China in the Era of Deng Xiaoping: A Decade of Reform

A Decade of Reform

M.Y.M. Kau, Susan H. Marsh, Michael Ying-mao Kau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315287478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This is a reference on the ten years (1978 to 1987) of Deng Xiaoping's power in China. It also offers the views of Sinologists of the time. The concluding section examines policy implications arising from Deng's rule for the four great East Asian powers.

PART I:
ANALYTICAL PAPERS AND COMMENTS

1

CHINESE REFORM SOCIALISM UNDER DENG XIAOPING:

Theory and Practice

Lowell Dittmer

THE DENG XIAOPING model of developmental socialism is much more tentative and pragmatic than its forerunner, stepping gingerly from stone to stone in a stream (to use a Chinese metaphor)¹ rather than leaping forward, giving it a protean quality difficult to pin down. This remains true despite the amplified information and improved access to sources available to contemporary China scholars. Whereas Mao’s theory of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat seemed to have been constructed a priori, in response to the logical imperatives of doctrine, the thinking behind the post-Mao reforms seems to have arisen a posteriori; it is not coincidental that Western accounts of late Maoism have often been theoretically “supply-side,” whereas accounts of the Deng model have tended to deemphasize the impact of theory, placing it in the position of a dependent variable when it is considered at all.² Though such a distinction involves considerable oversimplification, in the sense that Maoism at its most radical was still shaped by political-economic exigencies just as the policies of Deng Xiaoping are also undergirded by theoretical assumptions, there is some truth to it.

It is thus fitting that we begin with an examination of the Deng model in practice. This examination begins, not with the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee that marks the advent of Deng’s political hegemony, but back in the period of New Democracy and Socialist Construction, where indications of a theoretical divergence between what later became known as Mao Zedong Thought and the “revisionist” thinking of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping made their first appearance. This survey of the prehistory of Deng’s thought will be partial and superficial rather than comprehensive, and unabashedly tendentious, selecting for special attention those incidents that hindsight reveals to have anticipated the genesis of the reform package. It will be followed by a “phenomenological” reconstruction (i.e., without critical commentary) of the theoretical arguments implied by, and sometimes articulated in defense of, reform policy innovations. In the second section this picture of the reformist policy “line”—and the imminent theory formulated in its wake— will be confronted by externally generated queries, comparisons, and theoretical schema.

The Practice of Reform

Origins

The first indications of sharp policy conflict within the leadership did not emerge until the mid-1950s, in the course of the completion of collectivization, but as early as 1951 there was already preliminary evidence of disagreement between Mao and Liu Shaoqi, with whom Deng seems to have been closely associated at the time.³ In the fifth volume of his Selected Works, Mao criticized Liu in sharp, explicit terms:

In July 1951, Liu Shaoqi turned his back on Comrade Mao Zedong and the party center to personally write a commentary recklessly criticizing a report submitted by the Shanxi Provincial Party Committee on the development of mutual aid and cooperativization in agricultural production, moreover distributing [the commentary] to every locality. In his commentary Liu Shaoqi opposed Comrade Mao Zedong’s line on the socialist transformation of agriculture, insulting it as being a “mistaken, dangerous, Utopian idea of agricultural socialism.”⁴

It is now possible to verify the accuracy of Mao’s quotation and to put it into the context of the original document.⁵ The thrust of Liu’s criticism of the Shanxi Party Committee report was that precipitate speed in the implementation of cooperativization would outpace the financial wherewithal of the freshly established cooperative organizations to ensure their prosperous future—the same concern that was to animate Deng Zihui (who then chaired the Rural Work Department) when he, in a meeting chaired by Liu, moved to dissolve twenty thousand Agricultural Production Cooperatives that in his judgment could not meet such criteria of financial soundness in 1955.⁶ Mao again expressed ire at the foot-dragging tactics of the “old women with bound feet” who had opposed him, imposing self-criticisms and demotions to punish them.⁷

On the surface, this seems to have been no more than a tactical disagreement concerning the scope and pace at which collectivization would be implemented. That it was, but in light of subsequent developments, it seems also to have signaled a more fundamental strategic divergence concerning the necessary preconditions for socialization of the means of production. To Mao, these preconditions seem to have been essentially political: could sufficient peasant enthusiasm be mobilized to achieve decisive collective action? If so, the party should strike while the iron was hot Further material preconditions need not be supplied—let alone state investment in the movement—for the economies of scale achieved in the new socialist units offered the capability of vastly increasing outputs without additional inputs. To Mao, improved “relations of production,” to use the Marxist terminology (the more efficient collective organization, the emancipated productive enthusiasm of the peasantry), were of decisive importance. To his opponents, the “forces of production” were still decisive; implicitly discounting the advantages of higher economies of scale, they assumed that any improvement of output would require additional material inputs—meaning specifically (in this case) that the period of family farming should last until industrialization produced the farm machinery that would make larger collective units more efficient Implicit in this contretempts were at least three issues: the relative importance of material versus ideal motivations, economic growth versus redistribution, and organization versus mass participation. On each issue Mao accorded priority to the latter, while his opponents tilted toward the former.

Suggestive as such reconstructions of the historical record may be, it would probably be erroneous to press them too far. Whereas Mao’s putative opponents did have their differences with Mao, their objections seem to have been relatively tentative at this stage, for they promptly reversed course when Mao chastised them, made self-criticisms, and expedited the timetable for collectivization. All this suggests that their reservations did not yet rest on deeply felt or theoretically elaborated convictions; they were acting more on the basis of pragmatic than principled considerations; so when Mao was able to demonstrate that accelerated collectivization was compatible with continued increases in agricultural production, they yielded. Indeed, both Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping subsequently became enthusiastic supporters of the Great Leap Forward, which reen-acted the errors of overhasty collectivization in spades. Only after the Leap had failed decisively did Mao’s opponents gain sufficient confidence in their own alternative policy preferences and theoretical assumptions to put these into effect in a relatively systematic way, in the context of economic reconstruction. But before looking at what came through the reform “window” of the early 1960s, one other incident of the late 1950s deserves momentary consideration.

The so-called double hundred (“Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend”) warrants mention because it illustrates the attitude of these proleptic reformers to “public opinion” and elite-mass relations. Clearly they were not “liberals,” to judge from MacFarquhar’s analysis of the intra-elite cleavage that preceded the decision;⁸ Deng Xiaoping himself seems to have led the antirightist movement that suppressed outspoken critics of the regime in the fall of 1957. Yet they also expressed certain subsequent misgivings about the severity of the antirightist movement, and Deng Xiaoping sanctioned the rehabilitation of some 200,000 “rightists” in 1977. During the early 1960s, they also sponsored a somewhat pallid revival of the double hundred, in which professional or academic expertise was meant to function as a gatekeeper to “blooming.” When this too nonetheless got out of hand, resulting in the airing of Aesopian criticisms of Mao’s personality cult, inter alia, it was their desire to limit the official reaction to “gentle breeze and mild rain” that overtaxed Mao’s patience and eventually triggered his resort to extramural rectification techniques in the Cultural Revolution.

During the early 1960s, the reform package soon to be denounced as “revisionism” was articulated systematically, as the reformers took advantage of Mao’s retreat to theoretical concerns and their own promotion to the “first front” of policy-making to present a relatively comprehensive platform (while still avoiding any frontal ideological confrontation with Mao). In the wake of Sun Yefang’s and others’ theoretical mooting of the “law of value,” free market activity was expanded in the countryside, peasant private plots enlarged, and in certain provinces hit particularly hard by the post-Leap depression, land was reassigned to peasant families in a revival of the production responsibility system of the mid-1950s. In industry, there was greater emphasis on economic efficiency, including an attempt to detach the party committees from control and devolve authority to factory management, greater reliance on piece-rate and performance-gauged incentives, professionalized accounting, and the introduction of horizontally integrated complexes (“trusts”). Liu was even quoted in support of reviving the stock market and permitting a substantial private sector to survive socialization of industry. Education became more elitist and meritocratic, with clear qualitative distinctions between full-time and part-time schooling.

Politics and ideology were almost completely untouched, tacitly conceding Mao’s hegemony in these areas. Yet during the Cultural Revolution, Mao himself claimed he could find the ideological precursors of what he dubbed “revisionism” in the theoretical writings of Liu Shaoqi—the only other party leader besides himself to have made a significant contribution to the party classics. It is perhaps not coincidental that Liu’s Collected Works were republished following Mao’s political eclipse (and Liu’s own posthumous rehabilitation) and have been circulated relatively intensively in connection with party rectification, indicating they have regained canonical status under reform auspices. Though now superseded by the publication of the Collected Works of Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun, Liu’s works remain philosophically richer than these more politically topical (and clearly written) companion volumes. In my judgment, Mao was essentially correct in tracing the roots of reform socialism to Liu’s theoretical contributions, which provide an articulate, internally consistent grounding for the policies introduced in the early 1960s. And I would argue that there is a direct line of descent between these limited experiments and the reforms implemented on a far grander scale in the post-Mao period. The same general posture toward innovation seems to have reemerged, for example, consisting of open-minded eclecticism with regard to political economy, but a much more cautious approach to ideological or political innovation. Certainly in the area of party life and ethics, Liu’s contributions remain definitive. Because Liu’s ideological framework continues to inform Deng’s reform efforts, a brief synopsis seems appropriate.

Liu’s worldview was characterized by moral elitism, a conviction that the party leadership in particular was morally superior to the masses it led. The contrast with Mao’s populist emphasis on the masses as the ultimate source of truth and virtue could not be more striking. The basis of the party elite’s superiority was its synoptic vision: ordinary people could discern and pursue their individual and group interests, but only the elite were able to rise to the appropriate level of abstraction to understand the interests of the people as a whole; only the party elite had the moral self-discipline to renounce personal advantage on behalf of public interest. Such self-discipline had to be “cultivated” through constant study and self-criticism. Thus, the party was conceived to constitute a hierarchy of moral efficiency in which those able to serve the interests of the whole and abnegate short-term self-interest would rise to the top. For the party was so arranged that the interests of the dedicated pa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Analytical Papers and Comments
• Part II: Public Addresses and Comments
• Index