Overview of the Early Years of the PRC

The CCP rode to power on a wave of popular support. Mao, the Supreme Ruler, was first in command with Liu Shaoqi, his deputy, and Zhou Enlai his Prime Minister (Premier) and head of government. Deng Xiaoping was already in the leadership mix as a junior minister who had also survived the Long March but his final ascendency would have to wait three more decades. The corrupt and virtually incompetent GMD had left China with much of its state treasure, leaving it bankrupt (and hoping to return to rule it again). The CCP wanted to remedy all of this as quickly as possible with much of the world seeming to want it to fail. They sought modernisation, strength and industrialisation.

They set to work in the country remedying vast inequalities between landlords and peasants and between men and women with much success from the beginning. Women had been regarded as chattels or slaves by their parents, then their spouses and finally their sons and this changed abruptly. Peasants gained equality (hundreds and thousands of the most despised landlords paid with their lives – in a short period, half of the then arable land in China was distributed directly to the poorest peasants) but soon surrendered it to the collective. Women too had some reversals in fortune. In the cities, workers ceased to be slaves of their bosses only to quickly become effectively the slaves of their workplaces. Everybody became slaves to development (except perhaps party bosses).

What was going on was that Mao began to seek only the advice of Moscow and Marx, virtually the only friends China seemed to have, and thus began to sacrifice the Yan’an spirit (for reasons I outlined in the last few posts). Who else could the Chinese trust (it seemed not even themselves)? Mao himself visited Moscow in 1950 (in his first trip ever outside China – he only ever took one other journey outside China in his eighty-two years before his death in 1976). In that trip he sealed a military and aid deal, though Mao and Stalin didn’t especially get on. He was playing the supplicating vassal in terms of the Chinese cultural tradition.

One further complication to the first years was the invasion of South Korea by the North Koreans and the subsequent Korean War. Once General Macarthur had become involved and began to insist into northern Korea, the US seemed to threaten to expand its efforts into northern China. Macarthur’s aim actually was apparently to provoke war with China and ultimately re-install the GMD on the mainland. The Chinese secretly added a quarter of a million Chinese to the forces opposed to Macarthur now in North Korea for a surprise attack. The US was, of course, forced into a retreat and ultimately a Korean armistice along the pre-war lines by this action. In the meantime, Mao had asked Chinese civilians for their financial support in the war effort and China had suffered around a million casualties all up but military success against a Superpower was a great fillip. Mao also used the situation as an excuse to clamp down on anti-revolutionary elements and encouraged informers. Thousands of people were denounced.

Mao’s China may have been a tough place to be for many but his doctor of the time, Li Zhisui, reported on Mao’s penchant for western dancing (which he organised for his associates and himself regularly) and other perks and peculiarities of being Mao. The peasants were performing their roles, however, and two thirds of them were already collectivised by the end of 1955. They were led to expect that the final abolition of private plots would improve their circumstances. Various grain and other production quotas proved a greater priority for Mao than ensuring the peasants were all adequately fed, however. Productivity had not in fact increased very much.

Artistic and other expression was strictly controlled from the beginning which made Mao’s apparently liberal call for ‘a hundred flowers to bloom’ in 1956 tempting for many formerly stifled artists and intellectuals. The outbursts of expression that followed the calls for them from the centre including Mao’s may have shocked Mao. Corruption and inefficiency had been major gripes in the period. Many criticisms of the party were tolerated but this proved a brief period of unfettered expression. Mao later claimed he had instituted the period simply to draw anti-revolutionary elements into the open so that he could punish them.

Punish many of those who had taken the CCP at its word the CCP duly did. Many were first denounced as class enemies from 1957 in the usual ‘struggle’ meetings. Ge Peiqi, an academic, was one well known example of a relatively mild criticism being radically dealt with. There were effectively ‘rightist’ quotas that had to be met in the crackdown period as leaders in workplaces that hadn’t denounced a sufficient number of ‘rightists’ were likely themselves to be denounced as ‘rightist’ by some radical or even an opportunist or perhaps a personal enemy. This new purge continued into 1958 and by the end of it nearly a million people had been denounced. The campaign had been partly motivated by anti-intellectualism per se.

On the international front Mao hosted Khrushchev in 1958 but failed to mention his intention to attack the GMD in Taiwan. Once he attacked and the US responded vigorously he backed down. In the following year he met Khrushchev again and in 1960 the Sino-Soviet split occurred. I’ll discuss much of this some more in later posts but suffice it to say Mao and the USSR never seemed to work as more than a short-term and pragmatic pseudo union of purpose. The USSR tended to seem to Mao as at least as imperialist as any other outside power. Also in 1959, Mao crushed a revolt in Tibet. The Chinese have always tended to regard Tibet as a rightful province of China but this strong action further harmed Mao’s international reputation.

Back at home, Mao, never satisfied with growth levels, prepared the ground for what he called the Great Leap Forward (GLF) in 1958. Everybody was asked to work day and night for the revolution and the slogan ‘catch the stars and moon’ was used to emphasise the need to work through the night to build China. The people were promised that they were a great people capable of the rapid growth Mao was calling for (and consequent rapid improvement in their conditions of living under Mao’s direction). Mao in turn was held in awe by his people as suggested by one anecdote of the time. It is said that he was in the country and happened to read aloud a sign that read “people’s communes are good”. This one action supposedly led to the immediate formation of many communes throughout the country as news of it travelled.

One of the more foolhardy but perhaps relatively benign projects of the period inspired by all this boosterism (aided by the stifling of any criticism wrought by the recent anti-rightist campaigns) was the attempt by cooperatives throughout the country to smelt new steel by melting down old scrap metal (that naturally turned out to be quite substandard steel). Such projects were seen as ‘real revolution’ and a thing of pride by the masses

There was worse to come. In the frantic process of attempting to increase yields, for example, many cooperatives planted crops too close together and over fertilized with the predictable end result of counterproductive waste.

Two features of the new China combined to create the calamity that was the Great Leap Forward: the competitive urge between collectives created by the boosterism and insufficient verification by the centre of truth telling in reporting of yields. The liars reported greater and greater yields and the centre relied upon those reports to squeeze further quotas. As a result there was soon mass starvation in parts of the countryside as the still actually quite inefficient farmers fed others as best they could (and better) before feeding themselves.

Mao first began to realise what was actually occurring on a visit to his home town of Shao Shan. Even so, he was still too ready to see any criticism of what had occurred even from personal friends as an act of treachery. His abject treatment of a long-time fellow Xiangtanese (Xiangtan being the Hunanese county they both hailed from) and formerly somewhat close friend as a result, Marshall Peng, after receiving his unpalatable advice is a case in point. Even someone as senior as Premier Zhou who sympathised with Peng’s view of the situation was not willing to speak out at the time for fear of the consequences of Mao’s wrath.

The Urban Scene – the Real Transition to Socialism (1953 to 1956)

So Mao adopted his first Soviet-style Five-Year Plan for the years 1953 to 1957. Its key strategies involved (apart from the development of rural productivity as I discussed in an earlier post) rapid development of heavy industry and dependence on Soviet advice and technical and economic assistance. The workers became a privileged class, socially, economically and politically, over the peasants for the first time.

The peasants began to be relatively more exploited, though the workers were, too, as they were all pressured to meet Mao’s goals that turned out to be quite unrealistic in this period and with this style of economic development. Consumption was also explicitly limited. Hierarchy and bureaucracy became pervasive as the work place and its demands assumed the positions of centres of all urban life.

Almost all of this was at obvious odds with Mao’s innovation of the Yan’an-style ‘mass line’ and Mao himself would soon become a critic of this centralisation of control along with his people.

The next main problem was that agriculture simply could not be equipped so quickly for its role as funder of industrial growth (which occasioned excessive pressure and performance anxiety in the countryside to meet central goals).

Finally, there was the natural cultural conflict between the careerist bureaucratic style of new cadre and the old style Yan’an cadre of self-sacrifice.

The work unit (danwei) system had also created egalitarian collectivism which clashed with the hierarchical ‘one-man-management’ methods of the Soviet-style bureaucracy. This clash didn’t sit well with the masses any more than the new style cadres did.

There was also a lot of the city/country divide in the new contradictions.

In the cities the bureaucrats quickly became unpopular with the workers the bureaucracy was supposed to be serving as things seemed to not live up to their promise (the Obama effect with bells on).

Setting the Scene for the First Five-Year Plan – a bit more Marxist Theory and Practice

From 1953 onwards the transition to socialism was thus deemed ready to begin as the political system was already relatively advanced (in Marxist terms) after the above consolidations. The economy now had to catch up (and catch up with the economies of the imperialist powers that were now predicted to be enemies). The great Chinese proletariat now needed to be awakened from its slumber in a traditional Marxist fashion. The first models for the workers of the cities to chomp on were the collectivisation already beginning in the countryside and all of the changes already occurring in the cities (see my last post). The best model Mao knew of for the cities and industry, however, was the Soviet one. Stalinist central planning (and tight control there) was to be the go from now on. But let’s consider what theory and practice Mao was working with before we get to the first five-year plan and the alleged real ‘transition to socialism’.

The first issue to be addressed now (in Marxist terms) was the need to resolve the contradictions between advanced socialist politics and society and the backward Capitalist economic ‘foundation’ by developing productive forces. So were the answers Soviet-style central state planning and the ‘command’ economy? Yes, according to what Mao had learned of Marxism so far (in theory and practice).

Here’s a bit of that theory and practice:

Marx began with some theory. He said the market under competition was unable to produce rational results in terms of resource allocation and was the inevitable source of labour exploitation. It was also wasteful especially because it produced bankruptcies.

Lenin then added his two cents attempting to study the methods of capitalists in order to find how socialists might learn from them. So he wasn’t as keen as Marx apparently was to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Specifically he sought to discover their management and economic coordination secrets. This was so that the central government could produce production plans that would be more rational than any unguided market could produce and bring them to fruition by rational allocation of resources that he considered only a centralised state could accomplish. He saw technology as ‘neutral’ in terms of whether it could be equally well employed by capitalists and socialists.

Then along came Alexander Bogdanov to propose the ‘science’ of state economic planning. He said the science required ‘a gigantic statistical bureau based on exact calculations for the purpose of distributing labour power and the instruments of labour’. So a large bureaucracy would be required.

Stalin’s contribution was somewhat fetishistic. It was his focus on the promotion of heavy industry in particular. In especially heavy industry he saw the ‘spiritual’ basis of socialism as he thought by its very nature it transformed workers into socialists.

So there Mao had his models. The market could not be allowed to do its usual jobs in capitalism, only the centralised state could do the job and it must be done scientifically with a large bureaucracy and heavy industrialisation must be a priority.

Here are a few practical and theoretical reasons why the Soviet model of planned development as by then being modelled by Stalin seemed naturally to be what was required of any half decent Marxist state:

1) The USSR was seen in the early 50s as economically successful especially as it had been successful in defeating Nazi Germany (Mao was never a fan of the political advice he received from the Soviets – after all it had advised him to work with the GMD twice – but he thought he couldn’t reasonably argue with its economics);

2) The USSR was among the PRC’s few allies at the time;

3) The USSR had actual experience to impart and advisors were thus seen as ‘elder brothers’;

4) The Soviet model had been carefully and successfully justified in orthodox Marxist/Leninist terms; and

5) There would be ‘strings attached’ to increased support from the Soviets.

The Urban Scene – Consolidation (1949 to 1952)

Firstly I want to consider the political structure of the party and state and the consolidation of power in the cities before getting to what happened with the industrialisation project. This was what was being set up and managed while collectivisation was rapidly happening in the countryside and women (there especially) were being told to wait for further liberation from their red-necked men. Industrialisation really had to wait to some extent for the reforms in the countryside to bear their as yet prospective fruits.

There were four levels of both the party and the state set up with an additional fifth very localised and committeefied level of the party (and still are): the Centre (there is 1); the Provinces (30); the Counties or Cities (2,500); the Town or District (40,000); and the Rural Collectives, Urban Work Units and Residents’ Committees (600,000).

At the Centre, running of the party was formally by the National Party Congress, the Party Chairman (Mao), a 200 person Central Committee, a Standing Committee of from 5 to 7 members and a 20 person Politburo with a General Secretariat.

The party was mainly responsible for deciding broad issues of policy and the National Congress was ostensibly the supreme decider. At first (in the 1920s before the PRC was formed) it was anticipated that the Congress would meet annually but it later came to meet less frequently to the point where from 1977 onwards it has met five-yearly (so far without fail). The next Congress (expected in 2012) will be the 18^th. The 17^th occurred in 2007 and still has the following English language website: http://www.china.org.cn/english/congress/225438.htm. The congress formally appoints the central party leadership group. In Mao’s time he was given the role of Chairman and also Supreme Leader. The above Standing Committee (ostensibly appointed by the Congress) is formally a standing committee of the Politburo and is the next most important congressional leadership group after the Chairman and his advisors.

The corresponding central arms of government from 1949 on were the State Council and Premier (Zhou Enlai until his death in 1976 – for virtually all of Mao’s time) and 20 to 30 Central Ministries. The state then extended its control outwards via most of the ministries in the form of Provincial Departments, County/City Bureaux and Town/District Offices for each ministry.

The government was mainly given the role of implementation of party policy (decided formally by the Congress and Central Committee of the party but informally by Mao and the Standing Committee of the Politburo). The main difference when compared with the party structure was that the Premier formally ruled over the State Council whereas the Congress was formally supreme in the party (i.e. over the Chairman).

So how did the CCP consolidate its power from 1949 to 1952 using this dual structure? Mao had stressed to the party just before his 1949 victory that the cities would need to be a real focus of reform and engaged socialist learning immediately following the victory. The principles of ‘New Democracy’ were still applied in the cities for the time being, however. Only foreign and unrepentant GMD-sympathiser-owned industrial properties were immediately nationalised (especially if they were large properties). Other businesses were allowed to remain in private hands. The major unrepentant GMD sympathisers had already mainly fled to either Taiwan or the US.

The first priority for Mao was getting industry working again after the mismanagement and corruption that were partly the results of the long war of independence and then civil war. Socialism and class war could wait. The first five-year plan was set to begin in 1953 but in the meantime Mao sought to produce a good base from which to build in the plan period.

The CCP re-established itself in the trade union movement as early as possible. The movement was made a party link and a socialist educational structure (for businesses and workers). The workers were immediately given the role of supervising their bosses (where they remained private employers) in anticipation of them later becoming the bosses once socialism got fully underway (and also for party purposes). Workplaces were made social, political, economic and welfare units of the party structure and of urban society.

The other social and political unit set up was the neighbourhood via the formation of street committees. In part this was to enable the regulation of people like street vendors (and really anyone) who didn’t have workplaces and so would otherwise not have come under immediate party control. These committees would be notified by the party of bad elements (usually people with some connection at some time with the GMD) so that their activities could be monitored and reported on by the committees back to relevant officials.