150

p A. Vladimirov

p At the llth plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the CPC, held in 1966, it was proclaimed "the situation for another general leap is taking shape" in China.  [150•*  The Peking leaders evidently intended to repeat the "big leap" experiment. This is not surprising because the "big leap" concept is part and parcel of the "thought of Mao Tse-tung”.

p Practice, as everybody knows, is the final test of any policy, and economic policy is no exception to the rule. How far have the economic directives of the Chinese leadership stood the test of practice?

p After overthrowing the landowners and the big bourgeoisie in 1949 the Chinese people started out on radical social reforms in their country. During the initial years after the revolution they registered impressive achievements in economic and cultural development. In many ways these successes were due to China’s all-round political, economic, military and cultural co-operation with the Soviet Union and other countries of the socialist community.

p China’s economy, dislocated by war and economic chaos, was restored by 1953. From 1953 to 1957, the period of the first five-year plan, gross output of industry and agriculture increased 67.7 per cent. During this period the annual rate of growth of output was 18 per cent in industry and 4.5 per cent in agriculture, gross output of industry and agriculture increasing at a rate of 10.9 per cent. Grain production soared from 108 to 185 million tons in the period from 1949 to 1957.  [150•** 

p The production capacities built or reconstructed with Soviet assistance enabled China to produce annually 8,700,000 tons of pig iron, 8,400,000 tons of steel and 32,200,000 tons of coal and shale. In 1959 the enterprises built with Soviet assistance accounted for 70 per cent of China’s tin, 100 per cent of her synthetic rubber, 25-30 per cent of her electric power and 80 per cent of her lorries and 151 tractors. More than 10,000 Soviet specialists were sent to work in China between 1950 and 1960. From 1951 to 1962 nearly 10,000 Chinese engineers, technicians and workers and 1,000 scientists were trained or given facilities for practical work in the Soviet Union. Over 11,000 undergraduate and post-graduate students completed a course of study at Soviet institutions of higher learning.  [151•* 

p Side by side with the achievements in economic development, serious difficulties came to light by 1958, due chiefly to the enormous gap between the level attained by the productive forces and the requirements of the country’s rapidly growing population. During the period of the first five-year plan employment increased 1.5 per cent annually, while the population increment was 2.3 per cent. The standard of living rose very slowly, with immense difficulty. Despite the relatively high rate of general growth of industrial output, per capita consumption in the period from 1953 to 1957 increased, according to obviously overstated official statistics, at a rate of 5.2 per cent annually. Foreign economists estimate this rate at 1.9 per cent.

p It was found objectively necessary to step up the rate of the country’s economic development. However, objective necessity was one thing, and the ways and means of achieving this acceleration was another. The means adopted by the Chinese leadership proved to be ill-advised, to put it mildly.

p The basic outlines of the second five-year plan of economic development, adopted at the 8th Congress of the CPC in 1956, took into account the country’s real possibilities, its financial, labour and natural resources. It was planned to double industrial output and increase agricultural production 35 per cent in the course of this second five-year plan period. Furthermore, the draft plan envisaged the corresponding growth of investments in agriculture. It was believed that approximately three five-year plans would be required for China’s industrialisation.

p However, as is stated in the Theses of the Central Committee of the CPSU on the 50th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, "at the end of the fifties the CPC leadership adopted a new line in foreign and domestic 152 policy, which was a deviation from Marxism-Leninism and flagrantly contradicted the principles of proletarian internationalism and the basic laws of socialist construction. The Mao Tse-tung group took up a policy in which it combined petty-bourgeois adventurism with great-power chauvinism disguised by Left phraseology; it openly set out on a course intended to undermine the unity of the socialist community and to split the world communist movement”.

p A new line, called the "big leap”, was proclaimed in economic development in 1958. Its aim was to “leap” over natural stages of social advancement and, by using the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses, industrialise China and mechanise her agriculture within an unprecedentedly short span of time. The Chinese leadership called upon the people "to work hard for three years and in the main change the appearance of most regions in the country”. Ignoring the requirements of the basic economic laws and closing their eyes to China’s own potentialities and resources, the Peking leaders planned to overtake and surpass the developed capitalist countries in the principal economic spheres within five years. Then this period was reduced to 2-3 years.  [152•*  The CPC leadership demanded unrealistic rates of economic development, calling upon the people and the Party to increase industrial output 6.5-fold in the next five-year plan period at an annual growth rate of 45 per cent, and boost agricultural output 2.5 times at an annual growth rate of 20 per cent. Steel output was to grow from 5,300,000 million to some 80,000,000 or 100,000,000 tons. It is hardly necessary to say that these “plans” had no scientific foundation and clashed with the Leninist principles of socialist economic management. In short, they were a piece of adventurism in economic development.

p The "big leap" was conceived as a kind of "cavalry charge”. Underlying it was the perverted belief that by fully employing all available manpower, especially in rural localities, production could be quickly increased. The Chinese leadership counted on achieving a considerable effect mainly by intensifying labour and even by reducing wages. They pinned their hopes chiefly on subjective factors such as the revolutionary enthusiasm and patriotism of the people. 153 Instead of material incentives they offered political and moral encouragement. On the whole, the Chinese theorists gave precedence to political consciousness and moral incentives over material incentives, proclaiming the former revolutionary and the latter backward, bourgeois manifestations of “individualism” and “selfishness”. In practice this meant disregarding and stigmatising the socialist principle of distribution according to work. "The big leap,” the newspaper Jenmin Jihpao wrote, "has swept away the principle of material incentives.”  [153•* 

p Peking propaganda claimed that the "big leap" was a fundamentally "new word" in Marxism-Leninism and that it was applicable throughout the world. Rejecting the law of planned and proportionate economic development under socialism, the Peking leaders said they had discovered a law of U-shaped economic development. The substance of this “law” is that the planned, proportionate and harmonious development of all branches of the national economy is alien to the socialist economy; that intrinsic to it is a movement of leaps and bounds, an uneven development in which a sharp upsurge gives way to an ebb. In the report of the Central Committee of the CPC to the Second Session of the Eighth National Congress in 1958 it was stated that U-shaped development is "high at the beginning and the end, but low in the middle. Didn’t we see very clearly how things developed on the production front in 1956-1957-1958 in the form of an upsurge, then an ebb, and then an even bigger upsurge or, in other words, a leap forward, then a conservative phase and then another big leap forward?”  [153•** 

p Another manifestation of the Chinese leadership’s pettybourgeois adventurism and voluntarism was that they underrated the large modern enterprises, scorning modern science and overrating small-scale primitive industry. Instead of completing the large projects, that had been started and whose importance had been formally admitted, the Chinese leadership oriented the economy mainly on small and medium semi-primitive factories. In the press it was argued that 154 small enterprises could be run very cheaply and were more profitable than large factories and mines equipped with the most up-to-date machinery.

p Striking evidence of this “line” was the nation-wide drive to produce pig iron and steel by primitive methods. Hundreds of thousands of medieval furnaces for the smelting of pig iron and steel sprang up throughout China, in the streets and yards of villages and towns. According to the Chinese press nearly 100 million workers, peasants, students and trained professionals were enlisted to tend these furnaces. Household utensils were smelted down. Much of the ore and coal designated for the large iron and steel plants was channelled to these furnaces. Naturally, the blow to the country’s economy was immense. These experiments involved a colossal waste in labour and raw materials. The output of the medieval furnaces proved to be unusable.

p A similar situation was observed in other industries, notably the engineering industry. No attention was paid to quality. Large numbers of tractors, lorries, metal-cutting lathes and so on were manufactured by "simplified methods" in violation of technical requirements. Naturally, these “simplified” machines proved to be useless.

p Industrial production was severely hit by the practice, prevalent in the period of the "big leap”, of disregarding specifications regarding the capacity of machinery, and ignoring the estimates and advice of specialists, technicians and skilled workers. This led to mass spoilage. Valuable equipment was put out of commission and entire workshops and factories were brought to a standstill. The specialists who opposed violations of specifications and technologies were branded as “conservatives” and “reactionaries”, given the sack and, in many cases, sent to "re-education through labour" camps. This thinned the ranks of the Chinese technical intelligentsia, of the cadres most needed for the development of production.

p The Peking leaders calculated that the "big leap" would allow China to be the first country to enter communism. To achieve this they believed it was sufficient to set up a nation-wide network of "people’s communes" that would engage in industrial production, agriculture, trade, education and military organisation and would thus create the conditions "for erasing the distinctions between town and 155 countryside, between workers and peasants and between labour by hand and by brain”.

p “Monobranch agricultural producers’ cooperatives embracing several tens or several hundreds of households,” states a decision passed by the Central Committee of the CPC on August 29, 1958, "can no longer meet the requirements of development. Under present-day conditions, the establishment of people’s communes, in which agriculture, forestry, livestock-breeding, ancillary husbandry and fishing would develop comprehensively, and which would combine industry, agriculture, trade, education and military organisation, is a necessary basic policy aimed at leading the peasants in accelerated socialist construction, the building of socialism ahead of schedule and the gradual transition to communism.”  [155•* 

p The Chinese leaders maintained that the "people’s communes" envisaged by them would "develop into the primary unit of the future communist society”. The "experimental rules of the Weihsing people’s commune”, published in Jenmin Jihpao as a guide for local organs of power, stated that the "people’s commune" was the "primary organisation of society”.  [155•**  The Chinese leaders pictured the entire country as an association of "people’s communes" with a self- sufficient natural economy resting on a primitive technological foundation.

p These petty-bourgeois views, reflecting an aspiration to make the "people’s communes”, districts and entire provinces economically self-sufficient, ran counter to the objective trend of socialist economic development towards the specialisation and cooperation of production on the scale not only of one country but of the socialist system as a whole. By forming "people’s communes" the Chinese leaders disrupted the economic links and cooperation between individual areas and thereby inflicted tremendous damage on the Chinese economy.

p They regarded the "people’s commune" as a lever that would enable China to go over from collective to public ownership in agriculture and to the communist principle of distribution within a matter of a few years (from three to 156 six years). In 1958 the peasants in many areas were deprived of their ancillary plots of land and all the property of the commune members, down to household utensils, was socialised. Article 5 of the above-mentioned "experimental rules of the Weihsing people’s commune" prescribed the socialisation of the land granted to commune members for their personal use.

p Army regulations were introduced everywhere. Labour organisation was militarised: the peasants were formed into companies, regiments and divisions. They received equal payment for labour and meals at socialised canteens, independently of the results of their work. This, of course, adversely affected their desire to work.

p In December 1958 the task was set of substantially reducing the area of ploughland (it was planned to use the released land for storage lakes and orchards). The national conference of foremost farmers, held early in 1959, decided "gradually to reduce the crop area and the manpower in agriculture and turn the country into a vast orchard”.  [156•*  The newspaper Jenmin Jihpao called this decision a "programme of struggle of all the people’s communes”.  [156•** 

p Having put forward the slogan "sow less and harvest more”, the Peking leadership now demanded deep ploughing (in some cases down to a metre) and dense sowing (in some experiment plots rice was planted so closely that the fields were a solid green mass on which it was possible to walk without falling through).  [156•***  “Instructions” of this kind were completely at variance with real possibilities and elementary requirements of modern agronomy. These “innovations” led to smaller yields of grain and industrial crops, loss of soil fertility and a general decline of agricultural production.

p Besides, it was found that official quarters were producing fake reports. In the press it was announced that in 1958 grain production totalled 375 million tons, which was double the output in 1957.  [156•****  On the basis of this figure the central organisations and the local authorities and "people’s communes" planned the consumption of grain. Unrestricted free distribution of staple foods was introduced in many areas. 157 The resultant over-expenditure of grain led to an acute food shortage. Soon the Chinese leaders had to announce that in 1958 the grain harvest in fact totalled not 375 million tons but only 250 million tons  [157•*  (but even this was an overstated figure: the 1958 grain output evidently did not exceed 200 million tons).

p In 1959 and 1960 the food situation in China sharply deteriorated as a result of the considerable decline of the grain output, the over-expenditure of a large quantity of grain on consumption, and the drought. In 1961 some areas were on the verge of famine.

p The "big leap" was similarly damaging to industry. During the first year of this "big leap" there was some growth in gross industrial (from 70,000 million to 117,000 million yuans)  [157•**  and agricultural output due to the efforts of the working people, but in subsequent years industrial production declined steadily.

p The principal reasons behind this decline were the diminution of output of agriculture, which provides nearly half of the raw material for industry, the drop in the output of electric power and, in particular, the acute shortage of coal, huge quantities of which had been used up in the tiny blastfurnaces. This dislocated China’s fuel balance, over 90 per cent of which consists of coal. The production of poor quality pig iron and steel created a shortage of metal, and this affected all other branches of the national economy, notably the engineering industry.

p China’s economy was wrenched out of proportion. Due to the raw material shortage, production first dwindled and then came to a standstill at many industrial enterprises. Capital construction was halted. The mass conservation of building projects froze huge funds. The curtailment of production in the light industry created an enormous gap between the output of consumer goods and the requirements of the market. The supply of necessities to the population shrank catastrophically. Soviet economists have estimated that compared with 1956 annual consumption per head of population decreased as follows in 1962-63: grain—from 202 kilos to 135-170 kilos; vegetable oil—from 6.4 kilos to 158 1.5-1.2 kilos. In 1961 food production fell to 170 million tons, as a result of which daily per capita consumption averaged only 900-1,200 calories.  [158•* 

p The economic adventurism of the Chinese leaders brought China’s economy to the verge of total collapse in 1961. It is hard to make even an approximate estimate of the loss suffered by China through the adventurist actions of the Peking leaders—no official statistics have been published in China since 1959. Some idea of the scale of this loss may be obtained from the rough estimates made by Japanese economists. According to these estimates, China’s gross national product in 1964 amounted to only 80,000 or 90,000 million dollars,  [158•**  which is 15 per cent below the 1958 level. American experts, whose analysis is based on some official Chinese statistics, have arrived at the same conclusion.

Table 1 shows that in the period 1952-65 the annual rate of growth of the gross and national product as a whole and in terms of per head of population average 3.3 and 1.4 per cent respectively. The decline of China’s industrial output after 1959 is illustrated in Table 2.

Table 1 GROSS NATIONAL PRODUCT Year Total (’000,000,000 yuans) Per capita (yuans) Year Total (’000,000,000 yuans) Per capita (yuans) 1952 68.6 121 1959 176.8 267 1953 73.3 126 1960 155.9 232 1954 77.8 131 1961 127.5 187 1955 83.3 137 1962 99.5 144 1956 96.4 155 1963 107.4 153 1957 104.2 164 1964 117.3 165 1958 145.0 222 1965 126.2 175 Source: An Economic Profile of Mainland China. Studies Prepared for the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, Washington, 1967, Vol. 1, p. 50. This study was prepared by a team of American experts, who offer their own estimates, which may be, of course, inexact but nonetheless give an approximate idea of economic development in China. 159 Table 2 OUTPUT OF KEY INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTS 1909 1964 Steel (’000,000 tons) ............ 13.3 9 Coal (’000,000 tons) ........... 347.8 220 Electric power (’000,000,000 kw) ...... 41.5 32 Oil (’000,000 tons) .......... 3.7 6.5 Cement (’000,000 tons) ......... . . 12.3 8 Grain (’000,000 tons) ....... 270.5 183 Cotton f 000.000 tons) ............ 2.3 1.2 Source: ’Ilie Oriental Economist, January 1967.

p Such are some of the results of Peking’s widely publicised "big leap”. The CPC leaders were unable to use the favourable opportunities created for development by the socialist state system. Their adventurist policies have cost the Chinese people dear. This experiment may be called a big backward leap.

p In the same way that Big Leap, pride of the Chinese shipbuilding industry built in 1958-59, hit a reef and sank soon after its maiden cruise, the huge ship of the Chinese economy has been cast on a reef as a result of misled handling by its helmsmen.

p The "big leap" could not help but fail because this policy was completely divorced from reality. Mao Tse-tung and his group entirely ignored the fact that in a technologically backward country like China the building of socialism involves greater difficulties than in industrially developed countries. They disregarded Lenin’s warning that circumspection was needed in economic policy. He wrote: ".. .a backward country can easily begin because its adversary has become rotten, because its bourgeoisie is not organised, but for it to continue demands of that country a hundred thousand times more circumspection, caution and endurance. It will be different in Western Europe; there it will be immeasurably more difficult to begin but immeasurably easier to go on. It could not be otherwise, because the degree of 160 organisation and solidarity of the proletariat there is incomparably greater.”  [160•* 

p Not venturing to analyse the effects of the "great leap" after its failure, the Chinese leaders confined themselves to general and vague admissions that some of their actions in that period had been wrong. According to the Peking correspondent of the Japanese newspaper Mainichi, Mao Tsetung admitted at the 10th plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the CPC on September 28, 1962, that "a number of mistakes had been made"  [160•**  in 1959 and 1960, the principal mistakes being the "lack of a correct understanding of the situation and the lack of experience”. At the same time, the Chinese leaders made an attempt to blame the difficulties encountered by the country on various "objective factors" and also on the Soviet Union.

p Life, however, brought the Chinese leaders round to seeing that it was necessary to chart a new economic policy if the country was to be saved from economic collapse. While continuing to defend their discredited theories, they were compelled to take urgent steps to stabilise the economic situation. The line towards, to use their terminology, " adjustment, consolidation, replenishment and enhancement" was adopted at the 9th plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the CPC in January 1961. This new economic policy gave priority to agriculture, to its restoration and development, chiefly in the production of food. The Chinese leadership abandoned long-term planning, going over to operative economic management on the basis of annual plans. In 1964 employment among the non-rural population was 25 per cent below the 1958 level. Nearly 30 million urban dwellers were resettled in the countryside.

p The line towards "adjustment, consolidation, replenishment and enhancement”, aimed at removing the disastrous consequences of the "big leap”, was enforced in the course of five years. In 1965 the national product was restored to its 1958 volume. As regards per capita production, it was still below the 1958 level in 1965. For seven years there was no increment in production while other Asian countries registered steady economic progress. Foreign specialists estimate 161 that during the past eight years the annual rate of growth of production in all branches of the Chinese economy averaged about 4 per cent.  [161•* 

p However, the fundamental problems of the Chinese economy remained unsolved. China fell even farther behind in resolving the basic problem—that of increasing production per head of population. In 1966 the need for considerably speeding up the rate of economic development was more acute than in 1958. Moreover, by that time the external conditions for solving this problem had substantially deteriorated as compared with the 1950s. With their own hands the Chinese leaders destroyed such a vital factor to China as the co-operation and fraternal assistance of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.

p It will be recalled that 1966 was proclaimed by the Chinese leaders as the first year of China’s third five-year plan of economic development. However, the "cultural revolution”, which the Peking press calls a "great strategic measure”,  [161•**  jeopardised this plan.

p The "cultural revolution" and the petty-bourgeois anarchy attending it disorganised industry and agriculture and disrupted transport and communications. Hundreds of thousands of hungweipings and tsaofans travelled back and forth across the country, paralysing the railways and the automobile transport and dislocating supplies and trade between the towns and villages, particularly the supply of consumer goods to the population.

p The countless rallies, meetings and demonstrations distracted tens of millions of workers and peasants from productive work. The baiting of Party and Government cadres hit organisation in industry and agriculture. In this connection the Chinese press had to admit that part of the cadres were obstructing agricultural production, that "some through a sense of injury and others motivated by fear had relinquished their leadership of production, thereby letting things drift”.  [161•*** 

p In a situation marked by petty-bourgeois anarchy it is 162 not surprising that there have been cases of embezzlement and squandering of state and collective funds, of reserve funds of seeds and fodder being arbitrarily distributed among the peasants, of uncontrolled slaughter of livestock. In the decision adopted by the Central Committee of the CPC, the State Council of the PRC and the Military Committee of the CC CPC on January 19, 1967 it was admitted that "state food and other warehouses have been plundered" in many localities.

p Under the slogan of "struggle against economism" Mao Tse-tung and his group have started an intensive drive to lower the people’s living standard. Wages and the general standard of living dropped in the course of the "cultural revolution”. Official Chinese propaganda calls on the people to prepare for further larger difficulties and privation. The fact that for a whole year schools and institutions of higher learning had been closed and students had been distracted from their studies will inevitably affect the training of cadres for all branches of the national economy.

p During the "big leap" of 1958 the Chinese leaders promised the people "ten thousand years of happiness after three years of hard work”. Nearly ten years have passed, but there has been no improvement in the life of the people, and the Chinese economy is running into increasing difficulties. While the "big leap" of 1958-59 wrecked the second fiveyear plan and held up China’s economic development for many years, the "cultural revolution" has torpedoed the third five-year plan with similarly disastrous effects for China.

Mirovaya ekonomika i mezhdunarodniye otnosheniya, No. 10, 1967 pp. 107-13