Mao’s Era in the Balance - a starting point overview

Social life in Mao’s time thus became the life of the collective in both the countryside and the cities. Mistakes were undoubtedly made but there were also successes and not all of today’s successes can be regarded as despite rather than because of Mao.

The collective life did offer economies of scale in both production and distribution and productivity gains as at least potential benefits. It also allowed the political aims of the state to be most efficiently made manifest to and taken on board by the population. Goals could be clearly seen to be collective goals and were thus uniquely motivating to the community-minded. It was quite a spiritual thing. At the same time the provision of welfare was quite effective in this more localised environment than that of the centralised state planning system. The danwei or factory in the cities and the commune or production brigade in the countryside were expected to be self-sufficient in various welfare arenas.

After some of the disasters in the countryside especially, the collectives began to work rather better after reforms made in 1962. The countryside was now divided into People’s Communes made up of 20 to 30 production brigades that were in turn collectives of 100 to 300 households (the typical village size and the size of the old Higher-stage Agricultural Producers’ Cooperatives). The communes continued to be responsible for things like education, health, military training, grain purchases and infrastructure coordination but production and distribution decision-making returned to a large extent to the more local brigade level. The Communes were now more like local governments than they had ever been intended to be initially. The earning of ‘work points’ over a year was again the basis of distributed income from the brigade level. The brigade or village level was now the official unit of society and for welfare and other local concerns. The famous ‘bare-foot doctors’ worked at this level.

The role of the centre in this was to discover best practice models in all of this both in rural areas and in the cities and propagandise them. Two well known examples of the models promoted in the propaganda were the Dazhai village for the country and Daqing for the cities. The slogans went “in agriculture study Dazhai” and “in industry study Daqing”. Naturally places like Daqing and especially Dazhai in Shanxi Province, west of Beijing, were models in part because they were given special and not necessarily completely transparent resource allocations precisely so that they could appear to be better models than they may in fact actually have been if left to their normal devices. In addition, Mao continued to lionise the peasants generally as a class in his state’s propaganda efforts as he rounded out the CR by sending the Red Guards to the countryside for ‘education’ by them.

Dazhai really was an example to an extent, though, of the transformation of a formerly barren piece of land into a fertile one with all of the mod cons (terracing, dormitory housing and irrigation) by means of collective labour.

Daqing, northeast of Beijing, was a new city established at the site of a significant newly discovered oil field and as such quite important as a model of progress to a developing China that had been previously thought not to possess substantial oil reserves. The workers were doubly praised for working so diligently in the inhospitable north of the country on projects of value to the whole country. Slogans especially praised the self-sacrifice of these workers.

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.