Was the Chinese revolution socialist?
A chapter from The Road to Tiananmen Square
Two years after China’s Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989, British socialist Charlie Hore published an account of the movement—and of the decades leading up to it. The Road to Tiananmen Square is now available in a revised edition from Red Flag Books. Hore has included a substantial new introduction that takes up events of the past 35 years, including the country’s explosive economic growth and the resurgent waves of resistance by China’s workers, peasants, women, and national minorities.
The following excerpt—the book’s Chapter 3—takes up the early years of the revolution, from the conquest of power in 1949 through the Great Leap Forward. Earlier chapters cover the development of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its rivalry with the nationalist Guomindang of Chiang Kaishek. A revolutionary upsurge of peasants and workers began in 1925 but came to an end when Chiang’s forces slaughtered insurgent workers and communists in 1927. After the defeat, the CCP made its “Long March” out of the cities and refashioned itself as the commanders and cadres of a peasant army. The party, thus transformed, took power in 1949.
1949 was a genuine revolution, in which a million-strong peasant army smashed forever the old ruling classes, broke the power of Western imperialism and laid the basis for a new social order. But it was in no sense a socialist revolution.
For Marx, as for Lenin, socialism was necessarily the self-emancipation of the working class. In 1949:1
… the proletariat played a negligible role in the last and decisive phase of the revolution. Neither major strikes nor urban uprisings paved the way for the Red Army as they had twenty years earlier for Chiang Kaishek in Shanghai. There were very few workers in the triumphant Red Army; it was composed essentially of peasants and officered by other peasants and intellectuals.
By the time the Red Armies reached the major cities of eastern China the decisive battles had already been won. And as they entered the cities, the workers were merely passive spectators. “Liberation” was brought to them from outside. This was not because Chinese workers were incapable of fighting. The years from 1945 to 1949 saw a steadily rising number of strikes as the workers fought to defend themselves against hyperinflation. In 1949 the cities went quiet on explicit instructions from the CCP. As the Red Army neared the cities, the CCP sent ahead orders that:2
… workers and employees in all trades will continue to work and that business will operate as usual … officials of the Guomindang [other officials and] police personnel … are to stay at their posts, obey the orders of the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Government.
One sympathetic American journalist recorded it was “… noteworthy that the Communists are not trying to curry favor with the city workers by paying excessively high wages, and that in private factories they give the last word on production to management.”3
These policies were no accident, but rather necessary consequences of the struggle waged by the CCP. For the revolution was above all a nationalist one: Their aim was to build a strong and independent national economy. Armed revolution was necessary to overthrow the old ruling classes, but it was to be strictly controlled from above.
Leon Trotsky had argued, in developing his theory of “permanent revolution,” that in countries such as China the national bourgeoisie were unable to carry out the equivalent of Europe’s bourgeois revolutions through waging a successful struggle against imperialism and the power of the landlords. This was both because of their myriad social and economic ties as a class to the landlords and to world capitalism; and, more important, because the threat to their power from the struggles of workers and peasants was greater than that of imperialism. The experience of 1927 had decisively confirmed Trotsky’s argument.
One of the most persistent Stalinist arguments against the theory was that Trotsky “underestimated the revolutionary potential of the peasantry.” This was a complete distortion: for Trotsky, the participation of the peasantry was essential for victory. But, he argued, they were incapable of leading the revolution:4
Without the decisive significance of the agrarian question for the life of the whole of society and without the great depth and gigantic sweep of the peasant revolution there could not even be any talk of the proletarian dictatorship … But the fact that the agrarian revolution created the conditions for the dictatorship of the proletariat grew out of the inability of the peasantry to solve its own historical problem with its own forces and under its own leadership.
Therefore, he argued, the national revolution could only be successful if led by the urban working class. This meant that the national and the socialist revolutions would be fused into a single “uninterrupted” or “permanent” process:5
The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfilment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.
The events of 1949 proved Trotsky right on every point except the last two—the most important parts of his analysis. For they rested on the assumption that the working class was capable of providing such leadership. The massacres of 1927 had crushed the revolutionary spirit in China’s cities, and the conscious withdrawal of the CCP from the cities had left a political vacuum. (Small groups of Trotskyists had fought courageously in the cities from the early 1930s, but they were too small, and too often hit by Guomindang repression, to fill the vacuum.6)
Yet in the absence of a revolutionary working class the potential for revolution remained. A section of the urban intelligentsia, who were able to break completely with the old ruling classes, had proved capable of filling that vacuum of leadership, building a mass armed movement of the peasantry under their strict control. The “permanent revolution” which Trotsky had envisaged now became deflected in a purely nationalist direction.
This process was not peculiar to China. In many other underdeveloped countries—Vietnam in 1945 and Cuba in 1959, to name but two—similar revolutions took place. In all of them an old, corrupt ruling class, or a greatly weakened colonial power, was overthrown by peasant armies led by nationalist forces drawn from the urban middle classes. Those classes felt most keenly the oppression of the old system, which gave them a superior status to the mass of the population but deprived them of any hope of advancement. They also benefitted from an education, which both brought home to them their nation’s backwardness and opened up the possibility of overcoming it. Their nationalism was at the same time a rejection of Western imperialism and a desire to emulate its economic development.7 The CCP’s victory thus achieved the old desire of Chinese nationalism for a strong and independent country which could begin the process of independent economic development—but the decisive agency of change would be the new state, not the old bourgeoisie. The CCP had come to power as a force in their own right, standing above all the classes of the old society. Yet they were not free to act as they wished. It was the existence of a competitive and hostile world economy that dictated the need for a strong national economy, and the imperative of beginning to compete with that world economy thus dictated the new state’s economic priorities.
State capitalism
The vast majority of the Chinese people—even large numbers of capitalists—welcomed the revolution. Mao’s victory promised an end to the backwardness and misery that had been China’s lot for centuries. By the time the government had consolidated their hold over the whole country in 1952, they had delivered on their promises to a significant extent. In the countryside the landlords were dispossessed and their land given to the peasantry. In the cities runaway inflation, mass unemployment and the constant shortages had been curbed. In the years that followed, there were also impressive improvements in literacy, education, health care and living standards, which gave rise to a major leap in life expectancy. The new Marriage Law of 1952 broke the absolute power of husbands and their families over women’s lives. Child mortality was vastly reduced, while a rudimentary system of food distribution made famine seem a thing of the past.
Yet the CCP’s economic strategy was not centred on improving living standards, but rather on the accumulation of capital from China’s meagre resources to begin the construction of an industrial base. The elimination of the landlords, moneylenders, warlords and all the other parasites of the old order made possible the more efficient exploitation of workers and peasants, for which an increase in living standards was essential. The imposition of accumulation as the central dynamic of the economy, and the consequent social divisions of labor this gave rise to, created a form of capitalism—bureaucratic state capitalism—in which the economy was not run by individual capitalists but by the ruling state bureaucracy. This process of accumulation created and drew together a class of top bureaucrats, factory managers, military leaders and so on, drawn overwhelmingly from the top ranks of the CCP. They were bound together as a class both by their control over the priorities of the economy, and by their inevitably antagonistic relationship to the mass of workers and peasants. For if the accumulation of capital was the central goal, then the fulfilment of basic human needs clearly had to be subordinated to it.
In China that contradiction was particularly acute, because of the extreme backwardness of industry. Compared to India in 1949-50 (by no means an advanced industrial economy) China produced less than half the amount of electricity; had half the number of cloth spindles; a quarter the number of looms; and less than one-third the extent of railway tracks. Output in every major category of industry was less than it had been in Russia in 1913.8
The CCP thus needed extremely high rates of accumulation, which would get higher as the 1950s went on. According to Mao: “The ratio of our country’s accumulated capital to national income was 27 percent in 1957, 36 percent in 1958 and 42 percent in 1959.”9
The overwhelming majority of this went into spending on heavy industry and arms. In the first Five-Year Plan (1953-8), for instance, 58 percent of planned investment went to industry, with most of the rest going to defence, transport and communications. Agriculture got only 8 percent.10 At the same time, living standards rose by only 2 percent a year during the early 1950s (and would drop severely between 1959 and 1961).
The contradiction between accumulation and human need also led to the establishment of a powerful system of state control, from the secret police down to officials in the villages, which could contain any protest from below. The potential for such protests was shown as early as 1957, in the “Hundred Flowers’ campaign. Mao called for greater freedom of speech for intellectuals in order to tie them more closely to the CCP, by making them feel that they had a stake in the new society. The government was overwhelmed by a torrent of criticisms and accusations, many of them daring to attack Mao himself. More seriously:11
The circle of complainers broadened rapidly. Urban workers began to express dissatisfaction by means of strikes, demands for better work conditions, slowdowns and phoney sick calls; peasants withdrew from the new collectives or tried to withhold taxes, claiming that the government was extracting more than landlords had ever done.
The CCP quickly abandoned the campaign. In the repression that followed (organised by Deng Xiaoping, then CCP general secretary) thousands of intellectuals were jailed, and more than 200,000 people were expelled to the countryside.
Initially the pattern of industrialisation in China was closely modelled on Stalin’s Russia—in particular the all-embracing Five-Year Plan which controlled all aspects of economic development. But while China’s first Five-Year Plan did develop an industrial base, it did not do so fast enough for the needs of the ruling class. In the early 1950s the Chinese economy grew at a faster rate than at any previous time in the century. Yet by comparison with the rest of the world economy, then in the middle of the most sustained boom in the history of capitalism, it was falling further behind.
The demands of military competition put further pressure on the strategy. To the east and the south, China was ringed by hostile regimes heavily armed by the United States. The remnants of the Guomindang regime on Taiwan, in particular, posed a constant threat. Their stated aim of reclaiming China was backed by vast quantities of American aid and direct American threats to intervene in any war between them and China. The Korean War of 1950 proved that the threats were not idle ones. Drawn into the war by the prospect of a direct American invasion, the Chinese army suffered more than a million casualties and was heavily defeated.
The enormous concentration of capital into heavy industry, and the top-heavy bureaucracy needed to run such concentrations, led to very high levels of waste and inefficiency throughout the system. That waste was greatly added to by an enormous squandering of scarce resources on arms spending. One writer, working from official figures, estimated that the production of the atom bomb in 1964 cost between a quarter and a half of that year’s total electricity output.12
Far from trying to reduce the tensions, the CCP deliberately exaggerated the atmosphere of siege, using it to demand even greater sacrifices from workers and peasants. The threat of the Guomindang’s return was still real enough to those who remembered conditions before 1949 for this to exert a moral pressure which officials could use against anyone who protested. Mao’s strategy ran quickly into the material barriers of China’s poverty, and the contradiction between that poverty and the needs of competition and accumulation. As early as 1956, growth was slowing down. Yet he pushed for an even faster pace of growth:13
[Steel] output this year will be over four million tons… the United States… can produce 100 million tons… Given 50 or 60 years, we certainly ought to overtake the United States. This is an obligation. You have such a big population, such a vast territory and such rich resources… if after working at it for 50 or 60 years you are still unable to overtake the United States, what a sorry figure you will cut! You should be read off the face of the Earth. Therefore to overtake the United States is not only possible, but absolutely necessary and obligatory.
The Great Leap Forward
Mao attempted to overcome this contradiction by a series of “mass campaigns,” in which the lacking capital and resources were replaced by greatly increasing the exploitation of the mass of the population. The first of these was the “Great Leap Forward” of 1958-1960. Grossly inflated targets were set for both industrial and agricultural production (steel output was to overtake America in four years, for instance), and new work disciplines were enforced. Factory managers tried to dragoon their workers into meeting the targets by abolishing meal-breaks, instituting 18 or 24-hour shifts and abandoning all safe working practices. When these failed, they simply lied, causing further havoc as other factories’ targets were raised to use these (mythical) increases in production.
In the cities the Great Leap soon collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. Workers could be forced once or twice to work an 18-hour shift; but this could not become the normal working day. Machinery run at twice its normal speeds simply wore out twice as fast. And much of the real increase in output was wasted, as the imbalances between different sectors of industry meant that it could not be used.
If in the cities the Great Leap was a fiasco, in the countryside it was a disaster. In 1952 an all-encompassing land reform had redistributed land from rich peasants and landlords to the poorer peasants, giving most families enough land to live on. Since then, the CCP had moved cautiously to introduce various forms of collective working, in order to increase production while using as little state investment as possible. Progress had been for the most part slow and wary, as the state sought to gain peasant consent for each stage.
But in 1958 all caution was thrown to the winds. The peasant cooperatives were merged into “People’s Communes,” new economic structures covering on average 25,000 people. The land was forcibly collectivised, and the peasants organised into large-scale work teams to meet the high production targets. Primitive communal kitchens and nurseries were set up, not to free women from the drudgery of housework, but to force them full-time into the fields. Thousands of small-scale rural factories were set up, using such capital as the commune possessed, to reduce even further the need for state investment in the countryside.
The factories were inevitably a drain on the rural economy—the “backyard” furnaces set up in thousands of villages used more industrial-grade steel than they produced. But the worst effects were felt on the land itself. Peasants angered by the loss of their land refused to work or did as little as possible. The local officials did everything they could to meet the impossible targets, and then resorted to lying on a grand scale. The 1958 grain harvest, originally claimed to be 375 million tonnes, in fact turned out to be 250 million, and the target for 1959 was cut from 525 to 275 million.14
1958 was a particularly good harvest. The next three were not. By 1961 famine—supposedly eliminated by the revolution of 1949—had returned to large parts of north China. Western demographers, working from Chinese figures, have estimated that between 27 and 30 million people died of hunger in those years.15 In Fengyang county, northern Anhui province, where particularly detailed records survived, one in four people starved to death—in some communes, that figure rose to one in three.16
Northern Anhui was traditionally one of the poorest areas of China, but even on the outskirts of Beijing there was enormous suffering. An intellectual who had been exiled to the countryside spelt out what it meant in stark terms:17
The press was reporting on the excellent situation, how good and glorious things were. The catchword was “The situation is very good and becoming better and better.” There was no food to eat in the village. The peasants were eating the leaves of trees, boiling leaves in water, mixing them with a little cornflour to make the leaves stick together… We intellectuals were lucky. We were eating sweet potato leaves. The best are the leaves of the sweet potato. Then the leaves of the plum. The worst are willow leaves. The peasants were eating willow.
In the far west more than 20,000 people crossed the border from Xinjiang into Russia, and there were armed rebellions in at least two, and possibly five, provinces: “In [Henan], and in Shandong to the east of it, members of the militia stole weapons, set up roadblocks, seized stocks of grain and engaged in widespread armed robbery.”18
Far from expanding the economy as Mao had hoped, the Great Leap cost almost ten years of economic development. Not until 1965 did total production (though not output per head) regain the levels reached in 1957.19 The disasters caused by Mao’s policies were aggravated by the departure of practically all Russian advisors in 1959-60, which halted more than a hundred major construction projects.
The split between China and Russia, which became an open break in 1961, was to be the inspiration for the growth of Maoism as a major revolutionary current in the late 1960s. But its real roots lay in the very different ambitions of the two ruling classes. While Russia supplied China with much-needed technology and technicians, the price asked was a high one. The Russian bureaucracy wanted to treat China as it then treated its Eastern European satellites—as a source of plunder. The ruling classes of Eastern Europe had little choice about this—their power rested on Russian tanks, as the 1956 invasion of Hungary had reminded them only recently.
Mao, by contrast, had come to power not only independently of Stalin but in spite of him. Stalin never believed that the Red Army could take power; in 1944 he dismissed them in talks with America’s ambassador as “margarine Communists.” Right up to Mao’s victory, Russia had remained a supporter of the Guomindang. In January 1949, when the Guomindang government was forced to flee their capital in Nanjing, the Russian ambassador was the only one to accompany them!20
In 1945 Russian troops had looted much of the heavy industry of northeastern China, claiming it as “war reparations” from Japan (Stalin had declared war on Japan just nine days before the war ended). Tensions between the two ruling classes diminished during the early 1950s, as China needed Russian technology and investment too much to worry about the price. But when increased Russian demands coincided with a reduction in the amounts of aid and investment given to China, as a consequence of Khrushchev’s moves to extend Russian influence in Asia and Africa, the CCP had an independent power base from which to defy the Russians.
Though Mao was the prime mover behind the 1961 split, he had by that time lost all real control over the running of the Chinese economy. The disasters of the Great Leap had originally been blamed on “overenthusiastic” local officials, but at a summit meeting of the CCP leadership in 1959, Mao took the blame and gave up most of his official positions. Isolated inside the ruling class, he probably did so in order to avoid a public split. But the effect of the move was to deepen his isolation.
Economic policy swung sharply in the opposite direction. Though most communes remained as administrative structures, control over agricultural production returned to village level. Targets were cut sharply, and private plots were given back to the peasants to boost output. In many areas this effectively meant returning to private agriculture. By 1962, “… the private grain harvest in Yunnan was larger than the collective harvest, and private cultivated land rose to 50 percent of the total. In Guizhou and Sichuan there was, even as late as 1964, more private than collective tilling.”21
In the cities a similar liberalisation took place. Productivity bonuses and piecework came into the factories, and factory managers were given greater control over their operations. Private markets reappeared and foreign trade—in particular grain imports—was increased. This was not a fundamentally different strategy from that pursued by Mao, as was later claimed; rather it was a necessary response to economic devastation.
But while the new policies eased the immediate crisis, they did nothing to resolve the deeper dilemmas facing the ruling class. Far from catching up with the advanced economies, China was falling even further behind. At the same time, the Sino-Soviet split meant that the external military threat was greatly increased. Mao’s enemies inside the ruling class had managed to turn him into a ceremonial figurehead for the moment; but they had no alternative strategy for the Chinese economy as a whole.
Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: thaths; modified by Tempest.
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Charlie Hore is a long-time revolutionary socialist, a founding member of rs21 in Britain, and the author of The Road to Tiananmen Square and numerous articles on China.