The Transition to Socialism in China (Routledge Revivals)

Mark Selden, Victor Lippit, Mark Selden, Victor Lippit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317239451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

First published in 1982. The dramatic changes in policy and theory following the death of Chairman Mao in 1976 and the publication of the most extensive official and unofficial data on the Chinese economy and society in twenty years both necessitated and made possible a thorough reconsideration of the full range of issues pertaining to the political and economic trajectory of the People's Republic in its first three decades. The contributors to this volume initiated a comprehensive effort to address fundamental problems of China's socialist development and to reassess earlier perspectives and conclusions.

Maoism, Titoism, Stalinism: Some Origins and Consequences of the Maoist Theory of the Socialist Transition

Edward Friedman

Introduction

Maoism, Titoism, and Stalinism are shorthand terms for the three broad notions which have legitimated the policies of the socialist transition in the People's Republic of China.¹ I will try to clarify these three socialist projects by sketching contours of these notions as they were first drawn between 1948 and 1958.

What has struck most observers is the struggle by Titoists and Maoists to avoid the errors, defeats and horrors of diverse aspects of the Soviet Union's experience. But the Stalinist path may have seemed more attractive in the 1950s when Minister of National Defense Peng Dehuai and others were generally incapable of imagining swift economic progress without close ties to the USSR.

The major theorist of the Maoist position was Chen Boda.² By 1958, in developing a critique of how capitalism was restored in Yugoslavia, Maoism took the form of new policies to guarantee the transition through socialism to communism. The new commitment was to a mass campaign, labor intensive, anti-economic, change of consciousness approach to the socialist transition.

The target of Chen's 1958 campaign was China's Titoists. Leading Titoists included Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun, and Sun Yefang. Since Chen Boda accepted and built on Stalin's notion of Titoism as capitalist restoration, his Maoism was not the antithesis of Stalinism. Yet because Chen's Maoism shared similar historical origins with Titoism, it also shared key Titoist concerns — a fiery nationalism, bureaucratism as a major obstacle to socialism, a need to positively woo the peasantry in the coming transformation.

Maoism was theoretically unique. Yet it built on Stalinist notions and included Titoist concerns. The complexity behind analytic shorthands such as Maoism, Titoism, and Stalinism in China can best be comprehended by relating theoretical distinctiveness to actual historical evolution.

1. Titoism as Capitalist Restoration

In 1948 Tito broke with Stalin. By 1953 Yugoslavia's Titoists had developed a theoretical critique of Stalinism as a terroristic, bureaucratic, overcentralized, antidemocratic path which could not be considered socialist. When Tito's Yugoslavia broke with Stalin's Soviet Union, it also opened up the possibility that Leninist parties controlling the levers of state power and committed to socialism as described by Marx could take a far more humane path than that carved out by Stalin. Tito's quest began to open new vistas for many. Such people began to look more sympathetically at Bukhara's opposition to Stalin's murderous forced draft collectivization.³ They looked into building on the democratic, popular, egalitarian, and antibureaucratic elements in Marx and Lenin.

Titoist efforts to move in a socialist direction while avoiding the worst features of Stalinism had eventually to concern the revolutionary group coming to power in China which was confronted in 1949 on the establishment of the People's Republic with what seemed to be the same dilemma as Yugoslavia. How should it wield power through a socialist transition to achieve the humane goals for which it had fought, an independent people determining its own destiny and building a flourishing, just, and equitable society without exploitation by classes which owned the means of production, classes which could live a life of plenty while most others went hungry and lost home and family and life itself? How to do all of this in one poor and backward peasant society, in China?

The head of China's Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought Institute noted many decades later that

in the beginning, countries which adopted socialism ... adopted the same "pattern" as that of the Soviet Union ... it was quite inevitable.... Later the differences between the forms of organization in the world's socialist countries became greater and greater. In the early 1950s there appeared a form which was quite different from the pattern of the Soviet Union, the autonomous system of Yugoslavia.⁴

But would it be reasonable to expect Mao Zedong and other nationalistic Chinese revolutionaries to be quick to inquire into non-Stalinist socialist strategies? These Chinese Marxists led by Liu Shaoqi had already at the end of the 1930s attempted to make over their Party to avoid the horror of Stalinist inner-Party purge.⁵ Mao had made explicit his opposition to centralized statist development of the Stalinist sort. Stalin's loyal Chinese worshiper, Wang Ming, was the major inner-Party opponent mechanically and dogmatically miming the USSR. Mao's indigenous Chinese Leninist-Marxists explicitly distinguished their new patriotic path. It could include almost all China's people in a united front encompassing bourgeois classes — peasants, merchants, and entrepreneurs — who gradually would learn and affirm the superior nature of socialism.

This might have predisposed Mao toward Tito. It didn't. Mao moved in a profoundly anti-Tito direction. Despite all of Stalin's crimes and cruelties, many of which Mao subsequently acknowledged and criticized, Mao came to define Stalin as a legitimate socialist revolutionary successor to Marx and Lenin. Mao came to define Tito as Stalin defined Tito, a traitor to socialism, a friend of imperialism. On the socialist transition, much of the Maoist analysis as it developed between 1948 and 1958 was infused with the need to follow on the misleading dualism that Stalin's way was true to socialism, that Titoism was the enemy's way.

Mao's identification with Stalin's socialist transition may have been overdetermined and inevitable. Mao believed political movements required leaders. In an international struggle, Stalin's Soviet Union emerging victorious over international fascism as the world's number two industrialized military power could play a global anti-imperialist leadership role. Weak, little Yugoslavia, apparently on the verge of national extinction, hardly seemed a natural to become a leading champion of a nonaligned movement of Third World nations. The situation defined the choice for Mao. In 1948 Tito contended that he was an orthodox adherent of Stalin's socialism. There was no alternative Titoist strategy then.

China's revolutionary armies then stood on the steps of China's capital city. Their armed adversary was backed by the rising superpower from America. The government in Washington was already engaged in cold war combat with the Soviet Union which the Soviet government feared could turn into a hot war as America struck with nuclear weapons. Whatever China's new leaders had not learned in decades of murderous combat, they well knew the ultimate danger of isolation when confronted by an armed foe which might try to destroy them. Survival itself dictated holding out more than an olive branch to the United States while making certain of continuing lines of trade and military support from the Soviet Union. To stand with Tito against Stalin meant jeopardizing a lifeline to Moscow while thrashing in perilous waters churned up by a hostile United States. Not to denounce Tito would be to court extinction. Surprisingly Liu Shaoqi's November 1, 1948, statement on the Stalin-Tito issue, "Internationalism and Nationalism," came from a context in which leaders of China's revolutionary movement were quite divided on how to respond to Yugoslavia's plight.

Stalin had diplomatically stood with the Chinese revolution's armed adversary, the Chiang Kai-shek side, to the end. Stalin had instructed Mao not to fight for victory. Stalin's forces had stolen billions of dollars worth of scarce industrial equipment from China's northeast as war reparations from Japan. Stalin was allied to the Wang Ming faction in China's Communist Party which had opposed Mao's group. Any Chinese Maoist patriot had to know that the interests of Mao's China and Stalin's Russia were not always congruent, that Moscow regularly sacrificed vital Chinese concerns (e.g. recognizing the Japanese puppet government of Manchukuo in China's northeast) to Soviet strategic priorities.

Besides, the Soviet economy was a wreck after World War II. Surely there was much to be said for the Tito position which treated both Moscow and Washington as expansionist imperialists with the American side less an immediate threat to Yugoslav independence. This meant comprehending Russian expansionism as a continuation of a centuries old Czarist drive. (Mao too would eventually adopt this view, but not until twenty years later, long after he defined his notion for China's socialist transition as the negation of Tito's policies.)

Mao already differed with Stalin, who saw international politics pitting imperialist America against peace-loving Soviet Russia in Europe, a contest between capitalism and a supposed international proletariat. Liu expressed the view of the whole Mao leadership in focusing on real Third World struggles for independence of imperialism, for

without such national liberation movements which say, weaken and undermine the foundations of imperialist domination, it would be extremely difficult for the proletariat of the imperialist countries to achieve victory in the struggle against monopoly capital and to attain its emancipation.

... the victories of the national independence movement of the oppressed nations of the world over imperialists... will deprive these countries of their colonies, undermine the foundation on which they dominate the world, greatly weaken the rule of the imperialists in their home countries, and will therefore lead to these liberations of the proletariat and the peoples of the countries from the rule of imperialism.⁶

This position, similar to Tito's, seemed a nationalist heresy to Stalin. Liu and Mao insisted that the patriotic bourgeoisie could participate in anti-imperialist struggles and side with the forces of socialism in the colonial and semicolonial world which contained most of the earth's people and therefore would decide the fate of the species. Stalin, on the other hand, insisted that the fate of the first socialist state, his Soviet Union, was the essence of international struggle. The difference was decisive. Mao's Stalinist adversary Wang Ming wrote, as he no doubt told Stalin, that on October 4 and 5, 1941, he and Mao had argued fiercely. 'I said anti-Japanese military operations in China had to be stepped up to deny Japan any chance of helping the Nazi offensive against the Soviet Union. Mao objected ... I intimated that his line was anti-Soviet...."⁷

In short, Mao played the role of a Titoist (putting socialism in his nation before Moscow's global interests) long before Tito's act gave the part meaning. Mao naturally put first leading an independent Chinese nation toward socialism. Hence when Tito gave content to the crime of which Mao had long stood accused, it had to create a crisis within the Chinese leadership. Mao had always claimed that fighting wars of national liberation was proletarian internationalism and best advanced the cause of socialism. Tito's partisans had fought such a war. But Yugoslav national independence lead to a life and death conflict with what Stalin insisted was proletarian internationalism.

Nonetheless, if China's war-torn economy, hungry people, and unfulfilled great dreams were to come alive in a world where the United States was threatening to blockade and embargo Mao's China, and if Western Europe and Japan were dependent on the United States, what alternative was there to turning to Stalin? Observers of virtually every political stripe agree that Stalin imposed harsh terms hoping to make China dependent and subservient....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• The Transition to Socialism in China
• Cooperation and Conflict: Cooperative and Collective Formation in China's Countryside
• Village in Transition
• Socialist Development in China
• Maoism, Titoism, Stalinism: Some Origins and Consequences of the Maoist Theory of the Socialist Transition
• Some Ironies of the Maoist Legacy in Industry
• Accumulation, Technology, and China's Economic Development
• National Agricultural Policy: The Dazhai Model and Local Change in the Post-Mao Era
• Market, Maoism, and Economic Reform in China
• About the Contributors