On October 1, 1949, the leader of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Mao Zedong (1893–1976) announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Three hundred thousand people gathered in Tiananmen Square to welcome the new government and to greet the new leadership. After Mao made his initial announcement, he unfurled the new flag of the PRC, and then the military chief Zhu De reviewed the forces of the People’s Liberation Army. Similar celebrations were held in other parts of China. The foundation of the PRC ended a century of humiliation before the imperialists (that began with the first Anglo-Opium War of 1839) and the long second world war (that began with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931). Ten days before, at the first plenary session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Mao had said, “we are all convinced that our work would go down in the history of humankind, demonstrating that the Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have now stood up.”
The words in the name of new state, the PRC, are important: people and republic. The word republic signified the completion of the 1911 revolution that ended the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and that inaugurated a form of post-monarchical sovereignty. Chinese republicanism drew from the reformist views from people as diverse as Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929)—who supported a constitutional monarchy—and then put into practice by Sun Yat-Sen (1866–1925), who was not only against monarchies but more importantly against the wretched cultural inheritance of the centuries and for the unity of the Chinese people across a sprawling territory. The other word—people—has a rich history in Chinese thought and in Marxist theory, where it means that the state must operate on behalf of a range of classes that form most of the society (peasants, workers, intellectuals, and the petty bourgeoisie—the four stars in the new flag of China, with the fifth and largest star representing the CPC). The PRC was understood from the start to be an instrument for the transformation of Chinese society and not the culmination of a previous transformation. It was not a socialist state, but a people’s republic, which would strive to construct socialism. From the very beginning, it was understood by the leadership of the CPC that the Chinese Revolution was not an event that took place in 1949 but a process that began long before, at least since the formation of the Chinese Soviet Republic in Ruijin in 1931 to the revolutionary base in Yan’an in 1936.
The Three Mass Movements
The PRC’s formation came at a time when it had not yet established the unity of the territory or found the means to defend itself against imperialist aggression. Two of the main mass movements deepened right after 1949 were the completion of the defeat of the Kuomintang forces in the southwest and south China, and the establishment of allies in the world (particularly the Soviet Union with the Sino-Soviet Treaty of February 1950) against the imperialist support for the Kuomintang (once it had moved to Taiwan) and then with the US invasion of the Korean peninsula in June 1950. These two mass movements—the defeat of the rightist forces and the building of strength to defend against imperialist aggression—forced the PRC to hold off on the third mass movement, which however was the most enduring: the agrarian reform plan.
The decisions of the CPC in the winter of 1950 began a land reform process in the newly liberated zones that were substantially completed by the spring of 1953. The first general principle of the Law of Agrarian Reform noted, “Abolition of the land ownership of the feudal exploitative landlord class and introduction of peasant land ownership so as to liberate rural productive forces, develop agricultural production and pave the way for New China’s industrialisation.” That was the goal. The process was for the state to encourage grassroots political power, trained and led by the CPC, to conduct land reforms in a guided, planned, and orderly manner. The PRC was not to give land to the peasants, but it was to ensure that the peasants could build regionally and locally to accomplish the task of redistributing resources in their areas. Forced confiscation was not as much the policy as political education in the rural areas to transform land relations away from feudal oppression to a more just basis. By 1956, 90 percent of the country’s peasants had land to till, 100 million peasants were organised in agricultural cooperatives, and private industry was effectively abolished.
Agrarian reform had several productive outcomes: it meant that the landless peasantry and agricultural workers now had access to land and resources that allowed them to live with dignity; it meant that the total population of the rural area worked with a stake in the land and with an interest in making material improvements to the land, which increased productivity; it meant that the old landlord culture of hierarchy and its wretched outcomes in terms of patriarchal relations, for instance, was stamped out. These positive outcomes improved the living and working conditions of most of the Chinese people and built an almost immediate sense of loyalty to the Chinese Revolution.
Overcoming the Penalties of the Past
In 1949, the official literacy rate in China was recorded at 20 percent, although by all indications this was a highly inflated number. This was simply one measure of the miserable conditions of life for the mass of the Chinese population. Another was that population mortality was immense, with infant mortality at a striking 250 per 1000 lived births. The average Chinese life expectancy did not surpass 35 years. Coming out of the Century of Humiliation at the hands of imperialist powers, China’s GDP fell from about one-third of the global economy at the beginning of the nineteenth century to only 5 percent at the PRC’s founding. At that time, in terms of GDP per capital, China was the eleventh poorest nation in the world, behind eight African and two Asian countries. The immense turmoil in the Chinese countryside from the nineteenth century—reflected in the wars against the British and the peasant uprisings, such as the Taiping (1850–1864), Nian (1851–1868), and the Du Wenxiu (1856–1872) rebellions—and the theft by a small class of feudal landowners forced the peasantry and workers into an unreconcilable set of circumstances. They fought because they had to fight, and they were able to prevail because of the context of the war against the Japanese and the brilliant strategic choices made by the CPC during and after the culmination of the Long March.
To overcome the penalties of the past is not an easy option. The PRC simply did not have the resources to redistribute wealth through the creation of an immediately adequate educational and health infrastructure. During the process of agrarian reform, the PRC developed a First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957) under the leadership of Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) and Chen Yun (1905–1995). This Plan was worked out over two years and emphasised four theoretical points:
- To build an industrial base, which had never really been built to satisfy the needs of the Chinese people both in the cities and in the rural areas. Of all the capital pledged toward construction, 58.2 percent went to the building of industrial capacity.
- To build a New China based on its realities and not on utopian expectations. This meant that the precious resources harnessed by the PRC had to be used judiciously and that the PRC needed to train an enormous army of bureaucrats to manage the expansion of the state and to use the state’s power to assist in democratisation of the economy.
- To use whatever means that the Chinese could assemble without too much reliance upon outside help, although the USSR did provide assistance in the early years for industrialisation in particular. During the period of the first Plan, the USSR sent three thousand technical experts into China and welcomed twelve thousand Chinese students to study technical subjects in the USSR. The foreign loans necessary for development accounted for only 2.7 percent of the Chinese state’s total financial revenue in the first Plan.
- To correctly handle the balance between capital accumulation in a poor country and the consumption needs of the impoverished population. The Plan articulated the need for careful consideration of the immediate interests of the people and their longer-term interests: putting too much of the resources toward building fixed capital might dampen the enthusiasm for socialism, while spending the resources on the immediate troubles will only defer the problems till later.
The sophistication of the theory of the first Plan allowed for some major advances, but these were not sufficient for the prevailing needs. While the objective factors of enhancing the material conditions of life advanced progressively, the major social problems had to be confronted by more subjective techniques. The CPC organised mass campaigns to combat illiteracy (1950–1956), including holding classes in the fields for the peasantry. Caught up in the whirlwind of the 1940s, many rural areas of China developed a mutual help tradition that became the Rural Cooperative Medical Insurance Scheme in the PRC. With this form of medical insurance, the PRC began to distribute its resources to build public health, assisted by the Soviets, including by building general hospitals in the rural provinces and polyclinics in the villages. Both literacy and medical health improved dramatically because of the highly motivated cadre of the PRC, who took their wartime experience of sacrifice and strategy to good effect.
One of the downsides of the need to rely on subjectivism for building socialism is that such a framework is prone to human exaggeration and error, such as in the call for the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). But even here, there the record is not entirely negative. During this period, the PRC formalised the “barefoot doctor” scheme, which allowed medical colleges to provide basic training for doctors to go and serve the people in rural areas and thereby allowed the peasantry to access primary medical care where there had been none before. It required this kind of subjectivism to fight against the temptations of corruption and the deterioration of cadre discipline, both of which had become serious problems in the PRC; these were formulated through the 1951 campaign against the “three evils” in the state sector (corruption, waste, and bureaucracy) and the 1952 fight against the “five evils” in the private sector (bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on government contracts, and stealing economic information).
In the twenty-nine-year pre-reform period (1949–1978), China’s life expectancy increased by thirty-two years. In other words, for every year after the Revolution, more than one year was added to the life of an average Chinese person. In 1949, the country’s population was 80 percent illiterate, which in less than three decades was reduced to 16.4 percent in urban areas and 34.7 percent in rural areas; the enrolment of school-age children increased from 20 to 90 percent; and the number of hospitals tripled. From 1952 to 1977, the average annual industrial output growth rate was 11.3 percent. In terms of productive capacity and technological development, China went from not being able to manufacture a car domestically in 1949 to launching its first satellite into outer space in 1970. The Dongfanghong satellite (meaning The East is Red) played the eponymous revolutionary song on loop while in orbit for twenty-eight days. The industrial, economic, and social gains in the transition to socialism under Mao formed the foundation of the post-1978 period.
Breaking the Chain of Dependency
In 1954, Mao addressed the Central People’s Government Council and asked a question that was on the minds of many of the delegates:
Our general objective is to strive to build a great socialist country. Ours is a big country of 600 million people. How long will it really take to accomplish socialist industrialisation and the socialist transformation and mechanisation of agriculture and make China a great socialist country? We won’t set a rigid time-limit now. It will probably take a period of three five-year plans, or fifteen years, to lay the foundation. Will China then become a great country? Not necessarily. I think for us to build a great socialist country, about fifty years, or ten five-year plans, will probably be enough. By then China will be in good shape and quite different from what it is now. What can we make at present? We can make tables and chairs, teacups and teapots, we can grow grain and grind it into flour, and we can make paper. But we can’t make a single motor car, plane, tank or tractor. So, we mustn’t brag and be cocky. Of course, I don’t mean we can become cocky when we turn out our first car, cockier when we make ten cars, and still more cocky when we make more and more cars. That won’t do. Even after fifty years, when our country is in good shape, we should remain as modest as we are now. If by then we should become conceited and look down on others, it would be bad. We mustn’t be conceited even a hundred years from now. We must never be cocky.
Three important points come from this speech. First, that it will take time to build socialism, since revolution in a poor country like China requires the state, the party, and the people to build the material basis for socialism. Patience is a central value of national liberation Marxism. Second, that China needed science, technology, and industrial capacity to break the chain of dependency and produce high-value, modern goods. To do this, China had both to rely upon the import of science and technology and to train its own scientific and technological personnel. Third, humility is as central a value as patience because China is not seeking to advance for national chauvinism but for the purposes of international socialism.
The attempt to break the intractable problem of dependency was attempted (and substantially failed) during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Many lessons were learned then, and during the two-year period after the death of Mao (1976–1978). In May 1976, Hu Fuming (1935–2023), a CPC member and professor at Nanjing University, published an article with an interesting title, “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth.” This philosophical position, which was attractive to many people in the CPC, was adopted by Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997) in his 1978 speech to the 3rd Plenary Session of the CPC’s 11th Central Committee, which was titled, “Emancipate the Mind. Seek Truth from Facts. Unite as One in Looking to the Future.” What might appear as pragmatism was in fact an adherence to materialism, setting the course of Chinese socialism on the tracks of actuality rather than trying to hasten matters through an excess of subjectivism. The reform era, that opened in 1978, was built on this philosophical foundation.
In January 1963, Zhou Enlai had laid out a programme for China to focus on the Four Modernisations, namely, to modernise agriculture, industry, defence, as well as science and technology. In his 1978 speech, Deng returned to these Four Modernisations and said that they could not take place “if ossified thinking was not done away with.” The following year, Deng said that China must strive to become a “moderately prosperous society” (xiaokang), which could only take place with the advancement of the industrial base. In focusing on the opening up and China’s policy to attract technologically advanced industry into the country, an uneven appraisal has come of the Reform era that started in 1978. Several aspects are neglected, but two should be highlighted: agricultural productivity was to be increased through a household responsibility system (which weakened collective farms in the pursuit of a greater socialisation of labour and a higher form of collectivity); the role of the CPC had to be strengthened over the PRC and over society with a better political education and discipline for the cadre (in 1980, Deng made a speech where he highlighted the major malpractices of “bureaucracy, over-concentration of power, patriarchal behaviour, and leading cadres enjoying life-long tenure and privileges of all kinds”). The country would never be able to meet the challenge of the Four Modernisations and advance to socialism if it ignored the problems created by China’s dependent place in the neocolonial world order, as well as the rot that frequently sets in when power becomes an end in itself.
Private foreign capital came first from the Chinese diaspora then from East Asian capitalists (Japan in the lead) and finally from Western capital; this investment that entered the PRC to take advantage of the highly educated and healthy workforce had to transfer science and technology as a prerequisite, which formed a basis for the growth of China’s own science and technology sector. The PRC placed significant restrictions on the foreign capital, such as that it had to meet the productive needs of Chinese plans, that it had to transfer technology, and that it could not repatriate as much of the profit as it wished. Dependency was broken by this insistence, built on the foundation of the early decades of the Chinese Revolution. It was a consequence of the long trajectory of the Chinese Revolution that it was able to demonstrate high growth rates (nearly 10 percent year-on-year) in the period since 1978, that it was able to abolish absolute poverty, and that it was able to increase household and total consumption—including on education—across the decades since then. The chain of dependency was weakened, but not broken, although the reform period came with its own severe problems—such as increased inequality and a weakened social fabric.
The Zigs and Zags of the Chinese Revolution
In 2012, thirty-four years after the opening up period began, CPC leader Hu Jintao (born 1942) told the 18th National Congress that corruption had become a key issue. “If we fail to handle this issue well,” he warned, “it could prove fatal to the Party, and even cause the collapse of the Party and the fall of the state.” At that Congress, Hu was succeeded by Xi Jinping (born 1953), whose first take was to tackle this issue and to revive the socialist culture in China. In his inaugural speech as the Party head, Xi committed to “striking tigers and flies at the same time,” referring to the corruption that had spread from the high echelons down to the grassroots level. The Party launched the “eight-point” measures for its members, to limit practices such as inconsequential meetings and extravagant receptions, and advocated diligence and thrift. Within a year, 25 percent of official meetings were cancelled, 160,000 “phantom staff” were removed from the government payroll, and 2,580 unnecessary official building projects were stopped. By May 2021, a total of over four million cadres and officials had been investigated, with 3.7 million of them having been punished by the Central Commission of Discipline Inspection. At least forty-three members of the Central Committee and six Politburo members have been punished for corruption, including former ministers, provincial governors, and presidents of the biggest state-owned banks.
Hu’s comments and Xi’s actions reflected concerns that during the period of high growth after 1978, CPC members grew increasingly detached from the people. During the first months of his presidency, Xi launched the “mass line campaign” to bring the Party closer to the grassroots. As part of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation campaign launched in 2014, three million Party cadres were sent to live and work in 128,000 villages as part of this project. In 2020, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, China successfully eradicated extreme poverty, contributing to 76 percent of the global reduction in poverty over the last four decades. The 19th National Congress of the CPC in 2017 marked a shift in the principal contradiction facing Chinese society, from developing the productive forces quickly to addressing unbalance and inadequate development. In other words, the reform and opening up period was seen as a precondition for building a modern socialist society, but its work is still incomplete.
Beyond the Party’s self-correction, Xi’s strong words and actions against the corrupt “flies and tigers” contributed to the Chinese people’s confidence in the government. According to a 2020 study by Harvard University, the central government approval rating sits at 93.1 per cent, seeing the most significant growth in the more underdeveloped regions in the countryside. This rise of confidence in rural areas results from increased social services, trust in local officials, and the campaign against poverty.
In 2016, reflecting on the continuation of Chinese dependency, Xi said that the “dependence on core technology is the biggest hidden trouble for us. Heavy dependence on imported core technology is like building our house on top of someone else’s house.” The US trade war against China, which began in 2018, came after the collapse of confidence in countries such as China, India, and Brazil that the US can be the buyer of last resort (the confidence falling after the Third Great Depression began in 2007). These phenomenon—the lack of confidence and the trade war—set China on a path that would diverge from the West, building the Belt and Road Initiative (2013) and then developing New Quality Productive Forces (2023). The first concept shows China’s interest in building new markets away from the United States and Europe, but also using that process to assist in the development breakthroughs in countries in the Global South. The second concept, central to Xi Jinping Thought, is about moving China to “lead the development of strategic emerging industries and future industries,” as Xi put it in September 2023. The US trade war put pressure on Chinese science to advance in new areas, such as artificial intelligence, biomedicine, nanotechnology, and the manufacturing of computer chips. Two examples of the rapid advances are that China’s digital economy in 2022 accounted for 41.5 percent of its GDP, while its 5G penetration rate was greater than 50 percent in 2023. While the growth of these strategic industries have been key to China’s development, the government has taken decisive measures in recent years to curtail the “disorderly expansion of capital,” specifically targeting Big Tech monopolies and other private sectors as well as real estate speculation. At the same time, there has been an increased emphasis on combating the “three mountains” faced by the Chinese people, which is the high education, housing, and healthcare costs.
The Chinese Revolution continues to be a process. It is unfinished because history proceeds onward and there are many problems to solve, including the character of China’s relationship to the rest of the Global South as it searches for a new development architecture after the complete failure of the International Monetary Fund-World Bank austerity and debt approach. That China has been able to abolish absolute poverty and build advanced technology at the same time indicates that the balance between investment and consumption has been well handled by the PRC under the leadership of the CPC. China’s stability and strength has enabled it to now enter the world sphere and offer leadership to solve seemingly intractable problems, such as between Iran and Saudi Arabia and in Palestine.
This is a good period, after 75 years, to go back and study Mao’s 1954 speech where he highlighted the need for China to develop independent science and technology, patience, and humility. In 2021, with the eradication of extreme poverty and on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CPC, China was able to achieve its “First Centenary Goal” of building “a moderately prosperous society in all respects”—in other words, achieving xiaokang for a country of 1.4 billion people. Now it is on an unchartered path to achieve its Second Centenary Goal of building “a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious” by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the PRC’s founding. These are important traits of any development process, but especially one rooted in the socialist tradition.
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Tings Chak and Vijay Prashad work at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and are both editors of the international edition of Wenghua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought.