Roderick MacFarquhar

China's economic policy and performance

Few really new economic ideas or policies were put forward during the Cultural Revolution decade, 1966-76. Chinas economic strategy emphasizing machinery and steel was virtually a carbon copy of Stalins development strategy for Russia in the 1930s. Before turning to Chinas development strategy in the Cultural Revolution period, one must first deal with the argument that China had no coherent strategy in the period, because the country was in continual chaos. Politics, of course, was frequently chaotic, but the question here is whether politics regularly spilled over into the economy, causing work stoppages and worse. Chinas basic industrial development strategy was set in the 1st Five-Year Plan, of 1953-57. In terms of sectoral growth strategies, China had made a significant move in the direction of the strategy that had proved so successful among its East Asian neighbors.

Provincial People's Congresses

This is a report of a short trip made in November 1997 to investigate the workings of the Provincial Peoples Congresses ( sheng renda : PPCs) in Shandong and Heilongjiang as part of a more general enquiry into the democratic possibilities of the mainlands renda (NPC) system in the light of democratization in Taiwan. The visit was somewhat zouma kanhua , but since the Heilongjiang PPC at least had never before had an English-speaking visitor, some of the observations are possibly worth wider currency.

The Great Leap Forward and the split in the Yenan leadership

During the spring and summer of 1958 Mao Tse-tung and his colleagues pushed the Great Leap Forward (GLF) idea as an alternative to the development strategy that had been imported from the Soviet Union for the first Five-Year Plan (FYP). Needing some way to overcome bottlenecks that appeared to preclude a simple repetition of the first FYP strategy, the Chinese leaders settled on an approach that utilized the mass mobilization skills they had honed to a fine edge during the Anti-Japanese War years in Yenan. Mao began to take the fateful steps that led to unleashing the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Factors such as weather and the industrial sector produced a rising crescendo of support for the GLF, both within the Chinese Communist Party and among the general populace. The split in the Yenan leadership has focused on the different components that came together to launch the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

Mao Tse-tung's thought from 1949 to 1976

Like Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, on coming to power, continued to develop his ideas in a context different from that within which he had operated while in opposition. One important constant in the development of Mao Tse-tungs thought was his concern to adapt Marxism, or Marxism-Leninism, to the economic and social reality of a backward agrarian country, and to the heritage of the Chinese past, which for Mao was no less real. This chapter first quotes a passage about Stalins propensity to exterminate his critics. Following on from this, Mao developed, under the heading of eliminating counterrevolutionaries, a comparison between China and the Soviet Union as regarded the use and abuse of revolutionary violence. Mao drastically changed his position regarding the nature of the contradictions in Chinese society during the summer of 1957. The consequences of this shift for economic policy have already been explored, and some of its implications in the philosophic domain have also been evoked.

The reunification of China

Journalism as the chief mode for understanding the Chinese revolution has had a fruitful growth throughout the twentieth century. Television can bring the Chinese revolution into the home of every Westerner. Through the revolution of 1911, then the revolution of the 1920s under the Kuomintang Party in its first united front with the Chinese Communist Party, the reporting of the current scene in China has continued to progress in technique and expand in coverage. A turning point in the social-scientific approach was inaugurated during World War II by the growth of area studies, which focus the various disciplines on China. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Chinese scholars noted increasing difficulties in administration, the decline of morale, and the rise of rebellion. These phenomena, from the late eighteenth century to about the 1870s, were slotted into the traditional cubbyholes of the dynastic cycle theory. The Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth century had obviously outgrown the sphere of industry.

The China Quarterly and the History of the PRC

When I was appointed editor of the CQ in 1959, my vision was that it should focus primarily on all aspects of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history, but that there should also be occasional articles on contemporary Taiwan and the overseas Chinese. That autumn, I did a quick tour of a few American campuses to try to drum up contributors; basically I needed social scientists. But even those universities with significant China programmes were peopled mainly by historians who were not doing research on the PRC. Benjamin Schwartz at Harvard, who had already published Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao , did write articles from time to time on the current scene; at MIT, Lucian Pye was ensuring that political scientists should incorporate East Asia into analyses of comparative politics; at Berkeley, Franz Schurmann (a Yuan historian in an earlier incarnation) was engaged in what became Ideology and Organization in Communist China , S.H. Chen was interested in contemporary mainland literature, and Choh-ming Li (like Alexander Eckstein at Michigan) was studying the economy; at Columbia, C. Martin Wilbur was working on the documents captured when the Soviet embassy in Beijing was raided in the 1920s, but Doak Barnett would not get there till the end of 1960; the only real nest of social scientists examining Chinese behaviour on a daily basis that I found on that trip was located at RAND: Allen Whiting, A.M. Halpern and Alice Langley Hsieh, all working on Chinese foreign relations. The shock of the launch of the first sputnik in 1957 had already led the US government to allocate massive funds to academia for the training of specialists on Russia and China, but the first beneficiaries of the largesse did not start coming out of the pipeline until the late 1960s. With so few potential contributors available, I stopped reviewing China books in case I offended any of them! But the scarcity of talent was also an advantage, for Western and Asian China watchers – diplomats in Beijing, journalists in Hong Kong, businessmen travelling in and out – all subscribed, making the CQ the house magazine of a growing community.