p The 9th CPC Congress has not changed the Maoist economic policy which had shattered China’s economy and retarded its development for a long time. It did not work out any practical recommendations, but only reiterated provisions 237 that would serve as a “theoretical groundwork" for Mao’s policy. The CC report to the Congress mentioned the oftrepeated thesis that politics are a commanding force, that production may be stimulated by a “revolution in the superstructure" and by a criticism of the “revisionist line" and once again according to tradition in Maoist propaganda Lenin’s words that politics have a priority over economics were interpreted as a justification of arbitrariness in politics. The congress once again approved the formula: “Agriculture is the basis of the national economy while industry is its leading force.” This formula is contrary to Lenin’s idea that developing industry is the basis of the transformation of the national economy along socialist lines. The congress reiterated that Mao’s group would henceforward carry on the policy of “support on one’s own strength”, a policy which consolidates the disunity of economic cells and places them in a position of state tributaries compelled to complement state accumulations with their own means without claiming any material assistance from the state.

p The years that have passed since the 9th CPC Congress testify to the continued crisis of the Maoists’ economic policy, which fact serves as a direct reflection of the existing discrepancy between their theoretical conceptions and the objective requirements of China’s economic growth.

p It is quite obvious that the establishment of a semblance of “order” by tightening up the military-bureaucratic regime has not helped to improve China’s economy. The country’s militarisation has not helped and cannot help invigorate production activity among the working people, contrary to the Maoists’ expectations. Nor can this be achieved by the system of labour services, under which millions of peasants have to do temporary, arduous and poorly paid work in industry, while hundreds of thousands of intellectuals are transported into the countryside to work on the farms. Nor can the economy be improved by the measures designed to make the millions of Chinese in the semi-subsistence and separated economic units boost production with their bare hands on the basis of manual, unskilled labour, “stimulated” not by any moral or material incentives geared to the results of their work, but by political demagogy, orders from supervisers and threats of reprisal. Nor will the economy be improved by the waste for military purposes of money which 238 is being squeezed out from the people through a lowering of their living standards.

p In 1971, according to Chinese official statistics, China produced 21 million tons of steel and gathered 245 million tons of grain. However, already in the early 1960s, the Republic’s production capacities had made it possible to put out as much as 22 million tons of steel. The results achieved in the production of grain were below those of 1958, although the country’s population had risen considerably since then. This is evidence of the fact that the Chinese economy up till now has not been able to overcome the big economic difficulties brought about by the adventurist policy of the “Great Leap Forward”, the “people’s communes" and later of the “cultural revolution”.

p Recent facts testify to certain zigzags in Peking’s economic policy: in a way it reappraises the theoretical “values” of the “cultural revolution”. A part of Chinese leading personnel, especially those who are employed in concrete sectors of economic construction are realising more and more that voluntarist attempts to force up the rate of economic growth through the utmost strain of the workers’ effort, to rely not on objective economic laws and real possibilities but only on Mao’s ideas cannot bring about the expected results. This, it seems to us, explains the now observable in China return to some rational methods of economic management which had justified themselves during the first five-year-plan periods, to the application of economic levers of influencing production. And though the Peking propagandists continue to insist on the “revolutionising” of management in enterprises and on “fighting the revisionist venom of Liu Shao-chi”, one can see in fact the use of forms and methods of economic management which had been subjected to criticism and abolished by the “cultural revolution”.

p The striving to put an end to the chaos and anarchy in industrial management is seen in the attempts to restore the principles of planning in industry and the centralised guidance of enterprises.

p Reality itself forced the Government to resume the work of industrial ministries and the State Planning Committee which had been paralysed during the “cultural revolution”. After a long time it convened a national conference on problems of planning and some sectoral conferences on the 239 same subject. Chinese papers, while mentioning the fact that the “cultural revolution" was so to say “a great stimulus" to the Chinese economy, fulminated against those “hostile elements" who, “under the influence of anarchism and ultraLeft views”, negate the need for economic planning. The mass media have buried in oblivion the “theories” of the sponsors of the “cultural revolution" according to which planning “fetters mass initiative" and centralisation means a “departmental dictatorship”, which “the revisionists and reactionaries" had tried to implant in the country.

p Peking propagandists are bent on expanding the campaign to improve the economic performance of factories and mills based on the application of such categories as cost accounting, prime cost, profit, payment according to the work done, and planning. The journal Hungchih stresses the need for “a maximum utilisation of manpower and equipment, a maximum improvement of labour organisation, better management and higher labour productivity”. As this journal writes, “cost accounting in the national economy is an important method of managing socialist enterprises”.

p Reports from China show that there is a greater tendency towards the restoration of the principle of distribution according to labour contributed, although during the “cultural revolution" the principle of material incentives in general was declared to be “a sugar-coated shell”, “a black revisionist commodity”, “a dagger driven into the back of the revolution”. As was mentioned before, the “cultural revolution" abolished the system of material incentives for good labour, the latter comprising 25 to 35 per cent of the workers’ total earnings. This “reform” was played down by Peking propagandists as an essential “guarantee” against “bourgeois regeneration" to which workers of some socialist countries are allegedly subject. But economic construction has made the Chinese renounce egalitarian dogmas and retain the principles of remuneration for the labour done.

p According to the Chinese press, there is no clear-cut criterion by which to distinguish the universally recognised principle “to each according to labour contributed" from “ revisionism" and “bourgeois economism”. Yet despite all this, the management of many Chinese enterprises is renouncing wage equalisation and is introducing a system of differentiated payment for the labour done in order to stimulate 240 production. An example is provided by the Shanghai Engineering Works, a large enterprise employing over 6,000 workers. Their wages are two or two and a half times higher than those received by apprentices. The wages are fixed here not only with due account for the “devotion” of a worker to “Mao”s thought”, as the sponsors of the “ cultural revolution" insisted, but also for the record of labour service and professional skill. The same situation obtains at many other enterprises and in some agricultural communes. As the provincial newspaper Hunan jihpao points out, “Members of communes who produce more output must receive greater income”.

p Economic experience prompts the most sober managers to come to the conclusion that slogans and quotations cannot replace concrete economic and technical knowledge, that it is impossible to run the national economy without experienced, knowledgeable personnel. In recent times the Chinese have intensified the campaign for “strengthening the guidance of production”, for the gradual return into the sphere of production of those qualified administrative and especially technical personnel who had been defamed and repressed during the “cultural revolution”. After completely reversing its policy in this field the Chinese press is now reporting about “the valuable experience" of making use of the old cadres who are now employed in managerial work. Jenmin jihpao says that “the old cadres must play today the role of the backbone in the management of enterprises" and subjects to criticism the management of those factories who “make insufficient effort to promote their role as technical specialists and managers”.

p According to the Chinese press, the cadres promoted during the “cultural revolution" cannot cope with the tasks they have been assigned because they do not know the elements of economics and often apply methods that do not correspond to realities. On the other hand, the “old cadres”, that is specialists accused during the “cultural revolution" of revisionism, “economism” and other “mortal sins”, sent for “re-education” purposes to rural localities or placed as manual workers in labour-consuming sectors of production, but now returned to their former posts, behave passively, shirk the solution of concrete problems out of fear of entering into conflict with those who watch over their political 241 “trustworthiness”. All this, naturally, exacerbates the moral atmosphere at enterprises and creates additional tensions in the economy as a whole.

p Complex and contradictory, at times even diametrically opposite phenomena and processes occurring in China, the absence of consensus in the Peking leadership concerning the ways and means of the country’s development are bound to retard the progress of the Chinese economy.

p The congress did not work out any practical recommendations, but merely reiterated the propositions designed to serve as a “theoretical foundation" for Mao’s line. It once again repeated the thesis that politics was the command force, that production should be stimulated through “revolution in the sphere of the superstructure”, and criticism of the “ revisionist line”, and once again—in accordance with the tradition established in Maoist propaganda—what Lenin said about politics taking precedence over economics, this being interpreted as justification for arbitrary political acts. Once again this formula was proclaimed: “Agriculture is the basis of the national economy, and industry is its leading force,” a formula which is fundamentally at variance with the Leninist idea of industrial development as the basis of the socialist transformation of the national economy. This provided further evidence that Mao’s entourage is still intent on pursuing the line of “relying on one’s own strength”, a line which tends to perpetuate the fragmentation of economic units and which puts them in the position of tributaries of the state whose duty is to provide resources for its accumulation, without claiming any material assistance on its part.

The 9th Congress did nothing to change the policy which has unhinged China’s national economy and which has retarded her economic development for a long time. The only way to clear the obstacles to this development is resolutely to reject the Maoists’ anti-popular policy, the line which runs counter to the requirements of the objective laws of socialism. So long as this line is being pursued it provides ground for the “tactics of despair" and for preparation of adventurist “leaps forward”, which do not bring the Chinese people anything except greater extra-economic coercion and political deprivation, nothing except fresh burdens and privations.