THE WRONG MARCH: CHINA CHOOSES STALIN'S WAY

...The changing social composition of the Chinese Communist Party has been accompanied by a broader effort to rationalize the functioning of the bureaucracy...

...Official Chinese Marxist theory, now purged of its more radical Maoist features, has in recent years increasingly come to resemble the orthodox Soviet version of Marxism-Leninism...

...Many of the more repressive and obscurantist orthodoxies in cultural and intellectual life have been denounced or ignored...

...Under the fastidious guidance of Pierre Cardin, a branch of "Maxim's de Paris" has opened its opulent doors in Beijing, although tourists on a budget will have to content themselves with one of China's new Pizza Huts...

...These images of Russia and China bear little relation to their respective social realities...

...ambassador to China finds to be a matter of great historic import...

...This double if somewhat dubious honor previously had been bestowed on only one other Chinese: Chiang Kai-shek...

...As a consequence, an elite of urban bureaucrats, intellectuals, and professionals has emerged as the most reliable political supporters of the post-Mao regime—and, indeed, its essential social base...

...Having abandoned the more egalitarian features of Maoist educational policies, the "new" education system is, in fact, largely a refurbished version of the elitist and Soviet-modeled system adopted in the People's Republic in the early 1950s...

...Insofar as plans to professionalize the bureaucracy are successfully carried out, they will serve to make bureaucrats a more distinct social group, more fully conscious of their status and interests, and thereby widen and cement the already enormous gulf between the rulers and the ruled in Chinese society...

...In their place are new portraits more pleasing to Western eyes...

...What remains of the Sino-Soviet dispute are purely issues of conflicting national self-interest—Vietnamese troops in Cambodia, Russian troops in Afghanistan, and old border disputes in Central Asia...

...It is, then, an irony of contemporary history that the policies of the post-Mao regime, almost universally praised by Western observers, are not making China "more like us...

...The characterization is as applicable to Deng Xiaoping as it is to Stalin—and, of course, to Stalin's successors...

...This has permitted a significantly wider (if still limited) realm of freedom for artistic and intellectual expression...

...Such measures have little to do with—and indeed are totally antithetical to—the professed aim of "socialist democratization...

...One such area of "Sovietization" or "Stalinization" has been the refashioning of the Chinese Communist Party in accordance with firm Leninist organizational principles and methods of discipline, making the Chinese Party structurally and functionally more similar to its Russian counterpart...

...Another and even more unlikely convert is Time magazine, whose editors have selected Deng Xiaoping (China's "paramount leader," in the delicate phrase favored by Western journalists) as its "Man of the Year," not once but twice...

...But it is a development that is too important to be ignored—especially by those who are celebrating (or lamenting) the birth of capitalism in China and those who praise the current Beijing leaders as "Marxist materialists" laying the necessary economic foundations for socialism...

...Deng Xiaoping, like Stalin, also finds the Party insufficiently expert—and has adopted Stalin's solution to remedy the deficiency...

...the first is caricature, the second a romanticized vision...

...The market-oriented economic policies are, largely, eclectic borrowings from the "market socialisms" of Hungary and Yugoslavia...

...The contrast between Western media portraits of China and the Soviet Union is striking...

...In an article last spring in the Sunday Times Travel Section, China Tees Off in Style, Burns recalled that "the urge to play golf in China" had been with him since 1971, when over lunch at the Royal Aero Club in London an old China hand had told him of the delights to be experienced at a splendid golf course near Beijing...

...Also similar to the Soviet pattern is the revamped and expanded university system, which serves to foster and perpetuate the privileges and status of urban elites...

...It grants them considerable autonomy within their respective spheres of expertise in exchange for political loyalty—or, for that matter, apolitical loyalty...

...It is, he exclaims, "a dream that came true...

...The popular media treat Americans to a Russia full of drunken and slothful workers laboring in antiquated factories, an inefficient and virtually collapsing economy whose creaky functioning is dependent on the purchase (or theft) of Western technology, long lines of shabbily clad consumers queued up to buy the bare essentials of life at perpetually ill-stocked state stores, a ubiquitous KGB dispatching untold numbers of dissidents to labor camps or psychiatric hospitals, and an overbearing bureaucracy staffed by officials whose incompetence is matched only by their venality...

...Many of the political abuses performed under the name of "class struggle" and the pernicious system of "class labels" have been terminated...

...But along with these changes, which have been widely reported and universally applauded, certain basic social and political patterns have emerged—patterns that are less visible and less salutary and bear a distinctively Soviet imprint...

...A network of golf courses—where foreigners can play and Chinese can caddy—is under construction, including one in the Valley of the Ming Tombs...

...The most pronounced similarities between China's post-Mao regime and the Soviet Union are in the realm of social policies, and they bear a Stalinist imprint—albeit without the terror that accompanied virtually all of Stalin's pursuits...

...Sovietization, or Stalinization, is, of course, not the only force at work in this period of the history of the People's Republic...

...The Beijing government, willing to sacrifice a bit of national pride in exchange for foreign currency, has spared no effort to satisfy tourist tastes...

...Fashion, however, now calls for the Maurice J. Meisner is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison...

...Rather, as Deng Xiaoping candidly sums it up, the aim is to make state bureaucrats "better educated, professionally more competent, and younger...

...The noted Sovietologist Moshe Lewin has described Stalin's post-1933 social policies as "a set of classical measures of social conservatism, law-and-order strategies, complete with a nationalist revival, trying to instill values of discipline, patriotism, conformism, authority, and orderly careerism...

...These have been progressive developments by any reasonable standard of judgment and should be welcomed by all who are concerned with the welfare of the Chinese people...

...One can only speculate on the thoughts of many Chinese, who, nurtured on the Maoist slogans of "self-reliance" and "serve the people," are now enjoined and employed by their government to serve foreigners...

...Sino-Soviet trade and cultural relations have grown markedly over the past halfdecade, and a recent agreement provides for the dispatch of Russian technicians to oversee the modernization of the aging Chinese industrial plant built with Soviet assistance in the 1950s...

...By any reasonable standard of judgment, and certainly by the standards which Americans usually apply to judge other lands, it is the Soviet Union that should get a comparatively favorable press...

...that the leaders of the People's Republic should have resurrected it may be attributed to a fit of historical absent-mindedness or a deliberate attempt to appeal to Western greed...

...Among the more notable is William Safire, The New York Timers designated conservative, who has hastened to celebrate "the rejection of Marxism and embrace of capitalism by the government of a billion Chinese...

...But little speculation is required to divine the thoughts of many Westerners for whom Peking's open-door policies have stimulated a longing for "the good old days" when China was a vast playground for foreigners...

...If Mao was to find the Party insufficiently Red," Schwartz wrote, "Stalin found it insufficiently expert...

...Among the more nostalgic is John Burns, The New York Times correspondent in Beijing until his recent expulsion by the Chinese government...

...that of China, a happy tourist strolling atop the Great Wall...

...They are making China more like the Soviet Union...

...With the advent of Deng Xiaoping and his open door, plans were laid to build ten golf courses within the People's Republic...

...Having abandoned the Maoist view of socialism as a continuous process of social and human transformation demanding progressive reductions in social inequalities, post-Maoist ideologists have found it convenient to return to the simplistic Soviet definition of socialism: "public ownership" of the major means of production and the principle of "payment according to work...

...Luxury hotels, built and managed in Western fashion, have appeared throughout the vast land...

...regularity...

...Thus one of the more prominent features of Chinese communist ideology in recent years has been condemnations of what is called "the fallacy of egalitarianism," to which many of the evils of the Maoist era are attributed...

...Along with Soviet-style political developments, the position of urban elites has been consolidated and institutionalized...

...The first of these, designed by Arnold Palmer, opened at Zhongshan, near Guangzhou, inspiring Burns to report that "golf has returned to China in a guise as alluring as anything that existed before communism turned fairways into rice paddies...

...Virtually all have precedents in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe...

...And for the more adventurous but not unduly ascetic, a Holiday Inn will soon be in business in Tibet, an event that the U.S...

...It is likely to apply to Deng's successors/as well...

...predictability—accompanied by perennial (and usually futile) campaigns against the more glaring manifestations of bureaucratic privilege and corruption...

...Whereas Chinese leaders in Mao's time condemned the Soviet Union as "revisionist," "capitalist," and even "fascist," the new leaders of the People's Republic recognize Russia as "socialist"—one among a variety of national forms of "socialism...

...It is part of an eclectic (if not necessarily contradictory) mixture of tendencies which include processes of de-Stalinization, the rationalization of the Stalinist component of Maoism, and a significant (if weakening) movement for democratic socialism...

...In recent years, the Party has emphasized the recruitment and promotion of technical specialists and university graduates, replacing millions of purged "leftists...

...The elitist character of the effort is nowhere more strikingly apparent than in the 1985 announcement that the regime had selected 1,000 especially talented and well-educated officials in their forties and fifties to form a pool from which the future leaders of China will be drawn...

...China, moreover, remains a Leninist Party-State where the realm of semi-freedom, while widening in recent years, is still considerably more restrictive than it is in Russia...

...In political organization, social structure, and ideology, China under Deng Xiaoping has come to resemble Soviet Russia far more closely than was the case under Mao Zedong...

...American journalists, eager to demonstrate that avarice is a universal human characteristic, are much enchanted by the Chinese discovery of the "magic of the market," reproducing from the official Chinese press success stories of Chinese entrepreneurs who have heeded their government's injunction to "get rich...

...In recent years, the government has gone to great lengths to raise the material and social status of intellectuals, technical specialists, factory managers, and professionals...

...The much-celebrated economic reforms of the post-Mao years are considerably less innovative than advertised...

...Thus the "red/expert" dichotomy, so long an agonizing dilemma for Chinese Communists, has now been resolved in eminently Soviet fashion...

...But a Soviet-type pattern of development is clearly among the more powerful tendencies molding the post-Mao era...

...But in China, where the practice has become routine, the events are reported in matter-of-fact fashion (if at all) as salutary measures to maintain social order...

...Policies emphasizing the development of agriculture and the production of consumer goods have corrected many of the economic imbalances inherited from the Mao period, yielding a significant (if unequally distributed) rise in an abysmally low material standard of life...

...China's new leaders are pictured as sober-minded "pragmatists" who have abandoned "ideology" in favor of "modernization...

...Images of "Red China" as the land of "blue ants" and "red hordes" have vanished from the popular press...

...Such trappings of "modernization," while of minor economic consequence, do have a certain psychological significance...

...The development of socialism itself is now viewed through the prism of an economically deterministic interpretation of Marxism...

...For the next five years, the indefatigable journalist traveled 1,500 miles to pursue his pastime at the Royal Hong Kong Club where, he fondly recalls, "white-jacketed waiters serving lime and lemonade at thatched rest stops around the course were a blessed antidote to the mayhem of life under Mao...

...Far more important than Soviet-style organizational changes has been the changing social composition of the Party...

...Beijing's "open-door" policy, welcoming foreign trade and investment (and also more naked forms of exploiting Chinese labor in "special economic zones"), is cause for Western celebration, conjuring up old visions of a limitless "China market" and the profits to be made therein...

...The post of Party chairman has been abolished in favor of a revived secretariat and the position of Party secretary-general, the Stalinist-invented office which Deng Xiaoping occupied in the 1950s before Mao abolished it...

...Such "reforms" as strict managerial authority in the factories and the principle of enterprise profitability, for example, were among Stalin's "socialist" innovations in the 1930s...

...It offers the double attraction of being "exotic" and becoming "more like us...

...Chinese authorities, for instance, would never tolerate the writings of an independent and critical historian of the stature of Roy Medvedev, much less permit him to publish his works abroad...

...Ronald Reagan, long an ardent supporter of the rump Kuomintang regime in Taiwan and a bitter critic of the 1979 normalization of Sino-American relations, apparently has been persuaded by his more politically astute advisers to subordinate his primeval ideological impulses to Real-politik policies...

...As post-Mao China has moved closer to the Soviet Union in both theory and practice, relations between the two countries have become increasingly friendly...

...Soviet citizens enjoy a material standard of life that the Chinese people can only dream of achieving sometime in the next century—if, in the unlikely event, the policies that proceed under the title of the Four Modernizations actually yield what Chinese leaders promise...

...specialized knowledge, expertise, and occupation...

...Others can take their "China tour" within the confines of a new Club Med, erected on the grounds of the old Imperial Summer Palace...

...U.S...

...American media to praise China...

...To these one must add the unleashing of market forces whose social results are especially unpredictable—although it can be predicted that market relationships will not be allowed to threaten the bureaucracy's control over economic and political life...

...The tendency has been little noted, not because it is particularly obscure but for reasons of political expediency among Western journalists and scholars alike...

...Moscow, in turn, has generally welcomed the changes wrought by Deng Xiaoping, praising the Chinese leader for his "economic common sense," and his efforts at "de-Maoification...

...This flexible formula has the advantage of permitting wide latitude in social and economic practice while retaining the ideological claim to socialism...

...And if the Soviet regime engaged in mass public executions of alleged criminals following summary trials, as has become a regular practice of the Chinese state in recent years, one can easily imagine the condemnations of barbarous and uncivilized behavior that would flow from Western pens...

...citizens are naturally eager to visit a country that garners such rave reviews...

...By contrast, the media portray a China dominated by enterprising and prospering peasants newly freed from collectivistic bondage, innovative entrepreneurs who have rediscovered the wonders of the market, reform-minded leaders who wisely hope their country will learn the ways and techniques of Western capitalism, and masses of consumers purchasing a vast array of products hitherto denied them...

...Deng's China has spurred an enormous growth in social inequality, which in turn has created a need to rationalize the phenomenon...

...The dominant American image of the Soviet Union is the Gulag...

...The term "open door," so intimately associated with the annals of Western imperialism in China, is a rather curious choice on the part of the Chinese government...

...Not the least important of Beijing's new friends is the Reagan Administration...

...Chinese arts and crafts, not long ago banned under the "Trading with the Enemy Act," are advertised in publications catering to affluent American readers—and sold at Bloomingdale's at inflated prices...

...The policies off the post-Mao regime are not making China more like the United States but more like the Soviet Union...

...As Benjamin Schwartz once observed, Stalin stressed the "social-engineering" function of the Communist Party, in striking contrast to Mao Zedong, who was concerned with the moral and political virtues of Party members...

...Thus the United States now supplies China with armaments and nuclear technology, even though post-Mao China is pursuing a Soviet-style social path and moving closer to what Reagan describes as "the Evil Empire...

...Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners have been released from jails and labor camps, often with due apologies and sometimes honors...

...The stridency of these Chinese denunciations is reminiscent of Stalin's infamous campaigns against egalitarian ideals, which the Soviet dictator once said are worthy only of "a primitive sect of ascetic monks...

...There is, therefore, much emphasis on the Weberian virtues of administrative efficiency...

...The reappearance of street peddlers and noodle vendors—few of whom become rich and most of whom eke out the barest of existences much in the fashion of their counterparts in other Third World lands—is offered as evidence of the rebirth of liveliness in Chinese cities...

...The Wrong March China chooses Stalin's way BY MAURICE J. MEISNER The People's Republic of China-product of the greatest and most, radical of modern revolutions—has gained some politically astonishing champions in recent years...

...The Soviet Union is "the Evil Empire," as President Reagan has decreed, whereas China is regarded as a friend of the United States, at least for the time being, and a potential (if thus far reluctant) ally in the West's anti-Soviet crusade...

...In the 1930s Stalin ordered the Soviet Party to recruit new members from among professionals, technical specialists, and intellectuals...

...The essential aim of what is advertised as "political reform" in post-Mao China is not democracy, although much democratic rhetoric and, indeed, some genuine Party democrats exist...

...The Chinese have adopted the long-standing Soviet orthodoxy (first formulated by Stalin) that the combination of modern economic development and Communist political power more or less automatically guarantees the achievement of ever higher stages of socialism and the eventual arrival of a communist society...

...As is customary with most journalists and scholars—and now more firmly the custom than ever before—Washington's immediate foreign policy interests take precedence over the interests of social and historical accuracy...

...Adiscussion of China's current "Soviet"—or one might say "neo-Stalinist"—tendencies must be prefaced by noting the many positive accomplishments of the post-Mao era...

...The phenomenon is similar to a characteristic feature of Soviet society since the 1930s...

...And even as the leaders of the People's Republic experiment with the market—an instrumentality notorious for its unruly behavior and unintended consequences—China is clearly moving closer to the Soviet Union in many other areas of social life...

...Market relationships won't be allowed to proceed to the point where they threaten the bureaucracy's control...

...However, in the early 1970s when Burns was first posted in a China still burdened by the Maoist regime, he discovered to his horror that the fabled fairway had been plowed under to make way for an agricultural commune...

...Here, Deng Xiaoping, who has often complained that Party members lacked modern technological knowledge and specialized skills, has followed directly in Stalin's footsteps...