Sun Yat-sen 171
25. See Sun*s argument in the lectures on nationalism to be found in Sanmin Zhuyi, for which there are several translations; the most authoritative, unabridged version is to be found in Paschal D*Elia, The Triple Demism of Sun Yat-sen (New York: AMS, 1974, a reprint of the 1931 Wuchang edition), 71, 90, 92, 118, 134.
26. Ibid., 101, 108-09, 158ff., 472.
27. Ibid., 132-37; see Sun, Memoirs, 37.
28. See Sun, "How to Develop Chinese Industry,** in Fundamentals of National Reconstruction (Taipei: China Cultural Service, 1953), 190; Sun, Triple Demism, 487-93.
29. Ibid., 408ff., 498; see Sun, "Fundamentals of National Reconstruction for the National Government of China,** in Fundamentals, 9.
30. Sun, Triple Demism, 520; compare with Friedrich List, National System of Political Economy (Lx)ndon: Longmans Green, 1916), 152ff.
31. Sun, Triple Demism, 189.
32. Ibid., 532ff.
33. Ibid., 204-06.
34. Mao Zedong, "On the New Democracy," in Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press^ 1965, hereafter, MSW), 343, 362.
35. See the discussion in Karl Marx, "Draft of an Article on Friedrich List*s Book Das Nationale System: Der Politischen Oekonomie,*" in Collected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, 1976, hereafter MECW), vol. 4, 280-81.
36. Friedrich Engels, "The Condition of the Working Class in England,** in MECW, vol. 4, 298.
37. Marx and Engels, "The German Ideology,** in MECW, vol. 5, 49, 51.
38. Engels, "The Festival of Nations in London,** in MECW, vol. 6, 6.
39. "A Circular of the First Congress of the Conmiunist League to the League Members, June 9, 1847,** in MECW, vol. 6, 595.
40. Engels, "Hungary and Panslavism (1849)** and "What Have the Working Classes to Do With Poland? (1866),** in Paul I. Blackstock and Bert F. Hoselitz, eds.. The Russian Menace to Europe (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1952), 59-75, 98-100.
41. See the comments of Engels on the French occupation of Algiers. Engels, "French Rule in Algeria,** in Shlomo Avineri, ed., Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 43.
42. Marx, "Nationalism, Internationalism and the Polish Question (1882),** in ibid., 117-19.
43. See Horace B. Davis, Nationalism and Socialism: Marxist and Labor Theories of Nationalism to 1917 (New York: Monthly Review, 1967), ix, x, 9.
44. See, for example. Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitaetenfrage unddie Sozialdemokratie (Vienna: Ignaz Brand, 1907).
45. "Manifesto of the Moscow International,'* New York Call 24 (July 1919): 1.
46. "The Twenty-One Points of the Third International, July 1920,** in Maurice William, The Social Interpretation of History (New York: Sotery, 1921), 346.
47. Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy 1917-73 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974), 115-17.
48. See the discussion in A. James Gregor, Contemporary Radical Ideologies (New York: Random House, 1968), chap. 3.
49. Mao, "Stalin, Friend of the Chinese People,*' in MSW, vol. 2, 335; see the discussion in Gregor, The China Connection: U.S. Policy and the People's Republic of China (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1986), chap. 3.
172 Marxism, China, and Development
50. Mao, "On New Democracy," in MSW, vol. 2, 343-44, 346; see Mao, "The Role of the Chinese Conmiunist Party in the National War," in MSW, vol. 2, 196ff.
51. See discussions like those of Hu Sheng, Imperialism and Chinese Politics (first published by Beijing's Foreign Languages Press during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and then reprinted in 1985 under the new dispensation), 141-42.
52. See the discussion in Sun, TYiple Demism, 64, 134, 175ff.
53. See the discussion in Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton. 1990), 300-03.
54. See the discussion in Hao Chang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 7590-7907 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1971), 154-64.
55. See, for example, Arthur Keith, Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View (London: Oxford University, 1919); Eugen Lember, Nationalismus: Psychologie und Geschichte (Stuttgart: Rowohlt, 1950), Introduction and chap. 1.
56. Sun, TYiple Demism, 68-69; see the discussion in Philip C. Huang, Liang Ch'i-ch 'ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism (Seattle: University of Washington, 1972), 58-59.
57. Sun, TYiple Demism, 164; "The Works of Mencius," in The Four Books (Taipei: Culture Book, 1974), Book 6, chap. 15, para. 4, 930.
58. Sun, TYiple Demism, 137.
59. Ibid., 174-80.
60. Ibid., 64.
61. See the instructive discussion in Anthony D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism (New York: Harper, 1972), chap. 1.
62. See the discussion in Jorge E. Spilimbergo, La revolucion nacional en Marx (Buenos Aires: Coyoacan, 1961).
63. As quoted by M. N. Roy and cited by Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence, 123.
64. See the discussion in Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx and Friedrich List (New York: Oxford University, 1988), chap. 14; and Stuart Schram, Mao Tie-tung (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1967), 44, 54, 321.
65. Mao, "On New Democracy," in MSW, vol. 2, 343-47.
66. Mao, "In Memory of Norman Bethune," in ibid., 337.
67. Mao, "On New Democracy," in ibid., 367.
68. Mao, "On Coalition Government," in ibid., vol. 3, 284.
69. Warren Kuo, Analytical History of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1 (Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 1968), 132.
70. Sun, TYiple Demism, 411, 422, 435, 448, 452, 470.
71. Ibid., 429-36.
72. Ibid., 452ff., 470-71.
73. Ibid., 429, 466, 472, 487.
74. Ibid., 465; Sun, "The International Development of China," in GQ, vol. 5, 135.
75. Ibid.
76. See Sun, TYiple Demism, 101, 110, 408-11, 426-33, 443, 447, 454, 467, 469, 472, 475, 486, 503, 516-38; Sun, "International Development," in GQ, particularly 143, 146, 148-52, 181, 183, 203, 216, 276, 297, 301-02, 306, 309, 323, 324.
77. See the discussion in Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, Vecchio e nuovo nazionalism (Rome: Volpe, 1967).
r
Sun Yat-sen 173
78. K. R. Minogue, Nationalism (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 8.
79. See Gregor and Chang, "Chiang Kai-shek and the Concept of Economic Development," in Proceedings of Conference on Chiang Kai-shek and Modern China (Taipei: China Cultural Service, 1987), 616-35.
80. See Shirley W. Y. Kuo, Gustav Ranis, and John C.H. Fei, The Taiwan Success Story: Rapid Growth with Improved Distribution in the Republic of China, 1952-1979 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1981) and Growth with Equity: The Taiwan Case (New York: World Bank, 1979).
81. See Hu Sheng, "On Dr. Sun Yat-sen*s Socialist Thought," Social Sciences in China 8, 3 (September 1987): 40-42.
82. Mao, "On CoaUtion Government," in MSW, vol. 3, 280-81.
83. Ibid., 284; Mao regularly maintained that he would implement Sun's economic policies. See Mao, "On New Democracy," in MSW, vol. 2, 353.
84. Mao, "On Coalition Government," in MSW, vol. 3, 285.
85. Mao, "On New Democracy," in MSW, vol. 2, 351, 377.
86. Liu, "Sun Yat-sen," in Hu, et al.. The 1911 Revolution, 30-31.
87. See the discussion in Harry Harding, "China*s American Dilemma," in Allen Whiting, China's Foreign Relations (Newbury Park: Sage, 1992), 12-125, particularly 21; "Imperialism and 'Peaceful Evolution,'" People's Education Magazine no. 9 (1991): 21-25 (partially translated in Inside China Mainland 14, 2 [February 1992]: 29-34).
88. Gregor, "The People's Liberation Army and China's Crisis," Armed Forces and Society 18, 1 (Fall 1991): 7-28.
89. See the discussion in "On Pernicious Peaceful Evolution," Chinese Higher Education Monthly, no. 10 (1991): 30ff.
90. Harold Z. Schiffrin, Sun Yat-sen: Reluctant Revolutionary (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1980), 120, 269ff.
8 Imperialism, Marxism, and Sun Yat-sen
Of all the strange developments that mark stages in the intellectual history of Marxism, the changes that have taken place around the notion of "imperialism" are perhaps among the most curious. Originally loosely identified with "colonialism" or the expansion of the "bourgeois mode of production," the founders of Marxism spent little intellectual energy in the analysis of imperialism.
For Marx and Engels, the "bourgeois mode of production" was the first productive system in history driven by its own impetus to extend itself over the entire surface of the globe. In its search for profit, industrial capitalism was compelled to open markets everywhere. But the opening of markets implied their ultimate exhaustion and the eventual, inevitable extinction of the system.^ Capitalism was destined to provide the conditions for its own transcendence. The full maturation of capitalism was the herald of the advent of international socialism.
In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described the modem epoch as one in which "modem industry [had] established the world market," heralding the rise of "an immense development [in] commerce... navigation, [and] conmiunication," which, in tum, would precipitate "the extension of industry." For Marx and Engels, the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century was compelled, by the very laws of "capitalist production," to constantly expand the market for its products—and consequently extend its mode of production "over the whole surface of the globe." Capitalist production must, of necessity, "nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere." In the course of its diffusion, capitalism would "draw all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization....It [would] compel all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois modes of production. ... In one word, it [would] create a world after its own image."^
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The process, needless to say, would be accompanied by wars of conquest, the callous exploitation of native peoples, and the dissolution of traditional cultural, economic, social, and political forms; but all that was understood to be inevitable and in accord with the "logic of history.*'^
Just as capitalism had displaced patriarchal and traditional forms of social and economic intercourse in Europe, so it would proceed to displace similar outmoded forms throughout the remainder of the globe. Thus, the German expansion into the Slavic East in Europe was characterized by Engels as the occasion for introducing "trade, industry, profitable methods of agriculture and education to them." Such a conquest was "in the interests of civilization." The entire process was described as enabling retrograde nations "to take part in an historical development which, if left to themselves, would have remained entirely foreign to them."^
The expansion of the capitalist powers throughout the world created the preconditions for the economic development of regions that had been, in Marx's judgment, stagnant for centuries. Just as the emergent bourgeoisie, as a class, succeeded in destroying the traditional feudal zmd agrarian structure of Europe in order to pave the way for capitalist development, the colonizing and imperialist bourgeoisie was "doing history's work" in Asia by fulfilling a "double mission: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of [the] old... society, and the laying of the material foundation" of the new.^
Marx conceived the penetration of capitalist "imperialism" or "colonialism" into the less-developed regions of the world as part of a historic process destined to revolutionize the economic foundations of the "mummified" societies of Asia "predestined" to be the "prey of conquest."^ With that conquest, the expansion of the prerequisites of development proceeds with the creation of an economic infrastructure that constitutes "the forerunner of modem industry" with all its technological and skill spin-offs.'' "Imperialism" must necessarily produce the industrialized "material basis of the new world" that Marx anticipated.*
Although he anticipated that the process would be slower in China than in India, Marx believed its ultimate effects would be the same.^ It is perfectly clear that Marx and Engels expected European penetration— capitalist commerce, technology, and finance—to foster the economic development of areas of the world long locked into precapitalist productive, social, and cultural patterns. While "bourgeois" economists tended
Imperialism, Marxism, and Sun Yat-sen 177
to conceive of the "civilizing process'* as pacific and mutually beneficial to both the "advanced*' and the "barbarian" peoples involved, the first Marxists anticipated that horror, exploitation, and degradation would attend its course.
Nonetheless, both Marxists and orthodox economists of the last half of the nineteenth century expected the "modem mode of production** to ultimately involve all the peoples of the world. For Marx, this meant simply that "the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future."'° In realizing that future, of course, the less-developed countries would have to pass through all the violence, oppression, and exploitation that had accompanied a similar process in Europe—but Marx never seemed to doubt that all the countries of the world were destined to make the passage.
Marx died before the "new wave** of imperialist expansion involved the less-developed portions of the globe. After 1880 the expansion of Europe accelerated, and by the advent of the First World War almost the entire surface of the earth had been divided among the major industrial powers. Throughout the period, Marxists, and other social critics, continued to deplore the excesses that attended that division, but there was little suggestion that the ultimate result would be other than the industrial development and modernization of the subject territories. The older industrial lands—England principal among them—had witnessed the rapid industrial development of Germany and North America. By the end of the first decade of the new century, Japan, an Asiatic country, gave every evidence of an indigenous industrial development. In a few decades, countries that had been marginally developed, characterized by essentially agrarian and "semi-feudal** economies, had made the transition to industrial status. They all undertook that development under "bourgeois** auspices.
These were the convictions entertained by an entire generation of Marxist theorists. In 1909 Rudolf Hilferding ventilated the same arguments. Monopoly capitalism, because of the intrinsic properties of the industrial system itself, would be compelled to underwrite "a rapid economic development (eine rasche oekonomische EntwicklungY"^^ for the less-developed economies of the world. Rosa Luxemburg, in 1915, expressed similar judgments. ^^ In 1915, Nikolai Bukharin bruited the same claims. Like Marx, Engels, Hilferding, and Luxemburg before him, Bukharin argued that capitalism must necessarily drive itself into the
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peripheral, underdeveloped regions of the world in its search for markets and investment outlets. The net result would be the development of an increasingly interdependent world economy. According to his judgment, capitalism was compelled to "revolutionize the pre-capitalist methods of production in the most backward comers of the world, thus accelerating world commodity circulation in astounding proportions."^^ The industrial core countries—the industrial "towns" of the world system—would precipitate "the industrialization of the agrarian and semi-agrarian countries ... at an unbelievably quick tempo. "^* Bukharin thus anticipated the conmiencement of an "era of... accelerated industrialization of agrarian countries."^^
Even V. I. Lenin, whose Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism was written in 1916, did not suggest that capitalist expansion into the less-developed regions of the world would do anything other than transform them, ultimately, into industrialized and modem communities. In fact, Lenin simply restated the theses advanced by Hilferding, Luxemburg, and Bukharin. For Lenin, the vast accumulation of capital in the advanced capitalist countries compelled those economies, organized into industrial and Hnancial combinations, to export capital to the more primitive regions, there to create "the elementary conditions for industrial development." "The export of capital," he went on, "influences and greatly accelerates the development of capitalism in those countries to which it is exported. Thus, while the export of capital may tend to a certain extent to arrest development in the capital-exporting countries, it can only do so by expanding and deepening the further development of capitalism throughout the world."*^ "Young capitalist countries," in Lenin *s judgment, were expected to undergo "extraordinarily rapid" development.^^ The transfer of investment capital in considerable quantity, and the attendant transfer of advanced technology from the more- to the less-developed economies, would expedite the transition from a traditional, noncapitalist mode of production to that of modem industrialism.^*
In effect, Lenin, like those Marxists before him, was prepared to argue that the expansion of capitalism brought with it the rapid industrialization and modernization of less-developed economies. Modern monopoly capitalism, freighted with the enormous quantity of surplus value produced by intensive exploitation, was compelled to seek profitable investment outside the confines of capital-saturated national econo-
Imperialism, Marxism, and Sun Yat-sen 179
mies. Capitalism extended itself to every comer of the world—and in so doing visited all the horrors of economic transformation upon traditional societies. Its penetration threatened such societies with cultural extinction and national exploitation. The peoples in the backward areas of the world were suddenly brought face to face with forces more powerful and threatening than any they had ever experienced. Lenin suggested that imperialism would transfer industry to the backward regions of the world in order to exploit lower wage costs. The peoples of those regions would become the world's proletariat, with the more-advanced countries decaying into "rentier, parasitic" states. The capitalist periphery would become the "workshop" of imperialism.
Thus, Lenin did not expect imperialism to obstruct the industrialization of traditional societies. He imagined that the process of imperialist-fostered industrialization would produce intensified exploitation in the hitherto backward regions, and "parasitism" in the modem capitalist states. All of which would ultimately generate massive resistance on the part of the oppressed nations. That resistance could be hamessed to the cause of world revolution.
Lenin's innovations did not involve the notion that imperialism might impede economic development in the less-developed countries. Rather, they were addressed to a new assessment of the disposition of worldwide revolutionary forces. Because imperialism returned enormous profits to the core countries—while it fostered the economic development of the periphery—the capitalist class could use portions of that profit to subom the venal leaders of their indigenous working class. But the superexploitation of the oppressed peoples on the periphery would generate resistance—and the dependent territories would become the "weakest link" in the chain of capitalist control throughout the world.
Whatever the merits of such an analysis, it is evident that Lenin did not seriously consider the possibility that imperialism, or colonialism, could obstmct the process of industrialization and modernization for the "oppressed peoples" of the noncapitalist world. Implicit in his analysis was the conviction that the advanced capitalist countries were driven, by forces inherent in capitalism, to produce their own "gravediggers." The advanced countries were compelled to provide the capital subventions for the industrialization and modemization of less-developed economies. In the process, they would provoke the revolutionary resistance of the peoples of Asia and Africa.
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By the beginning of the 1920s, these Leninist convictions had become doctrinal among members of the Third International. The message, in and of itself, was not lost on Chinese revolutionaries already cognizant of the threat of European aggression. Certainly Sun Yat-sen was not hesitant in stoking nationalist resentments against the industrial powers. But there were more differences than similarities in the position assumed by Marxist-Leninists in China and the anti-imperialist nationalism of Sun. For the Communist revolutionaries of China, Sun continued to harbor "illusions*' about imperialism until his death. ^' It is not immediately self-evident what those putative "illusions** might have been.
In 1922, the Chinese Conmiunist party issued a manifesto at the conclusion of its Second Congress in which "world capitalist imperialism** was identified as China's principal enemy. By that time, the leadership of the Third International had made condition of membership in the Moscow-led organization the defense of the Soviet Union. That defense necessitated a concerted and principled opposition to imperialism. It was uncertain what such opposition was understood to entail, but it did involve a conceptualization that conceived only two "trends** in international politics: one that represented "the capitalist-imperialist powers of the world... attempting to subjugate the proletariat and the oppressed peoples throughout the world,** and the other "the revolutionary movement which aims at the overthrow of international capitalist imperialism ... the world revolutionary movement and the oppressed people's national revolutionary movement, both led by the Communist International and Soviet Russia—the vanguard of the world proletariat. **^°
This became the position assumed by Mao Zedong. As early as 1926, Mao Zedong accepted what had become Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Together with the orthodox, Mao conceived the world as divided into "two major fronts,** one led by the "red banner ... held aloft by the Third International**—the institutional leadership of the "revolutionary movement against imperialism**—and the other following the "white banner of [imperialist] counterrevolution.**^'
For Mao, international imperialism had helped create and sustain classes and population strata in China that were enlisted in its service. Chinese "compradors** assured foreign capitalists access to local markets. Local landowners invested their capital in foreign financial institutions or underwrote the activities of domestic compradors. Chinese bureaucrats allowed themselves to be suborned by imperialists in what
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had become a plague of malfeasance and corruption. Venal intellectuals supplied a justificatory rationale for everything that was transpiring.
To Mao, following a strategy articulated in Moscow, "anti-imperialism" meant that Chinese revolutionaries would have to wage domestic war against those Chinese who were "traitors" because they were not "resolutely anti-imperialist." Those Chinese who did not serve the needs of the "world proletariat" were "class enemies." Those Chinese who undertook or sanctioned trade with imperialists—who advocated borrowing from foreigners—failed to recognize that such activities were part of a systematic policy to "plunder" China employing "the vast financial resources" available to world capitalism. Chinese Marxist-Leninists insisted that there had to be a "resolute break" with the disposition of some Chinese to engage in economic exchanges with the nation's "international class enemies."^^ These were notions not found in classical Marxism, and hardly discernible in Leninism.
Chinese Marxist-Leninists, in fact, appeared more insistent in their anti-imperialism than the leadership in Moscow. During the last years of his life, Lenin had approached businessmen in Europe and North America with generous trade, joint-venture, land-use, resource-exploitation, and profit-repatriation concessions in order to elicit their support in restarting the devastated economy of the Soviet republics. After Lenin's death, and after he had securely established his regime, Stalin made clear his readiness to enter into "very friendly" relations with Italian Fascism—understood by Marxist-Leninists to be the most "virulent form of imperialism.""
Other than the unqualified defense of the Soviet Union, it is difficult to know what "anti-imperialism" might have meant during the interwar years. Other than accepting the conviction that there were but "two trends" in international politics, it is uncertain what behaviors would constitute "anti-imperialism" without "illusions."
Neither Lenin nor Stalin excluded the possibility of accommodating imperialist states when it was in the interest of "world socialism."^'* Similarly, Mao Zedong ultimately decided that while Marxist-Leninists should be "firm in principle," "flexibility" in practice recommended itself.^^ During the Second World War, for example, Mao was prepared to support those "imperialist powers" allied with the Soviet Union against the Axis.
After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, Mao chose to "lean to one side" and sought sustained support from the Soviet Union.
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Although major European industrialized powers recognized his government, and the prospects of trade and capital transfers were real, Mao chose to enter into intense and protracted economic relations only with Moscow.
In the 1950s, as a consequence, there was a massive transfer of goods and technology from the Soviet Union to China. About 256 complete plants from the Soviet Union, together with a similar number of turnkey projects from the Soviet's Eastern European satellites, provided the material base for China's initial economic rehabilitation and growth. It was one of the most comprehensive technology and skill transfers in modem economic history. Between 1950 and 1959, it is estimated that the Soviet Union provided not only $2.5 billion in goods and turnkey industries, but 21,000 sets of technical and scientific documents for the establishment of a modem economy as well. Ten thousand Soviet experts assisted the Chinese in their enterprise—and trade between China and the socialist economies of Eastern Europe dominated Beijing's ex-temal economic activity.
All of this was orthodox enough—in full accordance with the conviction that the world had divided itself into "two fronts." Only when tensions developed between Moscow and Beijing in the late 1950s—and the Soviet Union decided to terminate its contracts with the People's Republic, withdraw its experts, and discontinue its support from projects not yet completed—did the Chinese Communists cast about for altema-tive sources of technical and material support.
As early as 1962, Beijing had already begun negotiations with "imperialist" Japan for the constmction of two synthetic textile plants. Fifty or more turnkey plants followed, purchased from Japan and various "imperialist" economies in Westem Europe.
The "opening to the West" that commenced in the early 1960s was largely overwhelmed by the advent of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Maoist radicals insisted on "self-reliance" for China and a rejection of "things foreign." The increasing emphasis on "self-reliance" has been understood to be an expression of "deep anti-imperialist sentiments"^^—and in a sense it did embody one interpretation of the anti-imperialist orthodoxies of Marxism-Leninism. The Maoist radicals argued that the Soviet leadership had failed to persist in its "anti-imperialism." The post-Stalin leadership had undertaken to "restore capitalism" and accommodate socialism's intemational class enemies. There
Imperialism, Marxism, and Sun Yat-sen 183
was talk in Beijing of resisting both the "social imperialism** of the Soviet Union as well as the "capitalist imperialism" of the industrial democracies. China would stand alone, if necessary, to continue the struggle against world imperialism.^^ Throughout the world, China's diplomatic offices became centers for the mobilization of the "revolutionary people." Almost all of the ambassadors of the People's Republic were recalled to Beijing for revolutionary instruction.
Because of the putative "collusion" between "social imperialism" and "capitalist imperialism," China was obliged to pursue rapid industrialization and economic growth through "indigenous" effort.^* Along the Sino-Soviet border Soviet and Chinese troops had engaged in fire fights and threatened all of Asia with the prospect of a major conflict. By the end of the 1960s, China's interpretation of "anti-imperialism" challenged the very survival of the People's Republic.
Maoist radicals never settled on an unequivocal interpretation of anti-imperialism. Only one element remained constant. Maoists always used the charge of "collusion with imperialism" to identify, isolate, and punish those elements of China's population that did not submit to communist rule. The leaders of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution argued that "international imperialism" fed the domestic opposition to Maoism and threatened the "restoration of capitalism." In making the claim, they merely repeated charges regularly made by Mao Zedong throughout his political career.
Late Maoism emerged as a confused effort at anti-imperialist "autogenic" development—the pursuit of nonmarket industrialization and modernization through exclusively indigenous efforts. It conceived opposition to "monster imperialism" as the linchpin of its political system and the center of its political convictions. "Imperialism" was the external enemy—and "imperialism" sought out, inspired, and sustained the domestic opponents of Maoism. Only victory over "imperialism" would see the realization of China's revolutionary Communist goals. What began to emerge as Maoism drew to its close was a rationale for a coherent, consistent, and militant "anti-imperialism." The threads of the argument had been available for years among Marxist-Leninist theoreticians.
As early as the first years of the 1950s, at the height of the "cold war," Soviet theoreticians argued that international imperialism in the modem world had created an elaborate mechanism for the plunder of less-developed countries. They argued that whatever had been the case in the
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past, in the modem world international capitalism employed all its overwhelming advantages to reduce economies on the world "periphery" to reservoirs of cheap labor, raw materials, and dumping grounds for the surpluses of advanced industrial economies.
The argument was that whatever development attended the intrusion of imperialism into less-developed countries, the ultimate result could only be a failure of self-sustained economic growth and the deepening of industry. Imperialists would ally themselves with the most reactionary elements in the less-developed communities to ensure the dependency *s impaired capacity for meaningful and equitable economic growth.^^ It was an argument, neither Marxist nor Leninist, calculated to assure the Soviet Union allies among the emerging nations.
These ideas subsequently found their way into the theoretical arguments of non-Soviet Marxist-Leninists.^ By the mid-1960s, an entire collection of "neo-Marxists" had put together a rationale that seemed to provide a conceptual framework for the Maoist effort at autonomous "socialist" industrial development and modernization. By the end of the 1960s, Maoism as a developmental strategy had been provided a rationale. American Maoists identified it as a program designed to accomplish the planned, nonmarket industrialization and modernization of a less-developed economy "by means of its own resources.*'^^ Maoism was understood to be unequivocally true to its original anti-imperialist inspiration.
By the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, the "New Left" in the West had put together a notion of imperialism that gave theoretical expression to the xenophobic zealotry of Maoist foreign policy and the politically driven developmental program of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The conviction that sustained the argument was that international capitalism, "once a mighty engine of economic development, [had] turned into a ... formidable hurdle to human advancement" that condemns the "peoples of the underdeveloped countries... [to] poverty and stagnation."^^
By the end of the 1960s, anti-imperialism found expression in the claim that "historical research demonstrates that contemporary underdevelopment is in large part the historical product of past and continuing economic and other relations between the satellite underdeveloped and the now-developed metropolitan countries" and, further, that "economic development can now occur only independently of most rela-
Imperialism, Marxism, and Sun Yat-sen 185
tions" with industrially advanced states.^^ Some of the most central arguments of classical Marxism were explicitly abandoned.
An entire body of literature emerged, devoted to the relations between "core** countries and the "peripheral,** less-developed regions of the world. Its central thesis was that,
it is the international division of labor characteristic of imperialism which perpetuates the underdevelopment of the backward nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and condemns them to be purveyors of basic foodstuffs, raw materials, and crude oil to the dominant nations which reserve for themselves that industrialization which multiplies wealth.^
In effect, according to modem radicalism, "underdevelopment ... is generated by the very same historical process which... generated economic development: the development of capitalism itself.**^^
Contrary to the classical theses of Marx, Hilferding, Luxemburg, and Lenin, the neo-Marxists insisted that sustained economic backwardness is not the consequence of the absence of capitalist penetration, but the result of capitalist exploitation. According to the thesis, the peripheral or satellite regions develop, not because of the influx of excess capital generated by monopoly or finance capital in the metropoles, but because of the absence of ties to the international market economy.
By the early 1970s, the "ideology of underdevelopment** had become something of a fixture in the intellectual environment of Africa, North America, and Latin America. By that time, what we now call dependencia theories had become popular, variously articulated by Latin American and Arab theorists, supported by intellectuals of neo-Marxist persuasion and Maoist enthusiasm. Dependencistas (however much they vary in particulars) all insist that it is the properties of the international capitalist market system, rather than any internal characteristics, that determine the economic fate of individual nations. According to the "dependency** thesis, the industrialization and modernization of less-developed countries are functions of their form of incorporation into the international system rather than any features of their native resource, cultural, social, or political endowments. Only countries like post-Meiji Japan and Communist China, not integrated into the world market economy, tend to modernize and industrialize, while those so integrated do not.
Neo-Marxists have, therefore, reversed the original Marxist contentions concerning the function of market-driven capital flows from the
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advanced to the less-developed countries. Advanced capitalist states are not compelled by "history" to develop other regions of the world. Relations with the "imperialist" powers have systematically retarded, rather than engendered, industrial growth and development. The more intimately the less-developed countries are drawn into the network of international trade, finance, and commerce, the more impaired are their prospects for industrial growth and modernization. Involvement in "imperialist" and "neo-colonial" relations produce economic stagnation, collective poverty, and political subservience. According to the neo-Marxists, "core" countries exercise a predominantly negative influence over the economic destinies of the less-developed "periphery." The result for the peripheral countries can only be continued underdevelopment, the inevitable consignment to a less-dynamic and less-profitable involvement in agricultural and extractive pursuits. Modem imperialism and neo-colonialism have condemned the less-developed countries to perpetual second-class status.
Should all that be accepted as true, less-developed countries would be well counseled to reduce involvement in world economic exchange and dissociate themselves from economic relations with the advanced industrial powers. Suffering from competitive disadvantage, characterized by extractive and agricultural pursuits, less-developed economies are threatened with increasing "peripheralization"—the descent into "underdevelopment."
Less-developed countries with high trading partner concentration, involved in the production of a limited number of agricultural products or raw materials for export, once drawn into the international trading system, would be condemned to a marginal economic development, affording only a low per capita income to their working populations.^^ Only a principled and revolutionary anti-imperialism, together with a program of "dissociative development," could assure industrialization and economic modernization. Anything less would be a betrayal of a nation's future.
In the century and a half since Marx and Engels published their Manifesto, the notion of "imperialism" has had a confused and confusing history. Inevitable for Marx and Engels, necessarily productive of industrialization and modernization for Lenin and Bukharin, "imperialism" became, for dependency theorists and radical Maoists, an institutional and structural restraint on development.
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If Sun Yat-sen is understcKxi to have failed to engage the issue of imperialism, it is uncertain which conception of imperialism he was expected to address. Given the differences that have collected around the concept, each would require a different response. An appropriate response to the notion of imperialism advanced by the first Marxists would be utterly different than that made in response to the notion of imperialism entertained by latter-day Marxists and neo-Marxist, anti-market dependency theorists.
In his treatment of imperialism, Sun Yat-sen was the product of his time and circumstances. As a youth, he was outraged by the depredations of imperialism. His first public proposals included a preoccupation with China's future in a threatening international environment.^^ As early as 1897, Sun identified China's inability to "resist external attack" as his central preoccupation.^* There is no question that for Sun imperialism remained a central issue throughout his life.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the literature devoted to the phenomenon of imperialism was fairly extensive. Original works and translations of works on the subject appeared in Chinese and Japanese and were familiar to Sun and those around him. By the early years of the century, the work of J. A. Hobson influenced Chinese thinkers with whom Sun was familiar.^^ We know that Sun continued to interest himself in the work of Hobson well into the second decade of the century.^
Hobson's Imperialism, which appeared in 1902, was a seminal work that influenced the work of both Lenin and Bukharin. Not incompatible with the understanding of imperialism to be found in the work of Marx and Engels, Hobson argued that a failure of effective demand in the advanced industrial economies created a glut of commodities at one end of the chain of production, while exploitative rates of profit created a surfeit of investment capital at the other. The consequence was a frenetic search for markets on the one hand and investment outlets on the other. Capitalist nations were driven overseas—to the industrial periphery—to secure supplementary markets for the sale of excess produce and virgin territories for the profitable employment of their surplus capital.
Like the first Marxists, Hobson conceived industrial capitalism as driven to the outermost reaches of the globe by its dynamic needs. The less-developed countries, ill equipped to defend their interests, found themselves subjected to the military aggression and political dominance
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of the more advanced states, theix populations exploited, their cultures subverted, and their resources pillaged.
Hobson catalogued an oppressively long list of abuses, ranging from wasteful administration, the destruction of traditional handicrafts, the insensitive violation of religious sensibilities, burdensome taxations, rapine, and violence—all attributable to imperialist oppression. The entire process was not only irredeemably immoral, it was economically perverse. According to Hobson, the costs of maintaining the entire machinery of dominance far outweighed any possible returns that such a policy might secure for the imperialist power. It was pursued only because {X)litical control in the modem industrial communities had been alienated from any popular base by a small aristocracy of industrial and financial plutocrats who, for their own immediate and parochial interests, employed the power, prestige, and collective capital of modem states in the pursuit of profit. Under such unhappy circumstances, the advantages of imperialism accrued to the wealthy and powerful, and the costs were bome by the impoverished and helpless.
Whatever the profits, however, Hobson nowhere suggested that imperialist policies produced or sustained "underdevelopment." In fact, one of his central arguments was that imperialism, dutifully pursued, could only bring ultimate min on its agents through the rapid industrialization of less-developed economies. The irrepressible necessity of trade and the investment of surplus capital drove the "great controllers of industry" of the modem advanced nations to the "making of railways, canals, and other public works, the establishment of factories, the development of mines, [and] the improvement of agriculture" in foreign lands. The United States and Germany, for instance, had both been developed by the inflow of just such foreign capital—until they achieved a level of maturity that drove them, more rapidly than England, into the ranks of commodity and capital-saturated economies. "As one nation after another enters the machine economy and adopts advanced industrial methods," Hobson argued, "it becomes more difficult for its manufacturers, merchants and fmanciers to dispose profitably of their economic resources," and they seek to vent their "excess of goods and capital" in less-developed environs. The "endeavor of the great controllers of industry to broaden the channel for the flow of their surplus wealth by seeking foreign markets and foreign investments to take off the goods and capital they cannot sell or use at home" is the "taproot of imperial-
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ism." What it must ultimately accomplish is an ever-tightening cycle of development and overdevelopment.
China, Hobson argued, newly "opened" to Western commerce and investment at the turn of the century, was due to suffer the full impact of unperialism in which some "Western Power," or some constellation of powers, would exploit China's investment and trade markets with massive infusions of "rails, machinery, and other forms of capital." Given such infusions, China must ultimately burst upon the world,
fully equipped for future internal development in all the necessary productive powers, [and] turn upon her civilizer, untrammelled by need of further industrial aid, undersell him in his own market, take away his other foreign markets, and secure for herself what further developing work remains to be done in other undeveloped parts of the earth/'
Should China or the other less-developed countries remain under the political control of those more advanced, the results would be no less ominous. The newly subject areas of the globe, given their vast resources and abundant manpower, would be rapidly industrialized at the behest of a small coterie of monopoly capitalists, and the original home countries would lapse into "parasitism," falling into decay while productive labor and manufacturing efforts would be transferred to and concentrated in the outlying, "peripheral" regions.'*^ An industrial economy would be more readily and economically transplanted to the more "backward" regions of the earth, and the currently "advanced" nations would succumb to a fatal torpor, their inhabitants given to unemployment and/ or unproductive leisure. The anticipated "rapid development of China" and other currently less-developed countries would seal the fate of Europe and North America.'*^ They would go the way of ancient Rome.
Central to Hobson*s argument was the conviction that imperialism was the motor of international economic and industrial development. Nowhere did he suggest that imperialism fostered or sustained "underdevelopment." The world would have to await the coming of an entirely new breed of critics before that argument would be given currency. Curiously enough, those critics, when they did appear, were to identify themselves more frequently than not as "Marxists"; and by our own time almost every student of the subject so characterizes them. Actually, the first Marxists and their immediate intellectual heirs said a great deal about imperialism—much of it embodied in Hobson's prose—but very
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little, if anything, about its responsibility for, and its maintenance of, underdevelopment. In fact, Hobson's account was perfectly orthodox in terms of classical Marxist analysis. Whatever **reformist'* remedies Hobson may have advocated, his analysis of the dynamics of capitalism, and the prospects for development in the less-developed regions of the world, remained remarkably "Marxian" in substance.
For Hobson, capitalism was compelled to further the industrial development of the world—to create an international industrial economy. Like Marx before him, Hobson argued that industrialization in one country or one region inevitably produced a subsequent industrialization of the remainder. Industrial capitalism was compelled, by the imperatives intrinsic to the domestic and international markets, to draw the entire world into a machme economy. Karl Marx had said nothing less.
Given these convictions. Sun and those around him were prepared to recognize that imperialism, whatever its threats, brought with it the potential for rapid industrialization and modernization. The critical question was whether revolutionaries in the backward nations might control imperialism's depredations while allowing the market-governed inflow of investment capital, asset formation, and export sales.
As early as 1904, the intellectuals around Sun were arguing that China would require massive capital transfers from the advanced industrial countries if it was to embark on self-sustained economic development and growth. It was Hu Hanmin who first fully articulated the arguments that were central to Sun Yat-sen*s developmental program. Hu argued that in order to undertake rapid industrialization, China would require foreign investment capital, foreign technology, and foreign skills. Together with investment opportunities, foreign capitalists sought market shares in China. Hu maintained that China should harness the energies that resulted in order to achieve rapid industrialization, the necessary condition for China's defense in a very serious struggle for survival.^
Sun repeated these arguments throughout his life. In his judgment, even with the best projections of China's ability to generate indigenous capital, it was evident that the nation would still require substantial foreign loans."*^ Sun regularly cited North American, Latin American, and Japanese examples to make the point that foreign capital transfers, employed for "productive purposes," could only redound to the benefit of all parties involved.^^ He insisted that the remarkable industrial and economic growth of Imperial Russia and monarchist Italy at the turn of the
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century was, in substantial part, the consequence of the effective employment of foreign capital.^^ Development could only take place under the influence of domestic and international market forces.
None of this was incompatible with the ideas common to an entire generation of Marxist theorists, ranging from Marx to Lenin. The advanced capitalist states would be instrumental in the rapid development of China, as they had been in the development of the United States and Germany. Commencing with economies that were essentially agrarian in character, underdeveloped countries would pass through conditions of capital dependency, to industrial development, and ultimately to achieve industrial maturity. The transition was accomplished through market influences.
While there was very little difference between this concept of the role of economic imperialism and that entertained by classical Marxism, what did distinguish Sun's assessment was his specific concern with China's cultural and political integrity during the period of transition—when it would be so heavily dependent on external assistance and support. For Marx and Engels, not only was the process of diffusing industrial capitalism inevitable, so also was the travail and misery that attended it. The travail involved the alienation of the sovereignty of "barbarian peoples," the destruction of their indigenous cultures, their subjection to armed aggression, and their surrender to foreign domination. All this was seen as simply part of a necessary, albeit unhappy, historic sequence. Whatever revolutions might occur as a consequence would be limited to enhancing the growth of "material productive forces." Such consequences were unacceptable to Sun and his collaborators. For them, political sovereignty and cultural continuity were matters of more immediate concern than they could ever have been for Marx or Engels. The latter were theoreticians of a macrohistoric process; Sun was the leader of a Chinese revolutionary nationalist party.
These various considerations significantly influenced the reception of Marxist notions in China. When orthodox Marxism began to penetrate Chinese revolutionary circles more insistently around the time of the First World War, the intellectuals of Sun's revolutionary party were compelled to deal with them more explicitly. Before that time, contributors to Min bao had grappled with some of the central issues of Marxism in an indirect and tangential manner. Little specifically Marxist literature had been available in China around the turn of the century. Only
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after 1910 or so—and especially with the termination of the First World War and the advent of the Russian Revolution—did Sun and theoreticians like Hu Hanmin and Dai Jitao have occasion to deal directly with primary Marxist materials. What emerged from this encounter was an attempt to deal with the issue of imperialism in a novel fashion—quite distinct from how the problem had been treated in the European context. Between 1911 and 1919 Sun articulated his own views on the question; and by 1919 his most intimate collaborators had undertaken the publication of two party journals, Jianshe and Xingqi pinglun,^^ in which the Kuomintang's ideas concerning imperialism were fully formulated.
Sun's ideas during this period have been generally neglected by West-em scholars and, as a consequence, we have been left with an impaired appreciation of the sophistication of his views concerning the nature of Western imperialism and his recommendations concerning an appropriate China's response. The articles in Jianshe, written by some of the foremost theoreticians of the Kuomintang—Hu Hanmin, Dai Jitao, and Zhu Zhixin, among others—leave little doubt about the substance of Sim's convictions and their development between the time of the publication of Min bao and his lectures on the Sanmin Zhuyi in 1924.
What becomes apparent in Sun's public statements and in the articles in Jianshe is the fact that intellectuals of the Kuomintang were the first to attempt to deal with orthodox Marxism in the context of the Chinese revolution—some considerable time before the formation of the Communist party of China. Hu Hanmin, for example, specifically accepted a modified form of the historical materialism of Karl Marx as a "canon of interpretation" in his analysis of China's millennial history.^' It was within that context that Zhu Zhixin addressed himself to the entire question of foreign imperialism with all the Marxist implications that had, by that time, collected around the term. Zhu, like the other theoreticians close to Sun Yat-sen, made an important distinction that had already been implicit in the discussions to be found in Min bao a decade before. Refusing to reduce imperialism to international behavior that was an inevitable consequence of "the highest form of capitalism," Zhu, like Sun, interpreted it to be the negative side of political nationalism.^® For Zhu, imperialism was dL political expression of a given people's drive for territorial aggrandizement and international security rather than a necessary function of economic variables. Sun and his colleagues did not see imperialism as an exclusively economic phenomenon. Thus, when Dai
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Jitao attempted to trace the "economic causes" of China's revolutionary turmoil, he identified economic oppression as its source, but argued that economic oppression itself was in significant measure the consequence of international political oppression.^^
These were restatements of contentions made by Sun as early as 1912.^^ For him, economic oppression was a function of the relative political inferiority and military weakness of dependent territories.^^ Relations between less-developed and economically mature communities became exploitative when the former lacked political integrity, an articulated policy for the governance of foreign capital inflow, and were impaired by military disabilities.^
Thus, by 1919 Sun and the intellectuals most closely associated with him had already arrived at an analysis of colonialism—or imperialism— similar to that held by classical Marxists, and had begun to formulate an alternative, and singularly Chinese response. They argued that if the less-developed nations were to effectively resist the depredations of imperialism while enjoying the benefits of foreign trade and investment, they must mount essentially political responses. Only then would the Western powers be compelled to cease treating Asia merely as a profitable adjunct to Western capitalism.^^
Sun and others were sufficiently sophisticated to appreciate that such political capabilities would be difficult to achieve. They were fully aware of the complex mechanisms used by the imperialist powers in the economic exploitation of weaker nations. Lai Ting, for example, argued at considerable length—and with impressive insight—that the Western powers had all the advantages that came with their dominance over the machinery of international commerce and trade. The major Western countries would be able to manipulate the terms of trade and the conditions of mvestment totally to their own advantage—unless the non-European countries could exercise some political control over such activities.^ The classic instances of such political defense against unequal terms of trade were Bismarckian Germany and Giolittian Italy.
To offset the threat of imperialist exploitation, Sun argued for a strong and politically unified China that would control the conditions of capital inflow, the repatriation of profits to foreign investors, and the tariff structure governing the nation's commercial arrangements.^^ Toward that end, an active and popular nationalism was required to provide the consensus to sustain the effort.^^ Sun and his collaborators had witnessed the
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potential strength of popular resistance in the anti-Japanese boycotts during the last years of the Qing Dynasty. Under a popular government, a determined population would escalate the costs of any effort at foreign exploitation.^^ But more than that, with a united population supporting it, a strong government could exercise control over tariff and currency regulations and monitor international exchange and investment.^ Such controls would preclude the possibility that foreign capitalists, employing local capitalists as their agents, might dominate China's indigenous industrial development in the service of their interests.^*
Sun and the theoreticians of the Kuomintang were attempting to formulate a coherent and consistent response to what they took to be the most critical problem facing China at the time. What resulted was a progranmiatic policy, more fully articulated by Sun in the years that immediately followed. It was a policy that went beyond the classical Marxist notions of imperialism by suggesting a coherent defensive strategy in response. By 1919, Kuomintang intellectuals were familiar with an impressive amount of Marxist literature,**^ but apparently found little of immediate relevance to the problems of economically underdeveloped China. Both Marx and Engels had anticipated that Western capitalism would inevitably conquer the East and would necessarily revolutionize the latter *s prevailing mode of production. But neither had suggested a strategy that the underdeveloped East might employ to reduce the threats to its cultural or political integrity—not to mention the massive threat, however temporary, to its economic well-being. What Sun and his fellow revolutionaries proposed, on the other hand, were a number of responses, selectively applied, that might insulate the developing nations from the most threatening consequences of Western economic penetration.
Throughout his life. Sun continued to maintain that market-governed international economic relations were not, in and of themselves, exploitative. He argued that in a world of self-seeking sovereign states it was natural for international actors to attempt to maximize their advantages. Where any one community was demonstrably weak (as was the Manchu Dynasty), others could be expected to exploit the opportunity to increase their gains.^^ Innumerable times. Sun provided doleful recitations of the economic exploitation of Asians at the hands of powerful Western powers. As long as nations are "strong enough to carry out acts of injustice" at minimal costs, he argued, one could hardly expect "respect for jus-
Imperialism, Marxism, and Sun Yat-sen 195
tice.'*^ As long as China remained politically disorganized and militarily weak, it faced the prospect of economic exploitation and existing forever in a "state of serfdom, so that a profitable trade [could] be carried on forever by the ruling country... [and China would] always be a market for [their] industrial products.'*^^ China, in effect, would be exploited and unable to industrialize.
Thus, Sun Yat-sen recognized the traits that were later to be identified with "dependent underdevelopment.** But his account differed from that of dependency theorists insofar as he made exploitative relations not the consequence of some intrinsic properties of the international market, but a function of some indigenous political properties of the "dependent" system. In effect. Sun held a political concept of exploitative imperialism. He clearly understood that "of the... forces [that determine a nation's future] the most potent are political forces and economic forces"; but he equally recognized that, while economic oppression was more severe than political oppression, the former could not be implemented or sustained without the prevalence of the latter. For Sun, "imperialism" was the "policy of aggression upon other countries by means of political force.'' In the pursuit of security and advantage, the "strong states" impose their will on "smaller and weaker peoples,"^ for without effective political and military dominance over subject peoples, exploitative relations could not be maintained.
In a clear and determinate sense. Sun entertained convictions about imperialism that distinguished his views from those of classical Marxism and the neo-Marxism of contemporary "dependency theorists." He was prepared to acknowledge that development could not take place in what is now called the Third World without large-scale transfers of capital from the advanced to the less-developed countries. But beyond that, he was prepared to recommend a political strategy that could insulate the developing countries from economic exploitation during the initial stages of development. Sun denied that exploitative imperialism is the simple and necessary product of international trade and financial arrangements against which market-governed developing countries are helpless. He laid major emphasis on the domestic policies of developing nations, the organization of effective government, and the real possibility of controlling the conditions under which capital transfers and commercial transactions take place. For Sun, the advantages enjoyed by the dominant nations during the processes of economic modernization of
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the less-developed countries were a consequence of political variables and not the result of some inherent disabilities of the domestic and international commercial and financial markets.**^
A developing country, in Sim's judgment, could negotiate the distance between underdevelopment and development by insulating itself within a strong state—as happened in Meiji Japan and Bismarckian Germany.^* Such a state would not only regulate the conditions governing international trade and financial transactions, but would seek out temporary or enduring alliances with one or another of the advanced nations in order to ensure that the advanced countries could not move against the developing country in concert.^^ Given the existence of a strong state, enjoying popular consensus and receiving collateral support from an advanced nation with which it shared some international and strategic interests, an underdeveloped nation could undertake a program of market-informed development that would redound to everyone's advantage. Dependency relations could be transformed into relations of interdependency, and exploitative relationships translated into those of mutual advantage. In such circumstances, China, for its part, could "compete freely with [other nations] in the economic field and be able to hold [its] own without failure";''® moreover, it could "open [its] markets for the benefit" of international commerce, and welcome "foreign capital to develop... industry... communication and transportation facilities, and foreign brains and experience to manage them."^^
Sun anticipated the development of China taking place in the context of the world market. Together with a domestic economy that was essentially market based, the involvement of China in the international trading system assured a price structure that reflected international exchange values. The system Sun anticipated was market based and inextricably involved in international trade and finance. While the state he anticipated was interventionist, there was never any suggestion that the state would ever dictate prices. However much the government might influence domestic prices through intervention, prices would never be allocatively neutral. Resources, inputs, productive goods, wages, and prices would be almost entirely determined by the market. There was never any question of an abandonment of "commodity production" and market-based exchange.
There is nothing to suggest that Marx or Engels would have anticipated anything else in an economy undergoing rapid industrialization
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and modernization. Whatever Marx or Engels had to say about a planned, noncommodity productive system was applicable only to an advanced industrial system in the first stage of the transition to communism. For the first Marxism, that stage would be reached only after the full maturation of the industrial system. Neither Marx nor Engels ever anticipated a nonmarket "socialism" in a marginally industrialized environment.
Sun's program of development was predicated on the backwardness of China's economy. He correctly argued that Marxism had little to say to an emerging China threatened by powerful foreign forces. Whatever similarities Sun's ideas shared with the first Marxists, the policies put together by Sun during the first quarter of the twentieth century shared more with those advocated as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century by Alexander Hamilton in an economically less-developed United States and Friedrich List in an equally less-developed Germany. It was a "bourgeois" program. Marx and Engels would have expected nothing less. Industrialization and economic modernization, in their account, were "bourgeois," market-governed responsibilities.
When Marx dismissed the developmental program of Friedrich List, it was because he thought that socialism would soon overtake all the industrialized nations of Europe. Later, after socialism failed to make its anticipated appearance in Europe, Marx admitted that underdeveloped countries would be well advised to follow List's recommendations.''^ Socialism was not as imminent as Marx and Engels had imagined in their youth. In the long interval between underdevelopment and full economic maturity, developing nations faced "bourgeois" tasks. Only when Marxism was tailored to the needs of the Bolshevik Revolution was there talk of a union of socialism and the "bourgeois-democratic revolution."
The distinguishing feature of Marxist-Leninist "bourgeois-democratic revolution" was a call for unremitting hostility toward "international imperialism." Even then, "programmatic flexibility" allowed trade and financial relations with "imperialist" powers. Only with the advent of "dependency theory" did the injunction to avoid "integration into the world market" become "Marxist." Kevin Clements recently argued that "in the light of what has been said by dependency theorists about the exploitative nature of the global world economy," these theorists could only recommend "a complete break with the world capitalist system."^^ For radical Maoists, participation in international trade and financial
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activity with "imperialist" powers became equivalent to "taking the capitalist road."''^
However one chooses to interpret the long history of the relationship between revolution, Marxism, and imperialism, it is clear that Sun Yat-sen had established a position with respect to each. For Sun, revolution involved the rapid economic and political modernization of China and its attainment of equality among the powers of the world. Marxism was interesting, and its ultimate goals recommended themselves, but it was totally unsuited for industrially backward China. Imperialism was a phenomenon that was a function of the power of states, fueled by national interest, and effective because of the differential distribution of international power. Whatever its nature and origin, imperialism could be made to serve the interests of revolutionary China.
Like the classical Marxists, Sun understood that agrarian China, out of its own resources, could not generate the vast sums of investment capital required to sustain development. Foreign capital inflows could provide much of the "primitive accumulation" essential to the process.''^ Beyond that, he advocated a domestic political policy that would buffer the nation from the impositions that might attend such capital transfers.^^ He advocated the construction of a strong state, united with one or another advanced power, that would abrogate unequal treaties, govern its own domestic tariff and currency regulations, and insure ultimate Chinese control over the developmental process.^ Indigenous political capabilities would determine the results of international market transactions. Sun's earliest search for foreign commercial support''* was governed by just such concepts. The idea that his nation might provide "a grand field hitherto never dreamed of... to the social and economic activities of the civilized world"^^ was always balanced by a conviction that such activities would redound to China's benefit only with the provision of a strong state system that would insulate the nation from exploitation.
There was nothing "contradictory" or "inconsistent" in any of this. Throughout his life. Sun resisted all the repressive features of imperialism. But he consistently distinguished political exploitation and its attendant economic exploitation from the international economic symbiosis that he believed not only possible, but essential, to China's economic transformation. The resistance to imperialism that he advocated involved eminently political defenses: a strong state, a deterrent defensive capa-
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bility, and/or supportive international alliances that would provide China collective security. The acquisition of political equality, the abrogation of unequal treaties, and a secure control over domestic developments would allow China to welcome foreign venture capital, technology transfers, and even the supervision of its market-governed developmental programs by foreign experts.*°
This was the complex collection of ideas brought to Taiwan by the followers of Sun Yat-sen after their defeat on the mainland of China by the forces of Mao Zedong. After 1949, those followers launched the Chinese on Taiwan on a trajectory of industrialization and economic growth largely unmatched by any less-developed economy in the twentieth century. By the mid-1980s, the economy on Taiwan had been transformed from one that had been traditional and agrarian into one that was newly industrialized and modem. With a domestic demographic base of only 20 million persons, by the end of the 1980s the Republic of China on Taiwan manufactured some of the most sophisticated machine goods and durable commodities in the world; it held one of the largest foreign exchange reserves in the trading community; its per capita income was about twenty-five times higher than that in mainland China; and in the judgment of those who are knowledgeable, it might well "serve as a model for others in the Third World and LDC camps.*'*^
While Maoist China dissolved into failure, Sun Yat-sen's China emerged as a model developing economy. Its growth and modernization had taken place within a network of complex and intimate economic relations with advanced industrial democracies. Originally possessed of a domestic economy largely dominated by an interventionist state, administering an import substitution policy to protect infant industries, Taiwan's market-governed economy grew at an annual double-digit rate from one that originally distributed an annual per capita income of about $100 in real terms, to one in which state intervention has been maximally reduced, the economy fueled by international sales, to equitably distribute an armual per capita income of approximately $9,000.
The history of the economic development of Taiwan is now generally known and widely appreciated. Beginning with significant land redistribution, the provision of general education, an intersectoral transfer of capital, the rural distribution of small and medium-scale industries, the gradual development of upstream industries, and remarkably equitable distribution of welfare, the Republic of China on Taiwan provides con-
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vincing evidence of the efficacy of Sun Yat-sen's notions of industrialization and economic modernization in backward economies.*^
On the mainland of China, after the death of Mao and the suppression of his more vocal followers, the People's Republic underwent a series of what seem to have become systemic reforms. First the elaborate commune structures in the rural sector were dismantled and the peasant economy was returned to family management. Collateral "side-line" industries rapidly emerged as the rural economy generated disposable capital. By the mid-1980s, the leadership in Beijing sought investment and concessional loans on a massive scale from the "imperialist" powers.*^ By the early 1990s, the People's Republic hosted over 20,000 foreign ventures on the mainland with a cumulative investment of over $20 billion; it was receiving about 25 percent of all foreign direct investment flowing into the capital-poor economies of Asia and 15 percent of all foreign capital flowing into the less-developed economies of the world. The People's Republic had abandoned the core convictions of the Maoist nonmarket developmental strategy. The foreign enthusiasts of Maoism lamented the passing of the "self-reliant, anti-imperialist" system. What they perceived was the "restoration of capitalism" and the "total rejection of Marxism."*^ In fact, what had transpired was an approximation of the developmental strategy of Sun Yat-sen.
Since the introduction of the reforms associated with the rule of Deng Xiaoping, the People's Republic has achieved an average annual rate of real growth of about 9 percent. In the process, the ill-conceived neo-Stalinist command economy has progressively unraveled. By the early 1990s, there was some evidence that about 75 percent of all industrial inputs were sold at prices set by the market. Fewer and fewer productive goods and commodities were passing through the hands of planners. While state-set prices still distorted the economy, their impact was being gradually minimized.
Given the intensity of its relations with the "imperialist" powers, it is evident that the policies of the People's Republic have outrun the rationale that is supposed to be their guide. The authorities in Beijing still refer to "imperialism" as China's principal enemy. They still feel threatened by the insinuation of "bourgeois democratic" ideas along with the inflow of capital and technology from the industrialized democracies. They continue to insist that China will resist "bourgeois pollution" and will persist with its "proletarian dictatorship" in an increasingly complex and liberal developing economy.
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Beijing continues to imagine that Sun Yat-sen failed to understand "imperialism*'—that he harbored illusions about its ultimate influence. Now that China's Communists have accepted Sun's views on capital investment and technology transfers from the "imperialist" powers, their resistance has collected around the democratic political philosophy he advocated.
Should the People's Republic continue on its path of what amounts to systemic reform, it is difficult to understand the role to be played by the Communist party of China. As the economy on the mainland becomes increasingly marketized, complex, and diversified, it is difficult to imagine that a one-party state could be anything other than dysfunctional.
Sun Yat-sen conceived an intimate relationship between a growing market economy and political democracy. The Communist leadership in Beijing has failed to appreciate the cormection. The system Sun advocated for an emerging China was one in which liberal laws, private property, international trade, and market-based growth strategies found their ultimate defense in a democratic system that matured together with industrialization and real economic development. Once the Communist leadership in Beijing resisted Sun's views on international trade, joint ventures, capital transfers, and the acquisition of foreign technology as reflecting "illusions" about "imperialism." They now resist his views on the functional necessity of political democracy—as a toxic product of that same "imperialism."
Notes
1. See the discussion in A. James Gregor, A Survey of Marxism: Problems in Philosophy and the Theory of History (New York: Random House, 1968), chap. 5.
2. Karl Nfarx and Friedrich Engels, "The Conmiunist Manifesto,** in Collected Works, vol. 8 (New York: International Publishers, 1976, hereafter MECW), 486-88.
3. See Shlomo Avineri, "Introduction,** in Shlomo Avineri, ed., Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 1-28.
4. Engels, "Democratic Pan-Slavism,** in MECW, vol. 8, 369-70.
5. Marx, "Die kuenftigen Ergebnisse der britischen Herrschaft in Indien," in Marx and Engels, Werke, vol. 9 (Berlin, Dietz, 1960, hereafter referred to as MEW), 226; an English translation is to be found as "The Future Results of British Rule in India,'* in Avineri, Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, 131.
6. Ibid., 220.
7. See Avineri, "Introduction,** in Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, 16-18.
8. Marx and Engels, in MEW, vol. 9, 224-26.
9. Marx, "Die Revolution in China und in Europa,** in ibid., 95-102. 10. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, 1954), 9.
202 Marxism, China, and Development
11. Rudolf Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital (Berlin: Dietz, 1955), 472.
12. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 421, 467.
13. Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy (New York: Howard Fertig, 1966), 35.
14. Ibid., 39.
15. Ibid., 159.
16. V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in Collected Works, vol. 22 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, 1966, hereafter LCW), 242-43.
17. Ibid., 259.
18. Ibid., 274-75; see also 295, 3(X).
19. Hu Sheng, Imperialism and Chinese Politics (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1955), 293, 296.
20. Ibid., 270ff.
21. Mao Zedong, "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society," in Selected Works, vol. 1 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1964, hereafter MSW), 14ff.
22. Hu, Imperialism and Chinese Politics, 240-304; particularly 266-67, 294.
23. See the discussion in J. V. Stalin, "Report to the 17th Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B)," in Problems of Leninism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, 1953), 590-92.
24. See the discussion in Gregor, The China Connection: U.S. Policy and the People's Republic of China (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1986), 53-64; Yung Ping Chen, Chinese Political Thought: Mao 'Ke-Tung and Liu Shao-chi (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 94-95.
25. Mao, "Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China,** mMSW, vol. 4, 372.
26. John King Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution 1800-1985 (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 349.
27. A typical expression is found in ''The Great CXiltural Revolution is an Issue of Prime Importance for the Destiny, Prospect and Outlook of our Party and Country,*' and also "An Issue of Prime Importance for the World Revolution,** in K. H. Fan, ed.. The Chinese Cultural Revolution: Selected Documents (New York: Grobe Press, 1968), 314-20.
28. See Kung Hsia-wen, "To Develop Industry We Must Initiate Technical Development,** in Raymond Lotta, ed.. And Mao Makes Five: Mao Tietung 's Last Great Battle (Chicago, 111.: Banner, 1978), 132-40.
29. See the discussion in K.W Ostrovitianov, D. T. Schepilov, L. A. Leontiev, I. D. Laptiev, 1.1. Kusminov, L. M. Gatovski, P. F. Judin, A. I. Paschkov, W. I. Pereslegin, and W. N. Starovski, Politische Oekonomie: Lehrbuch (Berlin: Dietz, 1955), 274-85.
30. See Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review, 1957).
31. See (hiarles Bettelheim in Charles Bettelheim and Neil Burton, China Since Mao (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 130, n. 72.
32. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 249-50.
33. See Andre Gundar Frank, "The Development of Underdevelopment,** in James D. Cockcroft, Andre Gundar Frank, and Dale Johnson, Dependence and Underdevelopment (New York: Anchor, 1972), 3ff.
34. Pierre Jalee, The Third World in World Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 129-30.
Imperialism, Marxism, and Sun Yat-sen 203
35. Frank, "The Development of Underdevelopment," in Cockcroft, Frank, and Johnson, Dependence and Underdevelopment^ 9.
36. See the discussion in Dieter Senghaas, Weltwirtschaftsordnung und Entwicklungspolitik: Plaedoyer fuer Dissoziation (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977); Dieter Senghaas, ed., Imperialismus und strukturelle Gewalt: Analysen ueber abhaengige Reproduktion (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973); Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism (Chicago, 111.: University of Chicago, 1980), chap. 5.
37. Sun Yay-sen, "Memorial to Li Hungzhang on the Plan to Save the Nation," in Guofu quanji [The Complete Works of Sun Yat-senJ, vol. 3 (Taipei, Kuomintang Party History Conunittee, 1973, hereafter GQ\ 1-11.
38. Sun, "China's Present and Future," in GQ, vol. 5, 81.
39. See Martin Bemal, Chinese Socialism to 7907 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1976), 144ff.; Li Yu-ning, The Introduction of Socialism into China (New York: Columbia University, 1971), lOff.
40. John C. H. Wu, Sun Yat-sen: The Man and His Ideas (Taipei: Conunercial Press, 1971), 196.
41. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1965), 49, 80-81, 308.
42. Ibid., 314-15.
43. Ibid., 318.
44. See Hu Hanmin, "To the Detractors of the Minsheng Zhuyi," Min Bao 12 (6 March 1907): 70, 75, 80; restated by Sun in "Minsheng zhuyi," in GQ, vol. 2, 214-19.
45. See Sun, "The Livelihood of the People and Social Revolution," in GQ, vol. 2, 117; "The Construction of Railroads and Foreign Loans," in GQ, vol. 2, 243; "The Problem in Foreign Relations Requires the Adoption of an Open Door Policy," in GQ, vol. 2, 264.
46. I deeply believe that foreign loans will not harm the nation, and that using loans can only benefit, not harm China In China, when the subject of foreign loans is mentioned, we shun it like poison, without realizing that foreign loans for non-productive purposes are harmful, foreign loans for productive purposes beneficial. The development of the United States, South America, Argentina, Japan was all aided by foreign loans Everywhere in China, production is not yet developed, our people are unemployed... if we can introduce foreign capital, create employment, then Chinese need no longer be hired laborers by others, while our domestic production will be greatly multiplied Those able to develop their productive capacity become prosperous, those unable to develop their productive capacity remain impoverished. (Sun, "The Speedy Construction of Railroads is to Establish the Foundation for Wealth and Power," in GQ, vol. 2, 258)
47. See the sunmiary discussion in Li, Introduction of Socialism, 40-41.
48. The Jianshe is available in its entirety (with the exception of vol. 3, no. 1, which is to be found in the Kuomintang Party Archives in Taipei). A history of the Jianshe and convenient sunmiaries of its contents are to be found in Corinna Hana, Sun Yat-sen's Parteiorgan Chien-she (1919-1920) (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1978).
49. See Hu, "A Critique of the Critique of Historical Materialism," Jiflnj/ie 1,5 (1919): 945-89; also "Mencius and Socialism," ibid, 1, 1 (1919): 157-68.
204 Marxism, China, and Development
50. Chu Chih-hsin, "The Rise of Nationalism and its Transfonnation,** in ibid. 1, 2 (1919): 239-73.
51. Dai Jitao, "The Causes of China's Unrest Considered from an Economic Standpoint," in ibid. 1, 2 (1919): 348, 349.
52. We must be relieved of a mistaken view; we must not think that once foreigners intrude into these businesses, our national sovereignty and our freedom are necessarily impaired, because in actuality, it is not so. The same method has been used in other places, and had not impaired those nations* sovereignty, such as the extensive railway system in the United States, most of which was constructed witti foreign capital.... The United States was not impaired as a result, but rather profited greatly from it and became prosperous. (Sun, "China's Railway Plan and the People's Livelihood," in GQ, vol. 2, 89)
53. "Towards the Europeans, if we use only morality to persuade them, asking those Europeans in Asia to peacefully return us our rights, this is like asking the tiger for his pelt, it cannot be done. We must use military power to completely restore our rights and privileges" (Sun, "Pan-Asianism," in GQ, vol. 2, 769); Sun, "The Press Should Encourage the Construction of Railroads with Foreign Lxjans," in GQ, vol. 2, 255.
54. "Especially important is to maintain and ensure unity, for only with unity can China survive. Once China is united and flourishing, then will she be included among the world's great powers, and will no longer be humiliated and partitioned by other nations." Sun, "China's Railway Plan," in GQ, vol. 2, 90; "The most important issue is that we must have an overarching plan— With this plan, then we can utilize others rather than being used by others" Sun, "How Should China's Industries be Developed," in GQ, vol. 2, 168.
55. Zhu, "The Past and the Future of the Baghdad Railway," in Jianshe 1, 4 (1919): 799-809.
56. Lai Ting, "The Paris Peace Conference and the Financial Situation of Nations," in ibid. 2, 4 (1920): 659-75 and 2, 5 (1920): 851-75.
57. In today's world, nations with military power prosper and advance to the status of a first-class power; nations without military power are destroyed. The evolution of civilization is still in the era of competition, not the epoch of harmony. Amidst this violent competition, we must establish patriotism and the maintenance of our race as our premise. We rely on the soldier to maintain our internal tranquility; we rely on the soldier to protect us from external invasion. Therefore, the survival of the Chinese Republic all depends on the soldier. (Sun, "The Cause and Effect of the Creation of the Republic and the Duties of the Citizen," in GQ, vol. 2, 315)
58. Zhu, "The Rise of Nationalism," Jianshe 1, 2 (1919): 239-40.
59. Zhu, "Public Opinion and Agitation," ibid. 1, 1 (1919): 177.
60. Liao Chongkai, "Currency Reform and Reconstruction," ibid. 1,3 (1919): 473-85 and 1,4 (1919): 789-98.
61. Lin Yungai, "The Prerequisites for the Progress of Socialism in our Time," in ibid. 2, 4 (1920): 687-706.
62. The editors not only provided some of the first Chinese translations of some basic Marxist texts, they also gave evidence of a familiarity with a broad range of Marxist literature, including Marx's Misery of Philosophy; Wage Labor and Capital; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon; Contributions to the Critique of Political Economy; Wages, Price and Profit, as well as vols. 1 and 3 of Capi-
Imperialism, Marxism, and Sun Yat-sen 205
tal. They made reference to Marx and Engels*s The Holy Family and The Communist Manifesto, as well as the Marx-Engels Correspondence. They referred to Engels's The Origins of the Family and Private Property and the State and provided translations for Karl Kautsky's Karl Marx's Economic Theories as well as his Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History (Ethik und materialistische Geschichtsauffassung). There are citations from the work of Karl Liebknecht and Eduard Bernstein as well as long analyses of Achille Loria's The Economic Bases of Morals (Le basi economiche della costituzione morale) and his The Economic Bases of the Social Order {Le basi economiche della costituzione sociale). Hu Hanmin makes allusion to Eugenio Rignano*s Historical Materialism (Le materialisme historique) and M. Tugan-Baranovsky's Modern Socialism and its Historical Evolution (Der moderne Sozialismus in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung). He is even familiar with Lewis Henry Morgan*s Ancient Society, and depends heavily on E. R. A. Seligman*s, The Economic Interpretation of History in his treatment of historical materialism. Emile Laveleye is mentioned in several articles in Jianshe as is Rudolf Stammler.
63. Sun, "The Problem in Foreign Relations," in GQ, vol. 2, 264.
64. Sun, The Vital Problem of China (Taipei: China Cultural Service, 1953), 8-10. This collection, while attributed to Sun, was probably compiled by Chu Chih-hsin. It does, however, faithfully represent Sun*s views. See C. Martin Wilbur, Sun Yat-sen, Frustrated Patriot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 92, 387.
65. Sun, The Vital Problem of China, 96.
66. Sun, The Triple Demism of Sun Yat-sen, ed. Paschal D'Elia (New York: AMS Press, 1974; reprint of the 1931 Wuchang Edition), 90-92, 142ff.
67. In this regard, see Hsu Yu-chu, "The Regulation of Private Capital and Equalization of Wealth and Income,** China Forum 3, 2 (July 1976): 69; see also the discussion in Benjamin J. Cohen, The Question of Imperialism (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 231-45.
68. See Feng Tzuyu, "A Revised *Minsheng zhuyi* and the Future of China*s Political Revolution,** Min bao 4 (1 May 1906): 97-122; Sun, "Promote national Socialism,'* in GQ, vol. 2, 261.
69. Sun, The Vital Problem of China, 124-25.
70. Sun, mple Demism, 532ff.
71. Sun, The Vital Problem of China, 135; Sun, "The Chinese Republic,** The Independent (New York), 9 September 1912, reproduced in China Forum 4, 2 (July 1977): 341-42.
72. See Marx and Engels, The Civil War in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1937), 150, 237; Engels, "Minutes of Engels' Lecture to the London German Workers* Educational Society on November 39,1847,** in MECW, vol. 6, 628.
73. Kevin P. Clements, From Right to Left in Development Theory (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, n.d.), 39.
74. Bettleheim and Burton, China Since Mao, 114-15.
75. Sun, "The Strategy for the Reconstruction of Kwangsi,** in GQ, vol. 2, 451; "To Promote Industry is to Realize Minsheng zhuyi,** in GQ, vol. 2, 225.
76. Sun, "The Construction of Railroads,*' in GQ, 243.
77. Sun, "The Revolutionary Army Must Not Think of Officialdom as a Mean to Make One*s Fortune,** in GQ, vol. 2, 645; "A National Conference is the Way to Solve China's Internal Problems,** in GQ, vol. 2, 745.
206 Marxism, China, and Development
78. Sun, "China's Present and Future," in GQ, vol. 5, 82, 108-09.
79. Sun, "The True Solution," in GQ, vol. 5, 121.
80. Sun, "The Construction of the Nation's Railways is the Key to the Survival of the Republic of China," in GQ, vol. 2, 269-70.
81. Julian Weiss, Jhiwan: One Year After United States-China Normalization (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1980), 86.
82. See the discussion in Alvin Rabushka, The New China: Comparative Economic Development in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hongkong (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1987).
83. See the discussion in Zhao Ziyang, China's Economy and Development Principles (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1982).
84. See Michel Chossudovsky, Towards Capitalist Restoration? Chinese Socialism after Mao (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986).
Marxism, Maoism, and Political Democracy
The undemocratic nature of Chinese society has hampered every aspect of social development in China for the last thirty years. This is a problem that everyone today understands. In the face of this serious situation the people of China have only two alternatives: (1) if we want further development in our society, if we want accelerated development ... we must reform our social system; (2) if we want to continue a Mao Zedong style dictatorship of the proletariat, then we can have no democracy.. .and we cannot attain any modernization of people's lives or of production. China today stands at a crossroads where there is no other alternative.'
For classical Marxism, the existence of a market, and commodity production for a market, signaled the presence of both political dictatorship and individual alienation.^ Capitalists produced goods for sale in the pursuit of profit. Production involved private control and ownership of the means of production. For Marx, that employment and ownership by the "bourgeoisie" implied direct and indirect political dominance over the vast majority of the working population. The owners of the means of production constituted a ruling elite that rendered the executive of the modem state a political "committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."^
For Marx, the relationship between political forms and the economic base that determined their character was relatively simple and direct. "The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus-labor is pumped out of direct producers," Marx maintained, "determined the relationship
of rulers and ruled [The] entire formation of the economic
community... grows up out of the production relations themselves, [together with] its specific political form."^ Relations of production, in turn, correspond to the existing forces of production.
For Marx, whatever the qualifications, the ultimate reality of life was economic. The notion that human beings could obtain meaningful freedom without radically altering economic reality was seen as illusory.
208 Marxism, China, and Development
For Marx, "political emancipation," while recognized as "a big step forward,*' was "not the final form of human emancipation.**' Real human emancipation could only take place with the abolition of private property and the most advanced form private property had assumed: commodity production in a market economy.
Marx argued that the notion of "political freedom** shared all the disabilities of abstract freedoms in general. He illustrated his thesis by reminding his audiences that in the United States the federal constitution did not recognize religion; the state was freed from religion. Religious commitment had become an exclusively private concern and the religious commitment of individuals in no way prejudiced their participation in state activities. Similarly, the federal constitution of the United States did not recognize the differential possession of property. Property holdings were a matter of private, not political, concern.^
Formally freed from both, Marx continued, neither the citizen's religion nor private property were understood to be relevant to govenmient policy. Each individual, whatever his religion or personal wealth, was assumed to be endowed with the same rights and powers with respect to governance. The state was indifferent to both. All were "equal** before the law. One*s religion did not impair or enhance one's status as a citizen, and neither did one*s property holdings.
Marx's analysis, however, went deeper. His contention was that the "freedom of the state from religion," and freeing citizens from religious restriction, left the citizen still subject to religion. For Marx, the extension of "freedom of religion" was not the provision of "comprehensive human freedom." As long as individuals felt the personal need of religion, they were, in some substantial sense, "unfree." Marx understood the very "existence of religion" as evidence of an existential constraint.^
Human beings sought succor in religion, according to the argument, because their lives were deficient. They were, in some sense, "estranged" from their "true essence." The "bourgeoisie" might provide political freedoms, but they could not free human beings.
Marx argued that "the more man puts into God," the less he himself possesses.* God is the illusory compensation for real deficiencies. Politicians who speak of the "freedom of religion" as a political right simply fail to understand the real problem. The real problem is the problem of true freedom, of comprehensive human emancipation.^ Thus, those who speak of "political freedom" provide illusory compensation for the absence of real freedom among the vast majority who possess nothing.
Similarly, those who imagine that exclusive political freedom addresses the real issue of human freedom fail to understand the essential relationship between "private property ... exchange and competition,** and the "value and devaluation of men.**^° As long as private property fmds expression in commodity exchange, the extraction of surplus value from workers as profit, and the employment of labor as a commodity, real human emancipation will remain no more than an aspiration. The state's liberation from property did not free human beings from the oppression of private property.
For Marx, political freedom was a fictive emancipation as long as human beings continued to labor in the market for the profit of others. As long as private individuals held property, and more and more property was concentrated in individual hands, the notion that workers, as individuals, might be truly free, because the state recognized them as all "equals,** was an illusion. Those with wealth controlled the state—and the executive of the modem state became a tool of wealth and property. Thus, even though the modem state, with representatives selected by universal suffrage and controlled by checks and balances, was the "most completely developed form** of political govemance, it afforded, at best, only the semblance of tme human emancipation.
For Marx, all forms of past govemance oppressed human beings. Modem representative governments, although a "big step forward,*' still oppressed human beings by "alienating** them from their "essence.** Human freedom was not to be found in political emancipation, but in the transcendence of the capitalist market.
Capitalism, Marx insisted, was irremediably predicated on the existence of the exploitation of man by man. Private property, and the exchange of commodities in the market, required the realization of profit by individuals as a condition of its survival. Profit, in tum, required that "a certain quantity of surplus labor** be "pumped out of the direct producer, or laborer.** That surplus is "extorted,** and "no matter how much it may seem to be the result of free contract ... it remains forced labor in essence.**^^ Thus, even if the individual in a "free democracy'* enjoyed all the rights of citizenship, he could not be "tmly free.** "The realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases Freedom ... can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control."'^
For Marx, true emancipation was the result of the liberation of humankind from the burdens of labor, the necessity to serve the needs of others in order to survive, the insecurity of unemployment, and the anarchy of production. That liberation could only be a function of the full maturation of productive forces. Where human beings are no longer required to labor to satisfy their most primitive material concerns, there freedom conmiences. Where abundance frees humans from the constraints imposed by the pursuit of personal profit and the inevitable fluctuations of the market, there true emancipation begins. With abundance, private property no longer has a reason to exist—and with its disappearance, the commodity market disappears. It would no longer be necessary to realize profit in the course of production. Production would be undertaken for use, not profit. Production would be "rationally regulated" and "controlled.*' As a result, there would no longer remain a "cleavage" between "the particular and the common interest." Labor would be undertaken voluntarily. "Society [would] regulate the general production" and make it possible for each individual "to do one thing today and another tomorrow."^^ Human beings would have been freed from the tyranny of the market—the need to work in order to survive.
Given this notion of "human emancipation," the concern for what is generally imderstood to be "political democracy" was a matter of only secondary interest for the first Marxists. The enjoyment of protected political and economic rights in a representative democracy was a matter of derivative and secondary concern. Those rights were illusory at best—at worst, they deflected revolutionary energies away from the radical resolution of modem problems.*"*
For Marx, "true freedom" could only be a product of the transcendence of private property and commodity exchange. Political democracy was of marginal interest. As long as private property and the exchange of commodities for profit persisted, true human emancipation could not be attained.
What is equally clear is that once private property was overwhelmed by revolution, and production was "rationally regulated" by "labor in association," Marx anticipated a radically democratic political order. "Human emancipation," sought in the realization of a nonmarket "rational communitarian productive system," was informed by a political system characterized by universal suffrage, referendum and recall, rotation in office, and salaries maintained at the level of workingmen*s wages.
Marxism, Maoism, and Political Democracy 211
Marx considered the Paris Commune of 26-28 March 1871 the first successful revolution by the proletariat and illustrative of the character of the anticipated socialist regime. Engels advised those who sought to know what "proletarian rule" might be like to look at the Paris Commune. The Paris Commune was the embodiment of the transitional "dictatorship of the proletariat*'—that form of institutional politics that would persist until the transition to communism was complete and familiar political institutions would have completely "withered away."^^
After the "communist" revolution they anticipated, the first Marxists expected production to be conducted by free labor organized in free association—with the residual politics necessary for the period of transition imdertaken in a democratic institutional setting. In that period of transition, all public posts—legislators, magistrates, and judges—were to be elective, responsible, and subject to recall. Universal suffrage would serve to "put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly." For the first Marxists, nothing could be "more foreign to the spirit" of the successful proletarian revolution "than to supersede universal suffrage by hierarchic investiture. "^'^
Until 1917 brought success to the Bolsheviks, V. I. Lenin accepted just that interpretation of the role of political democracy in the course of socialist revolution. In his State and Revolution, written on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin argued that Engels had instructed the proletariat to "seize state power" and turn the means of production into state property—presumably following the processes pursued by the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune.
The "public power" seized by the revolutionaries would become the anticipated "dictatorship of the proletariat"—admmistered as a popular democracy. As had been the case in the Paris Commune, the revolutionaries would replace the smashed state machinery of the bourgeoisie with a "fuller democracy" in which "all officials would be elected and subject to recall" in what Lenin saw as a transformation of "bourgeois into proletarian democracy. "^^
All of this was to transpire in a revolutionary situation in which "capitalist culture" had already
created large-scale production, factories, railways, the postal service, telephones, etc., and on this basis, the great majority of the functions of the old "state power" [would] have become so simplified and... reduced to such exceedingly simple operations... that they [could] be easily performed by every literate person...
212 Marxism, China, and Development
performed for ordinary "workingmen*s wages**.... All officials, without exception [would be] elected and subject to recall at any time.... [These] simple and "self-evident** democratic measures... [would] serve as a bridge leading from capitalism to socialism.**
Whatever the innovations Lenin had introduced into classical Marxism between the time of Engels's death in 1895 and the advent of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, it was clear that he attempted to remain true to its main outlines. He recognized representative democracy as the most advanced and progressive form of bourgeois politics. He also recognized that bourgeois democracy, in and of itself, could not deliver "true human emancipation" because it served as a perfect shell for industrial capitalism—and industrial capitalism was a refined machine for human exploitation.^'
What Lenin was not prepared to contend with was successful revolution in a primitive economic environment, where there was no large-scale production, factories, or railways, where rule would be complicated by tasks that the first Marxists had assumed would have been discharged by the enterprisory bourgeoisie.
Trapped in a totally unanticipated economic and social environment, Marxism-Leninism was compelled to improvise. From what Lenin had expected to be a "public power*' in the process of withering away, in the space of two decades not only did the Soviet state not "die away," it grew into what Trotsky called "a hitherto unheard of apparatus of compulsion." Not only had it not been possible for ordinary citizens, at ordinary workingmen*s wages, to operate the institutions of the state, but a self-sustaining bureaucracy had emerged that "turned into an uncontrolled force dominating the masses."^®
It was Stalin, of course, who gave shape to the Soviet state. Having assumed the obligation of mobilizing a backward economy for centrally planned and controlled growth and development, the Stalinist state necessarily arrogated to itself unprecedented powers. Entire sectors of the economy were exploited to fuel the processes of growth and development. Compulsion and terror were employed to ensure compliant behavior. Millions were consumed in massive agricultural failures and political violence.
The political system of the Soviet Union had degenerated into the dictatorship of a political party over society and of one man over that party. The concentration of power in the hands of a single authority led
to an atrophy of the leading organs of the party. By the end of the 1930s, Stalin had made victims of the Communist party itself. Members of the party congresses, and the Central Conmiittee, together with regional party secretaries, marshals, admirals, army corps commanders, regimental commanders, and managers of Soviet industry were all consumed in the political devastation. It is estimated that in Stalin's Great Purge, 15 million Soviet citizens perished.
All the institutions of Soviet society were controlled, directly or indirectly, by Stalin and the party he had made his instrument. The economy, the educational system, the media, the churches, all political life, and, in the last analysis, the family were subject to control through a network of legal and extralegal constraints and compulsions that Trotsky saw as sharing a "deadly similarity'* with those of fascism.^'
By the mid-1930s, Stalin had created state machinery whose scope and power exceeded that of any antecedent. Stalin enjoined his followers to "further develop Marxist theory" to meet the unexpected demands of nonmarket development in a primitive environment. Classical Marxism, he reminded his audience, could not foresee "each and every zigzag of history." All the talk of universal suffrage, referendum and recall, and state officials enjoying only limited tenure at workingmen's wages, was no longer applicable to a party government that had assumed the responsibilities of shepherding the economy of an entire nation through the process of growth and development. All the talk of the "withering away of the state" was inappropriate to a state that had assumed the responsibilities of governing the complex life of an entire nation.^^
In his Sixteenth Report to the Communist party of June, 1930, Stalin maintained:
[W]e stand for the withering away of the state. At the same time we stand for the strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the mightiest and strongest state power that has ever existed. The highest development of state power with the object of preparing the conditions for the withering away of state power—such is the Marxist formula. Is this "contradictory"? Yes, it is "contradictory." But this contradiction is bound up with life and it fully reflects Marx's dialectics."
These were the elements of a theory of politics and the state inherited by Mao Zedong. There is no evidence that Mao knew or appreciated any of the subtleties articulated by the young Marx. He dealt with revolutionary politics exclusively from the position that had been assumed by
214 Marxism, China, and Development
Stalin in the course of consolidating communist rule in the Soviet republics. By the time of Lenin's death, Stalin had already put together the rudiments of a conception of revolutionary politics around which Mao fabricated his notion of a presocialist "new democracy. "^^
By the mid-1920s, Mao had already accepted the conviction that all of world politics could be reduced to "an era in which capitalism is unquestionably dying and socialism is unquestionably prospering.**" Reactionaries collect around the failing standards of domestic and international capitalism while revolutionaries identify with the rising proletarian interests of world socialism.
Given that particular set of convictions, Mao argued that the variety and number of "state systems" in the world could be reduced to "three basic kinds according to the class character of their political power: (1) republics under bourgeois dictatorship; (2) republics under the dictatorship of the proletariat; and (3) republics under the joint dictatorship of several revolutionary classes.^'^^
Somehow or other, Mao imagined that the world's multiplicity and variety of state systems could be reduced to those three categories he identified as particular class dictatorships. However implausible the enterprise, the identification of all of them as "dictatorships" was illuminating. Mao had reduced the complexity of contemporary politics to a few simplisms. Every government—and every government was a dictatorship—represents the class interests of one or another class. For Mao, the prevailing conflict was not between dictatorship and political democracy, but between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The intermediate form he recognized as the "dictatorship of several revolutionary classes** was transitional, ultimately destined to give way to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Mao argued that after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, the course of world history revealed itself. Ultimately, the entire world would welcome the proletarian revolution, and the epoch of the "Great Harmony" would commence. In the interim, governance by the "dictatorship of several revolutionary classes" manifested itself—with the clear recognition that it would gradually transform itself into a "dictatorship of the proletariat. "2^
All of this had been suggested by Stalin himself, as early as the 1920s.^* The transitional form of rule, the dictatorship of several revolutionary
Marxism, Maoism, and Political Democracy 215
classes, was also called a **new form** of democracy—a "new democracy*' to distinguish it from the "old." Mao seized on that distinction in order to distinguish his "new democracy" from the "bourgeois democracy" that Sun Yat-sen had made familiar to the Chinese revolutionaries at the turn of the twentieth century.^'
Mao argued that at the time of the Qing dynasty, the struggle for "bourgeois democracy" constituted a credible goal. At that time the "bourgeois world revolution" was still progressive. With the advent of the First World War and the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, however, international capitalism was clearly entering into eclipse.^ Capitalism had begun its inevitable decline. The democracy that had appealed to the antidynastic revolutionaries of 1911 had become an anachronism. After the abolition of the monarchy, it was the proletariat and not the bourgeoisie that represented the future for China. It was the "new democracy"—the "dictatorship of several revolutionary classes"—that would be the vehicle of redemption for the new China.
Mao's argument was that "bourgeois democracy"—representative government as it is known in the industrialized democracies—had been bankrupted by changes in the modem world. In his judgment, "Western bourgeois civilization, bourgeois democracy and the plan for a bourgeois republic have all gone bankrupt."^* China's future was bound up with that of the victorious Soviet Union and the "people's democracies" that had become its allies. For Mao, the future was inevitable and the victory of worldwide socialism assured.
While Mao remained uncertain about China's immediate future in the mid- and late-1940s, he was certain that the "old democracy" would not do. The "old democracy" was the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. What China required was the "new democracy"—a dictatorship of several revolutionary classes and fragments of classes—including the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie, the intellectuals, the national bourgeoisie, and the proletariat—all led by the Communist party as the vanguard of the proletariat.-'^
On acceding to power, that "new democracy" would use dictatorial methods in suppressing the revolution's class enemies—the "comprador big bourgeoisie," the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, the landlords, those elements of the petty bourgeoisie that fall away from the demands of the revolution, the "reactionaries" of all classes, together with "robbers, gangsters, beggars and prostitutes."^^ Revolutionaries,
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led by the working class and the Communist Party... enforce their dictatorship over the running dogs of imperialism... [and] deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak....If they speak or act in an uruuly way, they will be promptly... punished.... The [new democratic] state is the instrument by which one class oppresses another. It is an instrument for the oppression of antagonistic classes; it is violence.^
Since Mao had accepted without qualification the conviction that all governments were essentially dictatorships, pursuing the interests of whatever class or classes happened to be in the ascendent, he drew no distinction between representative elective democracy, constrained as it might be by reserved rights, and simple autocracies. Mao perceived no real distinction between Hitler *s National Socialist Germany and the representative government of the United States. Throughout his life, Mao remained convinced that no matter what the form of government, the bourgeoisie of the capitalist countries sought only to impose a "bloody militarist dictatorship" on their subject populations.^^
For Mao, the proper response to such a universal threat was the creation of a "dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes" over any and all "bourgeois elements, counterrevolutionaries and traitors." A "system of government" was nothing more than the "form in which one social class or another chooses to arrange its apparatus of political power to oppose its enemies and protect itself." In the case of the "new democratic state system," government would be conducted in accordance with the principle of "democratic centralism," for only through such a disciplined and centralized system could the "will of all revolutionary people" be "fully expressed," and the fight against the enemies of the revolution be conducted most effectively.^
The invocation of "democratic centralism" as an instrument of rule fully reveals the character of Mao's "new democratic state." In 1924, Georg Lukacs spoke of the "Leninist state" as it took form after the Bolshevik Revolution. He held it to be "the first class state in history which acknowledges quite openly and unhypocritically that it is a class state, a repressive apparatus and an instrument of class struggle." "Democratic centralism," in turn, was a device for assuring "rigorous discipline" in the bitter struggle. Out of the "more or less chaotic mass of the [revolutionary] class as a whole," a "group of single-minded revolutionaries ... the tangible embodiment of proletarian class consciousness," would self-select to provide the "theoretical clarity and firmness to stay on the right course despite all the hesitations of the masses. "^^
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In fact, it is generally acknowledged that "Lenin's principal argument for centralized direction and control by the party command was that only firm leadership would be able to steer the movement through difficult periods, the implication being, of course, that only the leaders can know what is best.'*^'
While Lenin had sought to impose this discipline and this leadership on the revolutionary party, it was Stalin, and subsequently Mao, who imposed it on entire nations. Those who resisted were either punished or "re-educated." Mao confided that when the "people has a powerful state apparatus in their hands" they would exercise "dictatorship... over the reactionaries." Where simple compulsion failed, the "powerful state apparatus...under the leadership of the Communist Party" would "remold" opponents.^'
The entire rationale of governance disciplined by "democratic centralism" is predicated on the conviction that there are some among us who possess impeccable theoretical and practical knowledge about the present and future—who can anticipate events and can competently manage those forces that shape human destiny. For Mao, those who lead the party and the state fully comprehend the unalterable fact that certain "roads must be taken" by humankind. They possess that wisdom because as leaders of the world proletarian revolution they were heir to "Marxism-Leninism, the universally applicable truth."'*°
In its maturity. Maoism through the "genius" and "creativity" of the leader, provided the state with an "all-conquering weapon" composed of "Mao Zedong's Thought," the "ideological and political telescope and microscope for observing and analyzing all things." Since it was held that "every sentence of Chairman Mao is the truth," any resistance to "Mao's thought" was error. "The attitude towards Mao Zedong's thought" was considered "the touchstone" to distinguish "between revolution and counterrevolution." Those who "love Mao Zedong thought warmly" were revolutionaries; those who did not were reactionaries, to be punished or "remolded.'"**
Maoism conceived itself as governance by those who know. It was dictatorship by those possessed of "Mao Zedong Thought—the greatest truth ever known since time immemorial."'*^ Maoism, like the Marxist-Leninist system upon which it modeled itself, was an "epistemocracy," rule by those possessed of that infallible wisdom embodied in the "universal truth of Marxism.'"*^
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After the seizure of power in 1949, the germs of despotism already inherent in the notion of a "new*" Marxist-Leninist "democracy** rapidly matured into what has been called the "totalitarianism of the ultra-leftists.**^ That totalitarianism was already implicit in the Maoism of the late 1930s and 1940s with its talk of the leadership of the proletariat and its vanguard in the Communist party. By the time it had succeeded to power, the Communist party of China assumed the role of the most essential dynamic component of governance. As the concentrated political will of the "revolutionary classes,** the party became the key institution of the state, performing critical ideological, political, administrative, economic, and security functions. The party came to exercise bureaucratic and administrative authority over a vast network of central, provincial, and urban districts and rural counties. It managed production in state enterprises, allocated resources, circulated goods, provided employment, and made provision for services such as housing, medical care, welfare benefits, and education, as well as affording opportunities for recreation. By 1973, the constitution of the Communist party of China fully acknowledged that "all state organs...and all mass organizations must accept the centralized leadership of the Party.** It was formally specified that "of the seven sectors—industry, agriculture, commerce, culture and education, the army, the government and the Party—it is the Party that exercises overall leadership.**^^ Within the party, real power was concentrated in the Politburo and, more particularly, in the Standing Committee of the Politburo, among whose members the most important figures were those of the party chairman and the vice-chairman. Until the mid-1970s, it was Mao Zedong, the chairman of the party and the acknowledged supreme leader of the nation, who dominated all decisions.'*^
After the death of Mao, mainland Chinese intellectuals identified the system that had emerged in China after 1949 as one that had "perverted** Leninism. While Lenin had insisted on democratic centralism to maintain party discipline under the pressure of revolutionary events, Stalin had "absolutized** his views and had argued that party dictatorship was essential to the governance of the Soviet state—in the course of which the state would become "the mightiest and strongest state power that has ever existed.** The party was transformed into a bureaucratic stratum that ruled, through the machinery of the state, over society, its economy, and a subject population.'*^ Maoism was simply a local variant
Marxism, Maoism, and Political Democracy 219
of Stalinism. "The main theory of *party' and *state' transmitted to the Chinese Communist Party was Leninism in its Stalinist form. ... It advocated a tight concentration of decision-making power in the hands of a supreme leader and his cohorts and offered scant provision for effective mass participation in or control over the state machine.*"**
By the time Mao died, it was clear that a mood of revulsion threatened the stability and continuity of Communism on the Chinese mainland. There was evident weariness with the recurrent mass campaigns organized to resist "capitalist roaders," the followers of Lin Biao, and a variety of other "counterrevolutionary** forces, that seemed to surface and resurface without pause in Maoist China.
Through whatever means were left available to them, young intellectuals, aggrieved citizens, and those who had suffered at the hands of the authorities voiced their criticisms of the prevailing system. As early as 1973, young worker intellectuals, often former members of Mao*s Red Guards, began to raise objections to the political system that they saw as unrepresentative and unresponsive. Even while considering themselves Marxist-Leninists and supporters of Mao 21edong thought, these youthful spokesmen took exception to the system as it had matured since the Communist seizure of power in 1949.
During the early 1970s, Chen Erjin, a young worker intellectual, wrote the first draft of his On Proletarian-Democratic Revolution. He had undertaken an active role during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as a leader of a "Rebel" Red Guard unit in Kunming. He had participated in at least one of the mass rallies held in Tiananmen Square at which Mao exhorted hundreds of thousands of Red Guards to take the battle to the "Black Headquarters*' of the "capitalist roaders** in the party.
At the same time, other former Red Guards, members of "The Red Headquarters Call-to-Arms Combat Group,** had put together the first draft of a long, critical discussion of "Socialist Democracy" that was later to appear as On Socialist Democracy and the Chinese Legal System. Li Zhengtian, one of the authors, had been imprisoned in 1968, and while incarcerated he began to outline a critical assessment of politics during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Together with Chen Yiyang and Wang Xizhe, Li became a major spokesman for post-Maoist dissidents, and a major critic of Maoism in general.
The first discussions of the early 1970s were characterized by their "Marxist-Leninist" and "Maoist" enthusiasms. Neither Chen Erjin nor
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the three authors of "On Socialist Democracy" leveled their criticisms against Mao or the transmogrified Marxism of the Conmiunist party of China. Their principal objections were directed against "revisionism*' or the "Lin Biao System" that had imposed so much hardship, oppression, and deprivation on the Chinese people during the decade of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution/'
What is instructive is not so much their differences, but the similarities found in their assessments. These early criticisms all turn on an attempt to understand how oppression and exploitation could have surfaced in a "Marxist" and "revolutionary" system. If communist revolution was intrinsically progressive, how was it possible that it could spawn something as retrograde as "revisionism" and the "Lin Biao System"?
The authors of these accounts all recognized that it would not be enough to identify the failures of the system with the frailty of men— with individual character flaws, and the collective absence of virtue. All were sufficiently Marxist to attempt to trace flaws of character to material "socioeconomic roots."
In fact, all associated the failings of the system with the realization that under the prevailing arrangements a thin stratum of administrative functionaries controlled the vast bulk of a society's resources, productive capabilities, and welfare benefits. Chen Erjin identified oppression and privation among the people of mainland China with the evident incompatibility between "social production under public ownership and ... coercive monopolization of power by [a] minority. "^° For the authors of "On Socialist Democracy," the focus of their objections was not only Lin Biao and the "socialist-fascist" system he created, but on the existence of a "privileged stratum" that made it possible.^^
The "stratum" of privileged bureaucrats who dominated "public property" succeeded in exploiting the masses of industrial and agricultural laborers, denying workers wage increments in the presumed intention of accumulating capital for extensive industrial growth, and extracting tributes of "loyalty" from peasants in order to transfer assets to the modem sector of the economy.^^ In effect, the authors of "On Socialist Democracy," like Chen Erjin, addressed their criticisms to an entire body of Communist party officials that battened on the privileges that arose out of their dominance of the nation's "planned" economic base.^^
In their search for redress, the authors of "On Socialist Democracy," like Chen, invested their confidence in the institutions of political de-
mocracy. They all advocated the institutionalization of legal and electoral constraints on arbitrary power. Without such constraints there could only be
the expropriation of the various freedoms—of speech, publication, assembly, association, change of residence and choice of occupation—of the proletariat and working peoples as a whole: the turning of society into a prison for the confinement of their physical and intellectual liberty. It means the fascist tyranny of the bureaucrat class—the wanton jeopardization of citizens* personal security.^
With the death of Mao, and the end of the struggle between the remnants of Mao's followers and the "pragmatists" of Deng Xiaoping, a wave of dissent found expression in the "big character posters" that began to appear in all the major cities of the People's Republic. Most of the posters protested their abiding socialist and Marxist sentiments, but they almost all sought institutionalized defenses against future political abuse. They appealed for some form of official protection for the most elementary forms of political liberties.^^ There was a clear recognition that without responsibility to any identifiable constituency, dependent on their superiors through a system of hierarchical appointment, the bureaucrats of China's planned economy exercised arbitrary control over the people and the future of China.
There was a persistent cry for the recognition of legitimate differences of opinion, for the protection of the rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and travel. There was a call for the rule of law, for consistency in regulation, coherence in rule-governed behavior, and the availability of institutionalized opportunity for the defense of those charged with political offenses.
By the end of the 1970s, the critique of Maoism had matured into a fairly rigorous, and reasonably sophisticated, appraisal. By that time, Wang Xizhe, one of the authors of "On Socialist Democracy," reminded his audiences that the original founders of Marxism had argued that the classless and free society they anticipated required the full maturation of the available productive forces. Only material abundance could lift the onus of class distinctions and real and relative privation from humankind. Without that, there forever would be invidious distinctions and the dominance of some over others.^^ As long as that was true, ordinary citizens should have protection against arbitrary rule.
They went on to argue that when revolution came to backward nations such as czarist Russia and post-dynastic China, the result could
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only be a massive revision of Marxist theory. Wang identified the Leninist revision of Marxism with creating the potential for the despotic bureaucratization of society. By making "socialist" revolution in a backward economy, Lenin had charged the revolution with the "bourgeois responsibility" of creating the "material preconditions for the realization of socialism." Socialism required an antecedent modernization and industrialization. It was eminently clear that "scientific socialism" could not be "realized...in an economically backward nation."^^ It was left to Stalin to undertake the creation of the preconditions of socialism out of a traditional agrarian economy.
Wang reminded his audience that Lenin was fully aware of the dangers that cast their shadow over his revolution should it be isolated in retrograde Russia. Bureaucratization threatened any attempt to develop industry and pursue modernization under nonmarket conditions. To ward off any such threat, Lenin advocated the retention of some elements of the market, as well as the expansion of democratically organized worker and peasant cooperatives in an effort to limit the dominance of political bureaucracies in a developing economy. Only those "democratically elected" by their constituencies could pretend to truly represent the interests of the working classes. Without democratic representation, bureaucratic dominance would be all but inevitable.
Wang argued that Lenin understood that in backward economies attempting accelerated development, it would be necessary to marshall planning and management expertise. In circumstances where the working classes could not provide the requisite expertise, a privileged stratum of skilled professionals could exploit advantage and arrogate to themselves total control over the evolving system.
Chen Erjin had already outlined the institutional implications of such circumstances. Exercising the powers of planning and management, a bureaucracy could free "itself from supervision by the broad mass of producers." Quoting Engels, Chen refers to the emergence of a "special class freed from actual labor...[only to] saddle the working masses with a greater and greater burden of labor to its own advantage."^*
Such a system features the hierarchical investiture of the bureaucracy, the "sanctification of the party," and the "canonization" and "idolization" of the party leader. Chen rehearses the familiar series of substitutions: the people find their political fulfillment through the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy through the party, and the party through the leader. The
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absolute leader ultimately undermines the integrity of the party and it "ends up being communist in name alone.** It emerges as a "revisionist, fascist party. "^^
Wang Xizhe later indicated that all of this could never have been "a problem for Marx, because he never anticipated that a socialist revolution could be carried out in a nation where the economy and culture were backward and where the people were incapable of self-rule.*'^ For Wang, the system that consolidated itself on the Chinese mainland was certainly not Marxist. Neither was it Leninist. It was Stalinist.
By 1980, Wang was no longer advocating the reform of Maoism; he sought, instead, to explain its origins and development. For Wang, the political despotism that afflicted the People's Republic was a variant of Stalmism, created to husband a less-developed economic community through nonmarket planning from traditional and agrarian circumstances to modernization and industrialization.
It was concerned with machines, targets, statistics, tractors, and steel refineries.... It was not at all concerned with Marxist ideals.... It was a type of "socialist-fascism" that, in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat, foists upon the proletariat and the broad masses of the people a dictatorship of a privileged class of bureaucrats.**
Neo-Stalinism necessarily commits its advocates to invest confidence in the conviction that "will and spirit can replace everything.**^^ That, in turn, meant that exceptional leadership became critical in supplying "ideological truth" to masses expected to transform reality. The socialism Mao sought to produce in China was predicated on the availability of a population that was both "poor and blank.** Their socialist potential could only be released by those leaders possessed of the "truth.** With "truth in their hands,** such exceptional leaders—providing as they do the mass-mobilizing convictions that inspire to extraordinary enterprise— merit worship. Wang cited Mao*s convictions: "A team must worship its
team leader The problem is not with worship of individuals, but
with whether or not it is the truth.**"
All of this, Wang insisted, "would not only have flabbergasted Marx; it would certainly have caused even Lenin to break out in a cold sweat. **^ For Wang, the entire content of revolutionary Maoism was voluntaris-tic, adventurist, and profoundly anti-Marxist. Everything for Mao was "great** and "exceptional.** There was no place for objective constraints.
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"Great Leaps** were unconstrained by any "law of value**—on any demand that allocation of resources and the distribution of products conform to some standards of balance or efficiency. Those who advocated some measure of cost accounting, static and dynamic intersectoral economic balance, or rational planning, were dismissed as "those in the party taking the capitalist road.**
Wang maintained that Mao*s entire strategy during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was never intended to destroy China *s bureaucracy; it was calculated to destroy that bureaucracy and those bureaucrats who refused to submit without reservations to the authority of the chairman. For that reason, Wang argued, when the Red Guards urged employing the Paris Commune as a guide to antibureaucratic democracy in China, Mao dismissed the suggestion. That would threaten the continued supremacy of a suitably purged Communist party and the unique leadership role of Mao Zedong. To pursue the consolidation of the absolute rule of the charismatic leader and his party, Mao appointed Jiang Qing, his wife, and Yao Wenyuan to supervise the purges of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Mao sought the definitive defeat of his opponents both within and outside the party.^^
For Wang, Mao Zedong's ultimate intention was to "strengthen and expand the apparatus of a Stalinist-style bureaucratic state.**^ That apparatus was necessary for the exercise of control. It was the consequence of Mao*s unqualified commitment to "ultraleftism**—a "petty bourgeois** conviction that will, dedication, and devotion to a cause could, through a docile bureaucracy, transform Chinese reality.^^ What resulted, Wang maintained, was devastation for China. "When Mao Zedong passed on,** he insisted, "he left behind economic collapse and police-state terror.**^*
The remedy, Wang contended, was the introduction of all the elements of "bourgeois democracy,** a democracy having all the historic traits of Western pluralism, but possessed of "proletarian** content. Li Zhengtian, more emphatic than Wang, urged a "people*s** rather than a "proletarian** democracy.
Li rejected the entire notion that an economically retrograde community such as China could, or should, be divided into "classes.** He argued that the entire notion of "classes** was vague and ill conceived. He was uncertain who should be identified as "proletarian** or "working-class.** Despots characteristically use that uncertainty to exploit their subjects.
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Li argued that "people," not only proletarians, deserved the right to determine their own future.^^ He advocated universal suffrage, referendum, and recall. He demanded the rights of expression, assembly, and association for all persons. Together with the institutionalization of a separation of powers—with attendant checks and balances—Li advocated a criminal procedure code that afforded those charged with offenses specific protections. He pointed to the absence of a credible legal system in China. He cited the vagueness that afflicts its "security laws." The absence of definition, codes, and standardized procedures had produced the "lawless laws" and "crimeless crimes" of Maoist China. That assured the suppression of any independent thought or popular initiative. There were "thought crimes" and "crimes of attitude" that stifled inquiry and chilled judgment. More than that, arbitrary rule and despotic laws savaged the population. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, had been condenmed to repeated indeterminate sentences in labor camps, imprisonment, and regional exile.^° What both Wang Xizhe and Li Zhenqtian advocated was "bourgeois democracy."
Chen Erjin's early essay contained very similar sentiments. He advocated a two-party or multiparty system for post-Maoist China. "Political freedom, the right to assembly and association, and freedom of publication" were understood to be "the people's weapons." Chen maintained that only by using those weapons could the people be "producers, and at the same time their own masters.... Under the proletarian-democratic system, the people would enjoy genuine freedoms." Like Li, Chen Erjin advocated a separation of powers and associated checks and balances. He urged "the provision of safeguards for basic human rights," with standing for competitive elections in a multiparty system their indispensable prerequisite. What is clear in all of this is that the mainland Chinese critics of Mao were influenced by the ideas and ideals of "bourgeois democracy" as that democracy is understood in the West.^^
In the People's Republic, the youthful critics of Maoism recognized that whatever Marxism there was in Maoism was a Marxism transformed. It was a Marxism refashioned for use in primitive economic environments burdened by traditions of authoritarian rule. It was a Marxism convinced that will and subjective conviction could themselves create a Utopian reality. It was an arbitrary and autocratic Marxism.
It was a Marxism understood to have created an "inefficient and irrational... economic system," the oppression of "administrative co-
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ercion," and the rigidities of a "Stalinist style bureaucratic system.** The escape they recommended for China took the form of political changes that reflected those to be found in industrial democracies.*^
By the end of the 1970s, the views of such domestic critics were broadcast through "big-character posters*' posted in the population centers of urban China. Most of the posters advocated political changes that would provide Communist China the essentials of a "bourgeois democratic*' system with its protection of internationally recognized human rights together with the standard catalog of political and civil rights familiar in the West.
Echoes of these recommendations made their occasional appearance in the official publications of the regime. There was some talk of the possibility of "workers' management" of the publicly owned means of production.^^ A minority of authors in the official journals timidly questioned the traditional view that the state should enjoy dominance over the parts, the provinces, the local enterprises, and individuals as citizens.'''* Even as late as 1988, some of the mainstream academics of the People's Republic alluded to the disabilities that attended the state ownership of major enterprise. State ownership allowed bureaucratic control over employment and thus transformed bureaucracy from the people's servant into their master. With government bureaucracies monopolizing production, citizens become, in principle, dependent on the state for their welfare. Citizens become dependent employees.''^ The clear implication was that a nonmarket, bureaucratically dominated economy had political implications that were to be deplored.
In the beginning of the 1980s, the Deng regime, by that time consolidated, undertook to suppress the spontaneous anti-Maoist "democracy movement." The young intellectuals who had ventured on criticism of the flawed regime disappeared into the prisons and labor camps of Communist China. The overt petition for political and civil rights and for system reforms was overwhelmed by the monopoly of coercion possessed by the post-Maoist state.
Before the democracy movement of the late 1970s disappeared, however, there was an appeal to the memory and the political ideals of Sun Yat-sen.^^ The popular sovereignty and political pluralism he advocated no longer appeared anachronistic—"bourgeois democracy" apparently had every relevance for a China that had endured Maoism for more than a generation. More than that. Sun had related representative democracy
-1
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to the economic development of China in a fashion markedly more persuasive than anything found in Stalinism or its Maoist variant.
Notes
1. "Do We Want Democracy or a New Dictatorship?" a wall poster displayed on the "Democracy Wall" in Beijing in 1979, published in Lih-tang Lin, ed.. What They Say: a Collection of Current Chinese Underground Publications (Taipei: Institute of Current China Studies, n.d.), 139.
2. See the discussion in Richard W. Miller, Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power and History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1984), chaps. 3-4.
3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "The Communist Manifesto," in Collected Works, vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1976, hereafter MECW), 486.