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p G. Gidaszt (Hungary)

p The changes in China’s domestic and foreign affairs over the decade ending in the early 1970s led Hungarian students of that vast country’s social and economic development to reconsider (incidentally, largely on the basis of official Chinese data and assessments) their views of the preceding decades. The results of their work have been set forth in various articles, lectures and scientific writings, making it clear that the turnabout in Chinese policy is not an objective regularity and that the main responsibility for it lies with the Chinese leaders.

p This research shows that the specific features of China’s historical and social development and its extreme economic and cultural backwardness have also been conducive to the grave atterrnath of the distortions and deviations in China’s socialist development, which are largely due to the CPC leaders’ mistakes and delusions and their purposes hostile to Marxism-Leninism. A point to consider is that the contradictions in China’s development reflect some tendencies which are typical of many Third World countries that are backward in socio-economic terms, tendencies which could possibly characterise their future development. What makes the “Chinese question" so complex and multifaceted is, in our opinion, that it is a tight knot of general and particular features, regular tendencies and accidental elements, something which often makes it very hard to distinguish the ones from the others.

p In setting the tasks for Sinologic research in Hungary, we have always believed that while it is complicated by many factors, like the lack of any reliable statistical data, we 60 should, nevertheless, go on analysing the various elements of China’s socio-economic basis and the latter’s interaction with the ideological and political superstructure.

p We accept that for a long time to come the Chinese problem will continue to be one of great political importance from the standpoint of world politics and the international communist movement. We share the view that analysis of the difficulties of China’s socialist development and its leaders’ ideological and political line makes it possible to draw some conclusions for the benefit of both current and future policies.

p Let us emphasise, therefore, that Marxist students of China would do well to devote even more attention to the scientific analysis of China’s socio-economic specifics and, above all, of the forms and methods of transition to socialism deriving from the present situation in the country. Lenin is known to have attached much importance to this problem, especially in the New Economic Policy period. When dealing with socialist development in the Caucasus and the Central Asian Republics he emphasised that future revolutions in the East would bring out even more specific features than the Russian revolution had. We believe research into this question to be particularly urgent and important.

p A scientific approach to this subject warrants the conclusion that the CPC leaders’ policy of the past few years has not at all been due to any objective specific features of China’s socio-economic development. To be more precise, socialist construction seems to require forms and methods other than those used by the Peking leadership.

p The objective regularities of socio-economic development are bound, sooner or later, to make headway in China. But even if policy takes correct account of the actual conditions, these regularities will take on specific forms in accordance with China’s objective socio-economic specifics. That is why it is very important to study and analyse these specifics also with regard to the prospects of China’s socio-economic development. In analysing the specifics of China’s socioeconomic system, one should concentrate on the following questions:

p 1. The extreme backwardness of the productive forces and class relations; the influence of the vestiges of 61 pre-capitalist social relations in the minds of men; and the effects of general cultural backwardness.

p 2. The economic and geographical prerequisites and the demographic situation; the differing production conditions in various parts of the country; and the difficulties and obstacles in establishing production and trade on a national scale.

p 3. Domestic resources (size of accumulations, available manpower) and outside assistance (foreign trade, scientific and technical co-operation, availability of credits, and so on), which can be used to boost the national economy and their interconnection.

p The extreme backwardness of the productive forces and the fact that 90 per cent of all the gainfully employed persons work in agriculture or the handicrafts, burdened with vestiges of the subsistence economy, naturally call for ways and methods of socialist industrialisation that differ in many ways from those used in the advanced countries. It is clear that alongside the gradual build-up of the major modern industries, China cannot afford for a long time to come to give up its traditional production methods, even where handicraft techniques prevail. It is also clear that much external assistance is required to master modern machinery, especially in the first few decades, when the country has to resort to the experience and achievements of countries with advanced science and technology. It is also self-evident that in China, where most of the population is employed in agriculture, the latter is the main sphere in which the broadest and soundest basis of accumulation can be created for rapid development of the national economy as a whole and for industrialisation in particular. But all of this can be only if agriculture yields a steadily growing surplus product.

p In view of the relatively poor development of China’s infrastructure and commodity-money relations, there is fairly wide use of subsistence-economy methods in production and distribution (like the various types of manual labour in the handicraft industry, or payment in kind), whereas in other countries these have remained only as vestiges. The sharp changes in economic policy and the economic situation over the past 15 years or so have not been due to the use of these specific forms and means but, on the contrary, to 62 the fact that the Chinese leaders have for the most part tended to single out one aspect or another from the general range of interconnected phenomena and to exaggerate its importance. So, the “walk on both feet" idea, which is essentially acceptable and is deeply rooted in Chinese reality, has been applied by the Chinese leaders in a lop-sided and distorted manner even during the “great leap forward" when it was most advertised.

p It will be remembered that in the mid-1950s China was set the task of ensuring growth rates in modern industry that could not be achieved because of objective obstacles: on the one hand, the possibilities of accumulation growth and, on the other, the fact that the massive mastering of the necessary technical know-how has its limits. Excessive industrialisation soon had a negative effect on farming and the handicraft industry. The Chinese leaders sought to eliminate the lag in the development of the productive forces in the traditional branches by making changes in the relations of production, e.g., by speeding up collectivisation.

p They assumed (their ideological and political motives apart) that in virtue of the definite economic advantages of simple co-operation (living labour combined with more correct and organised use of the available means of production), collectivisation in agriculture, even without any massive use of machinery, fertilisers or the like, would lead to the rapid build-up of a large stock of additional resources, which could then be used to accelerate the development of agriculture and so to boost the national economy as a whole.

p The point is that from the very beginning of the first five-year period, China’s economy was faced with a major contradiction. Despite the consistent implementation of the agrarian reform, the agricultural basis was still extremely narrow and could not provide the accumulation funds and material resources (raw materials, grain and other foodstuffs, including export goods) that were necessary for rapid industrialisation. It soon became clear that it was impossible to raise the level of the productive forces in agriculture by political organisation and ideological training alone, without any additional investments. Thus, the Chinese leadership had to find ways and means to increase development rates, ways that by adopting many elements of the “walk on both 63 feet" idea, which fits China’s specific conditions very well, could have, undoubtedly, helped to achieve tangible economic results, provided the targets were realistic and the necessary proportions maintained. Because of the Chinese leaders’ subjectivism, however, there was too much emphasis on the massive co-operation of living labour and on traditional methods of production; the role of modern machinery was reduced to a minimum, the difficulties connected with its mastering were overlooked, and highly unrealistic, voluntarist plans totally out of touch with China’s socio-economic conditions were put forward.

p Subsequent events showed that the Chinese leaders’ adventurist domestic policy, which developed into the “great leap forward”, was closely tied in with their foreign-policy plans, whose final goal was to subordinate the common interests of the socialist camp to those of China, and to give China dominion over the international communist movement. This, other considerations apart, is one of the reasons behind their refusal to admit the failure of their economic development concept. Nor have they succeeded in their attempt to put the blame for their failure on external factors, natural disasters, the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. It has now become obvious to all that the industrious Chinese people have had to pay dearly for the “historical shortcut" experiment. The three years of the “great leap forward" threw the national economy off balance and led to marked disproportions, doing their worst damage to agriculture, the chief sector of the national economy, where the “leap” policy was first started in an attempt to mobilise its latent reserves and resources.

p The Chinese leaders’ second major blow at the national economy was to cut it off from Soviet technical assistance, which had previously been of paramount importance in the development of the country’s modern industry. Within a few years under the “self-reliance” slogan, they effected a drastic cut-back in China’s economic ties with the socialist countries.

p Historians and sociologists, as well as economists, should make a special analysis of the ways, forms and instruments of state administration which a revolutionary government, established upon the victory of a people’s revolution, should use throughout the period of transition to socialism.

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p In the mid-1950s, when doing post-graduate research work at the People’s University of China, I came across the view that the leading role of the working class and the class basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat in China were different from those in other socialist countries. The working class in China was said to include the army and all Party members regardless of their social origin, because, the argument went, they were the most consistent advocates of working-class goals and ideas. This kind of logic swelled the class basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat in China to 15 million, which was three times the actual figure but nevertheless amounted to only 5 per cent of the country’s adult population. The importance of this problem goes well beyond the framework of China’s development, for it is one of the basic problems in the transition to the socialist road of former colonial and semi-colonial countries with backward class relations similar to those of China.

p In dealing with China’s problems, particular attention should also be devoted to their full analysis: why do the actual problems stemming from the economic and cultural backwardness of Chinese society have a distorted reflection in the minds of men? This kind of analysis should be made by philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, as well as historians and economists. We regard research into this problem as particularly urgent because, among other things, it would give us a more or less accurate idea about which of the Chinese views should be regarded as a specific reflection of objective problems arising from China’s social realities, and which—as a harmful product of the distorted mental reflection of genuine or imagined problems, as ideological views that falsify the realities, or as incorrect theoretical concepts. A scientific and consistent separation of the two would make it easier for us to fight against incorrect ideological propositions and concepts.

p Here are some concrete examples to show the essence of the problem and the reasons for considering it. There is nothing surprising about the fact that in China particular emphasis in the sphere of the productive forces is being laid on the human factor, whereas the material and technical aspect is being left somewhere in the background. This is a direct result of China’s conditions and the objective 65 interrelation between the two factors. What is more, I think, this state of affairs also has its reflection in the matter of distribution according to work, notably, the use of the material incentives principle. The low level of the productive forces and the consequent heavy shortage of goods have in effect placed objective obstacles in the way of wider differentiation between consumption levels. Every member of society has to be assured of at least the minimum level, especially where actual consumption is just above the barest subsistence minimum. Once such distribution has been carried out, the remainder is so small that it does not allow for any differentiation of individual earnings according to work. The real trouble starts, however, where a virtue is first made of necessity, and then that is enshrined as a law in an attempt to present egalitarian distribution as a truly proletarian idea, and the socialist principles of material incentive and distribution according to work as bourgeois survivals. Then, also, the living labour and enthusiasm of millions are declared to be the best possible substitute for material and technical prerequisites and professional know-how, and then used to build up fantastic, utterly unworkable schemes. Hence the need to criticise these harmful views and come out against any attempts to find ideological justification for various compromises or to present the departures mentioned above as universally binding theoretical propositions. In doing this, one must bring out the objective causes of these phenomena and lay bare their historical roots.

p Some of the Chinese leaders’ ideological mistakes and incorrect theoretical conclusions spring from a conflict between subjective urge and objective possibility. Whenever this happens, an attempt is in effect made to substitute an erroneous ideological or theoretical concept for an analysis of the real state of affairs. Thus, for example, the theory of “wave-like” economic development under socialism was an attempt to account for the absence of proportional and balanced economic development. An interesting point to note is that the Chinese advocates of the “wave-like development" doctrine seek to prove it in “philosophical terms" on the strength of Mao Tse-tung’s well-known proposition which turns the state of disequilibrium into an absolute, instead of analysing the concrete objective and subjective factors that 66 determine the process of economic development (like changes in natural conditions, investment priorities, the start of new productive capacities, the uneven use of manpower, the imperfections and irregularities in economic planning and management, the varying intensity of labour, and so on).

The past decade has seen China’s ideological and political superstructure increasingly riddled with elements that have nothing in common with Marxism except their phraseology. Take, for instance, the “great proletarian cultural revolution" with its ideological chaos, struggle for power and Mao Tse-tung’s personality cult, which has been whipped up almost to the pitch of a religious rite. These elements cast doubt on the socialist nature of China’s political and ideological superstructure and make one wonder whether the present CPC leaders have ever understood the essence of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Scientists should, therefore, go on studying problems connected with the penetration and spread of Marxist ideas in China and also their peculiar interplay with traditional (Confucian and Taoist) and revolutionary-peasant views (the Taipings’ Utopian striving towards egalitarianism). Under the pretext of “Sinicising” Marxism, the Maoists have been spreading nationalist, antiMarxist views. These include their vulgar, simplistic approach to objective class relations, which gives an entirely different reading to the concepts of “proletarian” and “bourgeois”, something that eventually produces an utterly arbitrary and subjective view of the theory and practice of class struggle and its use both inside the country and on a world scale (this includes the classification of countries and peoples as poor proletarians and rich bourgeois, and also the concept of world town and world village). The distorted reflection of reality in the Chinese mind is in a way obviously connected with the relatively backward class relations of Chinese society, the massive indigence among the Chinese working people in the past and the continued poverty today, among the rural population above all. The distortions are also, undoubtedly, due to the fact that most Chinese leading cadres are of peasant and petty-bourgeois stock, and had for decades, during the armed revolutionary struggle, lived in poor and backward rural areas.