Reganoff2 [none/use name]
The Soviets forced the GMD to make concessions in 45 with their friendship treaty, particularly in Manchuria. They gave weapons to the CCP but then ordered them to retreat because they didn’t want rail lines to warm water ports in the region to be damaged.
Again, as I’ve already quoted, the Soviets discouraged conflict with the GMD, wanted a united front government, and didn’t believe Mao could win. The archival evidence is all there.
Regarding the ETR, the Soviets had already been holding sway in Xinjiang before via Sheng Shicai. The ETR was an attempt to perhaps encourage the province to have close relations with Soviet Central Asia. The ccp denounced the ETR and in fact essentially dismantled it. And then designed their whole policy around discouraging any Soviet influence in the region.
I dunno how to properly quote you so am gonna respond in a big old lump of text!
So in regards to literacy, I don’t think even a comparison to Russia is all that useful considering how dire conditions of literacy were in China by 1949. Let’s compare them to a country with similar rates of (il)literacy at the time - India. This is what Jay Taylor does in his book The Dragon and the Wild Goose. Despite the shit title, it is a good book in that it uses a comparison that is fairly apt - by 1950 both countries had similar metrics in pretty much everything (actually India, having not gone through a devastating war with Japan, was slightly better off in terms of industrialization etc). He states that China had a literacy rate in 1951 of 26% compared to 77% in 1982. (I believe in the 71 it was something like 70%, but I am having a harder time finding my previous sources for that) I believe Wang Zheng’s recent book also notes that women’s literacy is harder to track, but she estimates that by the mid-1970s it was around 50%.; at 1949 it was less than 5%. For comparison, in India (which also had a relatively interventionist state, and a few fairly well-run literacy programs in certain states) had 18% women’s literacy in 1971. Total literacy that same year was 34%. That is a monumental difference. Only Sri Lanka was able to outperform China in Asia.
In terms of depoliticization of local life, I mean that in the Maoist era power ultimately did stem, at least in part, from ‘the people’, or ‘the mass line’. People went out on campaigns. Bands of women beat up abusive husbands. You’d insult your landlord on the street. In the village you would all work together and learn from your local cadre and then distribute the material to your neighbors. In the urban danwei you would live next to your manager, wear the same clothes, get called off from work to go to protests, signature campaigns etc. There was a sense that life was inherently poltiical, because it is. Today, there is nothing along those lines. Wang Hui makes note of this, but after the protest movements of the 1980s were crushed, people’s relationship to politics (Party endorsed or otherwise) became entirely disembodied. Politics became something only a very small subset of individuals did. ‘Campaigns’ in China now are not so much little laboratories of people’s democracy wherein individuals have a huge role in making sure they are carried out in a certain way. Rather, they are systematized, choreographed little things that have little substance beyond the full power of the state. Now granted, that counts for a lot - but it does mean your local kuaidi deliver man is probably not thinking about campaigns as integral to his life. In my opinion, this isn’t a simple issue of ideals or even ideology - practices are what make politics and can have a profound affect on the way people interpret and understand their material conditions. People are not thinking in such a way in China anymore, and this is a massive issue.
I actually reject stagism entirely. Several historians of Maoist China (Viren Murthy, Rebecca Karl, Arif Dirlik - all Marxists) have mentioned that the profound theoretical contribution of Maoism lies in its desire to break the idea of historical teleology. Revolution is possible, Maoism states, because one is backwards. To be ‘backwards’ means that you can transform things in a way that advanced capitalist powers cannot. I am aware that this goes against orthodox Marxist understandings of revolution. But pretty much every major revolutionary force in Asia disagreed with that understanding (and also with the Soviet notion of WORKERS and not peasants driving revolutionary change) because they saw it as too dogmatic and teleological. I think we ought to respect this somewhat. The idea that Maoism was doomed to fail materially doesn’t really stand up to snuff. The economy had certainly had its ups and downs but a lot of modern economic historians note that post-Deng growth would have been impossible without Maoist industrial policy. Who knows what the future could have looked like?
I agree a communist party is important. I believe, at least somewhat, in something resembling a vanguard party. I do not believe the CCP meets that category necessarily. I do not think they are holding back the tide of reactionary forces. Certainly, if one looks at cultural attitudes in China (for example, towards women, towards Confucianism, towards family hierarchy etc), the reform era has seen a lot of setbacks. My worry is that actually many cultural conservatives with a veneer of supposedly ‘socialist’ economic thinking have been in the Party for a while and are a pretty core element of its leadership. Again, the overtures towards Confucianism, against the discussion of sexual harassment etc all bodes badly. But even just from a purely materialist perspective, I believe that the level of collusion between Party elites and domestic and international capital is high enough to merit tremendous concern.
The problem is just how far to actually go. In the Maoist era, class became transferable by blood ie if your dad was a parasitic landlord, then you are too regardless of your material conditions. The logic was if you didn’t do this, those children would grow resentful and use their social capital that they inherited to foment dissent. The problem was those children grew resentful and instead aimed their ire at the children of Party elites in the Cultural Revolution, who were in many ways actually less enthused with the revolutionary ideals of their parents than the children from bad class backgrounds. This ultimately fueled a massive Thermidorean reaction in the form of Deng etc.
So the answer then is, what, make sure to kill the landlords and kill their children? But then the forces of Reaction and Capital are also many. Do we kill the children of priests and imams? When certain minority groups grow uncomfortable with the pace of certain heavyhanded reforms (like say Central Asia in the 1930s), do you just kill them all too? Yes re education is obviously a decent option, but how effective will it be against people that will likely always harbor some resentment against any new regime?
I ask all these earnestly, too, as I’ve been thinking a lot about it. Obviously counter revolutionaries have to be purged and dealt with. But despite best intentions you do get into quandaries. Good trained cadres in Maoist China now and then did let their personal grudges against people get ahead of them and so innocent people (like gay men, for example) got tarred with ‘bad class backgrounds’, which then affected their children etc. So how do we make sure to limit the logic of violence so that we aren’t just killing a bunch of people who can probably be reasoned with eventually, and also limit the abuse that will inevitably come with certain hierarchies and state structures?
…And so you wouldn’t advocate that the Mauritanians have any say in how it goes? Or that they should do it? Or that, maybe at best, China, Vietnam etc. should just encourage those reformers to do their own work? Why is it that in your mind slavery can only be abolished by an outside progressive force?
Well, the Soviets actually were in favor of supporting the GMD up until the last years of the civil war, but yes, Mao taking over China was good. But again, the Japanese wanted to modernize the country. Also good? Casteism essentially promotes a slavery system of itself. Should the British have abolished it?
Yes but I think the lack of definitiveness is what makes history so compelling to me! There were potentials for something different, and we cannot erase them. I guess ultimately my stance on this is that I do not genuinely believe that the CCP introducing market forces into healthcare was necessary for good health outcomes (in fact, there is also a lot of literature on how access to certain technologies such as MRIs also does not wholly necessitate better health outcomes). Whole other sectors of the economy (defense, energy) were shielded from marketization due to national interests. Why couldn’t healthcare also have been shielded? Important to note that the UK may be a rich country but the NHS is breaking down because the Tory party doesn’t want to fund it. China has the will to fund lots of infrastructure projects for example. Money could be found for an expansion of public healthcare as well, but Whyte argues the issue is that China’s aging society plus the total lack of any welfare infrastructure means that the costs would be tremendous (along the lines of Japan, but without the benefit of Japan being an already wealthy society). That is a political economical deficiency that was caused, he argues, by the one child policy and also macroeconomic policy in the 80s and 90s that left poor provinces at the mercy of the market.
So while I agree that a one to one comparison of the healthcare systems of Maoist and post Mao China isn’t the most helpful, I also don’t share your optimism about the current model getting much better, simply because I do fundamentally believe that the sector could have been left decommodified to some degree or at least wholly state owned.
While I agree that yes clearly by a lot of metrics life has gotten better for a lot of people in China, this premise supposes that life was not getting better in the Maoist system too. The economy was growing at a very steady rate (outside of the idiocy of the Great Leap anyway), services were slowly expanding, infrastructure was being built, life expectancy getting longer etc. The point is not to compare Maoist China to a China today where it followed the Korean model of basically opening up aspects of the country’s market and labor force open to foreign players thus creating huge growth, but to other countries in the Global South ie India. India was more developed in 1950 than China, but by the end of the decade was far outstripped, let alone by the end of the 70s.
So the question is would these successes have continued? People make the point that living standards in other socialist countries stopped getting better but China had something they didn’t - a massive population and internal market that, coupled with total state control over land, could really keep growth peddling along. No doubt that without Dengism you wouldn’t have had huge growth, but we have to remember the maxim of capitalism: growth and development in one place means the underdevelopment and exploitation of another. Lots of coastal provinces and cities got incredibly rich off of poor nongmin from places like Anhui or Gansu. 400 million peasants became proletarianized, and essentially because of the way the hukou restricts access to services they are also second class citizens and are told as much too with the whole suzhi discourse.
So yes I think we can say in some respects that sure the jury is out on whether or not poverty in socialism versus riches in temporary capitalism is better or not, but this also presumes that the CCP is absolutely acting in good faith when it says it is moving to somewhere else. You mention the healthcare system but even the current five year plan says very little about nationalizing care, so much as they are hoping for a hodge podge of private and public care. Let alone the fact that yes, much of the country’s culture has changed. Becoming rich is more important in a lot of circles than being active in society or politics. Hell, most people have no relation to politics in anyway. Politics is reserved for the technocrats who run things - not the masses. Mao’s genius was understanding that orthodox MLism will always degrade into some sort of weird personality based organization or sheer bureaucratism without the mass line and people’s input in daily politics. There is no such input now, and the class character of the CCP because of how rich sectors of the country have gotten is entirely different than 1949. How can we really know that socialism is still the goal? Are there any real movements to decommodification, work place democracy, economic equality, ending the surveillance state, reforming prisons and penal laws, empowering progressive cultural movements etc? As someone who deeply loves China from the language to the cultures, I can’t really see any of that.
So what you have is then, okay, a country that is willing to rein in capital’s excesses, sometimes by force if it needs to for the nationalist interest, but ultimately has no stake in fueling class war (one thing that I am always reminded of when visiting the country - even the phrase class conflict is barely used anymore, in favor of the language of peace and compromise in the workplace etc), is thoroughly depoliticized, and frankly growing increasingly chauvinist. That does not strike me as very different than South Korean managerial capitalism, save for the obvious exception that one country is an opponent of the US and one is not. But I am also reminded always of the fact that many leftists, particularly leftists of color, believed that the Japanese Empire would wind up becoming a progressive force because of its economic hostility to the United States and liberalism. The CCP is of course different, but it really remains to be seen what they will do to help working people imo
I mean I think we should also look at how the term was used in the relatively recent past. People want to shout about how China was a poor country in the 1970s and yet ‘socialist’ but the story is so much more complex. China was still the most successful Third World country by a long shot, it had successfully resisted both superpowers, launched an ambitious program of international aid in Africa (almost totally interest free at that, very much unlike today), literacy rates were incredibly high, healthcare was free, etc etc. Lots of incredible problems, sure, but most of these were the consequences of either misguided agricultural policies (I will maintain that center imposed quotas on agricultural production is dumb) or a lack of international trade.
What happened in the reform era was a very definite switch in terms of total political economy - privatization, mass cuts, depoliticization of local life…Much of this has been reversed somewhat but I think we need to look at fundamentals of political economy to actually gauge the ‘dialectical direction’ a country is taking. It is not enough to have a communist party in government if they do not try and establish some sort of decommodified understanding of economic life imo. Just calling yourself communist hardly fixes things.