ince is reported as being "basically self-sufficient" in grain, this means it is not self-sufficient in grains. The experienced reader also knows that claims of percentage increases in industrial production usually go down, the longer the periods being compared. For example, industrial production in Nan-ching (Nanking) in the first 3 months of 1971 was said to be 47.2 percent above the first 3 months of 1970; for the first 8 months, 36.8 percent above the first 8 months of 1970; and for the first 9 months, 30+ percent above the first 9 months of 1970. As to living standards, claims of improvements must also be generously discounted. Whereas the cumulative impact of the claimed improvements would have meant a substantial rise in well-being over the past years, other evidence shows that the per capita availability of food and the level of rations is roughly the same in early 1972 as it was 15 years earlier in 1957. A strange breach in the Government's policy of carefully managing information occurred during the Cultural Revolution when warring factions of Red Guards put up wall posters to support their respective positions. Until suppressed, these wall posters washed a lot of dirty linen in public. The subject matter was usually polemical politics rather than hard economic data. Nonetheless, the posters helped to identify the economic disruptions of the Cultural Revolution and to clarify the disputes over economic policy. The statistical blackout was partially lifted in late 1970 when Premier Chou En-lai gave several national aggregate figures for 1970 to the visiting American writer Edgar Snow. Beginning in 1970 and continuing through 1971, the official press published a growing number of percentage claims and even a few absolute figures, such as the amount of sown acreage. In November 1971, Vice-Premier Li Hsien-nien, as described in section IX of this paper, gave an unprecedently frank account of the alternative numerical estimates of the Chinese population held by different government bureaus. Finally, at yearend 1971, Peking published percentage claims of substantial gains in production of a dozen major industrial items as well as two absolute claims-steel, 21 million tons, and grain, 246 million tons. Prospects for 1972 are for a continued easing of the statistical blackout and even for a major breakthrough, such as the publication of details of the Fourth Five-Year Plan. VISITING FIREMEN A third source of information is the eyewitness reports of refugees and of journalists, businessmen, technical people, and other visitors to China. The visitors are normally persons who are favorably disposed toward the regime. The economic encomiums of an Edgar Snow or a Han Su-yin need to be taken cautiously and to be contrasted with the sour views of the occasional skeptic who slips through, like Jacques Marcuse, the permanent_correspondent of the Agence France-Press in Peking, 1962-64. In The Peking Papers. 30 Marcuse tells of his efforts to penetrate behind the official claims of universal success in production and universal popular support for Mao's policies. Since the recent thaw in United States-China relations, a few American reporters and academics have spent several weeks in China and have added a new dimension to the outside appraisal of Chinese economic developments. Travelers, especially those who visit China at intervals, are able to supply information on such matters as the food supply and the pace of industrial construction. The parlous state of the economy in 1960-61, for instance, was confirmed by travelers who for the first and only time since the revolution saw widespread malnutrition in the populace. The Japanese are by far the most numerous travelers in China and have the advantages of cultural, linguistic, and physiognomic kinship with the Chinese. Recently a growing number of Americans of Chinese extraction have visited China and have reported their impressions on living conditions. Most travelers are confined largely to tourist routes and show places; nonetheless, they are now so numerous and variegated that reports of their experiences in the public press can contribute to an understanding of what's going on in China. Visitors with special background and entree, such as Audrey Topping and John S. Service,32 give especially interesting details on the attitudes of the leadership toward economic development. 31 30 New York. Dutton, 1967. Marcuse comments on the frustrations of the permanent foreign correspondent in Peking who is faced with the problem of interpreting China to his readers through studying the official press and attending briefings by official spokesmen. The attempt to make sense out of this raw material drove the correspondents to a permanent state of roaring mirth, according to Marcuse. "It was like watching a film version of Orwell's 1984 starring the Marx brothers" (p. 11). 31 New York Times. Dec. 20, 1971, p. 20. 32 See Audrey Topping. "Return to Changing China." National Geographic, December 1971, pp. 801-833. and the four articles in the New York Times, Jan. 24-27, 1972, by Service, who gives an incisive account of the new egalitarianism in China. Refugees come mainly from Kwangtung province and are thus a geographically biased sample. Furthermore, they are a special group, namely, those with a reason and an opportunity for fleeing. Refugees are valuable in furnishing grubby details on how the Communist system works, for example, how the sharing-out of the commune's net income is accomplished at the end of the year. SOVIET ANALOGIES A fourth source of information is from Soviet analogies. The majority of the major heavy industrial plants in China were either built or planned under Soviet auspices. Until recently, the output of the Chinese armaments industry was made up almost entirely of Soviet weapons or of Chinese modifications of Soviet weapons. A large number of middle-level economic officials either were trained in the Soviet Union or on the job by Soviet instructors resident in China. As a result, estimates of the cost, productive capacity, and certain of the production methods of many Chinese industrial facilities may be made with considerable confidence. 33 SCHOLARLY APPRAISALS A fifth source of information is the result of scholarly research on the Chinese economy. An example of a thorough and thoughtful appraisal of the Chinese industrial scene is Prof. Barry M. Richman's Industrial Society in Communist China. Professor Richman draws on his long experience as a management consultant in the United States, the U.S.S.R., and India to compare the workings of management and the welfare of employees in the four countries. When visiting China, Richmand had access to more industrial plants and more management spokesmen than perhaps any other visiting management expert has had. Although directed to the problems of the society as a whole, Prof. Ezra F. Vogel's Canton Under Communism 3* is topnotch in giving a feel for the way in which the Communist system deals with the problems of economic organization in one large city (Canton) and one populous province (Kwangtung). Professor Vogel correctly argues that the organizational patterns and responses-such as the succession of "campaigns" and the problems they pose for local officials— seen in his microcosm apply to China as a whole.35 LIGHT AND SHADOWS To sum up: The best economic information on China is on the foreign trade sector. Information on economic policies and general economic trends is good, whereas information on the absolute value of economic aggregates-population, GNP, and national output of major industrial and agricultural products—is subject to a considerable margin of error. Even though production of military goods is closely held by the Government, enough information is available from foreign trade data, Soviet analogies, and other sources, to identify general trends. Information on living standards is fairly good; information on the attitudes of the Chinese people toward these living standards is necessarily vague and speculative. The general opening by China of diplomatic and commercial relations with the outside world, together with the publication of an increasing amount of hard economic information in the official press, suggests that the flow of economic information will increase substantially in the next few years after the statistical drought of the 1960's. 33 New York, Random House, 1969. 34 Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Press, 1969. 35 For an up-to-date and informative appraisal of the Chinese economy by a Soviet writer, see M. Sladkovskiy, "The Maoist Course Toward Militarization and Its Consequences for the PRC Economy"; Moscow, Voprosy Ekonomiki, Russian, No. 11, November 1971, pp. 71-83. 76-508 0-72-5 CULTURAL REVOLUTION: IN SEARCH OF A MAOIST MODEL By EDWIN F. JONES I. INTRODUCTION-POLICIES AND POLITICS Over the past 23 years the PRC has initiated a significant process of economic development. A self-sustaining dynamics of growth has been established, as the PRC has acquired the capacity to save, invest, and develop its technology and human resources. The government accepts the fostering of economic growth as a central objective, and the people are conditioned to participate in and adjust to the imperatives of economic growth. Still, economic growth has been erratic. Rapid growth has been the norm, but it has been periodically disrupted by political upheavals. The result has been a rather low average growth rate, as shown by the following data (average annual GNP growth rates 1): The PRC has argued that these political movements were necessary to secure an egalitarian and dedicated revolutionary society, but the cost should be noted. Had the PRC maintained an average annual growth rate of 8 percent, or even 6 percent, over the 19 year period, its per capita GNP would be double or half again higher, respectively, what it is today. It is difficult to speak of a Chinese model of development, for the PRC has followed varied economic strategies. At first, Chinese leaders hoped over an 18 year period to follow the path and pace of the USSR, which in its initial industrialization raised the urban share of the Soviet population from 18 percent in 1926 to 33 percent in 1938. In China the lack of a farm surplus and Stalin's refusal of massive credits at the 1952-53 aid negotiations dashed these hopes. The USSR did, however, agree to support a respectable industrial program paid for currently through Chinese exports, and during 1950-57 the PRC employed a modified Soviet model, adopting Soviet organiza 1 See Ashbrook, supra, p. 5, for GNP estimates. tional methods and concentrating on the construction of a complete modern industrial complex. However, Mao independently seized on the notion that an alleged vast reservoir of under-employed rural labor could be mobilized politically to accelerate economic growth and restore a revolutionary atmosphere to the bulk of society left untouched by the capital-intensive industrialization. Against the nearly unanimous opposition of his top lieutenants, he pushed through collectivization and socialization during 1955-56. But by 1957 the disruptions of this program had loosed bitter criticism and were seemingly forcing major retrench ments. Mao was stung into doubling his bets, launching in 1958 a total political mobilization of Chinese society through communes and the Leap Forward. Technical and fiscal controls were largely abandoned in the political drive. There was brief, heady talk of achieving an economic miracle in a few years, such as an annual steel output of 40 million tons and an urban population of 200 million. Instead, the Leap Forward disintegrated into chaos, and ended in mid-1960 with a collapse of farm output, massive economic imbalances, and the Soviet Union contemptuously washing its hands of responsibility of China's industrialization. In the ensuing crisis, China's leaders hammered out a new 20-year strategy stretching to 1980, which placed great stress on rational techniques and technology. The goal was to regain economic balance, attain. a marked degree of independent self-sufficiency, and restore conditions for renewed rapid industrialization and urbanization. The initial task for the 1960s was to raise farm output and to elevate industrial technology, a prerequisite to regain social stability and to secure a domestically-based recovery of industrial output. For this purpose, the planners chose to concentrate resources in the most efficient bases, the rich farm areas and the old industrial cities. The plans proposed that, as these bases developed surpluses, development would be extended to other areas of China in the 1970s, but selectively along lines dictated by economic considerations. The initial results of the strategy were dramatically successful. By 1964, a satisfactory growth of farm output had been secured at low cost, firmly rooted in the supply of industrial inputs to agriculture. Technological developments permitted a rapid recovery of industrial output during 1964-66, with extreme sophistication found in certain areas, such as advanced weapons. But the very success of the strategy apparently turned Mao against it. As in the 1950's, he found economic development becoming the preserve of technical bureaucracies and touching only a small share of China's population. His lieutenants and much of the Party were increasingly convinced that improved techniques rather than revolution would secure China's future. The "socialist education campaign," the counterpart of politics to the economic program, was being carefully circumscribed at every turn to prevent social disruption, and accordingly was ineffective. As the Third Five-Year Plan (1966-70) approached, Mao apparently believed he had to take drastic action to change China's political course before it became irretrievably congealed. In 1966 Chairman Mao precipitated the Cultural Revolution which has shaken up China's politics and society as it has wound a tortuous way through a radical phase, a military government phase, and now possibly a more relaxed phase seeking a return to normal political processes. How has it changed China's strategy and what are its prospects? To gain some insight on this question we may examine Mao's thought or his requirements, the changing appreciation of China's situation as seen through the three successive phases of the Cultural Revolution, and altered social and economic conditions. A. Mao's Thought Mao's beliefs can be related to his nature and experience. A charismatic leader, skilled politician, and shrewd judge of men, he has tended to rationalize an ideal world that would provide full scope for the use of these talents. He has come to view institutions, such as bureaucracies and incentive systems designed to guide men's activity and to chart and administer the nation's course, as instruments which might appeal to lesser nations and insecure leaders but which inevitably defend the status quo and are non-revolutionary. The higher organization he prescribes for China emphasizes political persuasion and direct communication between the political leaders and the masses, to the exclusion of an intervening bureaucracy. Political movements reveal the thought of the masses, and national decisions are based, not on a bureaucrat's calculations, but on political judgments of the enthusiasm and understanding of the masses. These beliefs developed and strengthened in over two decades of rule. In the 1950s he was obliged to give lip service to the bureaucratic Soviet model, and to present his later aberrations of collectivization before mechanization and of communes as Asian adaptations of this model. In the 1960s, freed from this inhibition and under compulsion to defend the Chinese brand of socialism against that of the Soviets, he organized his analysis systematically in an exchange of letters with the CPSU. These latters spelled out precisely where, in Mao's view, the USSR had strayed from the path of revolution and had become "revisionist," and constituted a commitment that China would not follow this path. Mao appears to have been the despair of the economic planners. He seems to have been bored by the economic affairs, and by his own testimony did not involve himself deeply in economic work for 13 of the 16 years of PRC existence up to 1966. Yet in this period he has brought to a halt two soundly functioning economic programs and strategies. His calculus differs from the planners. He is not concerned with the return on invested resources, but rather with how many people were affected and how it did alter their thinking. His predilection for political campaigns disrupts orderly development. Mao's lieutenants in charge of practical affairs have attempted to influence him in various ways with limited success. After over 35 years of Party rule, Mao's leadership has become institutionalized and unchallengeable. He is a proud man, and his enormous political successes have justified the extension of the normal large ego of a political leader to a mystic sense of destiny. Liu Shao-ch'i's efforts to deflect Mao in the early 1960's through bureaucratic footdragging, noncooperation, and subtle alteration of directives led eventually to Mao's destruction of Liu's party bureaucracy in the Cultural Revolution. Peng Teh-huai's direct confrontation and criticism in 1959 to halt the "Great Leap" proved fruitless and may have prolonged the "Great Leap." |