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Strategic Analysis:
A Monthly Journal of the IDSA
Will China Follow in the Soviet Footsteps?
Prof. Raphael Israeli, Harry Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace
Abstract
Deng Xiaping's 'New Deal' programme was a precursor to Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika. This not only forms a basis of an interesting comparative study between Chinese Communism and its Soviet counterpart, but more importantly, why China was able to, unlike the Soviet Union, contain the drive towards democracy and maintain the dominance of the Communist Party. The future implications of the ideas left by Deng to a new generation of Chinese, who are coming to terms with the realities of the present times, also form interesting facets for study.
China's Perestroika
Perestroika had been gaining ground in China under Deng Xiaoping some six years before the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, when Brezhnev's Soviet Union appeared still at the peak of its communist success.
In effect, subsequent to Mao's death in 1976 and the demise of the heroes of the "ten lost years" of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Deng's rehabilitation and takeover at the helm of power ushered in the new era of the 1980s, which equalled Mao's revolution in scope, depth, momentum, and ambition. For even though Deng's revolution still nominally clung to socialism, and was cautious not to distance itself from Marxism-Leninism-Maoism on the ideological level, it also undertook in practical terms, the quasi-impossible task of amalgamating communism with capitalism, 1 of combining the State's ownership of the means of production with free enterprise and private ownership of property; planned economy with market economy and free competition; a strict dictatorship of the "proletariat" with some leeway for freedom of organization, economic enterprise and cultural diversity; solidarity with socialist and Third World countries with a growing tilt and dependence on the West; and pursuing the traditional reliance on agrarian economy with a daring breakthrough in industrialization and technological development. 2
Deng Xiaoping, the progenitor and dynamo behind this new revolution since 1979, remained for the most part behind the scenes and shunned the forefront of power. In his late seventies when he undertook his drive, he laid emphasis on training a new generation of leaders who would carry on after him. In the Party Congress of 1985, he made sure that all the septuagenarians and octogenarians who had ruled the Party (some 130 of them) relinquished their posts, to be relieved by younger leaders brought up by Deng himself.
Deng's visionary plans, dubbed by some as China's "New Deal", began in 1979 with the "Four Modernizations" in the domains of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and the military. According to those three-tiered plans, Deng was first to mechanize agriculture and render industry more efficient within the first two years, followed by a five-year second stage which was to perform a true great step forward in industrial output by way of importing into China 120 large-scale high-tech industrial plants. Thereafter, between 1985 and 2000, China was to turn to production of consumer products and to the domestic rise of the standard of living. The military, although mentioned as part of the national effort, was not accorded high priority. The idea was to upgrade existing systems instead of investing in the purchase of new and exorbitantly expensive weapons, and to acquire new technologies in order to foster self-production and self-reliance.
Deng understood that some domestic liberalization was called for if he wanted his programme to thrust forward, and he also grasped the danger to his rule, should a process of democratization gain momentum, but he did not hesitate to launch his revolution. Pierre Cardin was invited to China to review the Chinese dress customs, Coca Cola was openly marketed in stores, and not a few notable Chinese were seen rocking to the sound of American music. Western-style dancing balls opened in Beijing and western beauty parlours seemed to attract many women in the larger cities. The French were invited to build new communication systems, the Japanese to erect plants, the Danes new ports, and the Swedes modern railways. An obsession with learning foreign languages, especially English, swept China, and the Middle Kingdom opened its doors to massive tourism, thus signalling not only China's new interest in foreign currency, but also its "open door" policy, this time initiated by the Chinese of their own volition, and not by the gunship policy of the West. Even Chinese television programmes began reflecting the prevailing worldview: the West was no longer a corrupt bourgeoisie on the verge of collapse, but an energetic and creative society worthy of emulation. 3
Within two to three years a revolution of major proportions did actually unfold, first in the countryside, where 80 per cent of the Chinese still find their livelihood. 4 The rural communes were annulled, each family was allowed to plough its own plot of land and extract the maximum from it, only a fraction of the crop was imposed as a production quota while the rest was permitted to be marketed freely for the sake of reaping profit. 5 The old quasi-slavish labour for the state, for which one collected work-points, was scrapped. Cottage industries sprang up in villages, private houses were built, tractors and trucks were purchased by farmers, and the race towards making money began, now sanctioned by the State which declared, contrary to classical Marxism, that if individuals got rich, the State would too.
Success was so stunning that land, first leased by the State to the farmers for two to three years, was now left for longer periods of ten to fifteen years. 6 A new law of 1985 recognized the right to bequeath lease rights to successors. 7 Draught animals are now owned by farmers, and those who can afford, even purchase machinery. The State allows farmers to erect houses on its lands and to lead their own private lives in them, instead of the old norm of compulsory living in the commune's housing and taking meals in its communal refectories. Since 1979, agricultural output scored 8 per cent per annum, as compared with 3 per cent previously, 8 and the range of produce was greatly diversified: rice, wheat, poultry, and pork. The amount of protein consumption in the Chinese daily diet shot up dramatically, to the point that nutrition experts are now predicting impressive physical growth in the Chinese population.
In industry and commerce too, changes followed each other; in the free economic zones, a new class of entrepreneurs became so wealthy as to give rise to a new class of bourgeois consumers. Shopkeepers and artisans began manufacturing and marketing their produce, new private restaurants were opened to cater for all tastes and income brackets, even small industrial workshops slowly moved to the limelight of economic activity. Service agencies, such as beauty parlours, housemaids and plumbers, opened shop in the large cities, and their owners were now allowed to hire their own labour force. Pornographic movies, the epitome of capitalist decadence, also made their appearance and became available to the public of eager consumers.
Even though most Chinese continued to work for their State employers, their State-owned plants themselves underwent far-reaching transformations: a marked transition was effected from heavy industry according to the Soviet five-year-plan model, to light and consumer-goods industries. In 1982 the government ceased dictating cloth designs to the factories, which now began designing their own fashion and pulling the Chinese out of the drab Mao-style uniforms. Since 1984 much of the initiative was transferred to plant managers: 9 the State now provided only part of the raw material and absorbed only a fraction of the produce in the State-run marketing networks. The managers were required to worry about the rest: to acquire by themselves raw materials to manufacture at will anything they liked and market it, after they satisfied the State-required quotas. Such plants began paying to the State treasury corporate taxes amounting to 55 per cent of their income, but they could use the balance for either reinvestment and development, or to distribute bonuses to their employees, or to provide for their work-force welfare. 10 Even though most of their capital still originated from State banks, they still had to compete for it and pay interest for it. 11
Such an impressive shift toward capitalism, if not by name then by action, should have, according to all expectations, accelerated China's opening towards democracy too. Why is it, then, that although China had preceded the Soviet Union in its far-reaching reforms, it was able to contain the democracy drive and maintain the monolithic dominance of the Communist Party? Why is it that, unlike the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, China was able to clamp down on liberalism and check public will? This article suggests several areas of disparity between Chinese Communism and its Soviet counterpart, which have allowed for their various responses to the challenges of modernization and westernization.
(a)Revolution from the Top vs. Revolution from the Bottom
When in October 1917 the Bolsheviks triggered the Revolution in St Petersburg (how timely it is to revert to that name), its fate was by no means decided. It could have turned out to be a mere coup, had Lenin's enthusiasts, led by determined intellectuals and hard-core ideologues, failed in rallying the support of the disaffected workers in the capital, and then in the other cities of Russia. This process took a few years of bloody civil war to filter down to the smaller towns and townships of the country. At the end of the process, the forced collectivization of the countryside, together with the imposition of the Party apparatus on all levels of social organizations, under the surveillance of the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB), made sure that the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" had seeped down to the grass-roots. 12
The Chinese Revolution began quite differently. Instead of just "selling" its ideology and appealing to the politically conscious, it strove, from the very outset of Mao's leadership in the 1930s, to achieve territorial autonomy so as to construct the revolutionary society from the base up, and to totalitarize the conquered base in all spheres of life. In other words, the soviets built by Mao, first in Kiangsi in the early 1930s, and then in Yenan following the Long March, were perceived as autonomous communist regions, which when successful, would appeal to more areas to join and thus would enlarge communist dominion over growingly larger portions of the country. These self-contained autonomies were reinforced in their distinc-tiveness and separate identities by the outside threat against them, first by the Guomindang forces of Chiang Kaishek and then by the invading armies of the Japanese.
The community-in-arms built by Mao soon encompassed and governed all aspects of life in the "liberated" territory: along with land reforms and the institutionalization of social welfare, Mao's followers also tasted guerrilla warfare, political education and a societal upheaval. Social strata underwent a fan-shen (upside down) inasmuch as the previously ruling and landowning bourgeois were divested of power, while the long-time oppressed and low-born peasantry came to the top. This process contributed to the creation of a feeling of participation among the masses which, by definition, widened the base of power and the scope of popularity of Mao's Party. The spirit of camaraderie which was forged during the horrendous experiences of the Long March generated among its survivors a propensity for collaboration and an esprit de corps which permitted the Chinese Revolution at its inception to remain relatively free from the terrifying contentions at the top and the ensuing purges which plagued the Soviet Revolution, especially after the death of Lenin.
Thus, it appears that the "mass-line" of the PRC also ensured a solid base which survived the excesses of the Great Leap in the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and the Tiananmen syndrome in the late 1980s. In the Soviet Union, there seems to have been little enthusiasm for the Revolution at any time. Except for some well-meaning intellectuals and cadres who had a stake in maintaining the regime, the revolutionary spirit never really seeped down to the masses. When they perceived an opportunity to rise against a tottering elite who had lost its self-confidence, they did not hesitate. Thus, the urban coalitions of intellectuals and workers who had brought the Party to power, also brought about its demise, without resistance from the countryside, or with perhaps even its silent approval. The cardboard structure of Communism in Soviet Russia was held together by the metal-frame of repression and fear. Once those were overcome, it collapsed at a great fracas. Chinese Communism, on the other hand, seems to have been more solidly built brick by brick: it would take more than a major tremor to bring it down.
(b)The Model of Soviet Republics vs. Unitarian Rule
China, with its predominantly Han population of 90 per cent or more, 13 has always regarded itself as one commonwealth ruled from one centre. To the extent that others existed outside the actual dominion of China, they were "barbarians" situated in a more or less inferior status in the Chinese worldview. This meant that China's hierarchical Weltanschauung not only could not admit the existence of outside political forces equal to it but, all the more so, could not consider the Middle Kingdom as a coalition or a federation of various peoples, let alone territories. There was one culture, the Chinese, where all the others had to find their place and into which they were advised to acculturate.
Even modern China, which under its republican experiment recognized the existence of five nationalities (Han, Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan and Hui-Muslim), did not associate them with their native territories in which they constituted local majorities (except for the Hui), but rather as small stones in the Chinese mosaic which was firmly held together by an ironclad Chinese frame. This is why Communist China has been a People's Republic, not a federation of any sort, and this is why China has always moved decisively to crush in its bud any attempt to secede or to claim regional or local identity. The maximum that China has been prepared to allow in its midst were "autonomous" regions of a cultural character, but under strict and tight control.
The Soviet Union had been ideologically founded as a federation of "republics", first of slavic peoples (Russians, White Russians and Ukrainians), and then as an empire which little by little came to encompass, in the 1920s and '30s, the republics of the Caucasus and those of Central Asia. In the 1940s, the Baltic states and Moldavia too were incorporated into the empire, supposedly in accordance with the will of their peoples. Like the Chinese, the Soviets undertook an energetic policy of settlement in the outlying areas, in order to create new demographic realities that would make the fusion of the components of the empire irreversible. However, while Russian settlements in Estonia, Moldavia and Kazakhstan were not taken as a matter of course, and never came to outnumber the local populations, in the eyes of the Chinese the unity of the nation and its sovereign territory were never in doubt, and hence the settlement of the Han people in the minority areas was simply taken and presented as "development" of the poor, desert or strategic areas of the country.
The Soviet Union had been concerned, for many years, about the ethnic problem in its armed forces. This was not merely a question of whether the less developed peoples of Central Asia, who did not always master Russian and new technological advances, could keep up with the requirements of modernity, but also a problem of political and ideological loyalty. This issue came to the fore during the Afghan War triggered in 1979, by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, inter alia in order to forestall the spillover of Muslim fundamentalism of the Iranian brand into the Muslim republics of Central Asia. During that war, there were many reports of desertion by Soviet-Muslim soldiers to the rebel camp. With the rapidly growing population of the Central Asian people (50 million, close to 20 per cent in 1990), the Soviet Red Army faced the real danger of seeing its troops handicapped and its orders ignored.
China, despite its large minority population (perhaps close to 100 million, 30 per cent of it Muslims) never feared such a prospect. First of all, the one billion mass of Han people could not be overtaken demographically, nor could their domain be threatened. Secondly, large traditional minority areas (Mongolia, Manchuria, the northwest) have been so massively sinicized that they are hardly distinguishable from the rest of the country. And thirdly, the harsh treatment of minority unrest (in 1958 and in the 1980s-Tibet; and during the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and again in the 1980s-the Muslims and others), has put an almost total lid on any centrifugal force likely to secede.
In short, China's homogeneity and tight controls, together with its policy of sinification and uniformization of the population, had lessened the possibilities of successful revolt against the central authority. In addition, the Chinese government was very cautious not to antagonize potentially rebellious minorities like the Muslims, who could rise in revolt if they had nothing to lose. For example, while prayer houses (Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist and Christian) were almost universally closed down in the heyday of the Cultural Revolution, Muslim mosques were allowed to operate, for the most part. Similarly, the draconian one-child policy in China was not enforced among minorities, including the Muslims. The turmoil in which the erstwhile Soviet republics are thrown today, and the inner threat of minority groups within the republics themselves, became a decisive factor contributing to the demise of the Soviet Union. China may yet escape that fate thanks to its different demographic and philosophical make-up.
(c)The Burden of the Periphery
Let us not forget that the first domino-bricks which tore the Soviet Empire apart were in the outlying areas of the Soviet Union, its "sister-states" in Eastern Europe. The Communist regime based in Moscow constituted not only a "Federation of Republics", a burden in itself, but also the life-artery of an immense empire in which were incorporated outside countries and cultures, which remained nominally "independent", but were to all intents and purposes part of the Soviet imperial scheme. Mongolia became the first satellite state in 1921, to be followed after World War II, by Soviet-occupied territories in Eastern and Central Europe. This empire was woven into a three-layered fabric: political, economic, and military.
Politically, those satellites permitted the Soviet Union to form its own world (the "Eastern Bloc" or the "Second World"), thus not only widening the base of its legitimacy as a socialist State, but also signalling the impending victory of Communism in Europe, the heartland of industrial capitalism of yesterday. This camp, consisting initially of nine countries (eight European and Mongolia), was at times diminished when occasional defections occurred (Tito's Yugoslavia in the 1950s, which helped shape the Third Bloc of the Non-Aligned, and Albania which went over to the Chinese camp during the Sino-Soviet rift beginning in the 1960s). But it was also beefed up by Asian, African and Latin American regimes, when local Marxist revolutions there took over power (Vietnam, North Korea, Ethiopia, Angola, Nicaragua, and Cuba).
Economically, the COMECON was so perceived as to create a dependence of the satellites upon the motherland: the Soviet Union provided gas and petroleum, military gear and machine tools, five-year plans and entire factories, but it exacted from its fiefs agricultural and industrial products, consumer products, and servility in meeting production quotas. So much so, that over the forty-five years of existence of the Soviet empire, each of its dependent countries was encouraged and trained to specialize in a given area, which ensured its total dependence on the Soviet Union and the rest of the "sister-states" for all the rest of its needs.
Militarily, the Warsaw Pact, which was practically abandoned by Rumania since the 1960s, was calculated not only to constitute a bulwark against Western Imperialism in the form of NATO, but also to guarantee the survival of the Communist regimes whenever they seemed in jeopardy. This concept, which under Brezhnev won the epithet of Brezhnev Doctrine, and justified military intervention to end the Prague Spring (August 1968), had already been practised to put down anti-Communist rebellions in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. The Warsaw Pact, like its counterpart NATO, was reinforced by a series of bilateral military agreements between the Soviet Union and other Socialist countries, even when they were not formally part of the Warsaw system (China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, Ethiopia, etc.).
This symbiotic relationship between the Soviet Union and its periphery was pregnant with risks-as much as it was loaded with promise. As long as the system could be held together, by force, terror, castigation, tight control, or placation, the interdependence deepened out of necessity. But as soon as the winds of nationalism and freedom began sweeping Eastern Europe, the entire machine collapsed under the weight of its own irrelevance, inefficiency, and resentment, much to the detriment of all parties which depended on it. The system could not be reformed piecemeal: it had to be torn down and rebuilt from the base. Therefore, when events gathered momentum and brought down the regime of Poland, after ten years of Solidarity struggle, it took nearly ten months for the Hungarians, ten weeks for the East Germans, ten days for the Czechs and ten hours for the Rumanians to accelerate the pace of history and bring down their regimes. The Bulgars and the Albanians were not far behind.
The Chinese have no empire of satellites as such. They have certainly maintained influence in various socialist Asian countries, like North Korea and Vietnam, and their staunchest supporter, Albania, remained ideologically committed to them almost until its own downfall. But they never built a system of interdependence with any outside country. The principle of self-reliance, one of Mao's key concepts, guided them in this regard. To the extent that they ruled other cultures or ethnic groups (e.g. Tibetans and Mongols), they always elected to see those groups not as satellite entities but as an integral part of their Middle Kingdom. Hence, no tail was there to wag the dog and no dependent country was there to trigger the downfall of the whole system.
(d) Politics or Economics First?
Perestroika and Glasnost, which soon became buzz-words, were initially conceived and announced by Gorbachev in the late 1980s. He was prompted to do it on account of growing pressure by the West-as a prerequisite for bringing the Soviet Union into the world of the 1990s, facilitating arms control talks and economic and technological collaboration with the West-to open up the Soviet Union, liberalize it, allow more human and political liberties, and cease the persecution of dissidents and free thinkers. When Moscow became conscious of the need for change, its mind and energy were set, first of all, on the political level: open debates in the Supreme Soviet, elections in the republics, a freer press, and a less inhibited influx of western thoughts and people across the crumbling Iron Curtain. After all, Glasnost meant transparency, and Perestroika meant reconstruction of State structures. In those early stages, the paraphernalia of a socialist economy remained almost untouched-production quotas, collectivization, State-set prices, subsidies, low wages, no competition and an emphasis on heavy industry, including weapons and space programmes. That was why, paradoxically, the more Moscow opened up and liberalized politically and restructured its institutions, the more its economic malaise became "transparent" for all to see. The food shortages were as tight as ever and the food lines as long as ever. This tragic unfolding of events gave rise to the oft-repeated sinister joke that before Glasnost, Russia stood on the brink of an abyss, but thereafter it took a big step forward.
China's restructuring had begun ten years earlier at the end of 1979, as we have seen above. But it was all geared towards economic and technological development. Opening up the economy bred investments, economic advance and a certain rise in the standard of living. The Chinese, who were satisfied with their improved lot and lured by the prospect of "getting rich" could not but support Deng's adventure of economic renewal. 14 Except for a small group of intellectuals who had wished to see political liberties to go along with economic openness, it seems that the majority of rural China, now embarked on a spree of self-betterment, cared little about liberties or politics. Food stores were full and no prospects of hunger, or fears of what tomorrow might bring, plagued popular thinking.
What is more, together with the new enthusiastic slogans of free enterprise in the economy, voices began to be heard questioning the merit of this entire undertaking. The Communist cadres who, during the Cultural Revolution, had dominated the scene on account of their "redness", now had reason to fear that the new turn of events might let the expert technocrats predominate at their expense. Even American and other western "China hands" who had been for years eagerly, and one-sidedly, feeding their audiences with the revelation of "New China" which they described as "revolutionary", "egalitarian", idealistic", "pure", and "anti-imperialistic", disparaged Deng's "dangerous steps" which were likely somehow to tarnish the bright and rosy picture of "their China". In China itself many Chinese countenanced with embar-rassment or cynicism the new turn China seemed to take, for they had learned from experience (the Hundred Flowers and the twice-purged and rehabilitated Deng) that every change was no more than a movement of the pendulum that was bound to swing the other way. Therefore, many of them adopted a defensive and prudent stance. Some daring intellectuals did place posters on Democracy Wall in Beijing, but the millions kept clear of the wall, for fear of the Secret Police. Some women did hasten to sport colourful western-style dresses, but the majority kept to their drab Mao-style uniforms. For every young couple who dared to hold hands in public, many millions stuck strictly to the puritanical mores of Communism.
The leadership itself had to apply the brakes whenever it seemed that Deng's quiet revolution was getting out of hand. For example, when price controls and subsidies were partly abrogated, an unknown new phenomenon emerged: inflation. In 1983-84 alone, food prices jumped up by 35 per cent in some areas and the authorities were forced to adjust salaries to deal with the problem. 15 The elders who remembered the hyperinflation that had preceded the Communist takeover in 1949, understandably panicked at the sinister sight of the growing inflationary monster. The key institutions of China, such as the Politburo, continued to be stacked with Party veterans who did not appreciate the almost provocative pace with which the new policies were distancing themselves from Marxist doctrine. Some conservative economists even lashed out at Deng for the price hikes, for the depletion of China's foreign reserves and for the increasing foreign debt that Beijing had to endure as the price for its too rapid modernization drive. Some of them even openly criticized the abrupt transition to a market economy when Chinese agriculture was far from prepared for it. This criticism was voiced, and heeded, by the leaders of modernization, despite the fact that the prices of some 70 per cent of the products were still fixed and controlled by the government and that 30 per cent of the university graduates were still recruited and sent to fulfil State-set jobs. In other words, harsh criticism accompanied China's new road even when the State still exercised control over key areas of the economy, and before the system slipped totally out of Deng's tight supervision.
Losing control over the savage laws of the market was the old guard's most scary nightmare. Therefore, some of them continued to press for a reversal of the policies, or at least for shutting close some of the wide open doors. Many of them were particularly angered by the rapid accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few entrepreneurs, at the expense of the time-honoured and sacred value of egalitarianism and at the cost of mounting corruption in which not a few party officials were implicated. In order to relax these tensions, Deng had to stage several public trials of such corrupt officials and to slow down the breathtaking pace of his reforms. Even the equation "money equals happiness" had to be diluted with a few statements that emphasized Party values and norms. These steps became all the more necessary because of widespread malcontent among the masses of common people who saw with alarm their guaranteed "iron rice-bowl" shattered by the forces of the free market. They also expressed their dismay at the sight of the nouveau riche class which dashed forward while they hopelessly trailed far behind. In a dramatic application of the old adage that people resent not what they lack but what the others have, this popular tide of the have-nots against the haves forced the leadership to take cognizance of the grapes of wrath that their policy had produced.
All this meant that the "mass-line", adopted since Mao's days and obligating the leadership to heed the vox populi, together with the discontent of part of the leadership, allowed those at the helm to remain less than totally and irreversibly committed to the reforms, to slow them down when the situation so warranted, and even to stop or reverse them when this became necessary. This half-hearted stance also allowed the leadership to keep the lid on political liberties while pursuing economic openness. It may be that for the Soviet Union it was necessary to accept the loss of control politically as the price for economic development; but in China, where party control is paramount, there is a readiness to sacrifice some of Deng's economic openness, as long as politics remains securely bridled.
(e)Foreign Policy and Images Abroad
Evidently, in both the Soviet Union and China the major reason for perestroika did not rest with the goodwill of their leadership as they woke up to the need to loosen their grip on central controls because of the economic disaster they faced at home. If they could streamline their economies without opening up to the West, or better yet, if they could make the Communist economy work and prevail, they would have had no reason to pay the heavy political price that eroded their hold on power and forced changes upon them.
Already under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union sought economic and technological advantages with the West, and it was prepared to pay in terms of allowing human rights and a limited emigration of Jews. China's modernization under Deng, too, occasioned some major restructuring of the Chinese economy, as we have seen, at a considerable ideological cost. In both cases, the realization dawned on the leaders of those Communist superpowers that without an improvement of relations with the US, and the import of capital and technology from the West, there was no way the turnabout could be effected. Once the momentum began, both the Soviets and the Chinese were caught up in a process they could hardly control, which inexorably catapulted them towards democratization. This state of affairs could not be reversed unless they were prepared to incur the wrath of the US and Europe. In other words, the deeper the dependence on the US and the West, the less likelihood there was for these countries to reverse course in order to safeguard their regimes.
The "Economics first" formula pursued by the Chinese ensured that they could remain self-sufficient in foodstuffs and could therefore risk to tamper with their ties with the US when necessary, while the Soviet choice of political liberalization first occasioned a growing dependence on the West, which made such a reversal impossible. Thus, while China changed course after the Tiananmen incident in June 1989, without incurring any fatal damage internationally (except for temporary reprisals and reprimands), the Soviets were too inextricably dependent on the West and had advanced too far on the road of liberalization on the domestic political scene, to be able to go back to square one, as the pathetic coup attempt of August 1991 well illustrated.
When China began gradually edging towards the US in the 1970s, it was partly because of its long-standing rift with the Soviet Union which had escalated into violent border incidents in the 1960s, and viewed from the Chinese viewpoint, threatened to erupt into a nuclear confrontation between the two Communist powers. In the triangle US-USSR-China, the latter had a direct interest not to remain the only one without access to either of the other two. Since the Soviets constituted a direct menace, the US was the only alternative. In 1979 diplomatic relations were established between Washington and Beijing, culminating the normalization process set in motion in the early 1970s. 16 Concurrently, China warmed up its relations with Japan and the rest of the West, through a process of smiling openness. 17 In the Middle East, the Chinese supported Sadat's peace initiative, principally because that process left the Soviets out, and reinforced the American grip on the area. China's downscaling of its relations with national liberation movements of all sorts, which had peaked during the ideological passion of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), also directly affected the PLO's advantageous position in Beijing.
However, in the 1980s, Deng and his team realized that only if China settled its relations with the Soviet Union could it channel all its attention and energy to economic development. Thus, together with a growing openness towards Japan and the West whence capital and technology came, China endeavoured to minimize the areas of friction with its northern neighbour, and to work out their differences in matters such as Afghanistan and Cambodia. 18 Concurrently, China stepped up its economic and cultural relations with the Soviet Union and edged closer to normalize its relations with Moscow, as illustrated in Gorbachev's visit to Beijing in May 1989, on the eve of the Tiananmen events. China went as far as undertaking to let capitalist Hong Kong thrive after recuperating it in 1997; China let it be understood that it would be amenable to a similar arrangement with Taiwan should the latter acquiesce in rejoining the mainland; 19 and it made tremendous efforts to improve its image in non-Communist countries by discounting its support to local Communist underground movements and announcing its peaceful intent towards such neighbours as Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. The more China diversified its foreign policy orientations, by making up with nearly everyone, even Israel, if discreetly so for the time being, the less it became dependent on its pro-American or pro-western commitments. In other words, a China on good terms with the rest of the world is much less susceptible to American and western castigations regarding human rights or the rigidity of its domestic regime, than it would have been had all its support and life-artery emanated from those quarters alone. The Chinese have also shrewdly capitalized on President Bush's personal link to them, since the days of his embassy in Beijing, to sustain American half-hearted relations with them even in the face of tough controls imposed by their regime much to American displeasure.
China Will Hang on for Some Time
Maybe the signs of fatigue which plagued Soviet Communism after three generations of Marxist rule have come to epitomize Ibn Khaldun's theory about the rise and fall of militant ideologies once put into practice. To wit, a fresh idea comes out of the desert, propelled by charismatic leaders who conquer the fat and clumsy establishment, remove it and ehthusiastically apply in its stead their new wizardry. It provides a break with the past and allows the second generation to take root, to solidify the achievement of the founders and bring the new polity to its peak. Like the Chinese Yin-Yang theory, decay and demise are built in within the climax, for from the summit one can only go down. The Lenin-Trotsky era in the Soviet Union was followed by the Stalin-Brezhnev period of stability and peaking Soviet power. It took another generation to pierce the first cracks in the wall of absolute certainties that provided the underpinnings of the Soviet regime. But once the cracks appeared, the entire system was quickly put into question, the feet of reality could no longer catch up with the wings of the dream, and the whole structure collapsed.
In China, the founder-ideologue was around for more than forty years, before and after the establishment of the People's Republic. It may well be that only at his death did we begin to see the second generation of men of action, from Deng Xiaoping on, who would attempt to make a practical sense of the lofty idea left to them by the Great Helmsman. This generation has been trying to tackle Deng's oft-repeated dictum: "It's not important whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice", meaning that the functional specialization of the "experts" has been given some primacy over the functional diffuseness of the "reds" who had previously prevailed. For while the experts of today have shown their mettle in the process of the "Four Modernizations", the red cadres, who are versed in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism but little else, in effect carry no relevant luggage in their bags for the new era of modernization.
Already the decline of the ideologues in China and the mounting role of the experts have carried with them far-reaching implications: a return to material incentives and to delegated authority to the factory level in order to enhance production. The free trade zones and the leeway given to private entrepreneurs have no doubt increased the differential of incomes and perhaps delivered a heavy blow to the similitude of egalitarianism that had been cultivated under Mao. Moreover, economic development in conjunction with the West may signify the abandonment of self-reliance and autarky and joining the world economic system. Industrialization will increase urban-ization, which in turn will lend impetus to westernization, as increasingly large portions of the population will come in contact with foreigners and with urban values.
In the 1960s, scared by the spectre of a "new class" rising among the ruling bureaucracy of China, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, addressing himself directly to the youth over the heads of the entrenched elite who had their self-interest at stake. After the tapering off of that revolution, which brought China to the brink of disaster, the pragmatic trend set in, attempting to swing China the other way, in order to make up for the "ten lost years" of the Cultural Revolution. But when another group of youth, this time students and pro-democracy dissidents, clamoured for a political liberalization which would put in jeopardy the existing order, the pragmatists struck back and drowned in blood the newly aroused passions of the young. This means that China is not prepared yet for a total overhaul of the system. It will take another generation of trial and error before Communism in China (and Vietnam and Korea for that matter) founders under the weight of its exhaustion and inadequacy.
What has been happening in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, and what will probably happen in China in one generation or less, only proves that revolutions cannot really change human nature, notwithstanding the assurances we hear to the contrary. In fact, no matter how radically each revolution has attempted to alter the national character of a people, the core has remained unaffected. In the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Communist regime was almost immediately accompanied by the revival of Russian (and Ukrainian, etc.) patriotism, by a return to the faith and by the reawakening of nationalism among the minorities. In China, too, these same trends will mature if the regime is given enough time to run its course, and when the third generation emerging today comes to grips with the realities of its day. The August 1991 putsch in Mosocw was hailed in China not because of its doctrinal purity but because of the semblance of continuity, stability, and centrality that it would have provided, and which China itself needs most. The present Chinese leaders regard themselves in the image of the leaders of the Moscow coup, that is, the vestiges of the Stalin-Brezhnev era of pragmatism, before Gorbachev's people took over.
The Chinese leadership, like its failed Soviet counterpart, has learned from Eastern Europe the limits and the menaces of the halfway measures syndrome. Every one of those who attempted to loosen somewhat their regimes (Krentz in Germany, Pankowsky in Poland, Mladnov in Bulgaria, Jasek in Czechoslovakia, etc.) were swept away by the logic of their own reforms: if you liberalize, that is, you let the people express their minds, then in the name of that liberalism people insist on, and demand total liberty. Thus, all of those transitional governments proved ephemeral even when they abandoned "Communism" and clung desperately to "Socialism", "Social Democracy", etc. Therefore, the choice is between political repression without bounds or compromise, or a total overhauling of the regime with the very concrete danger of losing the reins of power altogether. The Chinese have opted for the former, the Soviets are learning to live with the latter.
Recent experience in the Soviet Union and China has also shown that revolutions, and the dictatorships they engender, suffer from built in limitations in terms of technological and economic development. When the two Communist powers became aware of those limitations and turned to the democratic-liberal West for a remedy, they themselves thereby acknowledged the contradiction between revolution and modernization. The Soviet Union's "three-layered onion": the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Federation and the preponderant Russian Federation, has allowed Russia to take the road of modernization and democratization and survive. The unitarian government of China has no outer layers to shed; it will survive as it is for another while, in a slowed-down and tightly controlled process of modernization, or it will collapse beyond retrieval, when it shows its inability to maintain revolution and modernization at one and the same time.
Endnotes
Note 1: R. Cottrell, "A Vacancy Awaits", The Economist, 18-24 March 1995, p. 63. Back
Note 2: J.H. Park, "From Self Reliance to Economic Interdependence: The Impact of China's Open-Door Policy", Journal of Developing Societies 9(2) (1993): 181-6. Back
Note 3: G.C. Huan, "China's Open Door Policy, 1978-1984", Journal of International Affairs 39(2) (1986): 1-12. Back
Note 4: The Far East and Australasia 1986 (Encyclopaedia), 17th edn. (Europa Publications, 1985), p. 296. Back
Note 5: R. Kojima, "Achievements and Contradictions in China's Economic Reform 1971-88", Developing Economies 28(4) (1990): 366. Back
Note 6: The Far East and Australasia 1986, p. 296. Back
Note 7: M.W. Bell, H.E. Khor and K. Kochhar, China at the Threshold of a Market Economy (Washington DC: IMF, September 1993), p. 76. Back
Note 8: Park, n. 2, p. 184. Back
Note 9: T. Zheng, "The Problem of Reforming China's Foreign Trade System", Chinese Economic Studies 20(4) (1987): 27-40. Back
Note 10: Ibid.: 43. Back
Note 11: Park, n. 2, p. 184. Back
Note 12: E.D. Carr, The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin 1917-1929 (Macmillan Press, 1979), pp. 1-9. Back
Note 13: The Far East and Australasia 1986, p. 288. Back
Note 14: Bell et al., n. 7, p. 4. Back
Note 15: Kojima, n. 5, pp. 381-7. Back
Note 16: J.D. Pollack, "The Opening to America" in The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge University Press, 1991), vol. 15, part 2, pp. 402-456. Back
Note 17: Ibid., p. 466. Back
Note 18: Ibid., pp. 468-9. Back
Note 19: The Far East and Australasia, n. 4, p. 299. Back