From Commune to Capitalism. Zhun Xu
in the collectives that greatly improved overall public health and literacy in the Chinese countryside.32 Many peasants still had faith in collective production despite various problems with the existing models. In a widely read book on the history of Chen Village in China, the authors interviewed the people in the 1970s who fled to Hong Kong from the mainland illegally. Many of these people, despite their flight, remained convinced that socialist agriculture was better than the private model and few of them felt hostile to the CCP.33
However, neither the achievements nor the potential support of the majority meant the state would necessarily pursue the socialist path. In Lenin’s vision, under socialism,“there remains for a time not only bourgeois right, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!”34 Mao’s analysis confirmed Lenin’s vision: “China now still has an unequal eight-grade wage schedule, equal exchange, allocation to one’s labor, etc. It would be easy to launch capitalism.”35 Mao was correct. In Lenin’s mind, the bourgeois state machine will be small and democratically controlled by armed proletarians; however, this was not the case in China (and most other socialist countries). Partly due to the influence of the Soviet model, China developed a large state machine with a strong, powerful, and conservative bureaucracy, which meant that there would be no democratic control of the state by workers and peasants.
Thus, the bourgeois state machine in China was able to develop its own interests and political power and reproduce itself by decreasing the power of workers and peasants. But within the state socialist regime, the party-state elites still faced various constraints on their personal wealth and power. Their income was much lower compared to their counterparts in the Western world, and they could lose their privilege anytime in consequence of the mass movements and intense political struggles that occurred.36 Although there was no real bourgeoisie, the group that controlled the state machine had more than enough incentive to become one. The separation of the workers and peasants from the state also implied that the decision of development paths would largely be determined within the state machine, which tended to be pro-capitalist. That was why Mao used “capitalist roaders” to describe a significant portion of the upper-level cadres.
In the first seventeen years of the PRC, 1949 to 1966, these cadre, along with a portion of the elite workers and intellectuals, gradually established their control of the state. Although Mao and his allies resisted this tendency, which was parallel to that observed in the Soviet Union, they were not very successful. This constituted the major reason why Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution. It was only during the radical era (1966–1976) that the old state machine was partly smashed and Lenin’s vision of democratic control of the state machine was partly realized. However, the Cultural Revolution did not successfully establish peasant and worker control of the state, and the old state apparatus was restored gradually in the 1970s.37
Since the anti-socialist coalition had significant political muscle during most of the time Mao was in power, his intervention and personal charisma and authority played a crucial role in the pursuit of a socialist path in China. Sometimes it even seemed that Mao just by himself overturned the bureaucratic state machine.
Partly as a prophecy, the famous 1975 movie Breaking with Old Ideas (Juelie) told a story about collective versus private farming. The socialists had the popular support of the rank-and- file CCP members and most of the peasants, but they lacked political power. The capitalist roaders had the support of rich peasants, but most importantly, they were supported by the majority of the local CCP cadres, who received underground instruction from top central leaders. The socialists lost the political battle. They were forced to leave their positions and were even jailed. It looked as though decollectivization was going to happen when Chairman Mao directly intervened, writing a letter to show his full support for the socialists. In the end, the capitalist roaders were defeated and sunshine came back to the countryside. However, if we follow the movie’s logic, without Mao’s intervention, decollectivization would have been inevitable, given the political structure.
And this was exactly what happened after Chairman Mao died in 1976. There were no major obstacles for the anti-socialist coalition, and the palace coup just added some novel flavor, although it still took some years for them to figure out how to destroy Mao’s legacy.38 Interestingly, Breaking with Old Ideas was banned three years after Mao’s death and was condemned as “poisonous weeds.”39 Starting from the early 1980s, the CCP implemented nationwide decollectivization despite considerable resistance from the peasants and local cadres (for more details see chapter 4). The Chinese peasants, now forced away from the socialist tradition, returned to the status of small producers.
Most working people did not immediately see the implications of all these change for themselves. But artists often did. Only seven years later, in another highly influential film, The Herdsman (Mu Ma Ren), a poor herder is talking with an intellectual who had been a herder in Mao’s era and became a teacher in the post-Mao era: “You were once among us; now we folks are all done.”40
THE STORY CONTINUES IN THE NEOLIBERAL AGE
The triumph of the anti-socialist camp has marked the start of a new era, with socialism semiofficially taken off the political agenda. Nowadays the post-Mao leaders repeatedly claim that China will “never go back to the old road.”41 Yet what will the “new” road be?
With the socialist solution now considered politically incorrect, all that remains is populism and capitalism. An abrupt transformation from socialist collectives to capitalist farms would have been risky in the 1980s, since it might have stirred serious doubts from the masses, created landless peasants, and nurtured political unrest. Therefore, at that moment, a populist solution, with stable small landownership and family farms, seemed more feasible. The decollectivization campaign began in the late 1970s, although it was camouflaged under the guise of “socialist development.” But it actually took the Chinese countryside back to the pre-collectivization historical compromise between populist and capitalist factions that existed in the early 1950s.
If the populist camp in the Mao era was only arguing for a relatively gradual transition to socialist collectives, their contemporary counterparts were looking to something different. Given the changes in the overall political economy, the populist solution was now more aligned with capitalism. In essence, this type of neo-populism or promarket populism portrays a homogenous peasantry with a strong preference for family business and the market.
The ambiguous dividing line between the two factions found its best example in Du Runsheng, the architect of the new agrarian relations and then-head of the National Agricultural Committee.42 Du argued that given the uniqueness of Chinese agriculture—which was “sensitive,” “vulnerable,” and “undermechanized,” in his words—small producers would take better care of the crops than collectives could. In a report published in the People’s Daily, Du claimed that “the contemporary world” has proved that family farming is perfectly compatible with modernization.43 Clearly, this “world” only referred to the United States and Western European countries. In his later years, Du admitted that his ideas came partly from his positive impression of the United States, Japan, France, and other developed countries that he visited after 1979, in particular the widespread presence of family farming and modern technology.44
Despite the seeming superiority of small family farms over all other forms of agricultural production, in Du’s argument, the populist solution did not preclude a gradual transition to large-scale capitalist agriculture. As Du himself emphasized in the same report, “we do not want to maintain petty production forever; we will move on to big modern production.”
Only a few years later, Du revisited the question of agrarian change, adopting an even more pro-capitalist stance. In his speech at the CCP’s Central Party School, Du openly criticized family farms for their inefficiency and claimed that Chinese agriculture should develop economies of scale.45 However, Du denied the advantage of developing collectives, claiming that “the peasants would not support collectives.” Du’s argument implies only one choice: capitalist farms. In line with his idea, Du later made several policy suggestions,