The Chinese Model of Modern Development
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The Chinese Model of Modern Development

Tian Yu Cao, Tian Yu Cao

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The Chinese Model of Modern Development

Tian Yu Cao, Tian Yu Cao

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About This Book

This study examines the Chinese model of modern development, reflecting on the historical experience of China's reform and highlighting theoretical issues that are crucial for understanding the reform in its historical and global contexts. Bringing together articles from scholars, including designers of and active participants in the reform, opinion setters in the current debates on the nature and future of the reform, and Western scholars whose ideas have had great impact on Chinese intellectuals, the book considers the goals of China's reforms and the ways in which these goals may be achieved, the most urgent issues now facing China, and globalization and its impact on China.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2005
ISBN
9781134283187
Edition
1

Part I: Socialism

Institutional and conceptual innovations

1 We should encourage institutional innovations

Du Runsheng

1 We are still far away from modernization

The modernization of a country must comprise the complete modernization of its economy, politics and culture, and must be the modernization of the whole country. The substantive aspects of modernization are also developed with time. Although the policy of reform and opening has made great progress in China, we still have a long way to go.
  • The gross national product per person this year is US$900.00, far below that of developed countries such as the USA, England, France, Germany and Japan.
  • The disparity between town and country is growing wider. The income of city dwellers is five times greater than the income of farmers. Only 37.7 per cent of the population live in the city, while the majority live in rural areas. Sixty-three per cent of the population produce food for the consumption of 37.7 per cent of the population. Following Engel’s law, when surplus agricultural commodities are too big, farmers’ incomes stagnate because it becomes hard to sell grain.
  • The average daily income of the whole rural population is lower than US$1.00 (only 6.48 Renminbi); along with the unemployed and part-time working population, they form a large proportion of the low-income nationals who expect social protection and support for the poor.
  • The funding of compulsory education has not been stable for some time; the number of illiterate people decreased, and then rose; the number of high school students is less than 25 per cent of adolescents of eligible age to go to high school. These factors affect production and employment.
The government’s guidance and services are indispensable in solving these problems. Large amounts of state and private investments are required to promote the economy, which needs more capital investment in order to develop. This requires not only time, but also the creation of new systems and technologies which will benefit future development.

2 The system is more important than technology

Looking at history, at the whole process of social development, we see that it is technological revolutions which promote the development of socially productive forces and further innovate the social system. However, when a social system cannot accommodate the full development of productive forces and bottle-necks occur, it is time to re-establish or improve the system in order to assure sustainable economic development. We can say that the system is more important than technology under these circumstances.
In the past twenty years, our country’s basic line of focus has been on building the economy, continually innovating technology and accelerating the development of the national economy. To maintain sustainable and smooth development, we now need to further improve the system and our environment, and to establish social protection.
The function of the system is to provide citizens with a standard of behavior. National modernization depends on the efforts of individuals. In the different historical stages of social development, a good system can embody all that a person depends on: respect, encouragement and guidance. It can allow a person to transform the world outside of him or herself while continually remolding his or her subjective world, to gain command of current knowledge and develop new knowledge, and to have an advantage in manpower capital. We can see that social needs can be advanced and that they can motivate scientific and technological progress through the innovations of the system. Beginning with the fourteenth century, Western Europe went through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, with society promoting human rights, as well as the notion that state sovereign rights belong to the people. Throughout this time, the ideological bonds of ignorance of medieval religion were broken, and individualism (not selfishness) was fostered, promoting the rise of capitalism and the development of an unprecedented capacity for production. This change symbolized the transformation of the system and played a major role in changing the appearance of the world, but China’s situation stagnated for a long time because of the long dominance of feudal autocracy.
Today, China has a government led by the Communist Party which can provide leverage, moving the country into a more favorable position to promote innovation of the system, and to establish a set of more stable democratic and legal rules. This opportunity is so important that we should seize it and move forward in a timely manner. The following are several important systems.

3 Socialism with Chinese characteristics

We want to build socialism with Chinese characteristics, not capitalism with Chinese characteristics. Therefore, we must pay attention to controlling the direction of development and focus on two aspects. The first is to introduce market resources and promote the development of the production force. The second is to give energetic support to the low-income groups both in the cities and the country to improve their economic status and maintain fairness in society. We built socialism in a backward country in the past, and prematurely abandoned the commodity market system and private ownership of means of production, which resulted in great losses for the people. Looking back in history, we were right to pay attention to the innovation of the system, but the arrangement of the system was unrealistic. We acted too fast and made too great a change; also, the economic forms were lacking in variety. People summarized the positive and negative experiences and learned from the mistakes, and changed bad trends into good. The turning point was the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Deng Xiaoping came up with the theory that the function of socialism is to develop the productive forces, to avoid polarization, and to provide prosperity for all. He did not outline the details of a socialist society in his discussion, but he explained that socialism as a basic system can only be built through the endeavors of several or several dozens of generations. This perspective helps us to gain a better understanding of Marxism, of how socialism develops from an idle dream into reality, and helps us as well to correctly put it into practice.

4 A market economy that can be adjusted and controlled

The introduction of a market economy is one of the substantive details of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Since the reforms, we have proved with much practice that the market system can be compatible with socialism and that resources adjusted by the market can increase products in order to accommodate the market, and bring prosperity. The prerequisite is that government adjustment and control must be maintained and the policy of non-interference should not be allowed. The market is a competitive and disparate economy that will result in polarization, and it is hard to maintain a balance between efficiency and fairness. The emergence of Western Keynesianism, social democracy, and the third way were all efforts to explore new paths. Therefore, we should standardize the function of the government. We should do some things but also restrain ourselves from doing others. We must learn how to adjust and control the market economy as quickly as possible in order to build socialism with Chinese characteristics. Right now, with the exception of the commodity market which has recently begun, the capital, land and labor markets have many problems and need to be improved. But the main trend of development is positive.

5 The structure of combined property rights

China practiced a complete public economy for more than twenty years, then changed to a system that combined economies in which public ownership is the guiding force and various ownerships coexist. This structure of ownership has more advantages than the structure of single ownership for encouraging many types of investment to play positive roles. The implementation of public ownership as the guiding force reinforces its role and effect. The state can withdraw from competitive sectors and focus its financial resources to invest in big projects such as public products, public welfare, rare products, and protecting the environment, transforming the big rivers, and so on. Among these sectors some can be run by individual proprietorship; some can be operated by proprietary companies; and some can be run by individuals while establishing control mechanisms. We can develop non-governmental enterprises to enlarge the size of the total amount of investments, maintaining flexibility and practicality and emphasizing actual effects. When we withdraw from state enterprises, we must include the masses of workers in the process of reorganizing ownership plans, in order to prevent a few people from making arbitrary decisions and causing hidden problems.
One aspect of our system of combined economies that we need to take note of is that capitalism, which was eliminated a long time ago, has recovered; it has now become an indispensable part of the socialist market economy. The socialist market economy has the capability of a capitalist enterprise along with other positive factors – promoting the development of a production force and creating employment. The rapid development of the national economy over the past twenty years proves that balancing socialism with capitalism is a good choice which suits our nation’s conditions.
In the agricultural sector, we have implemented the household contract responsibility system on public land. We have stipulated further that the system cannot be changed for thirty years, thus turning a debt relationship into a material right, so that farmers are able to use, own, benefit, transfer and mortgage the land for many years. Twenty years’ experience shows that the operation system of combined public and private ownership is indeed welcomed by farmers. To stabilize property rights, we are now establishing a legal system to protect it. On the one hand, we need to forbid arbitrary administrative adjustment. On the other hand, we should cultivate the land market, allow for paid land transfers and maintain land transfers in the market. We did not implement land privatization under the terms of market economy conditions. It would be easy to produce a land monopoly in a country that has very limited land, and cause more instability in society.
Some say that the managerial scale of a household is too small, and will affect the changes of science and technology in traditional agriculture. This argument has merit. However, we should anticipate that the population in our country will inevitably move to cities from the countryside on a large scale. By then, the managerial scale of land will have relatively increased, but we expect that it will not surpass the level of two hectares per household. The efficiency of labor inevitably decreases because of the small size of the average land occupancy per person. We also need to innovate the system in order to reduce this negative impact. In recent years we came up with a policy of industrial development in order to extend the chain of industry to agriculture. We implemented an integrated operation of production, process and sale, established leading enterprises, and pre-production and post-production organizations, and gave farmers the advantage of the combined benefits. The innovation of new technology in modern times has been changing with each passing day. Farmers have not only bought many ‘walking tractors,’ but they have also started to use information and biological technology, and prospects look good. For example, the remote sensing technique can help to plan fertilization; gene reorganizing techniques can provide farmers with new, disaster-resistant seeds which can all be used by farming households. As long as the operation of family farms still accommodates the development of production power, it will not end. The modern capitalist countries have set precedents already.
The development of modern agriculture must meet the standards to protect our ecological environment and stick to the “green” reform. With the increase of the population in our country, the pressure for more food has grown. Two billion mu of cultivated land produced 500 million tons of grain, which exhausted the maximum capacity of soil and water. This is why the output of grain was stagnant in the final years of the twentieth century. We are still short of 5 per cent to 7 per cent of the amount of grain the market demands. If we try to increase the harvest through indiscriminate deforestation, over-herding, over-fishing and over-fertilizing, we will damage the environment. This is not acceptable. We anticipate that the solution will be to develop the big areas of the northwest, implement the delivery of water from the south to the north, and create more arable land. The state needs to invest hundreds of billion Renminbi in the project and it is impossible to start it in the near future due to limitations in state finances. However, delivering southern water to the northwest is a fundamental task crucial for generations to come and this amount of money should be invested sooner rather than later. The recent shortfalls in food production can only result in a dependence on imports. The import of grain is equivalent to the import of land, and land is the main factor we are much in need of. This is an opportunity to join the WTO, open the door further, use these two markets to arrange resources and ease the tension between our population and our land.

6 The democracy of constitutional government

Our citizens are demanding to participate in politics and gain the status of negotiation as economic pluralism emerges. While some become rich, others lag behind as the economy develops, and the economic gap is growing ever wider. The disparity between town and country still exists in our country. It causes several millions of people to migrate to the cities and we do not yet have a proper employment plan for them, which is one factor that produces an unstable situation. In addition to that, different classes exist in our society. They not only cooperate but also struggle against each other, which inevitably produces conflicts. Because of these factors, we must design a set of systems to solve the problems in maintaining stability in our society. We need to put the reform of the political system and strengthening the democratic structure on the agenda.
The theory of the new democracy which Chairman Mao formulated in early times was to lead the Chinese revolution to victory and establish the New China of People’s Democracy. In 1956 he came up with the theory of handling contradictions among the people correctly. The main goal of the theory is to give play to democracy to solve problems. However, the unexpected Anti-Rightist Campaign was started in 1957, and the spearhead of struggle was towards those people in power who showed capitalist thinking. He also came up with the theory of the continuous revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. He stressed class struggle as the guiding principle and praised the philosophy of struggle in which conflict among groups is beneficial. He also called himself “Marx plus First Emperor of Qin” and to some extent the impact of his policies turned the state power of people’s democracy into the rule of totalitarianism. However, looking at all this from another perspective, the problem is not only Mao Zedong’s; it also has something to do with the limited experience of the people. In our generation, we cadres used to say that we were “closely following some policy,” and we should add that everybody has his or her own responsibilities. Building socialism was a new cause and our pioneers had no precedent to follow, apart from the former Soviet path. It is understandable that there have been “wrong experiments.”
Now we must criticize the spiritual contamination created by feudal totalitarianism in our history, replace it with the political system of democracy, and form a new kind of political culture. We must pay attention to the following values and rights, and make them the cornerstone of our social and political life. These include the values and rights of man that used to be despised, the rights of faith and thinking, the right of freedom of speech, the rights of individual security and respect, the right of freedom of association, the rights of living and moving freely, the right of property ownership and the right to legal protection. The masses can participate in national affairs, understand their rights and obligations, maintain vigilance, and have the courage to fight against any tendency towards totalitarianism and violation of people’s rights. This political culture started but did not become part of our tradition within the fifty years after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. This is the cause that countless revolutionary pioneers struggled for for a hundred years, and it is the trend of the times. We expect that it is going to succeed.
The Communist Party, as the party in power, should demonstrate correct policies and hold its members to exemplary roles. It should give play to its leading role in this country. The power of the party is given by the people. We should maintain vigilance on abusing power to seek personal gain and on creating a bureaucracy that cuts us off from the masses. We should not think that as long as the socialist system is established it will naturally have a strong appeal to the masses, that they will support every activity of the party, that we can issue orders and do whatever we want without considering the will of the masses and practicing rigid discipline. This is the lesson we should learn from the collapses of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Currently, the party leads the reform but it must also reform itself. We should prevent the practice of replacing government with the party, with no boundary between the government and enterprises, and we should avoid the pitfalls of bureaucracy. We should give play to democracy within the party, inspire democracy outside the party, make close connections with the masses, and build the citizens’ society. In addition to the organizations of workers, youths, women and intellectuals, we should also support farmers, organize farmers’ councils, allowing them to manage themselves and protect their own interests. We should strictly regulate the party and educate party members to have the correct understanding of power, so as to prevent power from penetrating the market and being abused for personal benefit or crime. We should fit in with the trend of globalization of democratic politics, improve cooperation with various democratic parties, innovate the politics of parties, and avoid following the money-controlled path of American politics.

2 Imagining alternative modernities

Perry Anderson

Let me take Tian Yu Cao’s admirable address to us as a starting point. In it, he has posed a series of questions about China’s future today. At the centre of these is the issue of whether China can or should create an alternative model of modernity which is distinct from the pattern dominant in other parts of the world. There are different ways of conceiving what such an alternative might be, but at the core of all of them lies – inevitably – an institutional question. What kind of economy, state and society should be built in China? Behind this question, however, logically lies another one. What is the range of intellectual sources from which possible models of an alternative modernity might come? For institutions typically have to be imagined before they are engineered into existence. So we need to ask: What are the contemporary resources available for such imagining?
Normally, they will be of two distinct kinds. On the one hand, there will be the historical reservoir of thoughts, experiences and struggles connected to the past of the country concerned – its cultural heritage, if you like. On the other hand, there will be the range of foreign experiences that can be studied, imported or learned from, in any given period. In the first case, obviously enough, no cultural heritage is ever either homogeneous or consensual. Any use of it for imagining a national future always involves a political selection – that is, a choice among different, often quite sharply contrasting elements of the past, that rejects some, and accepts or transforms others. In the second case, foreign experiences are never just abstract institutional kits to be assembled at will somewhere else – they are always embodied in state systems that are themselves power structures within an international order. Successful attempts at building an ‘alternative modernity’ have nearly always rested on a creative balance between these two sets of resources – that is, selective appropriation of the national past and selective learning from the external inter-state system.
How do matters stand in this respect in China today? Historically, we can distinguish three main periods in the twentieth century so far as the issue of an alternative modernity is concerned. In the first phase, extending from the 1911 Revolution to the Second World War, but centred around the movements of May Fourth, Chinese intellectuals were confronted by imperialism on the world stage, and fissiparous regimes at home, each of them – the external menace, and the internal divisions – threatening national independence. But the collapse of the Qing Empire had released a great intellectual ferment, in which Chinese who were anxious to build their own version of a modern civilization could adopt a very free attitude both towards the national past – in the ‘new culture’ movement, and associated developments – and to a wide variety of external political experiences abroad. Two of the latter were particularly important in offering alternative models of social and state construction – Japan and Russia: starkly different experiences, yet each exercising a great force of attraction on Chinese thinkers of the time. However, the range of foreign intellectual resources was by no means confined to these two countries. Chinese intellectuals of this generation were often widely travelled, and had studied or worked in many different parts of the world: France, Germany, the USA, South-East Asia, Turkey and so on.
In the second period, running from the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the mid-1970s, there was much less intellectual discussion about alternative futures. But, in the Maoist period, the state itself sought very energetically to create an alternative Chinese modernity. Initially, it aimed at a synthesis...

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