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in my first year back at university we studied Communist China as part of Stage 1 Political Studies. My flirtation with the Red Guards was long over but once again I had to come to grips with the Party Line. Here’s my understanding of the relationship between the Party and the People — keeping it brief, of course.
The West defines Democracy as government of the people, by the people, for the people. Something like that. But the Chinese have changed the definition — now it’s simply government for the people.
Buying into that means they can claim to be running China democratically, even though they’ve skipped the voting rights bit — and surely that can be justified in the Chinese context? After all the Party has a lot on its plate — raising up the masses. Maybe we can forgive them for cutting a few corners.
Here’s another question — Is a “mass movement” an upswell of popular opinion or a tool of the state?
Answer — It’s a tool of the state, of course. A way to mobilise the population, to transmit directives and articulate public opinion — to maintain and direct revolutionary enthusiasm. Top down, not bottom up.
When you put it like that you begin to see the point of Top Down government — to raise up the masses.
And you can look at the communes and understand how they make sense too. Food and shelter for everyone. Rational use of tractors and workshops. No risk of rearing a generation of Chinese kulaks. Feudalism bad, collectivism good. Raising up the masses…
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But just imagine the tumult in the mid-1950s, when the supply and control of grain was one of the main problems facing the government, and when almost two thirds of all peasant households were pressed into “fully socialist collectives” — the precursors of communes — in just one year.
I won’t go into the Great Leap Forward at all. Or the Hundred Flowers Campaign. So romantic, so crazy.
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Reading about the Cultural Revolution now was like a bad dream recalled after waking. The endless campaigns and slogans. The battle against the Four Olds — old customs, old culture, old habits and ideas. The cleansing of the class ranks. The attacks on the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals and Confucianism. People denounced, publicly humiliated. Banished to the countryside to labour on collective farms, and often worse. And mango fever!
It’s hard to overstate the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, or how high into the party hierarchy that chaos was to reach. For example Lin Biao, who at one point had been named Mao’s designated successor, died in a plane crash over Mongolia, the official explanation being that he and his family were attempting to flee following a botched coup attempt.
Deng Xiaoping, who eventually led China away from Maoism, was for a while stripped of his power and rank, publicly humiliated and sent off to work in a steelworks.
Xi Jinping, the current Chinese leader, spent several years in an impoverished provincial region after his father was jailed and his mother forced to denounce him. He ran away, back to Beijing, but was arrested during a crackdown and sent back to a work camp to dig ditches for a while. Apparently the experience imbued him with some empathy for the masses too.
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And what better way to look further into the challenges of central planning than a dip into Soviet agricultural policy?
A few paragraphs from one of my essays gives a taste:
“The process of merging kolkhozy [collective farms] begun by Kruschev in 1950 was continued so that by 1960 the numbers had dropped to 44,000 from 94,000 — ostensibly in the interests of technological efficiency, but more so for the purposes of direction and control.”
“The failure of the 1953 grain crop led to the Virgin Land scheme, and a consequent increase in the importance of the sovkhozy [a type of massive state owned farm] that were used to settle them. Despite insufficient investment and high labour turnover on their marginally productive acreage, the Virgin Lands ensured that it was more difficult for bad harvests to strike all the Soviet grain areas at once.”
“In 1954 Kruschev enthusiastically began a crash program of corn and hog farming. In three years the corn acreage increased fivefold, then, after a retrenchment in 1957, continued to grow until the 1960s. Much of the acreage was unsuitable for corn, and the program was pruned after Kruschev’s downfall.”
Always that depressing, perennial belief in top down, bureaucratic government by the Party. The very language is oppressive.
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But here’s a thought — what if we could delegate large scale decision-making to an all-knowing elite? To people who could place all our bets for us? Who could prioritise the deployment of every resource, and all our people and talents? People able to foresee all the consequences of their decisions — hopefully including the unforeseen!
Obviously it turned out to have been impossible back then, but haven’t things changed? Armed with Computers, Big Data, the Internet, Science and Nudge Theory — and with the help of Universities, Think Tanks and NGOs — surely it can be done now? Central Planning v2?
Well, it can’t. I hope. Although plenty of people would like to give it one more try. My every instinct is to hate that thought.
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I like to claim that I’ve forgotten almost everything I studied at university, although to be fair I’ve probably forgotten most of what I learned at secondary school as well, like how to solve a quadratic equation and everything about Latin except how to conjugate the present tense of the verb to be.
Nevertheless I enjoyed my time at Uni, partly because I didn’t realise you were supposed to work out what your tutor thought and feed it back to them. That meant I did in fact develop a few basic ideas that have stayed with me. They mightn’t amount to much but at least I’ve made them mine.
For example I came across one of my Stage 1 essays — “well structured and comprehensive”, so the marker said — in which I discussed
…why the institution of manhood suffrage didn’t mark the advance of effective popular participation in political life in Japan from 1925 to 1940.
Good question, given what imperial Japan did next, but I can’t remember a thing about it.
I did however begin that essay with interesting (I thought) definitions of democracy and popular participation. By the latter I meant people’s awareness of “their ability to influence political decision-making, and their effective use of that power, particularly in their own interest”.
And beyond popular participation, I said, with the confidence of youthful undergraduates, democracy depends on “a means of changing governments without revolutions” — or more specifically on a society’s acceptance of several propositions:
— That opposition to government is legitimate — not something you should be locked up or beheaded for;
— That such opposition (supported by different interests and opinions) may be an alternative to the current government;
— That in our society machinery has been developed to legitimately present this choice to the popular electorate, and record its preference; and
— That all parties can be trusted to play by those rules — i.e. if you lose this time you’ll have another chance.
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In that little summation there’s no mention of the mechanics of democracy. No mention of first past the post versus proportional representation; of “one man one vote”, or “one white property owner”, or “adult citizen of qualifying age and either sex”. Just that everybody must agree on the rules and play by them. Which, when you consider that the other side might be able to squash you like a bug or monster your home and livelihood — but chooses not to — makes “democracy” seem like something worth nurturing.
Our own political mechanics may not be perfect but we were a long time getting here, it has been reformed along the way, sometimes profoundly, and it’s worth understanding the road we came in on. Beneath that, it’s also worth understanding why democracy — as we define it! — succeeds in one place but fails in another.
Why here we have reform, there repression, and there revolution.
And beneath that again, the big question — which of those three paths forward we prefer, and how democracy can best be defended and sustained.
Personally, I was over repression and revolution without having experienced either. I felt I’d gained some appreciation of the major interests, values and opinions that underpin a society, how they change, and how the electoral machinery channels, or should channel, their power into the performative drama of democratic politics.
For a boy who’d been sucked up into the vortex of Vietnam and Mao’s China, those insights, anodyne though they may have been, were profound.
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By the way — to return to my essay — why didn’t manhood suffrage advance popular participation in political life in pre-war Japan? Apparently the “masses” didn’t believe their politicians really wanted to engage them, and they were right, so they stayed home.
Always these resonances! We still wonder whether our politicians really want to engage with us — apart from in elections and polls — and, suspecting they don’t, we don’t trust them. And they wonder why.