Red China Up to Date
TAYLOR, GEORGE E.
Red China Up to Date Mao's China: Economic and Political Survey. Reviewed by George E. Taylor By Ygael Gluckstein. Professor of Chinese History, Beacon. 438 pp. $8.50. University of...
...On the weak foundations of a backward economy inherited from the past Mao is trying to build a new, gigantic, advanced heavy industrial structure...
...Only in this way can the elite drain off the needed agricultural surplus...
...The limitations of this theoretical approach do not impair the valuable detailed statistical estimates or the insights into specific connections between social and institutional factors, but they may explain the choppiness of the organization and the feeling that the author in some cases has not drawn as much out of his material as he might have...
...The Minister of Finance, for example, stated that over 3,000 militants died in the process of collecting public grain in a little over two years...
...Gluckstein's theoretical approach is that of a social scientist with Marxist but not Leninist overtones...
...The elite is in a constant state of war with the people and expects to remain so...
...But the author points out that the obvious mismanagement "corroding China's national economy . . . does not preclude very substantial, nay stupendous, achievements...
...Even the right of self-determination of minorities, written into the Chinese Soviet Constitution of 1931, is not found in the new one...
...China, he thinks, will outdo the Soviet Union in Stalinist exploitation, oppression and rigidity, for the newly privileged in China never had the Russian Communist party's tradition of egalitarianism and the roots of Mao's bureaucratic state capitalism (Gluckstein's phrase) go back into a long non-feudal past...
...To him the great law of social change is that the relations between people, including the mode of distribution of the social product, are determined by the wealth, the productive forces of society...
...The minorities are told to "meekly study from the Han Chinese...
...in fact, few writers on Chinese Communist economics have made Communist statistics reveal so much that they were intended to conceal...
...Gluckstein, an Israeli who lives in England, develops the thesis that the Chinese Communists are trying to break through the vicious cycle of a national income which is too low to provide for significant capital accumulation and therefore does not provide the conditions in which national wealth can grow...
...There is evidence to spare of Communist bungling in the villages, of hundreds of thousands killed or put in forced-labor camps, of serious bureaucratic mismanagement in industry, trade and capital construction...
...He knows the Soviet satellite system by virtue of his earlier work, Stalin's Satellites in Europe, and he can use Chinese Communist materials to full advantage because he knows the language...
...Opposition can be expected from both workers and peasants, but Communists have techniques for controlling both and are not likely to wince at the price...
...The Chinese Communists are ruthless enough to make China into a strong industrial and military power—by 1980 the industrial equivalent of Russia in 1950—but they will still have to play second fiddle to the Russians...
...Gluckstein has both...
...That Mao has rejected the slower and pleasanter method of starting with light industries is clear enough indication that his motives are not so much to raise the living standards of the people as to build up a Chinese state of great military-economic power...
...In view of some realistic observations on Moscow-Peking relations, it is difficult to understand the author's dogmatic underestimate of the help which Stalin's regime gave the Chinese Communists in their rise to power...
...University of Washington Ygael Gluckstein has been able to produce this careful and authoritative study of Chinese Communist political and economic institutions because he has the necessary qualifications...
...the more insistent the need for rapid economic advance in heavy industry, the more totalitarian becomes the regime and the more extreme the means used to control the people...
...the Constitution states that the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress has no power over the Council of National Defense...
...The fact that the collectivization has gone ahead without mechanization shows that it is a political device rather than a "progressive" solution for the technical problems of small-scale agriculture...
...It is Gluckstein's view that while the human price being paid in China is not irrelevant, it will still be several generations before the forces compelling the bureaucracy to grant concessions threaten seriously...
...This study is based on an extensive use of Communist publications, a treacherous but rewarding source of information for those who have the skill and experience with which to analyze them...
...It is significant that the Army bureaucracy, as Gluckstein points out, has a unique position...
...The author argues that, when the elite decides on the economic path to be followed and where the best interests of the people lie, a socio-political dictatorship is born...
...The author points out that the "twin brother of a bias toward heavy industry is the forced collectivization of agriculture...
...This is by far the most penetrating and realistic study of Communist China's political economy to appear since Richard Walker's study, and it stands out in welcome relief to the bland propaganda of Solomon Adler's recent book on the same subject...
...Most competent observers, unlike the author, believe that Manchuria was the principal area of battle, that the Japanese and possibly American arms stockpiled in Siberia were handed over to the Chinese, and that the ideological and political debts to Moscow were decisive...
Vol. 40 • December 1957 • No. 51
