>In order to change Chinese feudal society towards Communist social
>order, which is understood by Communists as a necessary goal of human
>development, Mao developed specific methods out of Leninist concepts
>which renedered special characteristics to Chinese Communism, its
>strengths and shortcomings. These methods, above all
>the system of organized mass movements, stress the change of social
>consciousness, i.e. the creation of new men for a new society, as the
>basis for changing reality, i.e. the mode of production. The concept of
>the mass politics, relevant in Chinese political thought from ancient
>time, plays a role as important as that of the elite cadre corps within
>the Party.
>The mass movement as an instrument of political communication from above
>to below is peculiar to Chinese Communist organization. This phenomenon
>is of utmost importance in understanding the nature and dynamics of the
>governmental structure of the Communists Party of China (CPC). The
>theoretical foundation of mass movement as a means of mediation between
>the will of the leaders and the people presupposes that nothing is
>impossible for the masses, quantitatively understood as a collective
>subject, if their power is concentrated by a Party of correct thought
>and action. This concept comes out of Mao's romantic faith in the great
>strength the masses are capable of developing in the interest of their
>own well-being. So the "will of the masses" has to be articulated by
>the masses and within the masses. This the CPC calls the "mass line".
>Mao's mass line theory requires that the leadership elite be close to
>the people, that it is continuously informed about the people's will and
>that it transforms this will into concrete actions by the masses.
>>From the masses - back to the masses! This means: take the scattered
>and
>unorganized ideas of the masses and, through study, turn them into
>focused and systemic programs, then go back to the masses and propagate
>and explain these ideals until the masses embrace them as their own.
>Thus mass movements are initiated at the highest level, announced to
>Party cadres at central and regional work conferences, subject to cadre
>criticism and modified, after which starts the first phase of mass
>movement. Mass organizations are held to provoke the "people's will",
>through readers' letters to newspapers and rallies at which these
>letters are read and debated. The results are then officially discussed
>by the staff of leading organs of the state and the Party, after which
>the systematized "people's will" is clarified into acts of law or
>resolutions, and then the mass movement spreads to the whole nation.
>Until the Cultural Revolution, the history of Chinese politics is a
>history of mass movements.
>Mass movements successfully implemented Land Reform 1950-53; Marriage
>Reform 1950-52; Collectivization 1953 - the General Line of Socialist
>Transformation (from national bourgeois democratic revolution to
>proletarian socialist revolution); Nationalization 1955 (from private
>ownership of industrial means of production into state ownership). The
>method against opposition was thought reform through "brain washing"
>(without the derogatory connotation), which is a principle of preferring
>to change the consciousness of political opponents instead of physically
>liquidating them.
>The Hundred Flower Movement, 1957 was launched on February by Mao with
>his famous 4-hour speech; "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions
>among the People" before 1,800 leading cadres. In it, Mao distinguished
>"contradiction between the enemy and ourselves"
>from "contradiction among the people" which should not be resolved by a
>dictatorship, i.e. physical force, but by open discussion with criticism
>and counter criticism.
>Up until 1957, the mass movement policies of Mao achieved spectacular
>success. Land reform was completed, the struggle for women's
>emancipation was progressing well, and collectivization and
>nationalization was leading the nation into socialism. Health services
>were a model of socialist construction in both cities and the
>countryside. The Party's revolutionary leadership was accepted
>enthusiastically by society.
>By 1958, agriculture production almost doubled from 1949 (108 million
>tons to 185 million tons), coal production quadrupled to 123 million
>tons, steel production grew from 0.1 million tons to 5.3 million tons.
>The only problem came from bourgeois intellectual rebellion.
>On May 25, 1957 Mao expressed his anxiety at a session of the Standing
>Committee of the Politburo, and gave his approval to those who warned
>against too much bourgeois liberty.
>That afternoon, Mao said at a Conference of Communists Youth League
>cadres that "all words and deeds which deviate from socialism are
>basically wrong".
>At the opening session of the Peoples Congress on June 26, Zhou Enlai
>initiated the "counter criticism" against the critics.
>Mao's call for open criticism was serious and genuine, but the
>discussion he had conceived of as a safety-valve reached a degree of
>intensity he had not anticipated. Mao over-estimated the stability of
>the political climate.
>Against this background, the CPC stood at the crossroad of choosing the
>Soviet model of development or an independent path.
>Economy development was based on three elements:
>1) Build up heavy industry at the expense of agriculture.
>2) The establishment of an extensive system of individual incentives by
>mean of which productive forces could be developed from a conviction
>that the superiority of socialist modes of production would be
>vindicated by visible rise in living standards,
>3) The acceleration of the socialist transformation of society in order
>to create the precondition required by the CPC for establishing a
>socialist order.
>Two paths were opened to the CPC leadership in 1958:
>1) a phase of consolidation
>2) pushing forward toward permanent revolution.
>Mao was forced by geopolitical conditions (withdrawal of Soviet aid and
>US embargo) to overcome the lack of capital through mobilization of
>China's vast labor reservoir. The strategy was to connect political
>campaigns to production campaigns.
>Under pressure from orthodox Leninists within the Party apparatus, with
>the failure of the "Hundred Flower Movement", Mao concluded it was
>impossible to create a socialist consciousness through a gradual
>improvement of material living conditions; that consciousness and
>reality had to be changed concurrently and in conjunction through
>gigantic new efforts at mobilization.
>This led to the Anti-Rightist Campaign 1957-58 followed by "Three Red
>Banner" in Spring 1958 initiating simultaneous development of industry
>and agriculture through the use of both modern and traditional methods
>of production under the "General Line of Building Socialism". It was to
>be implemented through a labor intensive development policy by a "Great
>Leap Forward" and by establishing a comprehensive collectivization by
>establishing "People's Communes".
>The GLP was not as senseless as some suggest. It called for the new
>system of "Two Decentralizations, Three Centralizations, One
>Responsibility." By this it was meant the decentralized use of labor and
>local investment, central control over political decisions, planning and
>administration of national investment capital and one responsibility
>meant every basic unit to account for itself to its supervising unit.
>The GLP was successful in many areas. The one area that failed
>attracted the most attention. It was the area of backyard steel furnace
>production. The technological requirement of steel making, unlike
>hydro-electricity, did not lend itself to labor intensive mass
>movements. Yet steel was the symbol of industrialization and a heroic
>attempt had to be made to overcome the lack of capital. The attempt
>failed conspicuously, but its damage to the economy was overrated.
>The real test however, was in the People's Commune. Favorable weather
>conditions produced high yields in 1958 in the experimental communes.
>This led to a rush nationwide to follow suit, even though almost
>everywhere the fundamental preconditions for successful operation were
>absent. Most did not have adequate administrative offices, nurseries,
>canteens, old peoples homes, hospitals, etc.
>In other places, the local leadership took the transition to communism
>at face value and severed all connection with supervising organs in the
>name of the withering away of the state. Disorder grew into chaos
>within months.
>During the Wuhan Party Plenum, December 1958, Marshal Peng Dehuai
>criticized the over-extended commune program which led to the Plenum
>initiating a readjustment of the "Three Red Banner" policy.
>Conccurrently the Central Committee approved "the wish of Comrade Mao
>Zedong not to stand again as a candidate for the Chairmanship of the PRC
>after the end of his term in office".
>Liu Shaoqi was elected as head of state by the second People's Congress
>on April 27, 1959 and became heir apparent after Mao in the Party.
>In the fateful Lushan conference July 2-August 16 1959, Marshal Peng
>shifted his criticism from policy to the person of the leader. On July
>23, Mao in an emphatic speech, rejected the reproach of his critics and
>declared that the "Great Leap Forward" and the People's Commune had
>brought about more advantages than disadvantages. Mao threatened an open
>split:
>"If we deserve to perish I shall go away, I shall go to the countryside
>and lead the peasants to overthrow the government. If you of the PLA
>will not follow me, the I shall find a Red Army. But I believe that the
>PLA will follow me."
>On August 16, 1959, Peng and his followers were condemned as an "anti
>Party clique" by a resolution passed by the Eighth Plenum.
>On September 17, Peng was dismissed as Defense Minister.
>In late 1959, several natural disasters and bad weather condition were
>reported in the press. Floods and drought brought about the "three
>bitter years" of 1959-1962. After 1962, the economy recovered, but the
>politic was shifting toward a struggle against revisionism which brought
>on the Cultural Revolution four years later.
>While Mao was the leader of the CPC, leadership was and still is based
>on mass support. The Chairmanship of the CPC before 1979 was similar to
>the position of Pope in the Catholic Church, powerful in moral authority
>but highly circumscribed in operational power.
>The GLF was the product of mass movement, not that of a single person.
>Mao's leadership was toward the organization of the Party and it policy
>formulation procedures, not the dictation of particular programs.
>To describe Mao as a dictator merely reflects an ignorance of the CPC
>power structure. The failures of the GLF and the People's Commune were
>caused more by implementation flaws rather than conceptual error. Bad
>luck and US embargo had also something to do with it.
>These programs resulted in much suffering, but the claim that 30 million
>people were murdered by Mao with evil intent does not deserve a
>courteous response.
>Henry C.K. Liu
>Michael Perelman wrote:
>> We do not need to be calling each other ultra-rightist idiots. I do not Brad
>> agree with Brad. William Hinton blames the famine on conflicts within the
>> government that immobilized it, but that is beside the point.
>>
>> We must keep a modicum of courtesy here.
>>
>> "Craven, Jim" wrote:
>>
>> > Who is this ultra-rightist idiot Delong? First of all, the use of the
>> > disingenuous Kirkpatrickian term "Totalitarian" versus "Authoritarian" is
>> > the first give away. If you have a society of despots and death squads that
>> > is anti-communist, monopoly or dependent monopoly capitalist and a
>> > whore/toady of US imperialism, it is "Authoritarian"; if it is nominally
>> > socialist, even more advanced in respect for basic human rights, it is
>> > "Totalitarian."
>> >
>> > Next, let's explore the logic. Jews of the Warsaw ghetto employed violence
>> > to resist genocide and the nazis employed violence to conduct genocide
>> > therefore Jews = Nazis because they both employed "violence"? Or Mao
>> > "killed" over 30 million Chinese (assumption to be summarily
>> > asserted/accepted) and Hitler "killed" over 20 million "therefore" Evil of
>> > Mao > Evil of Hitler?
>> >
>> > This is a good example of why the Cultural Revolution in China, depsite its
>> > excesses and crimes, was fundamentally a sound idea--send hacks, toadies,
>> > sycophants and ideologues/scholar despots like this Delong to the
>> > countryside to slop hogs; get some of the scholar despot/whore profs off
>> > their asses to do a decent days work. Since the poor have to work hard and
>> > produce surpluses for the Philosopher Kings, it is legitimate to ask what of
>> > value the Philosopher Kings and Scholar Despots are producing.
>> >
>> > And what makes this Delong worth even reading? Why does a long CV
>> > automatically qualify someone (quantity versus quality) as an "established
>> > scholar" or "notable scholar" without any reference to the quality of the
>> > work or the experiencial-as well as theoretical--basis for any purported
>> > quality or work.
>> >
>> > A Cold Warrior without an enemy is like a hooker without a motel or space to
>> > sell his/her wares. And the sad part is that the universities are full of
>> > these petiti-bourgeois self-appointed "scholars" and "experts" who turn out
>> > even worse shit than this Delong is apparently turning out.
>> >
>> > As they say in Kerala: "In the land of the people with no nose, the one with
>> > half a nose is king".
>> >
>> > Jim Craven
>>
>> --
>> Michael Perelman
>> Economics Department
>> California State University
>> Chico, CA 95929
>>
>> Tel. 530-898-5321
>> E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu