New York: Bloomsbury, 2022. 416 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, coloured photos.) US$30.00, cloth. ISBN 9781639730513.
The main question that this study of China after Mao revolves around is an examination of a seemingly plausible and widely accepted hypothesis: that an implementation of free market methods will lay the foundation, inevitably, for democratic political reform.
A central theme of the first three chapters is that paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping (1978–1989), representing the “opening up” initiative, is not deserving of his reputation in China and abroad as a pathfinding reformer. In particular, chapter 5 on Tiananmen in 1989, and then chapters 6 and 7 on the relatively attenuated rate of growth during the early period of reform, should temper the positive assessment of these years. While per capita GDP marked a steady progress from 1976 to 2001, China’s ranking internationally actually dropped seven points, from 123rd to 130th (234). The limited and highly constrained application of free market mechanisms—China basically remained a planned command economy—accounts in large part for the unevenness of mobility nationwide. As the author argues, top-down control by the same Communist Party that had perfected the dictatorial system from 1949 to 1976 held up progress economically and nullified any advance in political opening. The purge of Mao’s inner circle, following the tyrant’s death, amounted to a strictly surface-level show-trial outcome.
Crucially (perhaps decisively for the unfolding of future events), years before the Gang of Four was presented in court, the countryside had begun to dismantle collectivism in a “silent [counter] revolution.” “Real growth took place … far away from the glare of official scrutiny as the villages began to pull themselves out of poverty,” regaining “control of the land … away from the state” (43). “People’s Communes were divided up” with “responsibility for cultivating the land handed back to individual families” (44). The Party’s subsequent campaign against decollectivization failed, the conquest of the farmers being eventually consolidated (46–51). As chapter 2 points out, citing the historian of the Russian Revolution, Robert Service, this interesting aspect of the popular mass movement for reform is not specific to China: “Without some accommodation of the profit motive the economy would have destroyed itself. No communist regime [has] managed to stay in power without constant infringements of the party line. … [Disobedience] in the Soviet Union was not so much the grit that stopped the machinery as the oil that prevented the system from grinding to a complete standstill” (35).
But if upon completing chapter 8 readers get the idea that in the coming years the Chinese economy and political system face collapse after teetering on the brink of irremediable crisis, they are in for a rude awakening. A close reading of chapter 9 and the first section of chapter 10 prompts us to study the relevant comparisons worldwide. For example, we might want to study the early signs of a possible degradation of some of the core institutions of United States democracy and that country’s declining economic vitality (accelerating indebtedness, for example to China).
Thus, an alternate proposal to the above-mentioned economic-political reform link hypothesis, and different from the overall tenor of the book’s argument, would be the following. The error of the hypothesis consists in the time window assumed for the transition; evidence of deep transformational historical change of the kind we might predict should not be evaluated in the short term.
Consider, for example, the magnitude of some of the relevant indicators that mark the accelerated material and cultural progress following the incremental advances of 1976 to 2001. The economic boom coincides with China’s integration into the World Trade Organization. At the close of the Cultural Revolution, in some provinces more than half of the population was illiterate. Underdevelopment and dependence has today given way to the world’s most powerful industrial production base, supporting a massive and dynamic technical/scientific superstructure. With an annual GDP growth for years averaging at 9 percent (more recently it has declined to a more normal rate), the economy will soon surpass that of the current number one, the United States. According to the World Bank, China has lifted 800 million people out of Maoist Great Leap Forward starvation and extreme poverty and its Cultural Revolution mass violence chaos. New material relations among the social classes of the twenty-first century have already presented themselves.
It seems that even a partial adoption of the free market, its application hobbled by an unelected bureaucratic caste, is capable of providing significant improvements to people’s wellbeing. In turn, the political retrogression of the Xi Jinping extended term will be incapable of turning back the clock to the hecatomb of High Communism from 1949 to 1976, incapable as well of veering the country toward a Kim dynasty-type regime. Regarding some of the above considerations, the Vietnamese economic reform beginning in the late 1980s will be the parallel development, in the medium and long term, to closely observe.
The concessions reluctantly granted to the recent protests against COVID-19 lockdown may, again, be a glimpse into another germ of the emergence of civil society, indicative on two points: the autonomous and spontaneous movement itself and the government’s cautious response. In the end, long-term progressive change is not dependent on personalities and leaders. Thanks to the perhaps inevitable emergence of the new economy, a new class of workers and farmers and a new middle class is emerging, a potential motor of democratization that can escape the control of the Party Central Committee. From within the latter might emerge a group willing to ally itself with the new classes, as occurred famously in another communist regime during the same years of the April 5th Movement (1989) and the repression of June Fourth.
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff