Modernization And The Maoist Vision

...Not all elements of the vision have been equally prominent at all times and some of them have only been made fully explicit in the course of time...

...Paradoxically the emphasis on spiritual transformation may lend itself to quite disparate policies...

...This vision may involve aspects of what is called "modernization" in the West, but modernization is conceived of as a part of a much larger whole defined by the ideology...

...One widely accepted response is that the goal is the modernization of China...

...In the end the main criterion for assigning persons to the "people" or "non-people" is to be sought in their spiritual attitudes rather than in the facts of their class origin...

...One could, of course, devote volumes to a discussion of the meaning of this term and yet there does seem to be a kind of common core of shared meaning which is implicit at least in most American discussions...

...Surveying the history of the People's Republic since 1949, we find that various elements of the vision play an enormous role in the enormous effort of the first few years to bring about political and ideological consolidation...

...The enormous energies invested since 1949 in the effort to achieve the spiritual transformation of the entire Chinese people whether in the form of "study" (hsueh-hsi), "thought reform," "remolding," "education through labor" or "socialist education" is one of the most obvious instances...

...The doctrine of salvation stresses simultaneously that almost all men may be saved...

...All of these instances, of course, involve not so much a concern for the expansion of power as for the preservation of power in being and it may well be one of the defects of the theory of totalitarianism that it dogmatically assumes that the concern for power must always be a concern for its maximization...

...This is just as true of Rameses and Ch'in Shih Huang-ti as it is of Mao Tse-tung...

...It is functional to goals which lie beyond it or it plays a certain function in the larger social system, etc...

...Is there a rigid Chinese Communist "goal structure," etc...

...The obverse side of the formula—the notion that the "people" is not homogeneous but composed of different classes which still engender "non-antagonistic" (and even antagonistic) contradictions, has, however, been of equal importance...

...In terms of modernization, however, it is difficult to believe that the vision will be allowed in the long run to interfere particularly with those aspects of modernization most relevant to the achievement of national power...

...It must always be explained in terms of "larger" social, historic and economic forces of which it is the mere instrument...

...The transformation of the Chinese people must be carried out by the Party...

...has called Mao's "military deviation"—his tendency to think of a wellindoctrinated army as providing a paradigm of Communist life...

...In fact, one might argue that during the whole period from the "Hundred Flowers" campaign to the present campaign for "socialist education" all policies have borne some relationship to the problems of modernization...

...Undoubtedly they do serve this purpose...

...A highly advanced industrial society may be able to lavish equal resources on state power and prestige and welfare...

...Ideally it is also the Party which is in direct communication with the "worker-peasant-soldier" masses and which reflects what the masses want and need or rather what they ought to want and need in a Maoist universe...

...The Party may serve the interests of Chinese nationalism but it does so from a supra-national stance...

...On the question of Ieadership I shall simply adhere to the conventional hypothesis that Mao Tse-tung and those closest to him have played a leading role in determining basic policy shifts during the last fifteen years...

...It makes no allowance for the possibility that a concern for the maintenance of power in being may, at times, outweigh the concern for its maximization in the future...

...In the early years after 1950, his role may have been somewhat inhibited by the awesome presence of Stalin...

...One makes a virtue of necessity according to this view because the necessity is intractable...

...There may have been moments when his presence has receded from the center of the stage...

...The fact that "virtue" is associated with necessity by no means implies that the belief in virtue may not be genuine and fervent particularly since the belief is also linked to the power interests of the leadership...

...cit., p. 154...

...has again been allowed to affect the strategy of modernization, particularly in the economic sphere...

...To keep their vast population alive at the barest subsistence level it became obvious that a maximum attention to agriculture was imperative...

...Thus the fact that the slogans of the "Hundred Flowers" movement and of the great leap continue to live on into periods when they no longer apply is obviously a device designed to prove that Mao's contributions to the storehouse of Marxism-Leninism are irrevocable and cumulative...

...Mao's spectacular projection of his own authority in the Communist bloc and the world at large and the present hysterical cult of Mao in China may serve a certain vision of the world or be in line with certain policies but also admirably feed his limitless hybris...

...intensity, is the necessity of contact with the masses, and "participation in physical labor" on the part of intellectuals, students, professionals and lower bureaucrats...

...On the contrary, there is absolutely no reason to assume that it provided Mao with any prevision of the circumstances which were to give rise to the "Hundred Flowers" campaign or the "great leap forward" campaign, or to the circumstances which were to lead to their abrupt demise...

...The leadership may explicitly profess concern with other matters...

...The Chinese leadership's unquestioning adoption of this model after 1950 was due not simply to the fact that it was the orthodox MarxistLeninist model of economic development but also to the fact that Stalin had in this model already bent Marxism-Leninism to national power purposes...

...The Maoist version on the other hand projects a kind of collectivist mysticism...

...As long as Mao and those close to him remain at the helm, we may expect them to be as much concerned with the vision as with any of the other goals of the regime...

...At this very moment the Maoist vision, in one of its most extreme formulations, again occupies the center of the stage...

...The drive was speedily terminated when it seemed to involve a threat to the unlimited political power of the leadership...

...During the years from 1949-56 there can be little doubt that the goal of modernization on the Soviet Model was assiduously pursued by the Chinese Communist leadership in many sectors...

...Mao's Vision and Modernization These it seems to me are some of the more salient elements of the Maoist vision...

...There is also the assumption that the basic goal of the leadership is the achievement of a certain vision of society spelled out in the scriptures of Marxism-LeninismMaoism...

...1, 1965...

...Power, we are told, is not an end in itself...

...In fact, however, at given points in time they may by no means move in the same direction...

...It is difficult to believe not only, or even primarily, because in some of its aspects it runs counter to the requirements of modernization...

...Ideally speaking, the Party maintains its supremacy not simply by dint of its organizational machinery but by its ability to internalize its "proletarian nature" into every party member...

...Not only has the pursuit of this vision often cut across other goals of the leadership but has with varying degrees of intensity conditioned the manner in which these other goals have been pursued...

...They are not merely the embodiment of a social vision, or the destiny of China, or the process of modernization...

...In fact, all its behavior is determined by the imperatives of the modernization process...

...Many tasks of public health, police work, social control and even economic undertakings, which depend primarily on labor intensivity, lend themselves to Maoist methods...

...Yet, as we know, ever since the end of 1962 there has again been a rising crescendo of emphasis on "socialist education...

...Confracflon and Revival The retreat from the Great Leap in 1960-62 again seems to mark a return to a sober estimate of the requirements of modernization but no longer on an exclusively Soviet model...

...The "small group" technique and the technique of mass organization were universally applied...

...It is assumed that the goals are immanent in the process and that we know what they are...

...The Maoist Vision of the Good Society It nevertheless seems to me that if we are to understand some of the modes of response to these problems which have emerged since 1956, we must introduce another broad goal area which might be called ideological but which I shall refer to as the Maoist vision of the good society...

...All that will be urged in this article is that the goals of the leadership have been one of the factors shaping the course of events...

...The leadership's concern is probably justified...

...One of the most striking facts of recent Chinese Communist history (particularly since 1956) has been the gradual departure from the Soviet model of modernization...

...It has indeed become the tendency among some to regard this eminently Soviet phase of Chinese development as the "modernizing" phase par excellence as opposed to the irrationalities of subsequent phases...

...Again, we seem to be dealing here with standard Marxist-Leninist doctrine, but as has been pointed out by many, the Party has probably played a more crucial and concrete role in China than in the Soviet Union at least during the lifetime of Stalin...

...The "proletarian nature" of the Party no longer resides, of course, primarily in the industrial workers but has become a kind of spiritual essence embodied in the Party and yet still endowed with all those transcendental and universal qualities which Marx attributes to the working class...

...One may, in fact, argue as has been suggested that the modernization policies of this period are much more "rational" in terms of Chinese realities than the policies of the Soviet period...

...The emphasis on the individual's total self-abnegation and total immersion in the collectivity as ultimate goods...

...Yet all of this still leaves open the possibilities that the Party ranks, as opposed to the Supreme leader, are vulnerable to error and backsliding...

...Consensus and Collecfivism What are some of the essential elements of the Maoist vision...

...If modernization is an allenveloping force which controls all the acts both conscious and unconscious of the leadership, all their acts must be explained as a "function" of the modernization process...

...China may depart from the Maoist vision yet still move into a future uniquely its own...

...It is noteworthy that there is no reference to the "Socialist structure" of Chinese society as one of the factors preventing such a restoration...

...Of especial importance is the fact that our Party and State can count on a leading nucleus guided by the thought of Mao Tsetung...

...The campaign also seems to have coincided, however, with some dawning doubts about the complete applicability of the Soviet model of modernization to Chinese conditions...

...Even more immediately, it involves such a constricted and terribly simplified view of human Iife that one is inclined to doubt whether it is humanly viable...

...The ultimate roots of this emphasis may be sought in Lenin's own emphasis on the conscious factor (further extended by Stalin) perhaps fed to some extent by the Confucian faith in the power of moral influence...

...In fact, it may well have been high confidence and exuberance (as well as a desperate sense of haste) induced by the success of his vision in the political and social spheres which led Mao and those closest to him in 1955 to feel that collectivization could be speedily consummated in China without the dire effects it had produced in the Soviet Union...

...Another view places central stress on nationalism —on the goal of national power and prestige and on the achievement of world power status as quickly as possible...

...What have been the relations of this vision to the goal of modernization...

...The leadership may be quite optimistic about China's present economic situation and posture in the world at large, but it is precisely in the ideological sphere that one detects a mood of concern...

...Modernization If the ever-present concern with power by no means precludes the pursuit of broader goals—what are these broader goals...

...While the "Socialist education" campaign has, however, fallen with an enormous weight on the literary, artistic and cultural spheres and perhaps on all non-vocational areas of social life, while the cult of Mao has been raised to unprecedented heights, it is still not clear whether it 5 "Report on the Work of the Govemm^ent," Peking Review, Jan...

...A less developed society will have to make choices in this area and these choices may have a most profound effect on the strategy of modernization...

...The Party seemed to be proving that totalitarian consolidation of a people could be carried out effectively by relying on "man" rather than technology...

...Some parts of the vision seemed, and seem, to be quite compatible with certain aspects of modernization...

...While the vision may retreat, however, we are in no position to foresee the extent of the retreat or to predict what will remain...

...Plants raised in hot-houses are not likely to be robust...

...These doubts were certainly encouraged by the death of Stalin and the new winds blowing in the Communist bloc itself...

...Let a Hundred Schools Contend," Bowie and Fairbank, op...

...It was, after all, the peculiarities of Chinese conditions which made possible the stress on guerrilla warfare...

...The struggle against this bourgeois thought is not only a negative factor...

...The only desirable modernization is a modernization which can be incorporated into the Maoist vision...

...And yet when viewed in the abstract, there is a kind of rough coherence among them...

...Whether this language makes Marx a sort of ultimate liberal as some of his interpreters would have us believe, may be open to serious doubt, yet there is the fact that the individual and his situation does play a central role in Marx's Utopia...

...Power Turning first of all to the view that all the policies and decisions of the leadership are designed to maximize its power, we find that in recent years, particularly since the death of Stalin, there has been a distinct decline in the popularity of the "theory of totalitarianism" or all theories which stress the power drives of the leadership...

...The vehemence with which the ideological remolding of the army was carried on in the 1960-62 period can hardly be disassociated from this threat to power...

...Because the whole people (defined as a union of 1 Peking Review, "Fighting Task of Workers in Philosophy and Social Science," January 3, 1964...

...As has often been pointed out, the "Yenan syndrome" seems to occupy a central, hallowed place in the vision of Mao Tse-tung and most of the elements which form part of the Maoist vision first appear, at least in their embryonic form, during this period...

...Above all, however, there is the fact that the aging Mao and those closest to him are genuinely concerned with the survival of the vision...

...As we know, P'eng Teh-huai, who seems to have become the spokesman of military professionalism and perhaps of professionalism in general, had also become an "anti-party" element, that is a menace in the realm of power, while the crisis of morale in the army revealed in the Bulletin of Activities (Kungs-tso T'ung-hsun) documents suggested that the threat to the vision, at least in this sphere, was also regarded as a threat to power...

...Commenting on the European and Soviet discussions of Marxism, Chou Yang states "that in advocating the return of Man to himself they are actually advocating absolute individual freedom and asking the people who live under Socialism to return to the human nature of bourgeois individualism and to restore the capitalism by which it is fostered.1 " Even more characteristic has been the enormous emphasis on the power of spiritual transformation (indoctrination seems to be far too weak a term) to bring about this society of collective man...

...Beyond this, the growing intensity of the Sino-Soviet conflict has strongly impelled the leadership to project the 'Maoist vision onto the world at large as the very embodiment of "true Marxism-Leninism...

...Nationalism Viewed in this Iight nationalism may be much more than a "function" of the modernization process...

...The restoration of capitalism," states Chou En-lai (and here he is undoubtedly the spokesman of Mao Tse-tung), "is not inevitable...

...If the intelligentsia had shown its fundamental untrustworthiness, the subjective forces of the masses 4 were still available for heaven-storming feats...

...Where it occupies a central place, it may actually determine the strategy of modernization...

...The ideal Communist cadre is not only a paragon of selflessness but potentially omnicompetent...

...While the Soviet official ideology has been as deeply suspicious of the whole notion of alienation in the young Marx as the Chinese, a somewhat crasser form of the concern with the interests of the individual can nevertheless be discerned in its projection of Communism...

...Here again the Yenan experience provides the shining example...

...four classes) can be transformed, the whole Chinese people can participate in the building of Socialism and Communism...

...6 There is here, of course, an oblique implication that the Soviet Union lacks these reassuring features...

...Within China itself the Party ought to be the nervous system of society and should play a commanding role in every sphere of social and cultural endeavor...

...The whole thrust of the passage suggests, however, that what mainly stands between China and the "restoration of capitalism" is the Maoist vision...

...As far as one can judge at the present, experts are now expected to be diffused with redness even while devoting a maximum of attention to expertise and the system of higher education is more oriented than ever to the production of experts...

...In the other version, modernization becomes a conscious project or consciously entertained goal of large or small groups of men...

...This does not mean that one should see an absolute antagonism between the Soviet model of modernization and the Maoist vision...

...It is thus entirely meaningful to stress that the speedy achievement of nationalist goals has been one of the unchanging central goals of the leadership which has shaped the priorities and strategy of the modernization process itself...

...This view of the goals of the leadership is, of course, the avowed view of the leadership itself but is also shared by many others who may be ardently attracted to the vision or violently repelled by it...

...There are undoubtedly other assumptions which can and have been made concerning the goals and motives of the leaders, but I shall confine my attention to these...

...This does not mean that the leadership is not committed to the welfare goals which we associate with modernization— with living standards, public health, literacy, etc.—but the relative priorities seem quite clear...

...The "great leap forward" may have been based on the assumption that the "masses" (unlike the intelligentsia) had been basically transformed and that their "subjective forces" were at the disposal of the leadership while the present campaign of "Socialist education" seems to be predicated on the assumption that there is still much work to be done...

...Interpretations of events in Communist China have often swung wildly from the view that China is an inert clay in the hands of the leaders who shape it as they will to the view that everything that has happened is a result of an iron "objective necessity" which shapes all the leadership's decisions...

...The Relevance of the Soviet Model However, while the vision did permeate large sectors of political and social activity, in the areas most crucial to the modernization effort— particularly as related to state power goals—it was the Soviet model which was followed...

...In the strictly economic sphere one might argue that the economic policy pursued after 1960 with its emphasis on "agriculture as the base" has been much more rational in terms of China's conditions than the model of the 1953-56 period...

...One such widely shared assumption is that the overriding, indeed, all-embracing goal of the Chinese Communist leadership is to achieve the modernization of China or—put somewhat differently—everything that is happening in Communist China is an aspect of the process of modernization...

...It has justified the need for constant vigilance and unremitting indoctrination, but was also used to justify the vaguely defined legitimate area of "blooming and contending" of the "Hundred Flowers" period...

...This does not mean, one should hasten to add, that the whole history of Communist China during the last fifteen years can be understood in terms of an unproblematic implementation of the leadership's goals...

...after all, been collectivized without producing anything resembling the effects of collectivization in the Soviet Union...

...Some elements of the vision have had an obvious and almost unremitting impact on reality...

...This by no means precludes the fact that it has also been pursued as an end in itself and that this pursuit has played its own role in human history...

...There has, in fact, been a tendency on the part of some to brush aside the relevance of power considerations entirely on grounds which are a shade too facile...

...The fact remains, however, that on the whole Mao modestly deferred to the "superior experience" of the Soviet Union in these areas...

...At another level, however, elements of the vision are obviously manipulated simply as ideology in the narrowest sense...

...In fact the "great leap forward" and commune movement of 19571959 mark the high tide of the application of the Maoist vision to the very tasks of modernization...

...Objectively" Macbeth may have been a most successful Scottish "state-builder" but this by no means proves that the side of him which Shakespeare chooses to depict is irrelevant to a discussion of his day-to-day political behaviour...

...By transforming men's minds and consolidating their collective energies one can achieve enormous results in spheres where others have relied on material power...

...On the contrary, the "Hundred Flowers" formula was presented as a precious new contribution of Mao Tse-tung (the first since 1949) to the storehouse of Marxism-Leninism and it is, of course, quite easy to see how many ambivalent elements of the vision lent themselves to the "soft" interpretation of this period...

...Many elements of the vision are highly ambivalent ("dialectic") lending themselves to the support of quite opposing policies...

...Study," "thought reform," "confession," etc., were applied on various levels not only to prospective party members but to the "people" as a whole...

...The Role of the Communist Party Finally there is the enormous pivotal role of the Communist Party as the "proletarian" vanguard of society...

...The vision involves not only a conception of the good society of the future but also a sanctified image of the methods by which this vision is to be achieved...

...The emphasis on man as the decisive factor, on the negligible role of "material prerequisites," on the superior efficacy of collective subjective forces and on the omnicompetence of the Party all enter into this experiment, and give it its utopian, apocalyptic flavor...

...Where material incentives are not available, why not stress the "Communist ethic...

...In fact, one may speculate that in the areas of highest priority—such as nuclear development—the Maoist vision has never been allowed to interfere with the requirements of technology...

...People of the wrong classes are not easily transformed, and continue to generate poisons of wrong thought...

...Yet as we know, the relationship of the whole Soviet development to the supposed prerequisites of modernization has itself been the subject of endless, unresolved debates...

...The fact that Mao Tse-tung was still vigorously supporting the program in February 1957 only to allow him self to be won over to the opposition (which had undoubtedly been strong in the Party from the outset) within the next few months can hard ly be due to its failure to produce spectacular economic results in the early months of 1957...

...If the Chinese Communist Party is conceived of as the sole effective instrument for achieving a certain vision of the good society or for making China a great world power or for consummating the process of modernization, then the general goals and power considerations may actually reinforce and enhance each other...

...2 At the time when it was uttered, this doctrine was linked to the lenient policies of the "Hundred Flowers" period...

...It tends to involve the notion of a highly developed division of labor of "functional specificity" with the corollary that men should have a degree of autonomy and authority within their various areas of competence...

...Economists often treat it as being co-extensive with industrialization and it is indeed in this area that the meaning of the term "rationalization" can be most concretely elucidated...

...The Chinese could not reduce the peasantry to a subsistence level and then ignore the agricultural sector...

...On another level, however, the enemy must be conceived of as ever present in the minds of the people itself in the form of "bourgeois thought...

...Thus the campaign of "Socialist education" was begun very early in the army, and having been judged a success, we find the army projected as a model for society as a whole...

...When directed against those defined as the outer enemy, struggle makes for solidarity "within the people...

...It has always led to objective results, bad or good, which have survived its pursuit...

...In fact, the decisions of the leadership may have something to do with shaping the order of priorities and strategies of the modernization process itself...

...The adherents of the monistic modernization theory seldom if ever raise questions about the goals of modernization itself...

...All of this makes the restoration of capitalism very difficult in our country...

...Is the leadership a monolithic group...

...The intelligentsia had shown its unreliability at the time of the "Hundred Flowers" campaign...

...It would certainly be the gravest of errors to assume that because the 1960 economic strategy has proven fairly successful, economic considerations will necessarily override the concern with the "succession to the revolutionary heritage...

...that salvation is enormously difficult for all men, and that backsliding is an ever present possibility...

...This may reflect the genuine belief that "participation in labor" is a form of thought reform which will induce respect for physical labor and keep these elements from over-weening pretensions...

...if a reasoned judgment had been made that further economic and scientific development required the more positive participation of the intelligentsia, one can hardly say that the experiment was given time to prove itself...

...Yet it might well be argued that, in part, the departure from the Soviet model of modernization was due to the realization that this model was not applicable to China's real situation...

...Have its goals remained constant and unchanging...

...Where weapons and capital are scarce what is to be lost in stressing the organization of human energies...

...Among many Americans there is in fact the latent assumption that a fully modernized society will look exactly like the United States with all its social and cultural specificities...

...There is another view which may be said to concern motivation more than goals—namely, that the Chinese Communist leadership is essentially engrossed in the limitless "totalitarian" aggrandizement of its own power, both within China and in the world at large...

...On the one hand the experiment seems to mark a further concession to the requirements of modernization...

...It draws above all on the actual experience of the Communist movement during the thirties and forties, and the interpretation of this experience enshrined in the Yenan writings of Mao Tse-tung and Liu Shao-ch'i...

...Mao Tsetung's commitment to these values probably preceded his conversion to Marxism-Leninism and has, as we know, even colored his vision of the utopian future which he seems reluctant to think of in terms of stasis and total harmony...

...Where one has mobilized the collective energies of men, motivated by the Maoist vision, economic advancement, national power and social transformation are no longer purely dependent on "material prerequisites...

...Similarly, while the purges of Kao Kang and Jao Shu-shih in 1954 and of P'eng Teh-huai in 1959 undoubtedly involved policy differences from the outset, it is quite clear that in the end these "anti-party elements" were associated with a threat to power...

...the frequent reference to the model of military life with its nostalgic allusions to the heroic and idyllic guerrilla bands of the past are particular characteristics of the Maoist projection of the future...

...At the other extreme, we have the view that the vision runs completely athwart the prerequisites of modernization or that it is a sort of rationalization of the failures and difficulties of modernization in China...

...Weber himself in spite of his tendency to use the cover term "capitalism" (presumably an economic category) was just as much concerned with political bureaucracy, military development and legal "rationalization...

...They have led, it would appear, to a substantial economic recovery...

...One can easily see how the same doctrine can be given a much more draconic interpretation...

...Revolutions, ideologies, nationalism and the policies of governments are all surface eruptions of this underlying process which is independent of the wills of men and operates behind their backs very much like Hegel's "Weltgeist" or Marx's "mode of production...

...This doctrine finds its formal institutional expression in the coalition structure of government, and can, of course, be harnessed to the nationalist goals of the regime as well as to project the Chinese model to the "emerging world" where there is such an obvious political need to "unite with whom one can unite...

...The doctrine that all can be saved—even some "counter-revolutionary elements"— has, of course, always been heavily qualified by the retention of the class notion...

...The whole current fervid campaign of "Socialist education" is permeated more by a kind of pervasive anxiety than by a mood of high confidence...

...The hope is that of a kind of internalized total consensus achieved mainly by spiritual methods...

...3 The 3 Lu Ting-yi, "Let Hundred Flowers Blossom...

...The technician and, for that matter, the professional bureaucrat will be very conscious of the limits imposed by his materials and by the imperatives of the situation within which he operates...

...They were genuine Stalinists in their whole-hearted acceptance of Stalin's accommodation of Marxism-Leninism to the interests of a nation-state...

...Here again we note what Stuart Schram 4 Whatever may have been the discontents revealed in 1956-57, the peasants had...

...What is mainly implied is that the Soviet model involves a stress on professionalization, on a degree of autonomy for professional hierarchies, particularly in the industrial, state administrative and military spheres...

...On this side, it is particularly closely linked to another element of the Maoist vision, namely, the enormous stress on struggle, conflict and high tension as positive values...

...Nevertheless, the power approach reminds us that we are dealing with a group of men who know and savor power and its uses as much as any ruling group that has ever existed...

...This can be discerned in the effort to give professionals and specialists a greater sense of security and freedom, in the rectification campaign directed against the Party with the implied admission that in some areas the specialists knew more than the Party and even in the new concern with legal codification...

...growing doubts about the complete applicability of the Soviet model of modernization may have even encouraged the view that the Maoist vision was applicable in areas where "Soviet experience" had hitherto reigned supreme...

...With the beginning of the "Hundred Flowers" experiment, the picture becomes more complex...

...One is tempted to say that, when invoked in this way, these ideological themes simply serve to confirm the infallibility of the "thought of Mao Tse-tung" in the face of all shifts and twists in line, and—particularly since 1956—to confirm ever more emphatically the autonomy and originality of the "Chinese path...

...Unyielding objective conditions, Reprinted from THE CHINA QUARTERLY, January-March 1965, with the kind permission of author and publisher...

...The factor of power is relevant to a discussion of all these policies and shifts in policy...

...At another level, some elements of the vision have been invoked and made most explicit in connection with certain specific campaigns—such as the notion of "contradictions among the people" at the time of the "Hundred Flowers" campaign or the emphasis on "subjective forces," "revolutionary romanticism" and "man as the decisive factor" at the time of the "great leap forward...

...The notion was later vastly extended to include the whole "people" including the "national bourgeoisie" however defined...

...As perfervid Chinese nationalists the Chinese leadership shared the preoccupations which lay behind Stalin's own choice of model...

...Fighting against wrong ideas is like being vaccinated—a man develops greater immunity from disease after the vaccine takes effect...

...On the whole, however, one perceives the imprint of his outlook (probably developed in close collaboration with Liu Shao-ch'i) at almost every crucial turning point from the land reform campaign of 1950 to the present frenzied drive for "socialist education...

...In general, it tends to mean something approximating Max Weber's conception of the process of rationalization in all those spheres of social action—economic, political, military, legal, educational—which lend themselves to the application of "Zwecksrationalitat...

...The phrase "Maoist vision" seems to describe a static frame of reference and almost suggests something like an "operational code" which may provide a key to all the shifts and twists of Party policy since 1949...

...Yet they can be transformed while those of good class background can be led astray...

...On the matter of goals, while there is certainly no rigid static "goal structure," while the relationship among goals has undoubtedly been enormously complex, problematic and shifting over time, it may nevertheless be possible to speak of a certain range of broad goals which has remained fairly constant and which may have set certain outer limits to the possibilities of policy choice...

...It is of course true that to the protagonists of the modernization school nationalism is simply an "aspect" or "function" of some all-inclusive modernization process and hence not to be considered under a separate rubric...

...In fact, Mao may have genuinely believed that in the course of thought reform "the political outlook of the Chinese intellectuals has undergone a fundamental change...

...Indeed, at points where the implementation of policy may seem to endanger power interests, it may be the most relevant factor of all...

...If one assumes that one of the basic domestic aims of the "hundred flowers" campaign was to provide the intelligentsia (a term which, of course, includes both professionals and academic and literary intellectuals) with an opportunity to participate more fully and freely in the economic and scientific development of China...

...The "Hundred Flowers" campaign may have been predicated on the genuine belief that the intelligentsia had been basically tranformed during the 1949-55 period, while the "anti-rightist" campaign of 1957 was based on precisely the opposite assumption...

...Some have leaped to the conclusion that this marks the departure from a "rational" approach to modernization...

...To others it must be considered as a force in its own right...

...The Party does not derive its transcendent moral status and historic role in China or in the world at large from the fact that it merely represents the Chinese people, but from a higher source...

...What vitiates the narrow "power approach" is the assumption that a concern with the maintenance or expansion of power is necessarily incompatible with the pursuit of more general goals...

...Franz Schurmann has, for instance, stressed the emphasis during this period on the Soviet conception of managerial responsibility in industry (without necessarily regarding it as pre-eminently rational...

...If, on the other hand, modernization is a goal consciously pursued, it is not impossible that it may compete in the minds of the leadership with other goals...

...After the Korean War we have a gradual implementation of the Soviet model of economic development...

...The question is, of course, distressingly imprecise and begs further definition...

...To assume that Stalin's lop-sided emphasis on heavy industrial development was a function of Soviet nationalism seems to make much more sense than to assume that it was the only rational strategy of industrialization in an underdeveloped area...

...The return of large numbers of students to the countryside involving as it did the frustration of hopes for advancement in urban society, also created a serious problem of morale which seemed to call for drastic therapy in terms of spiritual transformation...

...One version treats the "process of modernization" as a vast, indeed, an all-embracing impersonal historic force...

...Even the masses had shown their inability to live up to Mao's expectations at the time of the "great leap forward...

...This involved some retreat in the concept of Party omnicompetence, considerable emphasis on a "rational" division of labor and professionalization and some emphasis on the need for a professional state bureaucracy...

...Populism" The emphasis on spiritual transformation is closely linked to the "populist" theme...

...Lenin's own projection of Utopia in State and Revolution still draws heavily on Marx's own meager and vague descriptions which, as we know, speak in terms of the total liberation and self-fulfilment of the individual...

...Modernization may not be fully compatible with the Maoist vision but neither has it been fully compatible with Jeffersonian democracy...

...Another theme which has been stressed, with varying degrees of 2 "Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People," Bowie and Fairbank, Communist China 1955-59 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 289...

...It is difficult to believe that the vision will survive at least in its present extreme form...

...it may even sincerely be concerned "subjectively" with other matters...

...Thus whenever there is a stress on the "mass line," one may assume that the decision-making function of the local party fraction is being stressed...

...The beginnings of this new revival are perhaps to be discerned in the crisis surrounding the army in the 1959-62 period...

...There is first of all the overriding commitment to a society united by something approaching a total consensus and a society marked by radical collectivism...

...Actually one can distinguish two versions of the concept of modernization which may have quite different implications...

...At the same time it is made crystal clear that one is not free to find among the masses any view of reality which contradicts the Maoist vision...

...It also involves a stress on norms of universality rather than ascription and thus, should involve social mobility—the opening up of careers to talents...

...One might say that for the whole course of human history power has always been "functional...

...Looking at the whole concept from the point of view of China, one is inclined to stress that it also may involve a sober respect for objective conditions...

...In China we have a firm and fighting Marxist-Leninist Party, a proletarian Power which is increasingly consolidating itself, a powerful and revolutionary People's Liberation Army, an enormous number of cadres, a people of high political consciousness and a glorious revolutionary tradition...

...Ideology is also deeply implicated in the whole Soviet development...

...Yet all this may change...

...This new emphasis on the requirements of modernization as well as the doubts about the Soviet model did not, however, necessarily diminish the role of the Maoist vision...

...It is this idea of the "proletarian nature" of the Party which sets strict limits to the whole populist drift of the Chinese vision...

...Its more immediate background is to be sought in the circumstances of the Yenan period when the methods of "remolding" were first applied to members and prospective members of the Communist Party...

...In fact since the beginning of the Sino-Soviet conflict, the Party has stressed its proletarian nature more than ever...

...The official view of the present leadership is that the vision—no matter how its interpretation may fluctuate—not only provides the most effective means for achieving modernization, but is also an end in itself...

...unforeseen events and contingencies, and the recalcitrances of human nature have certainly been just as decisive as the goals of the leadership in shaping the history of China since 1949...

...Indeed, it is now implied that the spontaneous inertial movement of things runs counter to the vision...

...Similarly one must assume that the apparent priority granted to nuclear development in China through all the recent shifts in economic strategy is related fundamentally to its nationalist goals rather than to any obvious imperative of the modernization process...

...Except for those defined as counter-revolutionaries and reactionaries, there was considerable reason for belief that the spiritual transformation was succeeding...

...It may seem superfluous to speak of the collectivist goal of a Communist society, and yet the image of collectivity which has emerged in China, particularly since 1958, seems somewhat different in kind from that projected in the Soviet Union...

...Those who deny the relevance of power considerations might at this point maintain, however, that if power considerations and objective goals often move in the same direction why assign any particular causal weight to power considerations...

...Power has always been functional and always been demonic and the end is not yet in sight...

...It is the "poverty and blankness" of China, Mao insists in 1958, which makes possible the achievement of Communism long before the insidious corruptions of capitalism and revisionism have set in...

...The two versions may have quite different consequences for an analysis of the behavior of the Chinese leadership...

...Yet while these themes are hardly the "sufficient causes" of the campaigns of 1956, 1958 or other new departures, the genuine belief in the assumptions implicit in them may well explain the high confidence and elan with which these campaigns are pressed...

...His influence may have flagged at the Wuhan meeting at the end of 1958 and after the retreat from the great leap forward...

...Even if we assume that modernization is leading in the end of days to some universal homogenized human condition, in processu it is quite compatible with quite different conceptions of the priority of ends to be served...

...There has been much discussion of Chinese Communist goals during the last decade and a half and there is a certain range of broad assumptions which can be discerned in most analyses of the Chinese scene whether written by academic experts poring over Chinese Communist media or visitors who have been there...

...Certainly Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology is one of the main sources of this vision, but this does not preclude the possibility that in some of its aspects it coincides with certain traditional Chinese habits of thought and behaviour...

...It also seems to mark a contraction in the influence of the Maoist vision even though the new economic model with its emphasis on "agriculture as the base" was quite distinctly Chinese...

...One simply has to peruse Mao's comments in such works as The Socialist Upsurge in China's Countryside (1955) to appreciate the fervor of his belief in those "facts" which seem to support his vision...

...Oddly enough, the official ideology also seems to stress the relation of necessity to virtue...

...Another element of the vision which is closely linked to the emphasis on spiritual transformation and collectivity is the stress on man rather than weapons or tools as the "decisive force in history...

...Obviously the gravitation toward the total nationalization of industry and the collectivization of agriculture was entirely in line with both...

...It involves the sustained attention to the most appropriate, "rational" and efficient methods for increasing man's ability to control nature and society for a variety of ends...

...There is a movement towards the creation of a state structure with a modern bureaucratic apparatus and the professionalization of the army on a Soviet model is vigorously pursued...