Deng the Economist and ‘Capitalist Roader’

So now it’s time to move on from Mao and all his successes and failures and consider what did Deng do? As I mentioned earlier I also want to explore the surprisingly positive economic legacy of Mao. I'll also do that here.

Incidentally Liao Yiwu is in Surry Hills Monday night (21 November 2011) as a belated part of this year's Sydney Writers' Festival (he was refused permission by the Chinese authorities that are Deng's successors to visit the US in April and attend the festival in May - he is now in exile since having apparently been forced to exit China irregularly). See http://www.swf.org.au/201110251054/home-page/liao-yiwu.html (the festival page for the event - it's apparently at the Belvoir Theatre) for more details. He seems to think he may be able to end his exile with the end of Hu Jintao's term in office next year (per an article in the New Yorker). Kommt zeit kommt rat!

After Mao’s death in 1976 a struggle for power ensued that Deng finally won in 1978. In so doing he and his supporters defeated the Gang of Four and their less numerous and less ardent supporters. Besides the Gang of Four, a possible compromise candidate, Hua Guofeng, also looked like a player for a time. He was also apparently Mao’s final personal choice for a successor. His policies were derided by all sides however as ‘whateverism’ policies as he had the tendency to model himself upon Mao and explicitly prefer doing ‘whatever Mao did’.

Deng’s victory became clear publicly at the 3^rd Plenum of the 11^th Central Committee in December 1978 when he also propounded his programme. By this time Hua had had the Gang of Four arrested and become himself a mere figurehead.

There would be a shift in CCP focus from class struggle to economic construction via the ‘four modernisations’. This was a Zhou term. The point of the change was to dial the politics back in favour of pragmatism. In defending his black-hatted (from Mao’s perspective) and ‘capitalist road’ approach to economic development Deng was wont to say something like “it doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white so long as it catches mice”. Political ‘colour’ was less important in the moment than what got the economic job done.

The more radical of Mao’s ideas were explicitly rejected and his class labels were all repudiated (as long as one didn’t oppose Deng or Dengism – that could still lead to a lifelong label that one still wouldn’t like and that could also stick to one's family). The vast majority of formerly specifically denounced bureaucrats and others were given their old jobs back. The term used for this was ‘rehabilitation’. And finally in 1981 we had the 70% good 30% bad statement in the CCP’s Resolution on Party History about which I have written in earlier posts. This was an assessment of Mao as both a man and a leader.

Just let’s have a brief look at Mao’s economic record, though, before we move on, as that was now to be Deng’s explicit interest. In fact the economic record may be surprisingly good to some (and his social record, too, was at least generally fair). China is regarded in the fields of Economic History and Developmental Economics as one of the 'major economy late modernisers' or 'late industrialisers' (along with Germany, Japan and the USSR) so it is fairest to compare China’s fundamentals with those of those three economies in their respective growth spurt periods (usually a few decades was the crucial period – early developers took longer as they had to invent more things from scratch).

Germany’s growth rate per decade in its spurt period (1880 to 1914) was 33%, Japan’s (from 1874 to 1929) was 43%, the USSR’s (from 1928 to 1958) was 54% and China’s (from 1952 to 1972) was 64%. So it’s not a bad record over a sustained spurt period even if we allow that China may have come from a slightly lower base. The down side is that China seems to have run out of spurt a little sooner (after two decades compared to Japan’s at the most impressive five and a half decades).

From 1952 to 1977 industrial output increased 11.3% per annum, agricultural output increased 2.3% per annum and population increased by 2.0% per annum. Here are some more impressive and more specific output and demography figures for China for around that period:

	1952	1976
Steel output	1.3 million tons	23 million tons
Coal mined	66 million tons	448 million tons
Crude oil produced	0 million tons	28 million tons
Fertilizer produced	0.2 million tons	28 million tons
Cement produced	3 million tons	49 million tons
Electricity produced	7 billion kilowatt hours	133 billion kilowatt hours
Size of Employed Industrial Workforce	3 million industrial workers	50 million industrial workers
Size of Employed Scientific Workforce	50,000 scientists (1949)	5,000,000 scientists

There were also fair records in educational development that made the above possible but especially of girls and young women and in both rural and urban settings that if anything Deng’s accession interrupted (albeit briefly). Sixty percent of fifteen year old girls in China in 1946 had received no formal education according to statistics produced by Wenfang Tang and William L. Parish in Chinese Urban Life under Reform: the Changing Social Contract (Cambridge University Press: 2000) but half had received a least some Junior Secondary education by the year of Mao’s death according to Tang and Parish’s statistics. That’s the change over thirty years. The small percentage who had received advanced education also nearly tripled (from around 2.5% to around 7.5%). I don’t have the text to hand but that information may be specific to rural females (despite a title that might suggest an urban focus) but, wherever it relates to, the trend is the notable thing rather than absolutes and locations. It’s possibly even more impressive if they are rural figures, though. So Mao was (perhaps more than adequately) setting Deng up for some success.