Reganoff2 [none/use name]

The problem ultimately I think is in trying to discern what ‘undue’ influence is. I think what bothers me about this view is that it pretty much erases the historical fact that 1. Maoist China existed, 2. It survived despite imperialism and aggression from both superpowers, 3. The nationalist bourgeoisie were liquidated after New Democracy properly came to an end in 1954. What made China a success in my view compared to say India is in fact that they realized that the bourgeoisie could never be CURTAILED so much as they had to be abolished, which is why Mao was so paranoid about capitalist roaders propping up - the revolution would never be complete without them being sequestered from society.

In my view, what you have in China is a situation where many of the elites that Mao and the left of the Party disdained are suddenly in a much better situation. As a personal anecdote - I knew kids who joined the Party in college because it meant that they would be able to get better finance jobs. The Party has become a sort of quasi corporate entity in that as an institution it doesn’t have a hostility to capital per se so much as it uses certain language to proclaim that it is against capital’s dominance. But my bet is that of Mao’s: an iota of capitalist influence will eventually corrupt any political project to overthrow it.

This is all well and good but I think what we ignore here is that China had a system of universal healthcare before. It was dismantled, I think frankly quite haphazardly, and suddenly talk of that old system is dismissed out of hand as unachievable. And it was not a joke medical system either! It accomplished huge strides in infant care, women’s morality, basic health outcomes etc. All for free and entirely uncommodified. Whereas now the real issue is that for many people even if ‘access’ exists if is curtailed by hukou, employment status, quality of care in shitty public hospitals, doctors having extremely limited time to see patients, etc. There is a whole phenomenon of mobs beating doctors up because they prescribe medicine that is pushed by insurance sponsors (like the US lol). Saying that things will change slowly ignores how quickly the state was able to change things before, which in my opinion is just a matter of a vastly changed political economy.

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.

I would prefer if the Party had a hostile attitude to the idea of finance, frankly. Having posters at econ schools that have mottos along the lines of “March with the Party - start your own company!” does not scream hostile to capital to me. Yes, I am not joking - it exists.

You’d actually be surprised as to what level of care was conducted by the barefoot doctors. Also I might point out that there is nothing in the definition of universal healthcare that suggests you need to have the very advanced equipment (not sure how much of that was largely available in the 1950s anyway). Universal healthcare is simply a system where all citizens are guaranteed easy access to healthcare. FYI the Maoist regime didn’t care for ‘traditional Chinese medicine’ (a nonsense term btw) but it is actually being significantly more espoused TODAY and even by government sources.

The justification as for why basic treatment’s access was changed was because the nature of health care largely changed. It stopped being solely the purview of the state. Private actors were allowed in, provincial governments felt they could let budgets slide. You can say that ah they couldn’t have gotten better tech if not for this budgetary change but I mean most government run healthcare programs would disagree.

Dengist policies were not pursued out of material necessity - it was an ideological choice. By erasing the Maoist legacy (read the Party’s 1980 statement of the Party’s historical achievements) they were able to suggest that there was no choice but the path they took and that ultimately nothing about their class character or driving political economical concerns changed. But these policies were opposed by plenty of intellectuals, workers, peasants etc and some of that opposition has lived several afterlives even today (wildcat strikes, resistance against forced removals etc). To say so matter of fact that ah the Party will just do what it says and if doesn’t matter what anyone thinks seems to me to entirely ignore the conscious decisions made in favor and against certain types of policy.

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.

I mean the question about specialized treatment is a valid one but again I am not sure how valid it is in the face of the Maoist project being dead for 50 years. We cannot really definitively say that the latest advancements would not have been procured by the state later on, and again I am not sure that we can sya the state of the field today is one where every villager has access to an MRI machine. There are certain treatments one cannot get in the UK under free healthcare today, but you can get them in the US if you pay a shit ton of money. The UK still has ‘universal’ healthcare, though, as it can offer some treatment of the illness even if not the specific, best one. The US will give it to you if you are willing to pay a shit ton of money. I would wager we would both take the former.

TCM is a moniker that actually a lot of Sinologists really get irritated at. My apology if I did as well. We don’t like it because it projects the idea of a single or even single continuum of traditional practices that were part of a body of scientific or pseudo-scientific knowledge in pre-modern China. But no such body existed. Much of the stuff was actually invented after the fact, many of the medicinal prescriptions were practiced by people that were very much at odds with each other, and the idea of medicine in say Qing-era China was radically different. TCM is very much an invented category for what is largely a set of practices that were made traditional, rather than really representing ‘tradition’.

It is more ‘espoused today’ in the sense that, again, Maoist era officials hated the idea of anything ‘traditional’, invented or not, and strictly forbid ‘superstitious’ practices like qigong etc. Again there is nothing about these practices that are deeply rooted in a singular ‘Chinese culture’ because that singularity is actually a lot more hetereogenous than people give it or credit for, and a lot of these supposedly popular ‘ancient’ practices were only made popular after the fact.

If you want a good source on healthcare in China today vs the Maoist era, Martin Whyte has written a lot on this.

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?

It is necessary and good to study theorists and leaders from past socialist projects, even if you disagree with them, but also necessary to recognize that present material conditions combined with the reality of the anthropocene poses challenges that cannot be solved by the strategies of the past alone.