CHINA BY DAYLIGHT

...food supply is usually geared to urban needs...

...19 According to Red Guard publications, T'ao Chu, a former associate of Lin Piao, maintained luxurious guest houses at the expense of the state treasury, had a floating club, and was on the point of building a crystal palace when the Cultural Revolution began...

...First of all, there is no historical tradition in China for legitimizing individualism, diversity, or dissent...

...Another group with acute grievances is that of the tens of millions of "educated youth" in China who enter the labor force each year unable to find suitable employment and often are unable to find employment at all...

...Moreover, it seems likely that the urban/rural differential moved even further in favor of the cities during the 1950s, although this trend may have been reversed somewhat in the '60s and '70s...

...Yet there is no necessary relationship between Maoism and equitable development...

...Alexander Gerschenkron, after thoughtfully reviewing the European experience with industrialization, points to "the great elasticity and variability in the industrialization processes," and to the creative ingenuity, originality, and flexibility of many once-backward countries in solving the specific problems of their industrial development.' His review of the European evidence concludes, in effect, that there are many ways to development and that it is difficult to make any generalizations except that they were all successful...

...As a result, the standard of living for the average small peasant in China has risen, even though the life of the Chinese city-dweller remains considerably superior to that of the peasant...

...But it seems to me equally likely that after Mao's death there will be a wholesale purge of the radical populists and an increase in the repressive apparatus of the state...

...Another study showed per capita peasant income in Kiangsu Province to be 74 percent higher than a comparable figure for Szechuan...

...A second achievement is what I would call Ruralism...

...I believe, because of collectivization...

...The austere values of the first-generation leaders of that revolution—asceticism, collectivism, 30Bao Ruo-Wang (Jean Pasqualini) and Rudolph Chelminski, Prisoner of Mao (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973...

...China can try to solve its problem of the educated unemployed, for example, by dispatching some 8-15 million youths to the countryside where they are expected to remain for the rest of their lives...

...The same conclusion holds for any objective 'Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Growth in Historical Perspective (New York: Praeger, 1962...

...My own guess is, however, that without Mao, the Maoists will quickly be routed in any succession struggle...

...In the countryside, there are inequities between rural communes close to cities and communes in more remote areas of the country, between rich and poor brigades, between different work teams in the same commune—depending on such factors as soil fertility, water availability, climate, distance to markets, size of family, and other factors...

...Nonetheless, it remains true that in the '50s and '60s there was not much to choose between Indian and Chinese growth rates, and that Indians did not have either to surrender their political liberties or to close off their country from foreign influences in order to promote growth...

...33 Indeed, much of the widespread admiration for Mao's latter-day version of Rousseau's notion of the "general will" obscures the problem of how it is that the supreme leader comes always to recognize and reflect the general will in a society that does not allow anyone to criticize him freely...

...Finally, there are the inmates of corrective labor camps, which are of two kinds: labor reform camps for more serious offenses and labor reeducation camps for less serious offenses...

...2) India received much more foreign aid than China...

...this undoubtedly is one of the notable achievements of the Communist regime...

...My point is simply that the gap between pre-1949 and post-1949 economic performance is not as great as is often contended...

...To quell the revolt, 1,000 party officials were transferred to work in the universities, 200 of them being assigned to such senior posts as president or vice-president...

...3 'Quoted in Edward M. Opton, Jr., "When Therapy is Punishment," Matchbox, published by Amnesty International, Fall 1974, p. 7. leveling egalitarianism, and puritanism, a package that has been aptly called "pauperistic Communism''—developed in the course of that revolutionary struggle...

...There is little doubt that the Chinese economy was thrown into a major depression in the early 1960s as a result of the Great Leap Forward...

...Indeed, this seems to be characteristic of many of the most enthusiastic promoters of the Chinese Revolution in the West...

...Overfulfillment of the contract gave the family additional cash income or a percentage of the surplus crop...

...China's basic problem is that it has an enormous population pressing on a limited amount of arable land...

...But it was not only the crackdown on intellectuals during the Hundred Flowers campaign 21James R. Townsend, Political Participation in Communist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969...

...26/bid, p. 320...

...Indeed, the long-term trend of Chinese Communist politics, as Townsend says, has been the "emasculation of the state structure in general and representative bodies in particular...

...Inspired by a populistic version of Marxism that is more populist than Marxist, the Chinese Communists came to power by organizing and manipulating the legitimate grievances of the rural poor...

...concessions to quality in offices, schools, and factories were undercutting the class line and benefiting the children of bourgeois and landlord families at the expense of children of the peasants...

...Mao subsequently admitted to the Supreme State Conference that his "contradictions" speech could not be published because his colleagues feared it would spark even more serious student riots and strikes by factory workers...

...Lewis goes on: It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies...

...In the early years of Communist rule, many people did act on the basis of their belief in the public good and the Chinese future...

...But such groups have not been able to play much of a liberalizing role even in Communist states with more Western traditions such as Russia...

...As Japanese industrialization efforts in Manchuria gained momentum, however, output expanded again and by 1941 exceeded the 1936 level...

...32 It seems likely that the moderates are arguing— as Marx did—that "socialism" cannot be based on scarcity and that, unless there is a dramatic increase in production, the entire enterprise in China will fail...

...CHINA BY DAYLIGHT 143 be "colossal," in the "millions upon millions...

...Such a comparison suggests that China was on its way to modernization well before 1949 and BSubramanian Swamy, Economic Growth in China ana India, 1952-70: A Comparative Appraisal (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1973...

...the increasing signs of sterility and artificiality in popular participation...

...But such matters are obviously impossible to predict...

...Different judgments about the Chinese Revolution are possible even when all the myths have been dispelled...

...The often repeated epithet of stagnation has no merit when applied to this sector of the economy...

...Harold Isaacs characterizes them as the ages of Respect, Contempt, Benevolence, Admiration, Disenchantment, and Hostility.' Now, it would seem, with the opening to China during the Nixon administration, we have entered a new phase, that of Romanticism...

...Both the Indian and the Pakistani portions of the Punjab, for example, have been the scene of very rapid growth...

...Stanislaw Wellisz of Columbia University for focusing my attention on the inadequacy of single-factor explanations of economic development...

...In this way, different groups within the single Party could compete against each other and prevent bureaucratic domination by any one group...

...Another benign possibility is that the new social classes emerging from the process of industrialization itself—specialists, managers, technocrats, in a word, the new Chinese middle class—will create pressures for a more liberal variety of communism...

...In industry, the moderates stand for shifting from output to profit targets within the enterprise, changing the focus of power in factories from Party committees to control by managers and technocrats, and changing from nonmaterial to financial incentives...

...Over the past 15 years, several developing countries have had growth rates exceeding 3 percent per head per year— that is, more than the two percent per head per year average rate achieved by the United States over the past 100 years and considerably higher than the averages of Britain or France...

...The Sinologists, restored to respectability, extol the "exceptional" and superior qualities of Chinese civilization and thus contribute to the aura of mystery on which the new romanticism thrives...

...The romantics think it likely that China will succeed in establishing a socialist society that is decentralized, debureaucratized, and egalitarian...

...These and other devices have been called for by the Chinese "Bukharinites" as a way of increasing low productivity in agriculture...

...In attempting to debunk some of the romantic myths prevalent about China today I take no especial pleasure...

...Within the Italian Communist party, factions have been institutionalized to the extent where competing groups are allowed to provide alternative programs to the Party membership for their approval or disapproval...

...To be sure, this is a very small and exceptional group of states, and it is not clear how far we can generalize from their experience...

...1 ° During the '50s, according to all Western estimates, Chinese grain production was generally well below 180 million metric tons, except for 1957 and 1958...

...This list includes China and some other countries, largely in the Far East...

...They have continued to promote rural interests...

...1e"Back to Grass Roots," Times Literary Supplement, December 19, 1968...

...the ability to organize for the protection of group interests...

...Quite obviously, economic development can and does take place under extraordinarily diverse cultural, economic, and political circumstances...

...effect, this system, the so-called production contract to the household, was an abandonment of collectivization and a revival of the traditional landlord-tenant relationship in which the commune now assumed the traditional role of landlord...

...The list includes countries on every continent, of every race, religion, and creed, of the poor and the not-so-poor, of tropical and temperate climates...

...The Maoist system involves a great deal of mass participation by ordinary workers and peasants, and Maoist values have gained widespread acceptance among the Chinese people...

...The extraordinary Chinese Communist penetration of society through thought control, small study groups, rectification campaigns, and neighborhood associations that institutionalize the practice of poking into one's neighbor's business are techniques that ensure a high degree of compliance with the state's programs— but they are not policies that most other developing countries can or want to emulate...

...Viewed in this historical perspective, the significance of the populistic, participatory, and egalitarian ethic preached by Mao lies in its efforts to combat both the "new class" and the deep-rooted totalitarian characteristics of Chinese society...

...They stand, in short, for orderly central planning, a larger degree of freedom for enterprises, and a quasi-market system in agriculture and wholesaling...

...Why risk an initiative that may one day turn out to be "revisionist...

...By ruralism I mean the opposite of what P. P. Streeten has called "Urbanism " 1 e—the major weakness of development programs generally...

...At such a point, those who now romanticize China will find that their God too has failed...

...Although the long-range effort of the Maoists has been to substitute nonmaterial for material incentives and collective for individual incentives, these efforts have had to be abandoned or drastically compromised...

...23Townsend, op cit...

...Some Communist countries, notably Russia, have followed this approach...

...In that relatively open period, workers as well as intellectuals were encouraged to express grievances and they began in 1957 to demand a variety of concessions, including the right to strike and to revive the long defunct Labor Bureau machinery for mediating conflicts with management...

...University teachers earn about 70 to 12 Christopher Howe, Wage Patterns and Wage Policy in Modern China, 1919-1972 (Cambridge, England: The University Press, 1973), P. 114...

...It is also possible that certain groups within the ruling party itself—groups I have identified as having "Bukharinite" tendencies—will win out in the succession struggle following Mao's death, introduce economic reforms of the Hungarian or Yugoslav variety, and develop a more liberal brand of communism...

...The Communists had to go back to 300 B.C...

...No matter how political participation in China may be defined, there are in fact many severe constraints...

...local cadres were less prepared to sacrifice for the future and more inclined to think of their own private lives...

...Still, the "Adelman model" for equitable growth, which stresses the importance of land redistribution and mass education, is not a recipe that only Communist dictatorships can use...

...The temporary workers are paid lower basic wages than permanent staff and do not receive the fringe benefits of enterprise welfare facilities, canteen access, etc...

...The practice of employing temporary workers began in 1964 and was evidently designed to lower the cost of the state wage bill...

...In fact, agricultural performance under the Communist regime was not, at first, dramatically better than the performance in the late '20s and early '30s, before the Japanese invasion that disrupted the countryside...

...The fruits of Chinese economic developmenI't have been more equitably distributed in China than in other developing countries...

...And the mass media, with their hunger for novelty, sensation, and instant heroes, have 'Harold Isaacs, Images of Asia, (New York: Capricorn, 1958...

...The "rightists" were accused of "endorsing democracy" but being opposed to both centralism and control over culture and education...

...In any case, it would seem that the best way to guarantee against intellectual scholasticism is not by forcing all intellectuals to adhere to a rigid mold of so-called practicality, but to foster a climate in which there is a genuinely free interplay of ideas, including ideas different from those of the leader...

...Within the Asian subcontinent, various regions have made very rapid progress...

...There are only eight countries in the world with more than 1,000 people per square mile of cropland...

...Surprisingly, perhaps, this is not a common problem...

...Another report indicates that in Shanghai alone, 400,000 persons were unemployed in mid-1967, probably most of them youth...

...This is a fact that does not yet seem to have dawned on Chairman Mao...

...I want to examine here some of these widely accepted propositions about the Chinese Revolution and the Chinese experience in modernization, propositions that either do not stand up at all under close scrutiny or need to be qualified...

...According to these figures, North Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, North Korea, and Taiwan all grew much faster than China...

...One sample survey in 1965 found that average 138 DONALD S. ZAGORIA income per peasant in the richest commune studied was 3.4 times that of a peasant in the poorest one...

...Both gaps are wider in the less developed than in the more developed countries, and can be closed only gradually, as a by-product of development...

...Collectivization of agriculture has been a weak spot in all Communist systems...

...Contracts were drawn up between the commune and individual peasant households according to which each family was allotted a fixed area of land to cultivate—often the same land it farmed before collectivization—and a given quantity of crop to be raised...

...There are also considerable variations of rural income between and within provinces...

...It also seems necessary to insist that one can praise some of the specific achievements of the Chinese Revolution without praising the system to which that revolution has given birth...

...Effective popular participation can be defined in many ways: participation in the making of decisions...

...Unequal farm incomes and gaps between urban and rural incomes, as Lloyd Reynolds has pointed out, are both products of underdevelopment...

...Like the Soviet Union before it, China has become, in the words of Barrington Moore, Jr., "a system of organized social inequality" in which the greatest gap is between the new bureaucratic ruling class and the masses...

...As a result, there is no grinding, mass poverty, hunger, and destitution...

...These 28 countries, as W. Arthur Lewis points out, 3 make an especially interesting list because of their variety...

...In China, these enormous pressures on the land have probably been responsible historically for the development both of certain values and of institutions, particularly the extraordinary amount of social discipline and gift for organization that has frequently been remarked upon by foreigners...

...The repression of intellectuals in China today has been so thoroughgoing that the Communist dictators in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as Generals Marcos, Thieu, and Park must surely be envious...

...It may be objected that the comparisons made here between Chinese growth rates and the growth rates of other developing countries are 'Robert Baldwin, Economic Growth and Development (New York: Wiley, 1966...

...Some student leaders were executed...

...During that experiment, many cadres simply falsified statistics and other data to create the impression that things were going as well as the leaders wanted them to go...

...By sharp contrast, Mao has pursued a more balanced development program, favorable both to light industry and to agriculture...

...For example, the Praxis group in Yugoslavia recommends an institutionalization of opposition tendencies or groups within the ruling Communist party...

...These remarks are not meant to deny or minimize the economic development that has taken place in China during the past 25 years...

...The recent "anti-Confucian" and "anti-Liu Piao" campaign, like the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, has led to a decline in economic performance...

...these areas and the products of these light industries have remained the basis of much of China's industrial product since 1949...

...About 28 of these developing countries had growth rates exceeding 2 percent per head per year between 1955 and 1965...

...Yet it persisted, often covertly, because it worked more effectively than other incentives...

...Yet, as Vogel concludes, "the Cultural Revolution was launched because years later capitalism, revisionism, and individualism remained rampant...

...CHINA BY DAYLIGHT 139 subsistence, with the result that resources are inevitably diverted from small to big farmers, and so inequities are fostered...

...Of the middle school graduates who do not go on to the university, only a handful can find jobs...

...Elsewhere, the Ivory Coast, Tanzania, Kenya, and Sierra Leone exceeded the Chinese rate, not to speak of such oil-rich countries as Iran and Libya...

...Perhaps the most important reason why China is a questionable model for other developing nations is that so much of the Chinese development experience is explicable only in terms of China's own revolutionary past...

...136 DONALD S. ZAGORIA misleading because of China's unusually large population, which compounds problems of development...

...Asia: Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Taiwan, Thailand...

...27 Thus, contrary to much of the Maoist rhetoric that encourages initiative, boldness, and spontaneity, all genuine efforts to think independently about the Party have been quickly suppressed...

...It is, of course, possible, as Mao contends, that intellectuals may lose their connection with "life" and degenerate into scholasticism...

...Much of this industrial growth was in light industry, particularly in textiles, which developed rapidly in coastal areas under foreign domination...

...The current land, reform program in the Philippines, although deficient in some crucial respects, is also an important step in the direction of giving the peasantry social and economic justice...

...Moreover, there are many sources of inequity in Communist China, some the inevitable product of underdevelopment and others a product of the political system itself...

...However, many other of Mao's ideas may be shallow or inaccurate...

...In such countries, too, new employment opportunities favor industry, which is usually located in urban areas...

...Several Western studies and the Chinese press itself reveal that by the '60s, "the relative egalitarianism of earlier years had been replaced by a system in which rating [of cadres] indicated very great differentials in power, prestige, salaries, and other prerogatives— and also involved great psychological distance between those at the top and those at the bottom...

...But in underdeveloped countries where pressures on the land are (or were) much lighter—as in many LatinAmerican countries where more than 50 percent of the people live in urban areas—the Chinese experience with intensification of agriculture, and the organizational concomitants of that, would seem to be irrelevant...

...India cannot replicate such a "model" even if its leaders were so inclined, nor are many of us likely to believe that it should...

...I do not presume to pass judgment on the totality of the Chinese Revolution itself, and I do not intend to deny many of the impressive achievements of that revolution...

...A I uthoritarian regimes of the Maoist type are the only ones that can mobilize scarce resources and bring about rapid economic development in the poor, agrarian countries of the Third World...

...The continual purging and repurging of the Chinese cadres and the enormous pressures they face from above and below are not likely to encourage audacity...

...Several detailed comparisons of Chinese and Indian rates of growth all conclude that, over the past 20 years, the two have been similar...

...Students went on strike because of dissatisfaction over job prospects...

...Whatever China has accomplished in the recent past and is likely to accomplish in the foreseeable future, its gains and the price paid for those gains result out of the dynamics of a revolution...

...It is evident that Chinese, wherever they are and regardless of the regimes under which they live—whether in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Malaya, Singapore, Taiwan, and throughout Southeast Asia— tend to be harder working, thriftier, more entrepreneurial, and have a greater gift for organization than their non-Chinese counterparts...

...23 Representative bodies of all kinds have been declining in effectiveness since 1956 because of: • tighter Party leadership, which lapsed briefly during the Cultural Revolution but is now being reasserted...

...Such a view seems to me extraordinarily optimistic...

...This would mean the retention and perhaps extension of free markets in rural areas, the consolidation and perhaps even the extension of private plots, the more widespread use of the household as the main accounting unit in the communes, and perhaps even the legitimization of the "labor contract to the household" system...

...Moreover, highly centralized economic systems involve the built-in risk that mistakes are magnified and difficult to correct...

...Such a reward system was about as far removed from Maoist egalitarian principles as one could imagine...

...In consequence, mass acceptance of Maoist values has been something less than total...

...But the most significant inequities in China today stem not from the economic but fm the 17 Irma Adelman, "Strategies for Equitable Growth," Challenge, May—June, 1974...

...In my various travels throughout the world, I have never encountered an intellectual class so intimidated and so fearful of engaging in discourse as that in China...

...After Mao's death, the "new class" in China—the Party apparat and the military commanders who even now play an increasingly large role—is likely to prefer "law and order" to the kind of frenetic, ideologically inspired upheavals characteristic of the Maoist era...

...Perhaps in some trivial sense, such as techniques of rice transplantation, China's experience can be utilized by other countries...

...Rapid economic development has taken place in many different places and in many different ways...

...The foremost student of Chinese industrialization in the 19th and early 20th century, Albert Feuerwerker, has recently written that, in industry, there is incomplete but convincing evidence that output of the modern industrial sector of China's economy increased at a very respectable rate throughout the period 1912-1949, notwithstanding the many obstacles to such a development...

...Stalin completely neglected and almost destroyed Russian agriculture in his single-minded quest for urbanoriented heavy industry...

...The Maoists, of course, disagree with most of this prescription...

...25 Ezra Vogel, Canton Under Communism (New York: Harper & Row, 1971...

...The intensification of these pressures in recent years has undoubtedly forced the Chinese Communists into experimentation with new techniques of rural organization such as the communes, techniques designed to maximize organizational resources for further intensification of agriculture...

...There are, in short, many ways, even within the severe confines of a one-party system, to prevent bureaucratic degeneration and to keep the Party leaders in touch with "life itself...

...Most of the economists now studying this problem have come to this conclusion...

...suggests that the Party leaders were unable to devise a practical system consistent with their socialist principles that was also capable of sustaining or increasing peasant motivation for production within the collectives...

...Wilfred Malenbaum's review of Swamy's book in the Journal of Asian Studies, November 1974...

...According to Frederick W. Crook, who has studied the agricultural incentive system in great detail, "the available evidence...

...30 Because the Chinese Communists have, unlike Stalin, sought to "reeducate" deviants both within and outside labor camps rather than to kill them, many outside observers have come to the conclusion that the Maoist system is much more humane...

...between 300,000 and 400,000 "rightists" were seized, one-third of them primary school teachers...

...According to one estimate, 8 million young Chinese have left the cities for the countryside since 1968...

...22 Trade unions, youth organizations, and many other groups were abolished during the Cultural Revolution, temporarily or permanently, because they articulated interests and grievances not in keeping with Party policy...

...But there is no reason to assume a necessary relationship between Communisttype regimes and equitable, balanced growth...

...This list includes countries with different political and economic systems, some with conservative military dictators, some more and some less authoritarian, some with democratic institutions, some with command economies, and some with freemarket systems.' Lewis's list of the top 28 includes: Africa: Gabon, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Libya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tunisia, United Arab Republic, Zambia...

...The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 brought that growth to a halt and occasioned a marked decline...

...Once the contract had been made, the individual family, not the cadres, had the responsibility to see that the contracted crop was planted, cultivated, and harvested...

...28 While many young people remain unemployed in the cities, millions of others are being sent to the countryside for permanent relocation...

...In the brief liberalization during the Hundred Flowers campaign, there took place in China what no less an authority than Liu Shao-ch'i described as a "revolt of the scholars," involving students, professors, and later spreading to some sections of the working class...

...It has failed because Mao overemphasized the possiblity of changing social values through education and propaganda and underemphasized the need to combat authoritarian tendencies by developing institutions that could check the abuse of power and privilege...

...but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience...

...During the Cultural Revolution, temporary workers organized themselves into groups and put forth various demands for amelioration of their status, demanding, above all, job security.'s It is nevertheless true that the Chinese have cut off the extremes of income distribution...

...It is equally evident that other peoples of Northeast Asia who share many of the common elements of Confucian, Sinic civilization have on the whole achieved more rapid economic development than the peoples of South, Southeast, and Western Asia who are influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam...

...Revolutions are rare, and revolutions of the Chinese type even rarer...

...Party bureaucrats were saying what they were expected to say but going about their business in their own ways...

...A recent study of industrial production in China, including Manchuria, indicates that net value added in industry grew more or less continuously through 1936...

...According to John Lossing Buck, the average harvest in 1929-33 was 182 million metric tons of grain and between 1931-37 it was 170 million metric tons...

...Many of the so-called spontaneous Mass Movements in China have had the quality of "controlled spontaneity...

...According to some estimates, it is customary in Canton for junior and senior middle school graduates to remain unemployed for periods ranging from three to five years...

...144 DONALD S. ZAGORIA even at the risk of lower rates of growth...

...At that level, some of the experience of all countries that are developing rapidly may be relevant to the others...

...In most development countries, planners put barely 20 percent of investment into farming—despite the fact that in most poor countries 70 percent or more of the people live on the land...

...Yet a comparison between the growth rates of China and India, two countries of comparable size, is not dramatically favorable to China...

...Nor is China's revolutionary heritage the only facet of the Chinese experience that may not be exportable to other developing countries...

...One of the most crucial constraints is—as James R. Townsend has pointed out21—that the only political issues capable of rallying mass participation are those the Party itself first introduces and defines...

...Thus, just as Lenin paved the way for Stalin without having intended to do so, so Mao may have set the stage for a Chinese Stalin...

...Such a breakthrough must be achieved, even at the risk of some "bourgeois revival...

...People will not sacrifice themselves indefinitely to a utopian collective good without some tangible and growing increases in their own living standards...

...There are many other areas of Chinese life in which the gap between Maoist values and actual practices are considerable...

...140 DONALD S. ZAGORIA In sum, the Chinese Communists have achieved a more equitable income distribution than most developing countries, and they have avoided some of the pitfalls of an urbanoriented strategy...

...To overcome their objections, the Party increasingly had to rely on incentives that would reward smaller groups...

...Some of the most rapid economic development in recent years has occurred in Northeast Asia...

...Yet most developing countries now are not led by revolutionaries and will not be so led in the foreseeable future...

...Alexander Eckstein estimates that, in per capita terms, growth in China since 1952 ranged between 2 and 3 percent per year...

...To combat these "vestiges of capitalism" the Maoists launched one campaign after another...

...the Maoist philosophy demanding that constant and direct mobilization of the masses should replace institutionalized political activity...

...But to proceed along such a course implies a realization that not only the "bureaucratic" leaders of the Party but the leader himself may occasionally be fallible and out of touch with reality...

...Reasonably successful land reforms have taken place in Bolivia, Venezuela, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Guatemala, and South Vietnam...

...Still other intellectuals, disappointed with the performance of many Third World countries, see in China a solution to the problems of modernization...

...that the decisive variable may not be the nature of the Maoist regime, but the skills, ingenuity, education, and organizational capacity of the Chinese people...

...CHINA BY DAYLIGHT 141 policy but popular execution of policy...

...12 There are also substantial differences between urban and rural incomes...

...18 A. Doak Barnett, Cadres, Bureaucracy, and Political Power in Communist China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967...

...As Irma Adelman has argued,'' Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Israel all have, grown rapidly and distributed the fruits of growth more or less equitably...

...protecting private interests and ensuring good government...

...There are greater inequities in China than are generally imagined...

...Workers, too, have been unable to express their grievances...

...Nor is it hard to find the reason for their intimidation...

...13 The considerable resistance among urban workers, intellectuals, and youth to be "sent down" to the countryside—resistance that became particularly strong during the Cultural Revolution—is evidence of the continuing gap...

...Although no confident estimates can be made of the number of such labor camps, of the total number of inmates confined in them, or of the economic importance of the labor performed within them, one former inmate, who for seven years was a prisoner in many such camps, has estimated their population to 27 Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 314...

...29Joseph Lelyveld, "The Great Leap Farmward," New York Times Magazine, July 28, 1974...

...1' When, after the collectivization of agriculture, villages with different levels of productivity were merged into one large collective farm that distributed income on a unified basis, members of the more productive villages soon realized they were subsidizing their neighbors at a disadvantage to themselves...

...political facts of life...

...It is even possible to imagine the emergence of a Chinese "Stalinism...

...Communist systems are also notoriously ineffectual in encouraging individuals to take risks and initiatives...

...6 Rawski estimates a per capita growth rate of 2.9 percent per year for the period from 1952-71.' According to the latest World Bank figures, this per capita growth rate for China (assuming the high figure of about 3 percent per year) is less than the average growth rate in Central and South America from 1960-70, which was 4.3 percent per year, and it is less than the average growth rate in the same period for all Asian and Middle Eastern countries excluding Japan, i.e., 4.2 percent...

...Engineers can earn as much as 150 yuan...

...No wonder a whole set of new myths about China has arisen to replace the older ones...

...4I want to thank Prof...

...Perhaps the most relevant comparison to test progress under the Maoist regime is one between pre-1949 and post-1949 growth rates...

...350 yuan, although few are at the top rung...

...There are several reasons for such pessimism...

...educational, health, and other public services are skewed in favor of the urban sector...

...146 DONALD S. ZAGORIA Finally, there is an even deeper and more perplexing matter...

...but there is the equal danger, as Schwartz says, that "practical" revolutionary politicians may also lose their CHINA BY DAYLIGHT 145 connection with reality...

...There is no class of the very rich, nor is anyone allowed to fall below a certain minimal standard of living...

...135 overview of the developing countries in the 20th century...

...that revealed the limits of mass participation in China...

...4) India's expansion was favorable to the wealthy.' All of these objections have some degree of validity, particularly the last, which I shall take up in a moment...

...There is general agreement among economists that India did better than China in agricultural growth, that China did somewhat better in industry, and that China's growth rate was much more erratic— impressive in the '50s and floundering in the '60s when growth was sacrificed to such politically motivated experiments as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution...

...Given the horrendous difficulties yet to be faced in the process of industrialization, the "totalitarian" traditions of the imperial state, the increasingly large role of a conservative military, and the absence of an individualistic, religious, or legal tradition legitimizing dissent from the state, the prospects for a Chinese Stalinism are unfortunately all too good...

...19 D. M. Ray, "China's New Patterns of Social Stratification," Australian Journal of Politics, December 1970...

...In fact, China's problems are quite unusual...

...Based on an ignorance rooted in great differences in language, culture, ideology, stages of development, and geographical location—and reenforced by a Puritan heritage that requires us to make devils of our enemies and saints of our allies—this volatility has led us through various phases...

...They also lack job security...

...All of these tendencies were reenforced by a Confucian ideology preaching virtues perfectly suited to the hierarchical state: respect, humility, docility, obedience, submission, and subordination to authority...

...Arthur Lewis, The Development Process (New York: United Nations Center for Economic and Social Information, 1970...

...In Poland, peasant productivity increased dramatically after the decollectivization of the agricultural sector...

...29 Regardless of which figure is correct, the Chinese have been undertaking the largest forced transfer of population any government has tried to organize since Stalin's mass deportations...

...increasing the value of the freedom of the individual, etc...

...To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as a disease is to be put on a level with those who have not reached the age of reason...

...8 According to Subramanian Swamy, net domestic product grew 3.7 percent annually in India during 1952-70 and 2.3 percent in China, which is "barely above the rate of growth of population...

...another estimate puts the figure at 15 million...

...The mistakes of the Leap revealed yet another problem in Communist systems—the difficulty of obtaining accurate information from below...

...Some intellectuals, particularly those associated with the New Left, find in China the "pure" revolution that was supposedly betrayed in Russia, a revolution that, in the words of one of them will go "beyond Hobbes, Weber, and Marx...

...3) India remains a "soft" state while China ranks among the superpowers...

...So the Maoist system does entail costs, and these costs may have been substantial for China...

...The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated...

...it did not rise consistently above 180 million tons until 1963...

...lbid, p. 51 "Lloyd G. Reynolds, "China's Economy: A View from the Grass Roots," Challenge, March—April 1974...

...Undoubtedly different judgments about the Chinese Revolution are determined to some extent by different estimates of the likely future of that revolution, which is not yet over...

...You start being "kind" to people before you have considered their rights, and then force upon them supposed kindnesses which they in fact had a right to refuse, and finally kindnesses which no one but you will recognize as kindnesses and which the recipient will feel as abominable cruelties 31 V Can (or should) much of the Chinese experience in development be replicated by other developing countries...

...to find a precedent in Chinese history for "letting 100 flowers bloom...

...America: Barbados, Guatemala, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela...

...Although eviddnce on these facts is scarce, one survey found that in one province the lowest grade of construction worker was receiving a wage 46 percent higher than the average of males in the richest rural cooperative of the same province...

...They see in China virtues that America once had but lost, such virtues as self-discipline and selfsacrifice...

...reduced enthusiasm for the process of participation as a result of a growing gap between the cadres and the masses...

...But at least some of these leaders have taken steps—or can be expected to take steps—to initiate some modest, incremental reforms of the gross inequities in their countries and to achieve slow but steady growth that may improve the lot of the masses...

...142 DONALD S. ZAGORIA No revolutions are cost-free...

...20 And the Maoist diatribes against the scourges of bureaucracy—corruption, "feudal" mentality, opportunism, slavery to routine, pedantry, formalism—make it plain that this tradition is still very much alive...

...The classic proof of this statement indeed was the Hundred Flowers episode in which some individuals tried to initiate debate on unauthorized issues, with an eventual result of either absolute rejection of the issues or continued debate on the narrow grounds defined by the Party...

...T IV he Chinese development path has avoided great costs and suffering to the Chinese people...

...Even in contemporary China, it is questionable whether the commitment on the part of the elite to those austere values will survive Mao...

...Cultural factors, while not decisive in determining economic development, are clearly important...

...ZBCurrent Scene, March 15, 1968...

...Moreover, much of Chinese development may have less to do with the specific nature of the Maoist regime and more to do with the Chinese people...

...Eckstein, op cit...

...Thomas Rawski, "Recent Trends in the Chinese Economy", China Quarterly, January—March 1973...

...Although this new pattern of bureaucratic stratification has been consistently attacked by the Maoists, it is fostered by the Chinese historical tradition of bureaucratic government...

...I gather from talks I have had with intellectuals and members of the elite in other developing countries that, while they respect Chinese Communism for the new discipline it has introduced in China, they are very reluctant to emulate it...

...During the Cultural Revolution, for example, pro- and antiEstablishment youth were recruited into rival Red Guard units and manipulated by different sections of the elite...

...Maoist-style participation has meant not popular formation and control of Z"Howe, op cit, pp 94-95...

...Under urbanism, agriculture is the chief source of savings for industrial investment and is gearel to production for the market rather than for ' SCurrent Scene, March 15, 1968...

...Thus local cadres increasingly began to sanction a system whereby the group to be rewarded was the smallest possible one, namely the individual peasant household...

...The imperial state was "totalitarian" in the sense that the state had complete control over all activities of social life, that there was a secret police atmosphere of mutual suspicion, that in the eyes of the authorities every accused person was assumed to be guilty, that terror was instilled by the principle of collective responsibility, and that reasons of state always took priority over the rights of the individual, the inevitable corollary being that an official in his capacity as representative of the state was sacrosanct...

...Perhaps the greatest victims of the Chinese Revolution have been the intellectuals, particularly those trained in the West and unable to rid themselves of this Original Sin...

...All that I have sought to demonstrate here is that the Chinese path to modernization is not a panacea, that it involves a variety of costs, human and economic, and that it cannot be replicated...

...To any attentive reader of the Chinese press during the past two decades, and to any perceptive visitor to the mainland, it is obvious that such tendencies are still deeply rooted...

...Contrary to many of the deterministic views that hold up the Chinese as the only or best way to modernize, the history of both 19thcentury Europe and of the Third World in the 20th century strongly suggests that there are many ways to modernization and that each way has its particular costs and benefits...

...promoted the Chinese-American rapprochement as though it were a pulp magazine story...

...Since the modest increase in such living standards that could be had by leveling down has already been achieved, any further increases can only come as a result of a major breakthrough in production...

...There are strong pressures within some parts of the Chinese elite for a kind of Bukharinism or market socialism...

...concessions to "capitalism" in the countryside were weakening loyalty to the collective...

...For example, what Benjamin Schwartz calls Mao's Baconianpragmatic view of science—learning by doing and by observing "concrete facts'.'— is a simplistic interpretation of what modern science is all about...

...As Ezra Vogel has written in his classic study Canton Under Communism, 25 the early 1960s in China witnessed a growing divorce between faith and practice...

...In most African, Latin-American, and Middle Eastern countries, pressures on the land are much lighter...

...There are considerable inequities between regularly employed factory workers and temporary workers who, according to data published during the Cultural Revolution, increased from 2.4 million in 1957 to 12 million in 1958, a figure equal to 26.5 percent of all workers and staff...

...t$ Throughout the late '50s and early '60s, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese leaders warned against cadres who no longer shared their lot with the masses, ate too much, received high rations, refused to take part in physical labor, assumed an attitude of superiority toward the masses, misused public funds, and sent their children to special elite schools that would qualify them for good jobs in the bureaucracy...

...20 Etienne Balasz, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964...

...But while it may yet be premature to make a final judgment as to the success of this Maoist enterprise, I am inclined to believe it has faili;d...

...Yet C. S. Lewis reminds us that "of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive...

...In Chinese industry, jobs are classified into eight labor grades and the ratio of the highest to the lowest wage is about three to one, from about 40 yuan a month at the bottom to 110 yuan at the top...

...These countries are more commonly led by army officers, reformists, organization men, or other types of leaders whose values and social bases will not permit them to move in the direction of leveling egalitarianism and austerity...

...To get some insight into the question of how deeply Maoist values are accepted by the Chinese masses, let us examine one aspect of Chinese society that involves hundreds of millions of people, namely, the agricultural incentive system...

...The emphasis on equitable, balanced development giving high priority to the countryside is a Maoist idea that is relevant to other developing countries, as I have suggested...

...CHINA BY DAYLIGHT 147...

...One of them, in an article appropriately titled "There Are No Simple Answers," cautions that because there is no one factor responsible for rapid growth, there is a need for "more microscopic analysis" of the growth process, which would stress the distinctive problems faced by each country.' Moreover, China's rate of growth, while substantial, is not remarkably high either in overall or in per capita terms when compared to the overall performance of non-Communist developing countries...

...And such intellectuals as the Chinese novelist Han Suyin preach the virtues of the Chinese Revolution for the Chinese living in China, but they choose to live abroad...

...In 24 Frederick W. Crook, "Chinese Communist Agricultural Incentive Systems and the Labor Productive Contracts to Households: 1956-1965," Asian Survey, May 1973...

...Between 1963 and 1971, however, there did appear to be a substantial growth average of 4 percent per year although a decline in 1972 brought the average for the period 1963-72 down to 3.1 percent per year...

...It seems quite clear that the removal of these so-called Educated Youths to the countryside is causing great strains in the society...

...But so far as crucial questions are concerned, such questions as the values of the Chinese elite, the basis of its legitimacy, its initial cohesion, its initial bond with the Chinese peasantry, and the distinctive institutions that have developed in China—all this cannot be understood without reference to the particular facts of the revolution...

...In China, rates of growth in agriculture have been much slower than rates of growth in industry, partly, Albert Feuerwerker, Rhoads Murphy, and Mary C. Wright, Approaches to Modern Chinese History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 305...

...To preserve order, and to legitimize its own special privileges, it will be able to draw on what the distinguished Sinologist Etienne Balasz has called the most "deep-seated and alarming tendencies" in the 2,000-year-old Chinese imperial tradition, tendencies that he describes as "totalitarian, state-centered and bureaucratic...

...But by the early 1960s the romantic bond between the Party and the peasantry had been snapped...

...Truth" may in fact be discovered in libraries or in laboratories...

...As a result, the standard of living of the Russian peasantry declined drastically and ever since has been lagging far behind the urban sector...

...Still another survey reported that the most affluent locality in Kiangsu Province had an average income 83 percent higher than the lowest...

...Along the same line, if Mao fears that a "new class" is emerging in China that may deprive the country of the fruits of revolution, the answer to this may be not an increase in ideological remolding, attacks on "bureaucracy," and all the rest of Mao's ideology, which rests on the notion of a preestablished harmony between leaders and followers, but rather in the creation of political machinery to check the bureaucracy and make it more accountable...

...And T'eng Hsiao-p'ing, one of Mao's closest associates now restored to power, was accused of building a club provided with every comfort for higher cadres in Peking...

...This led, in fact, to much stricter labor discipline and to the condemnation of these demands as "rightist deviations...

...33Benjamin Schwartz, "Thoughts of Mao Tse-tung," New York Review of Books, February 8, 1973...

...the lack of effective opportunities for ordinary people to express their views...

...They are the result of a certain set of conditions that are not generally found in developing countries, no matter how impoverished or exploited the peasantry...

...The peak year was 1942, followed by a sharp drop in 1945-46, and a partial recovery in 1947-48.' 1 Annual rates of industrial growth in pre'"John Lossing Buck, Food and Agriculture in Communis, China (California: Stanford University Press, 1966...

...Similarly, some of the ideas of Mao about revolution and modernization may prove to be more limited in their application than many contend...

...The cost of failure in such a system is often too high...

...Finally, those who stress the nature of the Maoist political system as a panacea for development overlook the fact that regimes of this type have built-in costs and weaknesses that impede development...

...Alexander Eckstein, "Economic Growth and Change in China," China Quarterly, April—June 1973...

...Albert Feuerwerker, "Industrial Enterprise in Twen tieth-Century China: The Chee Hsin Cement Co.," it CHINA BY DAYLIGHT 137 Communist China averaged 13.8 percent between 1912 and 1920 and 9.3 percent between 1931 and 1936...

...Top government officials can earn as much as 450 yuan...

...One scholar, Wilfred Malenbaum, has objected to Swamy's conclusions on the grounds that: (1) India has shown, in the 1970s, a progressive incapacity to cope with its problems...

...Their emphasis is on continued revolution 32 E. L. Wheelwright and Bruce McFarlane, The Chinese Road to Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970...

...Such elites are often not sufficiently picturesque or charismatic to capture the imagination of certain American intellectuals or the American mass media...

...Also, there are some things the Chinese do that other developing countries either cannot or will not do because of the costs involved...

...Income gaps between and within provinces are also a product of the Chinese principle of regional selfreliance, which necessarily favors those provinces and localities with better natural endowments...

...Many people who are alienated from contemporary American society project their dissatisfaction onto China...

...It has been made by both North and South Korea, both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, and by Japan, countries that culturally have much in common but little in terms of political or economic systems...

...The trade unions, abolished during the Cultural Revolution because they were becoming pressure groups for higher wages and better conditions of life, have since been reestablished under tighter Party control...

...Finally, the frequent ideologically motivated campaigns that are an inseparable part of the Maoist-type system have caused Chinese growth to be extremely erratic...

...During the Cultural Revolution, young people flocked back to the cities and organized into Red Guard units that demanded they be allowed to remain in the cities, and many were hidden by relatives...

...Such an evolution could produce rapid economic development but it could also lead to a society that resembles Marx's "Oriental Despotism" more than the Paris Commune...

...26 The Maoist ideals had become "canonized and ritualized, removed from daily life...

...Various groups and influences promote this new romanticism...

...Among some observers there is the misleading tendency to believe that the problems of all underdeveloped countries are the same...