BOOK REVIEWS

Werner Draguhn and David S.G. Goodman eds., China’s Communist Revolutions: Fifty Years of the People’s Republic of China

This handsome volume contains the main contributions to a conference held in Hamburg in 1999 by the Hamburg Institute of Asian Affairs and the Institute for International Studies of Sidney Technological University. This conference marked the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, and its subtitle named the important question with which it was concerned: Was the Revolution Really Necessary? Allowing for nuanced variations, the answer seems to have been that it was inevitable for particular historical reasons (Kuomintang inefficiency, Japanese aggression, the creation of a powerful red army by the Chinese Communist Party, etc.) but that it was certainly not necessary. Furthermore, the success of the Republic of China in Taiwan shows that in different historical conditions, the Kuomintang was able to adapt.

Such arbitrarily assembled collections can be convenient for publishers, but they are often notoriously frustrating for their readers. They tend simply to juxtapose the different contributions rather than organise them into a coherent whole, the published discussions are limited in scope, there is a lack of any overview, and some participants merely repeat views expounded elsewhere on their tour of the conference circuit. However in the present case, all these familiar faults serve to underline how well this volume avoids them and manages to achieve a very satisfying coherence.

An opening set of three articles deals with the situation prior to the founding of the PRC. Ramon Myers (“Revolution and Economic Life in Republican China, from World War I until 1949”) provides a brilliant summary of the current perspectives that have emerged from the work of Thomas Rawski, David Faure, and the writer himself, and that tend to revise the very negative views of Feuerwerker. Thus China in 1937 is said to show certain similarities to Japan in the Meiji period, but the war destroyed this still shaky edifice, and when the communists emerged victorious they did not understand that they owed their victory to some important archaic characteristics that still retained their hold, so they set out on a policy of centralised control which destroyed the little dynamism that remained from the ten years of the Nanking administration. Joseph Esherick (“Collapse of the Old Order, Germination of the New: Chinese Society during the Civil War, 1945-1949”) insists, by way of contrast, on the major role of the war in the 1940s, which made the collapse of the Kuomintang “inevitable”. Nonetheless, the swift success of the communists, leading to the thoroughgoing transformation of Chinese society in those key years, bore the marks of Kuomintang policy, and these went beyond their shared nationalism. John Fitzgerald (“The Politics of Civil War: Party, Rule, Territorial Rule and Constitutional Government”) also considers the Revolution more or less inevitable, while he too doubts its necessity, given the similarity of the goals pursued by the Communist Party and the Kuomintang.

A second set of four articles aims at assessing the importance of changes made after the communists came to power, first at the local and then at the national levels. Mark Selden (“The Political Economy of Socialist Transition: Restructuring Inequality”) covers the period from 1945 to 1960, and he shows the vicious circle in which Maoism was caught as, in order to destroy a society based on inequality, it constructed another one that was no less unequal but was also completely rigid. Marie-Claire Bergère (“China in the Wake of the Communist Revolution: Social Transformations, 1949-1966”) follows further a line of thought whose originality will already be familiar to readers of her article in China Perspectives, No. 28, March-April 2000 (“Post-revolutionary Social Transformations and the Chinese People, 1949-1961”). The article by Robert Ash (“The Cultural Revolution as Economic Phenomenon”) is one of the most stimulating in the collection, because it throws doubt on a good many statistics underlying a number of lazy assumptions. Of course, he accepts the view of the Cultural Revolution as an enormous waste of capital and effort, which was in no way necessary and often made those ten terrible years a caricature of the worst economic mistakes committed at times of more orthodox management (like, for example, the monstrously inflated rate of capital accumulation at the expense of consumption which, along with industrial productivity, went into steep decline). But, unlike the Great Leap Forward, the agricultural sector was not disrupted, and the “Green Revolution”, which had been delayed because of China’s isolation after 1949, began to bear fruit even though peasant incomes continued to fall sharply (in 1977, 30% of the peasantry lived in absolute poverty, as against 0.3% of urban dwellers). Michael Schoenhals’ brilliant and paradoxical article (“Was the Cultural Revolution Really Necessary?”) challenges the current tendency to reduce the Cultural Revolution to the “years of madness” formula, arguing that it is detrimental to thinking about the developments which followed. But his article is rather too negative.

The third part of the volume deals with the upheaval in China after 1978 and with the emergence of what might be called a post-communist China, though this term is not used. The articles positively teem with hypotheses, which sometimes gives the reader an impression of giddiness. Margot Schüller (“Economic Growth and Distributive Justice in the post-Mao Reform Period”) provides a graphic analysis, supported by often highly technical argumentation, of the real dynamics driving the average annual growth rate of 6.8% between 1976 and 1995, and of the rapid development of the inequalities and imbalances which accompanied it and now threaten to slow it down. Kay Möller (“China’s Foreign Relations: 1978-1999”) provides a very pertinent and erudite commentary on the article’s sub-title: “when it is liberated, the tiger feels alone”. In the light of China’s foreign policy objectives of national independence and security, it seems clear that the results of so much effort since the reforms started, are not satisfactory. Finally, in a particularly innovative article which takes account of a lot of current research work on the changes at the base in the Chinese provinces, David S. G. Goodman goes beyond the familiar problematic concerning the relations of the centre to the periphery after 20 years of reforms, and attempts to redefine the contemporary Chinese state. He finds others’ forecasts of breakdown unlikely, while the successful entrepreneurs who are becoming increasingly integrated, if not into the Party then at least into the state apparatus, play a correspondingly greater role. Without explicitly saying so, this article provides a gloss on Jiang Zemin’s beloved “three representations” slogan. This lays the theoretical groundwork for a post-Communist China which has renounced the utopian egalitarian socialism of the Mao years, and amounts to a kind of Copernican revolution in the policy of the Communist Party of China.

Translated from the French original by Jonathan Hall