China's Revolutions in the Modern World by Rebecca E. Karl

Author:Rebecca E. Karl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

From the very beginning of the CCP’s accession to power, major ideological and thus practical problems were presented by the contradictions between the revolutionary aspirations of the Communist Party and its developmentalist goals. Mao certainly was pledged to economically develop China, but he wished China to develop without the vast systemic inequalities that capitalism inevitably introduces and reproduces. Development for its own sake was never on Mao’s politico-economic horizon. Yet, there were very real policy differences within the Communist Party on this question. Those advocating rapid development at any social cost—the resurgent Moscow clique—were still quite powerful, and frequent intra-party struggles were waged over substantive ideology about the meaning of socialism itself. These conflicts erupted with great consequence very soon after the 1949 conquest of the state. One of the most acute contradictions revolved around the reliance upon extracting resources from the peasantry, whose lives the CCP had pledged to revolutionize and yet whose productivity was crucial to accumulations of surplus necessary for urban industrialization. This posed a theoretical and thus practical impasse all but impossible to overcome. By the same token, the necessity for the urban proletariat to increase production while revolutionizing social relations within the factory to become more democratic also became a contradiction that haunted industrial life. Imbalances in urban/rural relations became an enormous problem, not only because surpluses were exploitatively extracted from the rural to supply the urban, but because the cultural and social advantages of urban life were also thereby enhanced. Even though primary schools were established in the lowest rural villages, higher and better educational opportunities were reserved for urban children, and the best was offered to children of intellectuals and CCP cadres. The reproduction and deepening of inequality in social and spatial terms increasingly appeared to be a consequence of socialist policy, and not only a holdover from the previous system.

Meanwhile, the desire to politically and culturally-ideologically transform the country and its people through the instrumentality of the Communist party-state very quickly began to clash with the transformation of the party into a technocratic bureaucracy that imposed itself on society rather than being organic to it. The danger that CCP cadres would become a privileged class reared its head early. Indeed, the contradictions between the CCP’s bureaucratic role and its historical role as the bearer of social-cultural revolution informed and subtended the whole Maoist period. These questions ramified into another arena of insoluble social contradiction: the need for the educated classes to help build the scientific, technological, technocratic, creative, literary, and other bases of socialism, even as the independence and elitism of intellectuals thwarted party discipline and social equality. Sometimes the issues were addressed through mass movements launched to enable or to force intellectuals to be “reeducated” in programs designed to culturally and ideologically remold them into “new socialist personhood” (shehuizhuyi xinren / ); at other times the issues were left to fester, only to burst into anti-intellectual campaigns later. However it was handled, the contradictory space intellectuals occupied—as reproducers of elite knowledge,

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