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p The revolution which in 1949 led to the creation of the People’s Republic of China was an extraordinarily complex phenomenon. Its specific feature was the close intertwining of national liberation and social tasks, and its historical peculiarity lay in the integration of anti-imperialist and anti-feudal torrents. The first few years after the victory of the revolution witnessed the almost simultaneous abolition of colonial dependence, the eradication of feudal survivals, an agrarian reform, the nationalisation of key industries, the break-up of the old state machine, the establishment of a new social system and the appearance of contours of economic and social progress. The ultimate aim of all these changes was to create the foundations of a socialist economy.

p The main difficulties in China’s development towards socialism were: the polystructural nature of the Chinese economy ranging from the clan and primitive communal systems in the outlying regions to the capitalist mode of production in a number of large cities, the extremely low level of economic development, and the almost total absence of the material prerequisites for the socialist mode of production. The backward structure of industry and agriculture, the intricate system of social interrelations and the widening gap between the level of economic development and the population density confronted China’s leaders with grave problems. One of the cardinal problems was the fundamental reconstruction of the primitive productive forces, for without such reconstruction the economy could not hope to develop along socialist lines. But the technical re-equipment of industry was hampered by the meagre sources of capital investment and by the enormous overpopulation. To get around these difficulties there had to be flexibility, a strict account of objective trends and a thorough scientific scrutiny of every major political and economic undertaking.

p The Communist Party of China started out by drawing up a realistic long-term programme for the reorganisation of industry and agriculture. Its salient provisions were: the broad use of state capitalism, gradual cooperation by stages, the building of the foundations of modern industry with Soviet assistance, and the study and creative
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113 Table 1 PERCENTAGE OF INDUSTRIAL WORKERS IN THE GAINFULLY EMPLOYED POPULATION (’000,000) Year Total population Gainfully employed population Number of workers Percentage of workers 1949 549 329 3.0 0.9 1953 596 358 6.2 1.7 1957 657 394 9.0 2.3 1965 735 441 11.0 2.5 Note: No accurate statistics are available in China. In establishing the gainfully employed population the authors acted on the assumption that size of this population is equal to that of the so-called active population and comprises roughly (iO per cent of the total. The figures for the total population in 1949, 1953 and 1957 are from the official Chinese press. The figure for 1965 is an estimate made by the authors. The figures of the latest census taken in 1964 have not been published. In China the annual population increment averages 2.3 per cent and fluctuates in the vicinity of 15 million. The labour force grows by two million a year and exceeds the employment growth 10-fold.
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application of the economic experience gained by the developed socialist countries. These measures could be put into effect provided there was active, creative initiative on the part of China’s millions and their growing participation not only in implementing but also in determining the political and economic line of the newly established people’s democratic state. The close unity of all strata of the people and the promotion of broad social democracy directed by the working class were an indispensable condition of China’s successful advance towards socialism.

p However, the specifics of China’s class structure, in which the peasants are predominant, made it hard for the Chinese working class to carry out its historical mission. In China contingents of the modern working class took shape only in the past few decades. In 1949 industrial workers comprised about 0.5 per cent of the total population and 0.9 per cent of the gainfully employed population.

p Moreover, the Chinese proletariat was concentrated in the industrial centres, and these were islands in the vast 114 ocean of the millions of peasants. Its territorial isolation from the huge masses of atomised peasant households was a major obstacle to the spread of proletarian influence in the Chinese countryside. In addition, the influence of the proletariat was restricted by the propagation of a kind of “ peasant” Marxism in the CPC. The ascension to power of exponents of the "peasant revolution"’ with Mao Tse-tung at their head was accompanied by inadequate understanding of the proletariat’s importance, by the reduction of the entire strategy of the revolutionary process to the thesis of the "village surrounding the town”. No one disputes the immense revolutionary role of the peasants in a country like China. But the development of the revolution solely in the shape of a "peasant revolutionary war" led objectively to an underestimation of the hegemony of the proletariat. The overestimation of the role played by the peasants became particularly dangerous at the stage when the people’s democratic revolution grew into a socialist revolution. Nonetheless, the Chinese proletariat played a considerable role in the revolutionary movement, in the long liberation, anti-imperialist struggle and in building the economic and political foundations of the new, people’s democratic system. In its turn, the revolution brought the working class a certain improvement of its living conditions. Some progress was made in solving the problem of unemployment, which was regarded as insuperable in pre-revolutionary China, the wage system was adjusted, the medical service was improved and social insurance was introduced. However, the partial alleviation of the working people’s lot was quite inadequate in the light of the vociferous and grandiloquent official declarations. The working day was still 10-12 hours long, no system of annual holidays existed and low-paid juvenile and female labour was widely employed at the factories. Apprenticeship was dragged out to five and even seven years, and this allowed paying the apprentices an extremely small wage. This situation was the result not only of the country’s huge economic backwardness but also the Peking leadership’s certain disregard of the elementary demands of the workingclass movement. At their 6th national congress in 1948 the trade unions charted a broad programme of social reforms demanding an 8-10-hour working day, equal pay for men, women and juveniles, and the abolition of the semi-feudal 115 contract system in industry. But most of the programme’s demands remained a dead letter. Their realisation was opposed by Mao Tse-tung, who considered that the drive for an improvement of the proletariat’s working conditions was a syndicalist and economic deviation that checked the revolutionary enthusiasm of the proletarian masses.

p In 1955 and 1957 the infringements of the workers’ economic rights once again became a bone of contention in the Party and in the trade unions. Discontent mounted in the country, strikes flared up in several places and there was unrest among the peasants.”  [115•*  Those who championed the interests of the proletariat were again accused of economism. The deterioration of the condition of the working class was said to be a temporary difficulty of development, but it was becoming evident that China’s leadership was pursuing a questionable policy.

p The realistic programme of economic reforms was increasingly abandoned in favour of gigantesque plans and a feverish economic race. The working people were set the task of achieving, within a matter of a few years, an industrial growth rate that would allow China to overtake and outstrip Britain in the main economic indices and take her to a leading position in scientific and cultural development.

At the close of the first five-year plan period, the economic policy of the Chinese leadership called for a huge acceleration of heavy industry’s growth rate, and this inevitably led to cuts in investments in agriculture. As a result, the Chinese countryside with its primitive technology impeded any steady rise of the rate of industrialisation. This situation would hardly have arisen if the Chinese leadership had not abandoned the programme of comprehensive development of agricultural production through the gradual cooperation of the peasants. The initial programme for the reorganisation of the countryside in the course of three five-year plans was soberly realistic. It envisaged the transfer to collective ownership through a series of transitional stages, the creation of conditions for building up the productive forces, and preparing the peasants for socialist methods of farming. But miscalculations in industrialisation gave rise to gross errors 116 in agricultural policy, one of which was the demand for the maximum acceleration of the rate of cooperation. Without any radical changes in the nature of the productive forces an attempt was made to reorganise the peasants’ way of life within eight months. The peasants were not prepared for this change either economically or psychologically. The certain growth of production achieved through a simple cooperation of labour did not moderate the disproportion between industry and agriculture. Collective farming founded on primitive implements and manual labour could not meet even the requirements of the rural population. Pressured by want, the peasants began Hocking to the towns. In an effort to check this migration the authorities issued special decrees prohibiting any movement on the part of the rural population. The contradiction between the individual and collective interests of the peasants revolved in a vicious circle framed by the callous system of income distribution and attaching cooperative members to the land by administrative order, a system bordering on feudal survivals. The low level of farm output narrowed down industry’s raw material resources, caused food shortages in the towns and, by the law of retroaction, affected the condition of the working class.

Table 2 RATE OF COOPERATION in Date Percentage of peasant households embraced by cooperatives Summer 1955 ..... 15 November 1955 ........ December 1955 ....... about 30 60 January 1956 78 February 1950 ........ 85 April 1956 90 June 1956 .......... 91.7

p The zigzags and convulsions of the political line aggravated the social and economic contradictions in China. Official policy, which came more and more under Mao Tse-tung’s personal direction, began to acquire features of subjectivism 117 and voluntarism in contravention of the democratic principles of the country’s leadership. The quests for methods of removing the disproportion between production and consumption, between the rate of economic growth and the possibilities for accumulation, and between the development rate in industry and agriculture began to be expressed in theoretical concepts justifying the marked discrepancy between the requirements of objective laws and the subjective plans forced upon the people by the leadership.

Chinese practice strikingly shows how political and social life is deformed when it is sacrificed to the anti-scientific dogma of "politics is the commanding force”. Having turned upside down Lenin’s thesis that politics is the concentrated expression of the economy, the Chinese pseudo-Marxists have subordinated the development of social production to their nationalistic political objectives without giving the least consideration for the interests of the people, of the working class above all. Economic management increasingly came under political dictation. The proletariat was deprived of its historical mission in the social revolution. It found itself playing the role of a passive observer, and from the subject of the revolutionary process it turned into the object of the social experiments conducted by the Mao group, which lost its links with the people.