Chinese Models of Development by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

A Sino-Vietnamese Model

The remarkable economic success of China over the past thirty years has led Joshua Ramo to propose a “Beijing Consensus” about development in opposition to the “Washington Consensus.”31 His formulation has been much criticized inside and outside of China, but it is certainly worthwhile to go beyond the narrative of China’s development to more general questions of the mechanisms and their applicability elsewhere. Broadening the focus to include Vietnam as well as China should help transcend some of China’s idiosyncrasies and specify background conditions for applicability.

Rural Roots and Popular Mobilization

The Sino-Vietnamese model can and should begin with rural revolution rather than with current reform. For most purposes this is a major limitation of the model, since the conditions for rural revolution have mostly passed from the world scene. But the continuing appeal of “Maoism” to radical groups in Nepal and India indicates some relevance. The lesson of the Sino-Vietnamese experience for ongoing rural radicalism was best put by Mao Zedong:

If we only mobilize the people to carry on the war and do nothing else, can we succeed in defeating the enemy? Of course not. . ..We must. . .solve the problems facing the masses—food, shelter, and clothing, fuel, rice, cooking oil, and salt, sickness and hygiene, and marriage. In short, all the practical problems in the masses’ everyday life should claim our attention. If we attend to these problems, solve them and satisfy the needs of the masses, we shall really become organizers of the well-being of the masses, and they will truly rally around us and give us their warm support. Comrades, will we then be able to arouse them to take part in the revolutionary war? Yes, indeed we will.32

The lesson of the key importance of mass-regarding policy could apply to any political mobilization from below challenging an unpopular regime or occupying power. Suicide bombers and roadside explosives may improve the technology of resistance, but any action that terrorizes and alienates the popular base cuts the root of protracted struggle. A final lesson of rural revolution is derived from the contrast between China and Vietnam and European Communism. Revolutions based on mobilizing the power of the people have profound consequences for post-revolutionary capabilities. A party-state built from the ground up is in a leadership situation fundamentally different from that of one that is constructed in post-revolutionary consolidation or imposition.

There are negative lessons from China’s leftism and Vietnam’s socialist construction. The Great Leap Forward demonstrated that mass mobilization does not work as a modernization strategy even when it is carried out by a state with extraordinary mobilizational capacity. Indeed, if China had been less able to mobilize then the tragic consequences of its failure would have been reduced. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution provided the even deeper lesson that society requires respect for its complexity in order to operate. Chaos—not a better, egalitarian world—is the alternative to complexity. The anti-modern utopian tendencies inherent in Marxism were buried by the Red Guards.

Vietnam did not provide the only negative lesson of socialist construction; the example of the Soviet Union is the overarching one.

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