Marxism and the Making of China

A Doctrinal History

J. Gregor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137379498
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An assessment of the influence of the Marxism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on revolutionary developments in China. The work covers the period from the first appearance of the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong until its full transformation by Deng Xiaoping - into a nationalist, developmental, single-party, developmental dictatorship.

Chapter 1

China, Marxism, and the Background in Time

The [Chinese] government is based on the paternal management of the Emperor, who keeps all departments of the state in order. . . . Despotism is necessarily the mode of government. . . . On both rivers, the Huanghe and the Yangzi, dwell many millions of human beings. . . . The population and the thoroughly organized state arrangements, descending even to the minutest details, have astonished Europeans.

—G. W. F. Hegel1

The makers of Marxism, Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), came to their interest in China through the scholarship of G. W. F. Hegel and those Europeans who began to write extensively about the Central Kingdom at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. While historians had written accounts of the ancient kingdoms of the East, China, as a reasonably well-defined cultural entity, still remained largely unknown to Europeans. When the overseas expansion of Europeans brought China more insistently to their attention, Hegel was sufficiently impressed to suggest that human history seemed to have begun with the Chinese. He identified China as the oldest of the Asiatic riverine civilizations with which he was to concern himself in his universal history.2

Hegel was correct in so far as it is generally accepted that China probably has existed as a political and cultural continuity longer than any other on the planet. As early as the Neolithic era, first evidence of what was to be China was left behind by millet farmers in the Yellow River basin. That basin was soon provisioned with some of the cultural and political features with which China was to remain identified through the nineteenth century.

Hegel described a land of lofty mountains, terraced plateaus, extensive plains, and large and small basins, traversed by some of the world’s longest river systems. He told of northwest China suffering the lowest rainfall in the entire region, with no rainfall at all in its desert areas. The first settlements of those who were to become Chinese were threaded along the rivers, with irrigation providing the fresh water for the increasingly vast and intricate hydro-agricultural arrangements that typified even the first communities.

In fact, records indicate that China’s legendary first dynasty, more than fifteen hundred years before the Common Era, had assumed responsibility for the governance of the hydraulic system. Thereafter, political unity was organized around the presence of a ruling dynast and an attendant hierarchy—whose authority to rule was based on the supposed possession of demonstrable virtue. The rationale of governance was given doctrinal formulation and made public, and adherence was made obligatory. By the third century before the Common Era, Confucius (551–479 BCE) and Mencius (372–289 BCE) had codified the essentials of that public ethic—to inextricably link the ruled and the rulers together in doctrine until the advent of modern times.

Confucius conceived himself as a vehicle for the transmission of the culture of earlier times. His doctrines rested on the authority of the sage-kings of Chinese antiquity and reflected the concepts of the period that subordinated subjects to rulers, women to men, and children to parents. What emerged from his efforts was the rationale for an autocratic paternalism that, over time, might either take on the properties of a stilted and structured humanism or an inflexible authoritarianism. Political constraints on personal liberty were the price exacted from subjects for the creation of monuments of historic dimension, an increasingly sophisticated culture, an effective communications infrastructure, a unified currency, and victories in the field.

The Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE)—one of the dynasties that followed on the establishment of the imperial system—tempered the unrelieved oppressiveness of political rule with Confucian proprieties and humane sentiments. There was an effort to infuse religious faith into public creed—and, in fact, in the latter part of the Han dynasty, Daoism and Buddhism made their appearance. For all intents and purposes, the public philosophies that were to govern the behavior of the peoples of millennial China had made their appearance. The rule that resulted settled about sixty million persons, sustained by an agricultural economy, on an area about two-thirds the geographic size of the contemporary United States.

By the end of the Han dynasty, Chinese civilization had taken on those features that were to characterize it for almost two millennia. Whatever the alternating periods of internal political strife and disunity, those traits reemerged that thereafter would be forever identified as those of a timeless China. After civil strife, peasant rebellion, or warring states, dynasty would follow dynasty, each successive dynasty always possessed of common properties. It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Common Era that European seafarers and merchants began to systematically explore China and to reflect on those features that were to occupy their intellectual and political interests until our time.

China was informed by a set of institutional features nowhere to be found in the history of Europe. The Celestial Kingdom exhibited economic and political properties known neither to classical antiquity nor medieval or modern Europe. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, European impressions of China had become increasingly standardized, and in the third decade of that century, Hegel delivered a simple, plausible, and eminently memorable rendering of that prevailing academic fancy.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel spoke of China as a historic constant—a political community that emerged at the very commencement of human evolution, to endure, thenceforward, as a “fixed and stationary” phenomenon. It was a concept that was to have enduring influence on the young Karl Marx—and through him, on the history of Asia throughout the twentieth century.

For Hegel, “the empire of the two rivers,” whatever the alternating interludes, would serve history as the “most durable kingdom in the world.”3 Its ruler would be uniquely sovereign—around whom all things would gravitate. The emperor would be both heir and conduit for institutions, laws, norms, and customs that traced their origins back to the very dawn of human history. Without him, the “thoroughly organized” infrastructure of the state would not function. It was he who chose the members of the functional hierarchy that staffed the unchanging unity of China. It was he who served as the soul of a system that reconstituted itself after every dislocation. However fractured by war and revolution, however overwhelmed by invasion, flood, or famine, China forever remained herself. It was an image that helped shape the interpretations that were to follow.

For Hegel, China, as that “durable kingdom,” was a community that, by virtue of its very durability, existed in space, but not in time. Its history was “unhistoric.” Dynasty followed upon dynasty, and emperor upon emperor, but China remained, knit together by regulations governing every aspect of behavior—regulations that could be traced to its very childhood in political history.4 In that China, without “will or insight,” subjects obeyed their ruler, “as children their parents.” The “ahistoric State,” fashioned and informed by the “one all-absorbing personality” of the emperor, was paternal, holding together its constituent members by its provident care, by admonitions, and by retributive inflictions.

For Hegel, that was the empire with which world history began. The historic Chinese state was “thoroughly organized” along China’s two major rivers, and the state, however frequently “broken up into many provinces, which carried on long wars with each other,” nonetheless remained that enduring phenomenon that so fascinated Europeans. It was there that the “One Being,” the “Oriental despot,” who made the state “supremely dominant,” was to be found. Unlike those systems familiar to European history, Oriental despotism recognized neither individual nor corporate rights independent of the state—so that the state was not required to enter into negotiated compromise with, nor coerce submission from, its subjects. Rather, the Chinese government proceeded exclusively “from the Emperor alone, who sets it in movement as a hierarchy of officials or Mandarins,” who themselves unilaterally are “appointed to superintend the roads, the rivers, and the coasts. Everything is arranged with the greatest minuteness. In particular, great attention is paid to the rivers.” Hegel went on to add that among the traditional edicts of imperial China one typically found those designed to govern the flow, and the efficient distribution, of water. The implications were that the peculiarities of the Central Kingdom were derivative of the peculiar economic needs of the empire. Political rule was an instrumentality for assuring the necessary functionality of a hydraulic agricultural system.

So integrated was the entire arrangement that should the Emperor prove inadequate to his tasks, “the government is paralyzed from head to foot, and given over to carelessness and caprice—for there is no other legal power or institution extant, but this superintendence and oversight of the Emperor.” On those occasions when the state proves insufficient, unrest invariably results. Resistance emanates from within the palaces, and disquiet mounts in the countryside. At those times, it is said that “Heaven has withdrawn its mandate,” and a dynasty falls and another assumes its obligations—beginning another dynastic cycle.

That was the characterization of China that was common among European scholars by the mid-nineteenth century. Thus, Karl Marx was to speak of an “Oriental despotism” in which an “Asiatic fundamental form” of property would lend shape and substance to collective life, where individuals, and the proprietors of small acreage, conceived themselves not as owners, but rather as profiting from grants from “a higher or more inclusive proprietor”—a despot who “as real owner . . . appeared as the father of all.”5

By the time Marx ventured on his account, there was an effort among European thinkers to understand Asian despotism in some comprehensive sense. Europeans felt that they were dealing with a unique social form, both mysterious and portentous in its implications. How were they to understand a society that possessed a highly developed economic infrastructure as early as the Song dynasty (960–1229 CE), traded at distances as far away as East Africa during the Ming dynasty(1368–1644 CE), invented gunpowder, navigated the vast oceans guided by magnetic compass, produced the finest porcelain in the world, and yet failed to create a machine economy capable of producing weapons to protect itself, even as Europeans were battering down the country’s defenses with rifled cannon and breech loading rifles.

The search for a plausible explanation of the peculiar properties of China continued throughout the nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, Marxists had fabricated something of an account that remains worthy of reflection to the present day. It was an account of Oriental despotism that tended to render Asian cultures as somehow unique, destined to follow a historic trajectory forever different from that of the cultures of Europe.

History and Economic Variables

The commencement of the nineteenth century brought with it the first full impact of the Industrial Revolution. Ahead was the mechanization and systematic expansion of machine industry. Behind was a period of social transformation—a time of remarkable ferment in England following the Glorious Revolution (1688)—as Britons began to a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Transliteration
• 1 China, Marxism, and the Background in Time
• 2 Marxism, Revolution, and Development
• 3 Marxism, Revolution, and the Making of New Nations
• 4 China, Developmental Nationalism, and Revolution
• 5 Mao Zedong and the Conquest of China
• 6 The Making of Maoism
• 7 “Mao Zedong Thought”
• 8 The Passing of Maoism as a Developmental System
• 9 Maoism, Deng Xiaoping, and “Proletarian Internationalism”
• 10 The Ideology of Post-Maoist China
• 11 New China in Comparative Perspective
• Select Bibliography
• Index