of life’ the Leap ‘may have been the worst on human record.’⁴ Some scholars claimed that the Great Leap Forward cost China ‘almost a decade’ of economic growth.⁵

D The moderate Leninist model (1961–1965)

The failure of the Great Leap Forward led to a substantial retreat from the Maoist radical policies. A moderate Leninist model for modernization, identified with Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun, had been considered towards the end of the First Five-Year Plan and now was adopted. The Party decided on the policy of ‘readjustment, consolidation, filling-up and raising standards’ with regard to the national economy. This moderate approach was characterized by Chen Yun’s idea of overall balance through improved central planning, ideological uniformity and the supplementary role of the market in order to achieve overall coordination and balance among economic sectors and geographical regions. Deviating from the Stalinist and Maoist models, this approach favoured agriculture and light industry and desired to improve living standards along with industrialization. This approach was also committed to a national economy based on regional specialization rather than on local self-reliance.

Under this new approach, systematic retrenchment took place on all fronts. More realistic growth rates were set. In urban areas, investment priority shifted from steel and machinery to the production of fertilizer; the experiments with people’s communes were stopped and thousands of capital construction projects came to a halt. The output value of heavy industry in 1962 dropped by 58.8 per cent and its proportion in the total industrial output value reduced from 66.7 per cent to 53.5 per cent.⁶ Workers’ participation in management was replaced by greater authority for managers. Individual material incentives were used in enterprises. In rural areas, the communes were reduced in size, accompanied by a devolution of responsibility and authority from the communes and brigades to the teams. ‘Private plots’ and rural markets were restored, and strict limits were set on collective accumulation. The commune farming was replaced with output quotas assigned to families. As a result, economic recovery took place. Good harvests were achieved from 1962 onwards, and industrial growth was restored. By 1964, Premier Zhou Enlai announced that the recovery was complete and a Third Five-Year Plan was ready for implementation in 1966.

E The Maoist model II: The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976)

The retreat from the Great Leap Forward improved the Chinese economy, but in Mao’s perception, his power was in decline; China was changing ‘her colour’; the Communist Party had been led astray by revisionist and bureaucratic tendencies and China was further away from Mao’s idealistic goal of communism. Mao attributed the failure of the Great Leap Forward to the slow pace in the ideological transformation of the society and the existence of non-socialist elements. Mao shifted his attention to the need to purge the superstructure which was undermining the economic base.

Mao further developed his view that the development of the forces of production should be subordinated to the development of the correct relations of production. Mao put forward the slogan of ‘grasping revolution, promoting production’ on the belief that a new type of relations of production free from revisionist or bourgeois tendencies could emancipate the new forces of production which would lead to a socialist modern China.

Consequently, the moderate Leninist approach gave way to the Maoist radical approach with even greater emphasis on ideological mobilization. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, economic growth stagnated or even declined and considerable fluctuations occurred in government policies towards free markets, private plots and enterprise management. Technological progress became stagnant. Self-reliance prevailed over international trade. Exports were not viewed as demand stimulus but rather as a means to earn the hard currency to fill the gaps in domestic supply.

At the Fourth National People’s Congress held in 1975, Zhou Enlai attempted to reintroduce the moderate Leninist approach. He set forth the goal of the ‘four modernizations of agriculture, industry, science and technology and national defence’ and made it clear that to achieve the goal it was necessary to make changes in governmental policies. Zhou even invoked one of Mao’s statements on the need for a technical revolution and for borrowing technical know-how from foreign countries.⁷ But such views immediately encountered criticism from the radicals for reversing the gains of the Cultural Revolution. Such criticism began to focus on Deng Xiaoping, who had been designated by Zhou for implementing the economic modernization programme. Deng attempted to revive the moderate Leninist approach which had helped restore Chinese economy from the disastrous Great Leap Forward, but his initial successes were quickly overshadowed by a more fierce power struggle in the Party which led to his downfall and the rise of Mao-designated Hua Guofeng.

In summary, despite Maoist radicalism, China succeeded in laying a fairly extensive industrial basis for its economic development from 1949 to 1976. China’s gross material product grew at an annual average rate of over 7 per cent from 1953 to 1978, and net material product at almost 6 per cent. In the same period, its economic structure ‘shifted rapidly away from agriculture towards industry with agriculture’s share of gross material product falling from 57 to 28 percent.’⁸

However, these achievements have to be viewed against a number of serious...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Ideology and China’s Modernization in Historical Perspective
• 2 The First Cycle: From the Debate on the Criterion of Truth to Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (1978–1982)
• 3 The Second Cycle: From New Versions of Marxism to the New Technological Revolution (1983–1984)
• 4 The Third Cycle: From the Planned Commodity Economy to the Second Campaign Against Bourgeois Liberalization (1984–1987)
• 5 The Fourth Cycle: From the Primary Stage of Socialism to Deng’s Talks in South China (1987–1992)
• 6 The 14th CPC Congress: The Establishment of Deng Xiaoping’s Theory (1992–1993)
• Conclusions
• Selected Bibliography
• Index