The Great Leap Forward

The CCP’s efforts to emulate Russia’s plan could not succeed because the industrial base from which China was starting was far lower. Investment for heavy industry required siphoning off an enormous surplus from agriculture–a process that in China caused a decline in agricultural production. It was clear by the end of the first Five-Year Plan that the economy’s growth rate had begun to slow down. The social consequences of trying to squeeze workers and peasants even more were becoming obvious to Party leaders. The Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress in 1958 acknowledged the "need to increase consumption, otherwise there would be a serious contradiction between the Party and the masses which would lead to unforgivable errors." But Mao would have none of it. After an inspection trip around the country, Mao wrote:

Mao effectively pre-empted the second Five-Year Plan by launching a frenetic economic drive in 1958 which became known as "The Great Leap Forward."

The whole basis of the Great Leap Forward was to jump-start the economy through a massive effort to mobilize the human resources of the entire country. Circumventing China’s large steelworks, thousands of backyard foundries were set up throughout the countryside. The aim was to overcome China’s economic and industrial underdevelopment. Fantastic targets were set and the Party cadres were instructed to exhort the masses to meet the targets.

At first, the grotesque character of the Great Leap Forward was offset by the excellent harvest of 1958 and by the fact that if Mao could ask for outlandish targets, the local cadres could just as easily report outlandish results. Thus, the output of steel, which was 5.3 million tons in 1957, allegedly reached 11 million tons in 1958 and was planned to reach 18 million in 1959. The grain output which was 175 million tons in 1957, allegedly reached 375 million tons in 1958, and was planned to reach 500 million in 1959. The Central Committee solemnly endorsed this farce and planned for more. Zhou Enlai repeated and supported these fantastic figures and announced that the targets laid in the second Five-Year Plan (1958-1962) had been reached in the plan’s first year!

The grand deception that was being foisted on China’s workers and peasants even intoxicated those at the top. In their book, Tell the World, Liu Binyan, Ruan Ming and Xu Gang tell an anecdote which is exemplary of the whole process:

But despite Mao’s fantasies, objective reality could not be willed away in a collective act of faith. Each new method of production introduced to raise production, each innovation, instead led to a disaster. Thus, the backyard furnaces, designed to expand steel output, in fact deprived the modern steel mills of iron ore and coal–and produced an iron of too poor a quality to be refined.

The whole project could simply be dismissed as pathetic stupidity–were it not for the fact that it had a profound negative effect on China’s workers and peasants. Writes Simon Leys:

The image of the frugal Mao leading a "people’s republic" is as outlandish as the targets set during the Great Leap Forward. According to Mao’s personal physician, Dr. Li Zhisui, a banquet was held for Mao’s birthday in 1959. While millions starved, the Party served

Unfortunately, this was not the last "great catastrophe" Mao would engineer. Simon Leys writes:

Not long after the death of Stalin in 1956, Russia and China severed diplomatic ties. The Sino-Soviet split in 1960 produced splits in the Communist Parties internationally. For many radicals in the 1960s, Mao was seen as a more radical alternative to Soviet-style communism. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Insofar as Mao had any allegiances to Russia, it was to Stalin. This is certainly not because Stalin helped the Red Army’s march to power. Quite the contrary. During the war, Stalin took pains to belittle and deride the Chinese Communists, telling Harriman, the U.S. ambassador, on June 10, 1944: "The Chinese communists are not real communists. They are ‘margarine communists’."

It was only when the victory of the Peoples Liberation Army was certain, that Russia changed it line. Mao could forgive Stalin for this–after all, he understood the need to appease–in this case not the national, but the international–bourgeoisie.

What tied the two dictators together went much deeper. In Mao’s China, Tony Cliff writes:

Mao’s writings were treated as holy writ, his pictures and statues placed in every nook and cranny of China. Poems and songs were written comparing him to the rising sun. One example, from commanders and privates in the People’s Liberation Army, will suffice:

"The Cultural Revolution," writes Simon Leys in The Chairman’s New Clothes,

Mao counterattacked to regain his leading position in the Party and the state. In January 1965, he produced a document which launched the "Great Cultural Revolution." The document argues:

On August 18, 1966, a million Red Guards arrived in paramilitary formation to hear Defense Minister Lin Biao, Mao’s "closest comrade-in-arms" explain the big-character poster "Bombard The Headquarters."

The Headquarters, they found, were those of the Communist Party, where they would find "persons in authority taking the road back to capitalism." China’s 11 million students were urged to go out, seek and destroy. To speed up the process, Mao shut down much of China’s educational system in 1966. For several years, China’s school and universities ceased functioning altogether. Mass meetings, show trials, processions and street fighting became a regular feature of life. Bands of young people ransacked homes in search of proof of bourgeois ideology, destroyed historical monuments as "feudal remnants" and burnt "bourgeois" books.

In the beginning Mao was elated with the activities of the Red Guards. But by August and September, it was clear that things were moving in a direction not anticipated by Mao. Workers and Red Guards clashed, and a series of directives were issued by Mao ordering workers to stay at work. A collapse in production and a descent into social chaos were clearly results of the campaign. Moreover, the anti-capitalist slogans and cries for equality raised by the Red Guards were taken seriously by thousands of ordinary people. The "Great Cultural Revolution" threatened to unleash a real revolution. Mao tried to beat a hasty retreat by softening some of the attacks on individual Party leaders, and on the Party itself.

Once more, Mao apologized for his mistakes: "I myself had not foreseen that as soon as the Beijing University poster was broadcast, the whole country would be thrown into turmoil…Since it was I who caused the havoc, it is understandable if you have bitter words for me."

But the apology didn’t end the revolt. Again, Leys:

What had begun with the organization of "contract workers" (seasonal workers employed on a temporary basis) in 1966, spread to the whole working class in the following years. In some places, autonomy and indirect control of the work-group level was temporarily transformed into autonomy at the factory level. It took the army two years–from 1968 to 1970–to clear the way for the return of the Party to the factories.

All through the 1970s there have been outbursts of trouble, very often with roots in the factional struggles of the Cultural Revolution.

Those who had actually believed Mao’s rhetoric about revolution, about the importance of the youth revolt, were in for a rude shock. In July 1968 he told the four main Red Guard leaders: "I am the black hand that suppressed the Red Guards." State repression was intensified.

By 1969 the regime had successfully regained the upper hand. The need for restoring stability was paramount. Armed clashes with Russia in that year placed the question of defense–and therefore of economic development–back at the center of the bureaucracy’s priorities.

The main preoccupation of China’s leaders in the period after the Cultural Revolution was to strengthen the central state apparatus over the main institutions of Chinese society, reverse the massive drop in production and repair the economy, reestablish the Party’s authority and mend China’s diplomatic fences. This served to temporarily cement all factions within the bureaucracy around the need to reestablish order. Despite the various splits and feuds at the top, all involved understood the need to defend their positions from the threat from below.

There was a sharp retreat from the slogans and aims of the Cultural Revolution. By 1981, the Resolution on CPC History published by the Party officially characterizes the Cultural Revolution as responsible for "the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state, the people since the founding of the People’s Republic of China."

The Party no longer pushed "Bombard The Headquarters" but "It is the Party that exercises leadership in everything." By 1970, the economy had resumed its growth under the slogan "Grasp revolution and promote production." A new diplomatic initiative was launched in 1971 when Beijing invited the Vietnam War criminal Richard Nixon to visit China in February, 1972. In the countryside, private plots for peasants were no longer denounced but praised. Thousands of Party cadres were rehabilitated including some of the principal Party leaders ousted during the Cultural Revolution–like Deng Xiaoping. Indeed, all of the elements that were later to become known as Deng Xiaoping’s "reforms" were launched during this period–even if more limited and tentative. The direction of the central leaders of the Party–especially Mao and Zhou Enlai–was clearly set out.

The history of the 1970s is largely punctuated by big purges and shakeups in the bureaucracy, this time against those who had risen to prominence during the Cultural Revolution. This was not a smooth process, but one which moved in fits and starts. Overall, it represented a departure from the extreme voluntarism of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Simon Leys, once again, summarizes it very well:

Lin Biao’s downfall was accompanied with the glorious reinstatement of Deng Xiaoping, who for years had been vilified and pilloried by hundreds of millions of militants. Forever the pragmatist, Mao knew that Deng, an old-timer with roots in the Party, was the only one capable of running the state and disciplining the People’s Liberation Army–whose role had greatly expanded in running the country since 1969.

In August 1973, at the Tenth Party Congress, Deng Xiaoping was formally rehabilitated and he became deputy prime minister–effectively heir to Zhou Enlai. But his path to power was blocked by a powerful group of leaders of the Cultural Revolution which included Mao’s spouse, Jiang Qing. The "Gang of Four"–Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyan, Wang Hongwen–as they were known, made a bid for power while Mao was still alive but unable to supervise the project he had begun. They were able to manipulate the removal of Deng from his posts in the Party and were under the illusion they could reverse the whole course of development since the end of the Cultural Revolution. Deng and his cohorts were denounced in 1976 as "leaders of the Party linked to the bourgeoisie of our society, as well as landowners, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and badly re-educated bourgeois right wingers."

Their illusions were quickly shattered. The death in 1976 of three of the most central leaders of the CCP–Zhu De, Zhou Enlai and Mao–gave the central leadership of the Party the opportunity to silence the Gang of Four without fear of Mao’s intervention. Months later, at the Eleventh Congress, Deng was made Vice Chairman of the Party–as well as Vice Premier, Chief of Staff of the PLA, and Vice Chairman of the Military Affairs Commission. The Gang of Four was, conveniently, denounced as "typical representatives in our Party of landowners, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, as well as other old and new bourgeois elements."

Deng continued, but with increased vigor and no opposition, the program that had been launched almost a decade earlier. He informed the 11th Party Congress that there be "less empty talk and more hard work." In January of 1979, he assured the U.S. that the "honeymoon would last for a long time." "There is much in common between us on matters of global strategy," he said, and "the antihegemonies principle is our greatest common point politically."

The Cultural Revolution had finally been buried. As a recent ‘Letter from the Central Organs to the Party, Army, and People’ put it, when Deng took over in December 1978, "China was faced with a very grim situation and extremely arduous tasks. It was imperative to break away from the calamities caused by the ‘Great Cultural Revolution.’"

Calamities indeed there were. And there was clearly a break with the "Great Cultural Revolution." But this break was not a sign of a fundamental transformation of class relations in China. Rather it was another path by which the aims of China’s ruling class could be most effectively be met. Workers in China are as much out of power today as they were under Mao. Socialists should not in any way give credence to the idea that socialism in any form existed or exists now in China.

The mythology spun by market-apologists–which include many disillusioned Maoists–must also be rejected. The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 was not an aberration on the road to democracy. But that is the subject of the next article.

Special sidebars:

The mainstream media has downplayed Deng’s role in the Tiananmen Square massacre and highlighted his skill at transforming China into a market economy. Most commentators treat Deng’s policies as representing a sharp break from the politics of other CCP leaders, especially Mao.

The problem with this view is that it forgets that Deng–who became a member of the party in 1924–shared an outlook that united him with Mao and other party leaders more than it divided them. Depending on what period is selected, Mao and Deng can be shown to have the identical view on China’s future. The official ideology which has them representing the "proletarian" and "capitalist" interests respectively reflects not class struggle but the clashes within the same class of bureaucrats. The different fractures and struggles in China’s top leadership represented the falling out–and often different strategies–for achieving the same ends. By the early 1970s, Deng’s "reforms" were known as Mao and Zhou’s reforms.

The most frequently mentioned saying of Deng, "It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice," is interpreted as meaning that it didn’t matter whether or not China was socialist or capitalist. But this is only accepting the meaning given this phrase when Mao wanted to get rid of Deng. The real discussion was much more limited. Deng’s full statement reads as follows:

For the time being, the most important thing is to increase food production. In so far as individual enterprises can further this production they are a good thing. It is not important whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice...The best form of production is that which, within the framework of local conditions, is most likely to restore and develop production.

Mao couterattacked and ousted Deng for a time. But after the chaos created by the Cultural Revolution, Mao brought Deng–a tried and tested organization man–back to restore the authority and prestige of the Party.

The Tiananman Square massacre was not an aberration. Deng always repressed dissent that threatened him and tolerated that which served his purposes. He organized the inner-party "rectification" campaign in 1937; ran the "anti-rightist" campaign in 1957; shut down the Democracy Wall protest in 1978; launched the "anti-spiritual" campaign of 1983; directed another purge in 1983-86 and expelled leading dissident intellectuals in 1987. Like Mao, Deng died with blood on his hands.

If the Maoist rhetoric served to foster illusions about the character of the regime in China, the foreign policy it pursued should have dispelled any doubts about its character.

Until the break with Moscow in 1960, China’s foreign policy mirrored that of the USSR. So, for example, after the suppression of the Hungarian revolution by Russian tanks, the Chinese press came out in full support of Moscow. The editorial of November 5, 1956 in the People’s Daily, under the heading "Celebrate the Great victory of the Hungarian People," says, "The joyful news has arrived that the Hungarian people. . .with the support of the Soviet armed forces have overthrown the reactionary Nagy government which betrayed the Hungarian people and the Hungarian nation."

Stalinist orthodoxy was combined with Third World nationalism. The underdeveloped countries, according to Mao, had become "the storm centers of world revolution. . .undermining the foundations of the rule of imperialism . . .[so that] the whole cause of the international proletarian revolution hinges on the outcome of the revolutionary struggles of the people of those areas, who constitute the overwhelming majority of the world’s population."

The break with Russia and a series of foreign policy failures in the early 1960s forced the bureaucracy to shift. The Chinese line, exalting the revolution and preaching "fraternal" obligations between Communist Parties, was received coolly by other Communist Parties–with the exception of Albania. Alliances with nationalist governments fell flat, largely because China’s Indonesia policy failed miserably. Sukarno’s foreign policy had suited China, and he had also called on the powerful Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) to cooperate with the "national bourgeoisie" in the framework of an anti-imperialist front. This course, however, left the PKI virtually defenseless when the right began an all-out assault to wipe it out. The fall of Sukarno and the resulting disaster for the PKI ended China’s hopes of creating a new Third World UN.

The political direction that Chinese foreign policy took during the Cultural Revolution was an extension of the previous attempts to develop a ‘third alternative.’ According to Lin Biao, in 1965 the world situation was similar to that of guerrilla struggle in China:

Taking the entire globe, if North America and Europe can be called "the cities of the world," then Asia, Africa and Latin America continued the "rural areas of the world"...In a sense, the contemporary world revolution also presents a picture of the encirclement of the cities by the rural areas. In the final analysis, the whole cause of the world revolution hinges on the revolutionary struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples who make up the overwhelming majority of the world’s population.

A doctrine of self-sufficiency was now preached–revolutionaries of each country were to stand on their own two feet. In practical terms, moral support became the only kind of solidarity to be expected from the Maoist regime.

But this was still better than what was to follow. In the late 1960s, Zhou Enlai’s became the dominant voice in foreign policy. The winding down of the Cultural Revolution and the 1969 attack by the Soviet Union resulted in an abrupt change of line. The USSR was now China’s "Number One Enemy," and the regime set out to make friends with anyone it could–including yesterday’s "Number One" enemies. Foreign Minister Chen Yi’s remark in 1965, "Peaceful coexistence with U.S. imperialism, which is pushing ahead its policies of aggression and war, is out of the question," was quickly buried. A shift in U.S. policy toward China in 1971 strengthened this development. By 1973, the U.S. was no longer the enemy, but on the contrary, became a friend.

Talk of "storm centers of revolution" disappeared. The Chinese government made not a sound over the massacres of the population of Bangladesh, and left-wing opposition in that country was discouraged. The Ceylon (Sri Lankan) government’s liquidation of the left was applauded. In the Sudan, China supported General Nimeiry’s government when it crushed the pro-Soviet Sudanese Communist Party and hanged its members. After the September 1973 military coup in Chile, which overthrew Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government, the first country to expel the ambassador of Allende’s fallen government was China. China supported Pakistan’s military dictatorship against leftist rebels. President Nixon was wined and dined in Beijing just after the mining of Haiphong in North Vietnam by the U.S. In Angola, China supported the CIA and the South Africa-backed FNLA. In Europe, China supported the strengthening of NATO as a counterforce to the Eastern Bloc. When the fascist Spanish dictator Franco died, Chinese party leader Zhu De was sent to his funeral. Zhu shared the experience with Chile’s Pinochet and Bolivia’s General Banzer–the only heads of state from Latin America who attended.

A broad range of intellectuals had become enamored with the Cultural Revolution. The French philosopher Louis Althusser was, according to Perry Anderson, the most

prominent and influential Marxist thinker to invest much of his hope for a democratic communism in the Maoist project...But the wave of sympathy and admiration for the Cultural Revolution swept up a very broad range of socialist intellectuals, not to speak of student militants: affecting in different degrees and different ways Dutschke and Enzensberger in Germany; Poulantzas, Glucksmann and Kristeva in France; Rossanda and Arrighi in Italy; Sweezy and Magdoff in the USA; Robinson and Caldwell in Britain.

Many of these intellectuals had replaced one Stalinist–Stalin–with another–Mao. Thousands of people looked to China as an alternative to Western capitalism. But the verbal extremism used by the Chinese bureaucracy began to lose its appeal. The gap between what China did and who it leant support to and its professed aims was getting too wide. The result was mass disillusionment among a whole layer of people who had become radicalized in the 1960s and 1970s.

One of the enduring myths about Mao is that he began to see through the bankruptcy of the Comintern’s policy in China as early as the mid-1920s and began to formulate an alternative strategy. The mythmakers argue that Mao stressed the revolutionary role of the peasantry in countries where the working class was a tiny fraction of the population. In short, argue his admirers, Mao adapted Marx and Lenin to fit conditions in China–and by extension other countries like it.

But this is pure fantasy. One of the chief characteristics of Chinese Stalinism was its anti-intellectualism, its systematic ostracism and persecution of intellectuals and its break with Marxism. Stalinism in Russia of course shared these qualities. But Stalin was forced to justify himself by some reference to orthodoxy–to some distorted Marxism. Mao had no such obligation. What is startling is not the originality of Mao Zedong Thought, but how banal, parochial and vulgar his thinking is. This is immediately apparent on even the most cursory reading of Mao’s writings and speeches. Leszek Kolakowski’s three-volume study of the main currents of Marxism concludes:

Millions of copies of Mao’s "Little Red Book"–a short collection of homilies and quotes taken from different articles and speeches of Mao–were produced and sold all over the world. At one time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Maoist groups were dominant both in Europe and the U.S. For many, Mao had made a critical contribution to Marxism.

Mao rose to prominence in the party not because of his "Thoughts" but in spite of them–he had very few of a Marxist variety and had little attachment to the working class.

Mao spoke of the divisions in society as being between "bad gentry" and "good gentry," "corrupt officials" and "honest officials," rather than peasants against landlords, officials and the gentry. Likewise he spoke of a "new democratic order," not of a social revolution.

Guerrilla war, and not peasant revolution, was elevated into a theory. The "Red" Army, and not the poor peasants, became the new all-encompassing reality–political as well as military, philosophic as well as economic. The CCP as armed force might or might not win support from the peasantry when it took over an area and introduced agriculture reform. But with or without the peasant’s backing, its military control of the area gave the party state power over the peasantry.

Mao’s "contribution" was to elevate the immediate tactical necessity into a general truth. For Mao, theory became an afterthought–a convenient means to justify particular actions and tactics. Since the revolution was not to be the conscious act of a class, but fundamentally a military struggle, theory was a luxury, not a necessity. There was no longer a necessary connection between theory and practice.

What Mao had concluded theoretically from the trials of the People’s Liberation Army is that with the proper amount of effort anything is possible. Turning Marx on his head, Mao thus declares:

Mao’s extreme voluntarism is the most shockingly expressed in his view of nuclear annihilation:

Though Mao clumsily used some of the rhetoric of Marxism filtered through the prism of Stalinism, his thought is miles away from Marxism. Nationalism, not Marxism, was the main strand in Mao’s thought. Mao and the CCP did exactly what Lenin had warned against in 1920: painted nationalism in communist colors.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Several books and articles were used liberally in writing this article. Several were published in International Socialism Journal [old series], a journal published by the ISO’s sister group in Britain. These are:

"Marxism: Leninism-Stalinism-Maoism," by Nigel Harris, International Socialism 26

"Crisis in China," by Tony Cliff, International Socialism 29 (reprinted in ISJ 61)

"Wither China," by Tony Cliff, International Socialism 37

"China" by Nigel Harris, International Socialism 78

"Chou Enlai, Obituary," by Nigel Harris, International Socialism 85

"Mao and Marx," by Nigel Harris, International Socialism 89

"Mao Zedong," by Nigel Harris, International Socialism 92

Several books deserve to be read:

The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, by Harold Isaacs

Mao’s China, by Ygael Gluckstein

The Mandate of Heaven, by Nigel Harris

Marxism and Freedom, by Raya Dunayefskaya

The Chairman’s New Clothes, by Simon Leys

Broken Images, by Simon Leys

Chinese Shadows, by Simon Leys

Problems of the Chinese Revolution, by Leon Trotsky

The Road to Tiananmen Square, by Charlie Hore

Simon Leys is one of the most informed and astute–not to mention extremely talented and humorous–writers on China. His books are unfortunately out of print. Anyone wanting a sampling should get his article in the New York Review of Books, October 11, 1990. "The Art of Interpreting Nonexistent Inscriptions Written in Invisible Ink on a Blank Page."

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