These are the notes I made to sit the Politics in China paper as part of my PPE Finals in 2021. The topics covered are: (in slightly less detail) China in the time of Mao and Deng, and in a lot of detail: Representative Institutions , The Rule of Law, Social Instability and Protest, and the Interna...
Tom Barnes Finals Revision Notes
Tutor: Edward Howell
Wednesday 2nd June 2021
,Tom Barnes
Mao and his Legacy
Mao Zedong, who became leader of the CCP during the Long March of 1934-1935, proclaimed the
foundation of the PRC in 1949 after defeating the Nationalist Government, which retreated to
Taiwan.
Economic modernisation
When Mao proclaimed the foundation of the PRC, China was a desperately poor and backward
country, with a lower GDP per capita than the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mao modernised China extremely rapidly (stats from Meisner 1999)
- Gross industrial output grew 38 fold between 1952 and 1977
- Between 52 and 77 industry grew at 11%
- By the mid 70s, China was producing planes, modern ships, nuclear weapons and missiles.
- The number of industrial workers grew from 3m to 50m, of which 28m former peasants
- The number of Chinese scientists and technicians from 50k to 5m from 1949-1969
- Life expectancy almost doubled
Notably, he did do without relying on foreign help. All Soviet support was repaid in full by the mid
60s, and China neither took on foreign debt nor experienced high inflation.
Criticism
However Mao’s economic modernisation was beset with mistakes. These both took the form of
catastrophe (the Great Leap Forward) and general inefficiency.
Land Reform 1950-1953
- An estimated 1m landlords were killed
- While commonly thought to have led the rural economy to boom, Dikotter 2013 argues it led
to widespread famine in the 50s
- Agriculture grew at only 2.3% during Mao’s time in power, barely above population growth
of 2%
The Great Leap 1958-62
- The purpose was to surpass the UK in industrial output within 15 years
- Aimed to boost the productivity of agriculture via organising agriculture into communes
rather than family units
- Aimed to stimulate heavy industry by having backyard steel furnaces in every commune
- Agricultural production did not recover its 1957 level until 1965
- 20-30m died, birth rates plummeted
- This only ended when Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping conducted economic liberalisation,
dismantling the communes, after 1962
- Mao’s responsibility
o developed a political culture in which even his oldest comrades were fearful to bring
up unpalatable truths
,Tom Barnes
Zhou Enlai, and veteran orthodox party economist Chen Yun had publicly
expressed doubts, but Mao had rebuked them
o Mao was aware of the scale of the issue by 1959, making a visit to his hometown in
Hunan in June 1959, but did not divert from GLF policies until 1961, instead making
the Great Leap a matter of personal pride after coming under attack from Peng
Dehuai, and refusing to change course
More generally, industrialisation was hardly an efficient process, and had the same problems as its
Soviet counterpart (though not resulting in the same inequities)
- Waste, inefficiency, inertia were constant features
- To accumulate capital, consumer goods were ignored – accumulation rate reached 36%
- Quality was sacrificed for quantity
- Ghosh 2020 argues Mao went along with the Stalinist obsession with enumeration, and even
when it didn’t work, presented no alternative.
Assessment
- Despite the mistakes made, and their terrible human cost, Mao succeeded in totally
transforming China into a moderately developed nation by the mid-70s.
- ‘Without the industrial revolution of the Mao era, the economic reformers that came after
would have had little to reform.’ (Meisner 1999)
- His focus on industrialisation led to somewhat of a contradiction in a China dominated by
agriculture. Despite his concern for the peasants, the gap between the city and countryside
grew under Mao.
The Role of Ideology
Maoism and Mao Zedong Thought
Since Maoism became tarnished during the GPCR, and by the prominent personality cult which
developed around Mao, Maoism was renamed Mao Zedong Thought after his death, and stripped of
those most dangerous aspects. It is somewhat of a relic, clearly inapplicable today. The party line on
MZT is that as China has now reached the primary stage of socialism, his solutions are not relevant
to current problems
Its main features:
- Peasants as the ‘rural proletariat’
- Important role of guerrilla warfare
- High level of internal unity (from the Long March)
- Heavy reliance on the masses
- Heavy pragmatism to adapt ideology for practical considerations
The personality cult
It has it origins right after the inception of the PRC. It but accelerated from 1963, when he launched
the Socialist Education Movement in 1963 in response to the rising status of Liu Shaoqi within the
party. In 1964 Lin Biao published Quotations from Chairman Mao (the Little Red Book, while Chinese
radio increased output of revolutionary songs.
, Tom Barnes
The cult of personality reached new heights during the GPCR – 740m little red books printed
between 66 and 68, Mao paintings in every room, time spent each day reading his works. Disrespect
for his image could be punished by imprisonment.
Why?
- Mao himself spoke in the mid-60s in an interview about how the lack of a cult of personality
around Khrushchev might have been the reason for his fall.
- The cult of personality was primarily a means of making himself irreplaceable within the
parties, making challenging him impossible.
Nationalism
China views the years from 1839-1949 as the century of humiliation, when it went from, in its own
eyes, being at the centre of the world (and a prosperous nation with the world’s largest GDP), to a
near vassal state, defeated militarily on numerous occasions by the British and Japanese.
Mao longed to see China rich, powerful and respected amongst nations once again. (Dalvin 2013)
His greatest fear was that China would not be respected internationally, and this informed his
domestic policies. He saw economic modernisation, but without dependence, as the solution, hence
his autarkic modernisation plans and reluctance to adopt Western techniques and modes of
organisation.
Nationalist propaganda was an important source of legitimacy for Mao
- The revolution, the revival of the nation’s fortuned, the Party-State, and Mao as the leader
of all of the above were presented as one
- The personality cult of an omnipotent Mao, the Great Helmsman, gave people confidence in
the future of China and restored their pride in their country
Revolution
Mao was deeply committed to revolution, class struggle and socialism, and did not want to
compromise on this. In the 60s, he worried that the revolution was losing momentum:
- He feared that the introduction of material incentives into industry threatened socialism,
and practices condemned by official ideology as ‘spontaneous tendencies towards
capitalism’ like rural markets and private plots, were often officially encouraged
- Traditional customs and religion were reviving
- Mao feared that bourgeois elements were being created within the socialist society in the
form of the new bureaucracy
So he launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, which he would declare over in 1969, though the
CCP line is that it ended in 1976 (to discredit post-Mao Leftism)
- Re-emphasised ideology to try to restore popular enthusiasm for revolution
- Encouraged the Red Guard movement of violence towards capitalist elements in authority
positions, and attacking old ideas, customs, and culture.
- MacFarquar and Schoenhals 2006 – 750k-1.5m in the countryside killed, same number
maimed for life
o These were mostly elites
- It had a terrible impact on China
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