Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. ix, 320 pp. (Map, figures, B&W photos) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 9780674986497.
Against a background of historically splendid material and cultural exchanges with many parts of the world, China has regained its prominent position in today’s global economy as a top trading nation as well as an ardent campaigner for free trade. Market Maoists tells the fascinating story of the “Maoist roots” of this epic resurgence. Based on wide-ranging primary sources of evidence, this elegant book convincingly argues that long before its formal policy reorientation in 1978, the People’s Republic of China was actively present in marketplaces in the East and West, which laid the groundwork for its subsequent market transition. Though not exactly an original argument, for many have rebuffed misreading “self-reliance” for economic autarky, the author does make his case in a systematic and refreshing manner at a time when common knowledge can be forgotten or deliberately ignored.
The first chapter traces a tradition (known in China as “red finance”) of Chinese communists engaging in production and “foreign” trade while fighting to sustain and develop their wartime local regimes. A great strength of the book is such accounts of acute historical sensibility. The Chinese Communist Party’s Hong Kong foothold, for example, was a lifeline for medical and other essential supplies for the guerrillas and base areas in the north. Qin Bangli, a banker in training and brother of Politburo General Secretary Bo Gu, was a “capitalist in practice but communist by conviction,” who “scrimped every Hong Kong dollar he could” from business for the revolution, while his family lived in a rented, barely furnished apartment (26–29). The individual experiences of those involved in the Party’s logistics front, previously little known outside China, vividly fill Kelly’s narrative: Zhou Enlai, Liao Chengzhi, Chen Yun, Li Fuchun, Li Xiannian, Ye Jizhuang, Xue Muqiao, Ji Chaoding, Yao Yilin, and Lei Renmin, among others. Under the somewhat misleading title of “Closing the Open Door,” chapter 2 explains how, when faced with a US-led embargo, the new government had to lean to the Soviet side. Yet China did not sever trade relations with the West, even during its geoeconomically and geopolitically tensest period of opposing both superpowers. This reality is astutely detailed, including in the day-to-day operations of Chinese commercial institutions, most prominently at the Ministry of Foreign Trade set up in 1952.
Chapters 3 through 5 document China’s foreign trade since the Korean War. Despite sanction-induced detours via a third partner or place, a broadly shared desire to expand trade across political and ideological divides among countries prevailed, enabling China to explore outward opportunities. Having formulated its famous five principles of peaceful coexistence and along with it “coexistence through commerce,” and participated in the 1954 Geneva Conference, China scaled up commercial connections and even managed to import strategic equipment from the capitalist world for industrialization at home. In April 1956 Mao urged cadres to learn science, technology, and managerial techniques from the more advanced economies (118), two decades before Deng announced a similar approach. The opening of the Canton Exhibition Hall in April 1957 was a marker; by the end of the year China was trading with 82 countries and regions, on every continent. Some oversimplifications about policy split over the Great Leap notwithstanding, chapter 5 conveys important arguments, such as the fact that Premier Zhou was “deadly serious” about honouring trade agreements amid extreme domestic economic difficulties, as a matter of socialist morality and national dignity. The foundation of China’s foreign trade and policy must be socialism with a commitment to “equality and mutual benefit” in “the interests of the great majority of the world’s people” (149–152).
To guard Chinese independence, the leaders were also determined to quickly wipe clean the country’s debt to the Soviet bloc, after Moscow withdrew aid and advisors in 1960. Chapter 6 examines China’s response of “using imports to cultivate exports” (and vice versa), finding it a precursor of the post-1978 pattern. Alongside Sino-American rapprochement in the early 1970s, China had embarked on building factories and productive bases for export targets, “a sort of proto-Special Economic Zone” (202). By 1974, state guidelines already prioritized modernization and allowed in thousands of technological experts from foreign companies. The last chapter focuses on the ideological legitimation of these developments in anticipation of China becoming “one of the largest participants of the very capitalist system that Mao and the CCP once set out to destroy” (208). Applying the old conceptual framework of “red vs. expert” appears insufficient; a more theoretically informed dilemma would be reconciling market and socialism.
Having successfully established his central thesis of “deep continuities” between the Maoist and post-Mao undertakings, Kelly misses some equally deep discontinuities. Were the Maoist anti-hegemonic balancing acts against the narrow logic of the Cold War compatible with the reformist drift toward global capitalist integration? If the former cannot be responsible for the latter, the book’s subtitle “the Communist Origins of China’s Capitalist Ascent” requires qualification. The perceived need of external threat for internal mobilization is overdone to the extent of undermining the core argument on developmental pragmatism itself. In the Maoist vocabulary, the revisionist Soviet Union was referred to as “social imperialism,” not “socialist imperialism.” “Continuous revolution” is the translation of jixu geming, not buduan geming or “permanent revolution”; the two concepts, Mao’s and Trotsky’s respectively, have different connotations. Reading the common usage in everyday Chinese of “liberation” (jiefang) and “liberated” in repeated quotation marks makes one wonder if liberal “democracy” doesn’t deserve the same treatment. Li Xiannian did not “first [meet] with Mao in 1954” (158); he led advanced troops of the Red Fourth Field Army to join forces with Mao’s long marchers of the First Field Army in Maogong, Sichuan, in June 1935. This minor factual error is worth correcting because the fact that Li was a military commander turned economic manager exemplifies the entire Chinese communist project of modern transformation. Regardless, Market Maoists is a truly valuable contribution and merits serious attention from us all.
Lin Chun
London School of Economics and Political Science, London