Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China's Capitalist Ascent by Jason M. Kelly

Author:Jason M. Kelly [Kelly, Jason M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, China, Business & Economics, Corporate & Business History, General
ISBN: 9780674259270
Google: 2yAsEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Harvard UP
Published: 2021-05-11T22:16:34+00:00

6

TRADING FOR SALVATION

ON JANUARY 21, 1960, the New York Times reported that the PRC had missed its production target for grain in 1959. The news was thirdhand. The Times had picked up the story from the Hong Kong newspaper Ta Kung Pao, which had already reported the shortfall based on information from the Chinese Communist Party’s own Red Flag magazine. The author of the Red Flag article had tried to put a positive gloss on the figures by claiming that the PRC had produced 270 million metric tons of grain in 1959, a full 8 percent increase from the previous year. But the New York Times observed that this total still fell short of the state’s announced goal by nearly 5 million metric tons.1

Despite the shortfall, the government managed to collect enough grain not only to meet its export targets for the year but to exceed them. A few weeks before the New York Times article, on January 6, the Chinese State Council reported to Mao and the Central Committee that the last-ditch campaign to achieve the procurement and export targets set by the Ministry of Foreign Trade had been a success. The State Council boasted that ministry officials had collected 112 percent of the nation’s total procurement target for the year, which was enough to export 102 percent of the PRC’s total adjusted export target for 1959.2 In other words, the ministry had collected more than it planned for the year, despite signs that farm yields couldn’t keep up.

This disjuncture between what farmers produced and what the state exported revealed a crack in the foundation of the Great Leap Forward, but it wasn’t the only sign of problems. Troubling internal CCP reports were flowing into Beijing. One after another, local grain bureaus reported that food stocks had declined precipitously in late 1959 and early 1960, and that a crisis was imminent.3 People were already starving in some places.4 The bottom was falling out of the Great Leap Forward.

Serious problems were also emerging in foreign policy, especially in China’s relations with the Soviet Union. The tensions that had been building for years between the world’s leading socialist powers would finally rupture in the summer of 1960. Almost overnight, the Soviet Union transformed from an ally to a threat, a development that prompted changes in the way the PRC’s trade and diplomatic officials understood China’s place in the world. In this fluid international environment, China now had to contend not just with capitalist imperialism but with Soviet “revisionism” as well.

These crises in the early 1960s convinced Party leaders that the world was changing and that China had to adapt. Economic catastrophe at home pushed the CCP to look abroad for salvation—for grain to save lives from the famine, first and foremost, but also for technology and equipment to salvage the Party’s legitimacy, which still rested in part on the promise to modernize the nation and improve the lives of everyday people. Yet the break in Sino–Soviet relations left officials at the Ministry of Foreign Trade with nowhere to turn for certain vital imports but capitalist markets.

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