Class Contradictions Characterise Each Phase
Wu Song[1]
The Communist Party of China (CPC) turned 100 in July 2021. In November 2021 it passed a resolution on its history. Twice in the past, in 1945 and 1981, it has passed resolutions on its history, which marked important junctures in the party’s development. So it is an appropriate occasion on which to reflect on its journey.
There is renewed interest among progressive forces worldwide regarding China. This is on account of developments both internal and external to China. Among the developments which have aroused interest are the following:
(1) Setting itself the goal of “Common Prosperity”, the CPC’s latest history resolution claims that China has recently “brought about a historic resolution to the problem of absolute poverty in China, and created a miracle in the human history of poverty reduction”.
(2) Even as it has globalised, the Chinese state appears to have retained control over certain important elements of the economy.
(3) Among progressive circles, there is also interest in China’s claim to “ecological advancement” through what the history resolution calls “green, circular and low-carbon development”.
(4) Further, the Chinese government has recently taken steps against some well-known billionaires, leading to a crash in their companies’ share prices and consequently in their wealth.
(5) China has also become the target of US great-power strategy, with imperialist attempts to build a global anti-China coalition and to foment secessionist unrest in different regions of China. Progressive forces, on an anti-imperialist basis, have opposed this targeting of China. Some of them hope that China, with its increased economic and military strength, will emerge as an alternative pole against US global hegemony.
All of these are noteworthy facts. At the same time, we need to use a dialectical and historical approach in analysing the present-day situation of China. In doing so, it is important not to efface, but rather mark, the distinctions between different phases in China’s development. The following note is an attempt to look at the history of the CPC in the context of the class contradictions in different phases of its history.
The party was born in the age of revolution when new ideas and new organizations emerged around the world after the Russian Revolution. When, in July 1921, a group of activists secretly met in the French Concession in Shanghai, and then on a boat in Jiaxing, to formally establish the Communist Party of China, few may have realized it to be an epoch-making event. As we know later, none of the participants, including Chairman Mao himself, would remember the exact date of the founding of the party. Yet, 28 years after its founding, the Communist Party of China, with the support of millions of workers and peasants, defeated the imperialists, the landlords, and their servitors, and started building a new China.
It is worth noting that errors and struggles within the Party were necessarily a significant part of Chinese Communist history from the very beginning. When the Party was founded, the founding members were mostly intellectuals, and the two leaders (Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao) were both professors at Peking (now Beijing) University. It was over the course of years of trials and sometimes near-fatal errors that the party transformed itself into a fully grounded and mature revolutionary organization. Chairman Mao obviously played an irreplaceable role in leading the party out of many political and military crises. But the Party’s success was also based on the fact that different factions in the party shared a pretty similar goal: saving China from imperialism, feudalism, and their allies among the Chinese capitalists.
But, after the founding of the People’s Republic, the goals diverged, and the inner party struggles quickly became intense. Part of the leadership preferred to copy the Soviet Union’s pattern of development; some proposed developing capitalism first. On the other hand Mao and his allies were exploring ways of transitioning to socialism. The differences and the different interests these groups represent explain some of the major political struggles in China during the Mao era. Among them, the most important struggle was between the pro-socialist and pro-capitalist groups in the party.
Like all other socialist countries, China made great advances in people’s well-being, such as education and health. With the support of the Soviet Union at the beginning, and later with mostly domestic mobilization, China also developed its own extensive industries by the 1970s. But as Mao emphasized in his late years, the interest of the elites and the masses in the 20th-century socialist countries tended to diverge. (Here the ‘elites’ refer to the Communist party leaders and their allies in the military and academia.) The masses liked socialism, while the elites were discontented with all the economic and political constraints imposed by socialism. This was obvious when they compared themselves with their peers in capitalist countries. In capitalist countries, capitalists use all means possible to keep capitalism alive, while in these socialist countries, the powerful elites had a natural tendency of becoming capitalist-roaders.
While this theme of conflict was in and out of the party throughout the early decades of the People’s Republic, it was only after Mao’s death that the pro-capitalist elites took full control and explicitly shifted China’s course. Unlike in post-1991 ex-Soviet Union, however, the Chinese elites chose to develop capitalism in a more cautious and gradual way, such that it enabled sustained capital accumulation and rapid growth over a long period of time.
Why did the Chinese elites choose a more gradual transition? One possible factor was that the influence of Maoism was still powerful in the 1980s. Maoist education and the Cultural Revolution had trained the people well politically, and the restoration of capitalism, although already popular among the elites, was still taboo among most working people. Another important factor was that China’s development was highly uneven, and the rural-urban gap was still large overall. It was thus possible, without shock therapy, to create a new capitalist economy and a new reserve army of labour, given the large number of rural labourers available.
But the gradual transition to capitalism still had to have its shock therapy moments. The first such moment was in the early 1980s, when the party decided to dismantle all the rural communes. This not only ended the well-functioning rural collectives and destroyed many public assets accumulated by the Mao era, but it also reduced rural employment and forced/encouraged millions of rural people to migrate to urban areas. As mentioned above, this reform was the basis of the new capitalist economy. A decade after the rural reform, the party launched another nationwide reform in the 1990s: privatization of most of its publicly owned enterprises and the laying off of tens of millions of urban workers. The capitalist model was cemented after the urban reform, and Chinese society has not had another major change since.
These structural reforms and the sustained accumulation brought a huge amount of wealth to the new capitalist class inside and outside the party. On the other hand, the peasants lost their collectives, millions of urban workers lost their lifetime jobs and social benefits, and the market forces impoverished the general working people, who suffer from the rising cost of education, health, and housing. Not to mention their suffering owing to the widespread corruption, the mafia, and pollution.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the transition to capitalism in the former Soviet Union and China was a major setback for communists worldwide. We have entered a historic low point in the revolutionary movement. There were and still are leftists in the Chinese Communist Party. Many of them have kept struggling within the party. The party, however, is still dominated by careerists and capitalists. At a fundamental level, after the structural reforms, the party’s rule is so closely dependent on the smooth functioning of capitalism that it has to cater to the demands of capital accumulation.
Yet, the rapid growth of the economy and the continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party also create important challenges to the continued development of capitalism in China. For example, China has the largest urban working class in the world, and the continued class conflicts have been educating the working class politically. Moreover, because of the Communist Party’s continued rule, irrespective of the changes in the party’s character, Marxism remains part of the core school curriculum. Generations of students in China learn some sort of Marxism from an early age, and, however much it is diluted, it is practically impossible to fully reconcile Marxism with the realities of capitalism. Such conflict between rhetoric and reality can and does radicalize the working people. While the socialist societies in the 20th century tended to create capitalist-roaders, the unique Chinese model now continuously produces new Marxists.
The Chinese growth has till now also relied on China’s re-integration into US-led global capitalism. For years, the Chinese capitalists have developed a close working relationship with the US and other advanced capitalist countries. But as these advanced capitalist countries run into economic and political crises, their ruling classes become increasingly reactionary and use China as a convenient scapegoat. This, combined with the longstanding racism and anti-communism in those countries, shapes the current mainstream ideology in the US and others. One does not need to sympathize with the Chinese capitalists to discover the clearly imperialist anti-China drive in the West. The explicit or implicit alliances against China among some of the western ‘left’ and the imperialists only add some human rights/green/gender cover for the aggression against China. For the Chinese government, the rupture in the global order means they will face a much more uncertain and hostile external environment from now on.
All these challenges leave the Chinese Communist Party in a difficult position. The “business as usual” approach would only deepen the contradictions and further destabilize the capitalist order, while any meaningful reform would also threaten Chinese and global capitalism. Of course, capitalists over the world face deep problems, but in China, such problems are explicitly political and inherently revolutionary.
About a decade ago, Bo Xilai, a superstar politician, rose in the Chinese Communist Party due to his efforts at addressing some of the contradictions brought by capitalism. He carried out some genuine reforms in an important city, Chongqing, which went against the interests of the local capitalist class, and he crushed the mafia which served as the militia for the capitalists. Bo also built public housing and emphasized education in the socialist tradition. These reforms made Bo a very popular leader in China. In response, the Chinese party, with the overwhelming support of the capitalist class, quickly charged Bo with corruption and destroyed his political project. This clearly showed the limit of progressive reforms in China at that time. Will this time be different?
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Chinese government has responded to the internal and external challenges by instituting more regulation on the market and capital. It has promised to achieve “common prosperity”. It is interesting to note that in its 2021 resolution on party history (mentioned earlier), the Chinese party acknowledged certain errors and damages in much of the post-Mao era. For example, the resolution states that in a “certain period” there was:
serious lack of political conviction among some Party members and officials, misconduct in the selection and appointment of personnel in some localities and government departments, a blatant culture of pointless formalities, bureaucratism, hedonism, and extravagance, and a prevalence of privilege-seeking attitudes and behavior. To be more specific, some officials engaged in cronyism and ostracized those outside of their circle; some formed self-serving cliques; some anonymously lodged false accusations and fabricated rumors; some sought to buy popular support and rig elections in their favor; some promised official posts and lavished praise on each other for their promotions; some did things their own way and feigned compliance with policies while acting counter to them; and some got too big for their boots and made presumptuous comments on the decisions of the Central Committee. Such misconduct interwoven with political and economic issues led to a startling level of corruption that damaged the Party’s image and prestige and severely undermined relations between the Party and the people and between officials and the people, arousing the discontent and indignation of many Party members, officials, and members of the public.
The resolution, however, did not blame the new policies for such phenomena. Rather, it drew the lesson that there is need to “exercise effective self-supervision and full and rigorous self-governance.”
At the same time, it kept the anti-revolutionary stance against Mao and the Mao era. It rejected the major formulations of Mao regarding the construction of socialism (which he linked crucially to class struggle), and fully upheld the formulations of Deng Xiaoping on the question (which emphasized the development of productive forces as the main task, shelving class struggle).
It seems the current leadership is attempting to find a third path beyond Mao’s socialism and post-Mao capitalism. How far it can go in this direction remains to be seen, especially considering the power of the capitalist class and its close connection to the party. The mainstream media, for example, has almost equated “common prosperity” with the so-called “tertiary distribution” (philanthropy).[2]
At this point, it would take more than a few slogans to make the promises of the Chinese party credible. What is certain is that capitalism has passed its heyday even in an “emerging” market such as China. Given that China has the largest working class population in the world, the struggles around and within the Communist Party of China will be a critical piece in the ending of the present phase of capitalism and the re-emergence of socialism.
[1] Wu Song is the pen-name of a progressive economist.
[2] The CCP uses the terms “primary distribution” to mean wages, “secondary distribution” to mean Government assistance, and “tertiary distribution” to mean philanthropic donations by private corporations and the rich.
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