Communism With Chinese Characteristics

By Matthew Yglesias

Something my group has been exploring fitfully with some of our interlocutors is the question of in what sense, if any, is the modern day Communist Party of China actually a Communist party. What, in other words, is “Communism With Chinese Characteristics”?

(cc photo by bokur.net)

There are a lot of answers you could give to that question, but one strand of thought that I’ve picked up on here is the possibility at least that we ought to take more seriously the notion that this really is a Marxist-Leninist political movement of a sort. As a couple of people have pointed out to us, one of the oddities of the Soviet experiment was always that according to Marx the world would have to pass out of feudal/agricultural economic development and into capitalist/industrial development before further advancing into socialism. Marx saw revolution occurring in the most advanced countries first, not the most backwards ones. Historically, of course, revolutionary Marxism never took off in the west which created some paradoxical choices for the Communist Party as a ruling element in Russia and then later in China.

We know the road that was traveled, but for a time the U.S.S.R. floated with a different road. In the 1920s, Lenin implemented the so-called New Economic Policy which entailed substantially rolling back the “War Communism” command economy of the civil war years. Farmers and small businessmen were allowed much more freedom to conduct their affairs as they liked, and rather than insisting that the means of production be held collectively the state instead would merely control the “commanding heights” of the economy—the banking system, international trade, etc.—while permitting a substantial array of market activities. At this time the slogan “the capitalist will sell us the rope we use to hang him” was invoked to underscore the idea that foreign trade and foreign direct investment to build Soviet economic strength could be a legitimate element of Communism. After Lenin’s death, Nikolai Bukharin took up the N.E.P. torch and argued that the legitimacy of a private sector economy should be entrenched as a more-or-less indefinite aspect of Soviet economic life in order to better boost living standards and achieve the goal of industrializing the USSR. You can read all about it in Stephen F Cohen’s excellent 1980 book Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938.

Obviously, that didn’t work out for Bukharin and the USSR. He lost out in the post-Lenin power struggle, Joseph Stalin had him branded a “right deviationist” and he was purged, semi-rehabilitated, and then purged again. The USSR went down a robustly totalitarian path and then Mao followed a basically Stalinist approach for decades in even-poorer China with various well-known catastrophic results. But the idea of some kind of arguably Bukharinish Reform Communism never quite went away and you saw inklings of it during Khruschev’s administration, again during the Communism With a Human Face episode in Czechoslovakia, under Tito in Yugoslovia, and to an extent under Gorbachev in the 1980s.

I think it’s ideologically credible to see post-Deng China in this light. As I’ve emphasized before, China really isn’t much of a free market economy, and not at all in the Chile/Denmark/Sweden/Canada “economic liberalization plus social welfare equals prosperity” kind of way that I tend to advocate for. Instead it really is about state control of the commanding heights of the economy, permitting enough market activity to build a functioning industrial base, and welcoming private capital largely as a means of building up China’s physical capital and technological know-how. Even on an optimistic projection it would still take quite a long while of additional growth to really eliminate the giant peasant agriculture element of Chinese life and create a nation suitable for socialism. Chinese officials talking to westerners like to try to imply that they have a secret agenda for further democratizing and liberalizing the country once it reaches this state of development, but a Marxist might say that that’s merely the stage of development at which you once again start collectivizing industry or some such.

So that’s a lot of words on a fairly pointless and abstract question, but at one point in college I learned a fair amount about early Bolshevik political debates and China definitely reminds me of them. Lenin’s slogan of “better fewer, but better” as an account of what the USSR needed from its public officials also strikes me as relevant to the human capital issues facing China.