>seemed to buy into the idea that the state was doing fine and the
problems
>would all just go away. People didn't really seem to want capitalism,
and
>they weren't always sure what they wanted, but I can't remember ever
talking
>to someone who didn't think something was fundamentally wrong. Even in
>Vietnam, I had no trouble finding people who thought something was
deeply
>wrong with the country.
>I still haven't quite managed to figure out why its different in China.
>Scott Martens
Something I originally wanted to post at the time of the original thread that may partly help to explain Marten's observations, but I couldnt find the article until now:
Achin Vanaik: Independent scholar and journalist, TNI Fellow and Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library New Delhi, India
------------------------------ http://www.telegraphindia.com/archive/991023/editoria.htm#head2 GREAT LEAP FORWARD BY ACHIN VANAIK
What took 70 years in Russia has taken less than 50 years in China! Authoritarian rule in the name of a “socialism with Chinese characteristics” by a cynical elite primarily committed to preserving its own rule has effectively destroyed all interest in socialism on the part of the wider public. The latter’s principal idea is now Western style consumerist capitalism and liberal democracy. The elite itself neither believes in nor is interested in Marxism-socialism except as a legitimizing ideology for its rule. And like the Gorbachevian bureaucracy in Russia in the years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it will happily make its peace with the emergence of a fullfledged capitalism in China, that is, a “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” (towards which the country is already rapidly moving) provided it continues to enjoy political, economic or social dominance in the new dispensation.
But unlike in Russia, when this transition is finally completed, there will be no wholesale repudiation of its founding revolutionary moment in 1949 or of its revolutionary leaders. V.I. Lenin, personally, theoretically, politically and historically is a far more admirable character than Mao Zedong and does not deserve the general opprobrium he has received from a Russian public now bereft of any sense of balance regarding its historical moorings. But it is Mao who will be remembered more sympathetically by China and the Chinese.
These different fates of two historical giants mirror the different characters and trajectories of the two greatest revolutions of the 20th century. The Chinese revolution was in its scope the greatest in history but of all the great revolutions since the 17th century it was led by the most parochial and insular of political leaderships. This is not the only paradox.
Economically, politically and culturally more backward than Russia before, during and after its revolution, China was spared by this very backwardness the internal turmoils of post-revolutionary Russia. In China there were no liberal, social democratic, Menshevik or agrarian populist currents that were rivals to the communists. Chinese communism never experienced either the internationalist or the democratic traditions that characterized the pre-1917 Russian revolutionary scene.
There were no alternatives to the political monolithism that marked the birth and life of Maoism. A sophisticated and democratic radical culture was never seriously missed because it was always absent. Maoism, therefore, could pose much more convincingly as an overwhelmingly progressive force in the eyes of the general public for a much longer period than Bolshevism. This was not just because of its undoubted virtues as a peasant-based revolutionary force bent on genuine land reform, poverty removal and modernization of China but because its vices were obscured since the only other yardstick for political comparison was the truly reactionary pro-imperialist/landlord force, the Kuomintang. Even so, Maoism’s success in 1949 was crucially connected to the communist ability to append their socialist banner to Chinese nationalism and the united struggle against Japanese invasion in the years preceding the final takeover of state power.
The Bolsheviks first had their revolution and then faced a civil war. The Chinese communists first had their civil war and then their successful revolution. This makes a great deal of difference because in a civil war, no matter how respected the incumbent regime may initially be, it suffers a disproportionate share of the blame for the privations of that civil war and therefore invariably loses a great deal of popularity.
Moreover, the total defeat of one’s principal social and class rivals before revolutionary rule means post-revolutionary industrialization and the administration is much smoother and easier for the new government. Undoubtedly, the peasant based character of the Chinese Communist Party also ensured that the Stalinist horrors of “forced-march industrialization” through the most ruthless kind of agricultural collectivization (despite the regress of the Great Leap Forward of 1957-59) was never a considered or viable option in Maoist-dominated China. It is only during and after the excesses and chaos of the Cultural Revolution period of 1966-69 that Maoism as a popular and binding ideology goes into irretrievable decline among both masses and elites.
The prestige both Russia and China enjoyed even during the Stalinist and Maoist periods respectively was not just the result of their socio-economic achievements. They were widely thought to embody the challenge of a rising ideological-political force to a capitalism that was widely seen as full of injustices and evils and lacking in comparable economic dynamism. In retrospect, it can be seen that the challenge was never a serious one.
The backward socialisms of Russia and China would be ideologically (and in the case of Russia, politically as well) defeated by advanced capitalisms. This defeat had as much to do with the backward character of the socialisms in question as with the advanced, liberal-democratic character of the capitalisms in question. Ultimately, the only virtue that Stalinism/Maoism and indeed, post-Stalin/post-Mao reform communism could claim was achieving substantial development on the social and economic levels at the price of preserving authoritarian bureaucratic elite rule.
The reduction of socialism to effectively a nationalist developmentalist project meant two things. First, it meant abandoning international challenges to a postwar capitalism-imperialism whose record in imposing sufferings on a global scale dwarfs any comparable record of iniquity in the foreign policy of the socialist countries, despite the unjustified overlordship of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe till 1989.
Whatever progressive actions were undertaken by the Soviet Union and China abroad, this had a great deal to do with conventional foreign policy diplomacy and ambitions and much less with the determination to expand socialism at the expense of capitalism. Maoist foreign policy from the mid-Sixties onwards was particularly reactionary in its shameless betrayals of various anti-imperialist struggles in the third world in order to seek greater accommodation with the United States. It is particularly revealing of the restricted democratic and humanist character of anti-Maoist liberal dissidents in China — who are most critical of the Cultural Revolution and the general Maoist legacy in China after the Fifties (and of liberals generally) — that they have virtually no serious criticism to offer of the foreign policy orientations of Mao from the mid-Sixties, followed in their main thrust by his successors like Deng Xiaoping.
Second, it meant adopting standards of national self-judgment no different from those of capitalist countries themselves — the ability to provide economic goodies ever more widely and efficiently. Once centrally planned economies moved from the stage of extensive to intensive industrialization, they found themselves incapable of meeting the challenge except through recourse to market mechanism. The absence of any kind of commitment to industrial and economic democracy, let alone political and civic democracy, meant there was no option but to allow the market ever more sway in the name of developmental efficiency.
In such circumstances, the question of harnessing the market mechanism to the pursuit of a genuinely meaningful post-capitalist or socialist society does not even arise. For all the delusory talk of “market socialism” in China, what actually exists is more appropriately characterized as a form of “market Stalinism”!
However, the transition to capitalism in China over the next decades will be different from the nature of the similar transition process in the ex-Soviet Union or eastern Europe. It will not require the same scale of gut-wrenching repudiation of its revolutionary history nor of its past leaders. Mao and the Chinese Communist Party will be accorded a considerable measure of historical respect as, respectively, a leader and party which united China, expelled foreign dominance and inaugurated the process of its all round modernization which on balance proved more positive than negative. However, the death knell of Chinese communism has already sounded and can be heard easily in India except for those still unwilling to recognize and repudiate the dead-ends of Stalinism and Maoism.
The author is a political scientist and has recently published the book ommunalism Contested: Religion, Modernity and Secularization