The Sorcerer's Spells
Meisner, Maurice
Books The Sorcerer's Spells The Transformation of Chinese Socialism By Lin Chun Duke University Press. 370 pages. $23.95. The Writing on the Wall: Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face...
...At the same time, the urban working class, threatened by a vast reserve army of labor, suffers the erosion of its traditional job security, health care, and pension benefits, as well as a continuing prohibition on the organization of free trade unions...
...144 pages...
...It is possible that over time the interests of the bourgeoisie as a class will diverge from the interests of the Communist state...
...Nor did the leaders of Chinese Communism foresee that result...
...If political power remained in the hands of the Communist Party, Deng counseled, a socialist society would eventually emerge from "the developMaurice Meisner is Harvey Goldberg Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison...
...When the Chinese Communist Party adopted market reform policies in 1978, China had no functioning bourgeoisie...
...In both cases, capitalist modernization took place under the tutelage of authoritarian states...
...To this list, many more cases could be added, including a good many contemporary capitalist economies presided over by authoritarian regimes...
...The German bourgeoisie, as well as its Japanese counterpart, were heavily dependent on the state, having (in Barrington Moore's felicitous phrase) exchanged "the right to rule for the right to make money...
...James Mann's slim volume, The China Fantasy, rejects the common view that Chinese capitalism will eventually foster political democracy...
...As examples he noted Nazi Germany, Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, and early twentieth century Japan...
...But should that occur, it would be the result of processes that would probably have to be measured in generations...
...But without utopian hopes, people would not only lose their will to make history, but also cripple their ability to judge the history that is being made for them...
...Lin Chun, who teaches political science at the London School of Economics, joins Hutton in envisioning a democratic future for China emerging from the market reform era, but she does so on the basis of Chinese cultural and historical traditions, not Western prescriptions and demands...
...The frenetic advance of Chinese capitalism recalls the sense of astonishment that moved Karl Marx to write that the bourgeoisie "has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together...
...The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression By James Mann Viking...
...But he does not hesitate to offer policy prescriptions for the United States that, he naively and dangerously hopes, will influence the course of Chinese history...
...The authors of the three books under consideration differ radically in assessing the social and political results of China's capitalist economic revolution...
...Yet Marx's celebration of the productive powers of capitalism was accompanied by a foreboding of its unruly nature and terrible human costs...
...The economic results of China's market reforms have been stunning...
...In order to implement the Party's post-Mao "market reform" policies, a new bourgeoisie had to be created...
...Any realistic assessment of the prospects for democracy in China must begin with an understanding of the origins and nature of the contemporary Chinese bourgeoisie...
...The transformation of land and labor into commodities, the growth of sharp social inequalities, massive environmental destruction—such are the costs that have accompanied capitalist industrialization everywhere...
...But democracy has by no means thrived in all, or even most, capitalist countries...
...But the economic advance has come at enormous social cost...
...Once it is recognized that China is not moving in a democratic direction, he writes, "America may seek new measures to goad the Chinese leadership toward democratic change...
...But it has proven one of the most striking examples in world history where the means employed overwhelmed the ends that were sought...
...Sweatshops, exploiting mostly young women workers, proliferate in town and countryside...
...The only justification for imposing the costs is that they would become steadily worse off without it...
...Indeed, Milton Friedman, the most influential advocate of the free market, acknowledged decades ago that it was possible to have "economic arrangements that are fundamentally capitalist and political arrangements that are not free...
...Instead, he raises the specter that China's rapid economic growth will continue unabated alongside a more or less permanent Communist Party dictatorship, with capitalism simply strengthening Communist rule...
...It is rather that the essential economic interests of China's new bourgeoisie are so generously served by the state that created it...
...It was an orthodox Marxist assumption in a historical situation unanticipated in Marxist-Leninist theory...
...And in both countries the twentieth century political result was fascism...
...He is the author of many books on modern Chinese history, including, most recently, "Mao Zedong: A Political and Intellectual Portrait...
...There is nothing peculiarly Chinese about the social evils that Chinese capitalism has wrought...
...And that bourgeoisie (officially known as "socialist entrepreneurs") was largely recruited from the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party...
...This is clearly a material gain of great moral as well as socioeconomic significance...
...China, once among the more egalitarian of nations, now is plagued by greater income inequality than the United States and India, and is rapidly approaching Latin America's appalling gap between rich and poor...
...Yet it would be wise to resist any wholesale condemnation of the Chinese model of rapid industrialization because of the social inequities it has engendered...
...It is a long-term pace unprecedented in modern world history, and it has made the Chinese economy the world's second largest, as measured by purchasing power parity...
...On the basis of an already sizable industrial plant laboriously built during the Mao era, China's GDP has grown at an average annual rate of more than 9 percent over the last thirty years...
...The Transformation of Chinese Socialism, certainly the most intellectually stimulating book written on the reform era, is an eloquent plea to create a democratic "socialist market system" that combines the more egalitarian and democratic features of traditional China, the modern Chinese revolutionary experience, and the innovations of the reform period...
...Many party officials hastened to enter business themselves or arranged lucrative positions for their children, relatives, and friends in what soon became a highly profitable web of patron-client relationships...
...It has also made China "the workshop of the world," a title first claimed by nineteenth century England, and then relinquished to the United States in the twentieth century...
...Those who remain on the land are often preyed upon by corrupt local officials...
...For the foreseeable future, any serious impetus for democratic change will more likely come from the victims, not the beneficiaries, of state-sponsored capitalism...
...In making historically plausible the vision of a "socialist market system," Lin Chun challenges the assumption that only a capitalist economy allows for the possibility of political democracy...
...19.95...
...A society that has conjured up such mighty means of production and exchange," Marx warned, "is like the sorcerer who can no longer control the powers of the underworld that he has called up by his spells...
...The modern Chinese bourgeoisie, a relatively weak social class, had been destroyed by the Revolution of 1949, its properties and enterprises expropriated by the new Communist state...
...Both the positive and negative effects of the "powers of the underworld" invoked by China's market reformers are now evident...
...When Deng Xiaoping initiated his market reform policies in 1978, he did so with socialist goals firmly in mind...
...But in China, the social and ecological consequences are more extreme— and they occur on the largest scale in world history...
...On the one hand, the growth of production and consumption has dramatically reduced the number of Chinese living in poverty—from 53 to 8 percent of the population, according to the World Bank...
...It would be naive to believe that a bourgeoisie that is so obviously the creature of the Communist partystate, a class that remains so dependent on the state, and indeed a class whose members are still psychologically and materially tied to the partystate apparatus will support a democratic movement to limit the power of the state from which it benefits so greatly...
...Hundreds of millions of peasants have been forced off the now commercialized land, many of them driven into the desperate ranks of a vast "floating population" of exploited migrant laborers who seek temporary work at construction sites and as servants in the cities and towns...
...The most successful cases of late capitalist development, at least before postMao China, were Bismarckian Germany and Meiji Japan...
...The Writing on the Wall: Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy By Will Hutton The Free Press...
...As Barrington Moore observed forty years ago: "The tragic fact of the matter is that the poor bear the heaviest costs of modernization under both socialist and capitalist auspices...
...This is perhaps more a utopian hope than a prediction of China's future...
...The means of the capitalist market, he assumed, would hasten the building of the economic preconditions for socialism...
...432 pages...
...What is needed to complete the journey to Anglo-American-style capitalism and pluralism, he argues, is the infusion into China of Western "Enlightenment values...
...It is not so much that the new Chinese bourgeoisie (euphemistically known in many Western writings as "the middle class") is politically timid, although it is that, too...
...By Maurice Meisner One of the strangest incongruities in modern world history has unfolded before our eyes over the past quarter-century...
...It is true that political democracy has appeared only in capitalist countries in modern history...
...Who will be the bearers of such values is unclear...
...In the burgeoning cities the nou-veau riche bourgeoisie flaunts its wealth, aping its Western counterparts in an orgy of conspicuous consumption...
...In The Writing on the Wall, Will Hutton, an influential British journalist and scholar, finds China mired in "Leninist corporatism," an unsustainable halfway house between communism and capitalism...
...ment of the productive forces...
...He does not bother to argue why this might turn out to be the case...
...Three decades ago, no one could have imagined that the most massive process of capitalist development in world history would take place under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party...
...Party officials possessed the skills and the political influence to best take advantage of the new pecuniary opportunities the market offered...
Vol. 71 • November 2007 • No. 11
