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The Multi-Revolutions of China
The Social and Economic Upheavals of Maoist and Post-Maoist China
By Jeff Sun & Dan Tran
Engineering 297A: Ethics of Development in a GlobalEnvironment
Table of Contents
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Abstract
The Impetuses for Post-Mao Economic Policies
A Historical Perspective
Maoist Institutional Asceticism
The Cultural Revolution’s Destruction of
Traditional Values
Looking Forward
The Aftermath of Mao’s Death and the Beginning of Economic Reforms in the 1980s
Two stages of reform
The Need for Agricultural Revitalization
Opening Up to the World
Reforming Industrial Enterprises
Main achievements of economic reforms
Further Economic Reforms in the 1990s and Unresolved Problems from the First Economic
Revolution
Move towards Privatization
China’s Future Economic Progress
Economic development in the Asia-Pacific Region
China’s Economic Goals
China’s Investments Opportunities
Conclusion
Bibliography
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Abstract
China today is a country on the verge of economic dominance and superiority in our world. With 2 decades worth of economic policies focused on free enterprise, free trade and developing a competitive advantage in manufacturing and production, China has positioned the 21st century to be China's century.
But how did Maoist China, a country built on sociopolitical revolution and Marxist ideology, develop into what is now post-Mao China, a China more capitalist than it had ever been in its history? The answer lies in Mao ZeDong's social and economic policies from the 1950s to the 1970s and their complex, far-reaching consequences.
From this historical explanation of why China's present-day economic policies came about, we bring the focus to what these economic policies actually were, and their role in China's rapid modernization and economic progress in the 1980s and 1990s. From there, we look at China today, and hypothesize China's place in the political and economic framework of our modern international society.
The Impetuses for Post-Mao Economic Policies
China’s leaders since 1949. Mao ZeDong (left), one of the most intriguing and volatile leaders of the 20th century, would create a society based on his view of Marxist ideologies. His successor, Deng Xiaoping (middle), would quickly turn China’s focus to one of economic reform and progress. Deng’s economic vision of China has been further modernized and enhanced by his successor, Jiang Zemin (right). [
The 21st century will be China’s century.
Over the years, many have tried to argue against such a notion: “The United States is too powerful,” they say, “the United States has too much technology. The United States has too great of a military!”
But everyday, it becomes ever more clear that this premonition is quickly becoming a stark reality. The clothes we wear, the televisions we watch, the computers we use, the countless articles that we depend on for everyday life – so many are stamped with a little logo that represents a global changing of the guard: “Made in China.”
China’s economy today is growing faster than ever, driven by hard-hitting economic policies aimed at fostering free enterprise, global trade, and a competitive advantage in manufacturing and production that goes unmatched in our global economy. But how did today’s China come about? How did a rural, agricultural society built on ascetic ideals of communalism, simplicity and sociopolitical revolution develop into the world economic powerhouse that is China today? How did a people that had been programmed to follow Marxist philosophies suddenly discover the impetus to switch gears and embark on economic progress based almost purely on capitalistic ideals?
How did a country in our world’s economic backwaters just a few decades ago become what today is modern-day China, a country at the forefront of global economic dominance and supremacy?
The complex answers to these questions lie in a defining epoch of China’s social, cultural and economic history: the 30 years in which the Chinese people lived under Mao ZeDong, one of the most multifaceted and unpredictable leaders in world history. Mao’s continual call for asceticism in the name of Marxist egalitarianism would so deeply repress his peoples’ desires for material well-being and economic success that when they could have it once more, it would quickly become China’s obsession. His Cultural Revolution so thoroughly broke traditional bonds of family and friends, founded in millennium-old Confucian ideals of loyalty and trust, that the Chinese masses resentfully turned to an opposing value system that stressed materialism, personal wealth, and economic achievement. Mao’s policies and ideologies, and more importantly, the subsequent backlash against them upon his death, would effectively constitute the underlying forces that lie behind China’s modern-day economic policies and the rapid economic modernization and westernization they brought.
A Historical Perspective
For centuries, China stood as a rural state of landlords and peasants, built essentially on Confucian values: “the importance of families, the loyalty to the family, the ruling position of the patriarch” (Zeng quoted in Kuhn 260). In the 20th century, Mao ZeDong would bring his Communist Revolution into this feudal environment. Advocating the revolutionary Marxist ideal of socioeconomic egalitarianism, Mao would quickly win the loyalty of millions of rural peasants, enabling him to build a massive peasant army of over 500,000 soldiers. Though they were greatly outmatched in weaponry, technology, numbers and funding, Mao’s peasant army fought with a passion and determination that was greatly lacking in their opponents, the forces of the Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-Shek. Over the course of several years, Mao would ultimately lead his followers to victory against a Kuomintang that was essentially fighting 3 wars: against Mao, against the Japanese Invasion, and against the Axis powers of World War II.
Mao proclaiming his People’s Republic of China in Beijing, 1949. [
Instated as the Chairman of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Mao would create an egalitarian society founded on Marxist economic ideals of agricultural collectivization and industrial nationalization, political ideals of continual revolution and individual activism, and social ideals of self-sacrifice and asceticism (Walder Lect.). But if one characteristic could describe great leaders such as Mao ZeDong, it would be their inability to be satisfied, their endless yearning for more – whether it be more land, more war, or in Mao’s case, more revolution. It was this precisely this never-ending call to social revolution that would quickly detach Mao’s vision of China from that of his people’s.
Upon his death, Mao’s Party selected Deng Xiaoping, a man whom Mao had banished from Beijing twice before his death, as China’s new leader. Deng, always a harsh critic of Mao’s economic policies or lack thereof, would immediately put China on his own path, one that he felt represented the pressing demands and modern attitudes of the Chinese people. This path consisted of aggressive policies focused on economic development and material progress at all costs (Cook 19). To this day, China is hardly Mao’s China – except for his massive portrait hanging in Beijing.
Mao’s Portrait, still hanging today in the center of Tianamen Square in Beijing, China’s capital. [
Instead, it has become Deng’s China: a country devoted to economic modernization in the form of private enterprise and free trade, a country that sees economic dominance and superiority as its means for global recognition and power, a country that does not care, as Deng Xiaoping says, “if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.”
Maoist Institutional Asceticism
China’s economic reforms in the late 1970s and into the 1980s presented the Chinese people with the opportunity to be economically well-off and successful after 30 years of policies and ideologies embodying a system of institutionally forced asceticism. But we must ask: what was the impetus for the Chinese people and their leaders, especially Deng Xiaoping, to so drastically switch gears from Maoist economic policies? The answer, as we will see, is to be found in the shifting needs and demands of Chinese people themselves, at the heart of which is a pent-up lust for a taste of the material wealth and economic success that had been China’s forbidden fruit for a generation under Mao.
An idyllic Maoist life was one of poverty, of simplicity, of perfect egalitarianism: such was arguably Mao’s most ambitious and far-reaching socioeconomic ideal of his reign. Dr. Fang Wan, a researcher of cross-cultural psychology from China, attempts to see just how ascetic the everyday life of Chinese people truly was in his “A Tale of Two Cities.” In his assessment, Wan quotes a paragraph about the life of a new married couple in Maoist China, exemplifying just what life was like for the great majority of China’s citizens: ascetic, simple and poor.
“‘[They] held low expectations of life. They just lived in this small room when they got married. There was no sofa, no cabinet, no table and chairs, no new comforter at that time. They just pooled their stuff together and started their married life. The room is small, only 12 square meters…To them, a small room is big enough to live a life. Plain clothes are good enough to provide warmth. Simple food is tasty enough to ally their hunger’” (Rong quoted in Wan 301).
In 1950, Mao gave the Chinese peasants, for the first time in Chinese history, private and individual plots of land for them to sow and reap. But to the great dismay of these farmers, Mao would quickly turn away from what he saw as a system of petty capitalism. Instead, he chose to force his people into the incentive-loss, near-exploitative institution of agricultural collectivization. Introduced in 1952, Mao’s new system gave his people little, if any more, than they had had before the Communist Revolution (Walder Lect.). In fact, his people would work daily at a frenetic pace to meet monthly and yearly quotas: “the people, dressed in their blue Maoist uniforms, would work without sleep for 24, 48 and in some cases 72 hours straight, building with bare hands…” (Deng 14).
A scene from Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign, in which his government imposed impossibly high quotas and unbearable workloads upon China’s peasants in an effort to compete with America and Great Britain. In the Great Leap Forward’s aftermath, 30 million farmers would die of starvation or disease. [
Many were “so hungry that they had difficulty sleeping…people became ill…elderly died” (Chan 25). All this was part of Mao’s grand economic plan: to funnel large amounts of grain from the countryside to fuel a growing industrial workforce. But such a plan essentially created a distressing situation in which the peasant masses, the fuel behind Mao’s revolution for over 20 years, were to work very hard yet live very poor.
My mother, a young woman who worked in Mao’s rural-education institution of the 1970s, can clearly recount these difficult circumstances:
“We loved Mao, everyone had to love Mao. And in his Little Red Book of Mao’s Quotations, which we read several times a day, he told us over and over again that we had to live in poverty and not strive for economic gain [and] economic progress because that was how he and his Communist [comrades] had lived before us. He told us we needed to give up our personal dreams, our personal desires for happiness…and instead be hungry, be poor so that China as a country could surpass Britain and America in power. I had always wanted to be a doctor, many of my friends wanted to be professors, scientists and government officials. But we gave up these dreams back then, because they were not Maoist. We were all supposed to be equal, so how could I want to be a doctor, while millions of farmers toiled everyday in the fields for nothing? Mao was almost a God to us back then, and anything and everything he said was done without question. In fact, we never even considered not doing what he asked of us” (Zhou Int. 1).
A Maoist propaganda poster calling for the Chinese people to read and study Mao’s Little Red Book of Mao’s Quotations on a daily basis. [ dac/exhb/past/fifty3.html]
Ironically, it would be precisely this forced asceticism of the Chinese masses for almost three decades that would create a society that, upon Mao’s death, would demand and subsequently be exceptionally receptive to aggressive economic reforms allowing private property, free enterprise, and economic modernization and westernization.
In urban China, people were considerably richer. Many worked jobs in industrial facilities and government offices where the pay was above rural standards, and the majority of urban residents lived in decent housing structures with the full service of utilities. Still, self-sacrifice and “doing without” were a Maoist expectation of masses. Thus, once again, we have the fertile ground from which today’s capitalistic economic policies would rise from. My father, a young man living in Shanghai in the 1960s, recounts, “We didn’t have TVs, cars or bikes. All we ever received was our daily necessities. Anything extra traded for extraordinary premiums on the black market. I remember that bicycles were the one thing we wanted the most. If I had to say whether life was better or worse under Mao and before Mao, I would say without a doubt that [my family and I] had a great deal less in Mao’s time than we had before Mao” (Sun R. Int.). The people of urban China did not toil in the countryside day in and day out, but daily life was still described to be almost impossible languid and tedious:
“There was nothing to do, nothing to do all day, except work. If you didn’t have any work, you just loitered around the streets. Mao didn’t think we needed to have “fun”…and so there were no recreational places, especially not for the younger people. The pool halls, the bowling alleys, the bars and the nightclubs you see today? Nothing like that existed in Mao’s time, absolutely nothing! It was so, so boring and tedious, every single day” (Sun Int.).
An artist’s portrayal of Jiangsu, an urban industrial city in 1970s China. Notice the artist’s depiction of the city’s gloom and sense of desolation.
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Zhao, a preeminent scholar of Chinese sociology who lived under Mao and survived the Cultural Revolution, supports this view in his “Meanings of Money Nurtured by Nature,” stating: “I did not enjoy [urban] life. In fact, I hated it. Not that I felt I suffered-I had not expected a much better life-but because everything was so predictable” (346).
In a country that just a few decades ago had consisted of self-sufficient farmers, enterprising businessmen, powerful landlords and important statesmen, China under Mao was a country of state-imposed poverty and forced asceticism. Mao created a situation in which his people lacked the bona fide socioeconomic competition and economic incentive that motivated the citizens of other modern countries. People had no reason to work harder and to be innovative. “The most happiness someone got in [China] was when someone got a parsed-out ticket saying they could get a radio or a bicycle,” as Rong Sun states in his interview. Without the true economic incentives available in a capitalistic state, Mao actually created a trifling competition for the small things that were frugally meted out by the state. Duan Sheng Sun, an official in the Shanghai government for 17 years describes how people participated in this competition as an “escape” from Maoist egalitarianism; as a way to have more than one’s neighbor, to feel ever so slightly a hint of economic and material success (Int.). Obviously the Chinese people, suppressed by a stifling egalitarianism, had subconsciously developed an intense, pent-up desire to have more, to do better, to be more successful than one’s neighbor. Such a yearning to attain a “better” life than one’s peers, or even just a “better” life in absolute terms, would lay a fertile groundwork from which capitalistic economic policies, allowing for private property, private and free enterprise and open competition, would quickly spring up and be almost universally accepted in the years to come.
Mao had effectively created a state in which both his rural and urban citizens were looking to escape from his oppressive asceticism and egalitarianism, a situation in which the great majority of Chinese citizens were quietly pleading for economic reforms that would allow material progress and individual success. As Duan Sheng Sun states,
“Those of us in the cities knew what the United States and Great Britain had. We wanted that…we wanted to be able to start our own companies, to become managers, to choose our own houses, to buy what we wanted. We wanted to buy our wives gifts, to buy our kids toys, to buy more than just what we needed to survive off of. So many of us learned to love Deng Xiaoping because we understood and appreciated his economic goals. He wanted to make real change to China, to bring to us what was making America and Great Britain so great and so powerful. We loved him for that” (Int.)
Of course, what Duan Sheng Sun and his fellow citizens desired and loved so greatly were economic policies aimed at modernization, westernization and real progress and growth. Deng Xiaoping understood what was lacking in his country, and Deng implemented precisely these policies upon Mao’s death to the great delight of his people. Essentially, the Chinese people’s call to economic individuality and freedom, driven by a pent-up lust for all that they had done without for 30 years, would be the impetus behind the development and quick implementation of China’s modern-day economic policies, policies that have quickly allowed China to evolve into the dominant economic player that it is in today’s global marketplace.