The Socialist Manifesto by Bhaskar Sunkara

Author:Bhaskar Sunkara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2019-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

IT’S HARD TO overstate the misery of prerevolutionary China or the ineptitude of nationalist rule. Between 1927 and 1949, the country had been mired in foreign invasion and civil war, warlords ruled with impunity, illiteracy was the norm, life expectancy was barely forty, and women were barred from education and sold into domestic servitude. Outright slavery even persisted in some remote regions, and just 10 percent of the rural population owned 70 percent of the land. In the previous thirty years, ten million people had died in famines.

It was no surprise, then, that when they swept from the countryside back into the cities, the Communists were met with adoring crowds. Compared to the Kuomintang’s political terror and economic mismanagement, the CPC had earned a reputation for moderate, responsible leadership. Even some capitalists might have been reassured by Mao’s promise that parts of the bourgeoisie and even “enlightened gentry and other patriots” were vital to freeing China from not just imperialism but economic backwardness.18

Along with desperately needed capital, however, many of the nation’s trained managers had fled to Taiwan with the KMT. With the Cold War now underway, the United States took an aggressive stance in East Asia, moving to halt the spread of Communism in Korea. The CPC, with aid and expertise from the Soviets, faced the daunting task of rebuilding the country. With the outbreak of the Korean War, the party once again had to make huge sacrifices, joining the war and forcing a stalemate in the peninsula at the cost of over a half million Chinese dead and wounded.

At home, the Communists faced the same dilemma the Soviet Union had in the 1920s and ’30s—how to extract surplus from the peasantry with which to build industry in the cities. The challenge was even greater in China, because the party had come to power on the backs of peasants they now needed to exploit. As we have seen, even as democracy within the Soviet Union was strangled, the 1920s New Economic Policy (NEP) presented a blueprint for development through a gradual “unequal exchange” between town and country.

For the first few years of Communist rule, the CPC took a similar approach. It instituted an Agrarian Reform Law in 1950, which distributed the property of rural landlords to the peasant masses. Peasants were encouraged to pool equipment and livestock in “mutual aid teams,” but as late as 1953, the party would proclaim that “it is even necessary to permit the continued development of the economic system of the wealthy peasant.” Under the slogan of sexual equality, other measures such as the New Marriage Law banned child marriage and ensured that women had to consent to their betrothal. Other Communist gains must have seemed just as profound: the water supply and sewage systems were improved, and disease-prevention campaigns reduced the prevalence of cholera, scarlet fever, and typhoid.19

In the cities, the CPC faced hyperinflation—prices rose several million percent between 1937 and 1948—and the challenge of restoring production. The Kuomintang had already carried out extensive nationalizations, which the Communists promptly expanded.

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