- BEHIND THE POLIT FOR SEVEN years, the People's Republic of China has been engaged in a vast process of structural reforms. This is neither simply a continuation of the Maoist course, after corrections, nor a return to capitalism — regardless of what its 'leftist' critics or bourgeois commentators suffering from a surfeit of confidence in their class like to think. This is a 'New Economic Policy' (NEP) similar to, but more deepgoing and prolonged than the one the USSK went through between 1921 and 1928 - the NEP was a system where within the framework of the public ownership of the main means of production and a workers state, a pronounced development of private production in agriculture of mechanisms in the economy was permitted.
An interim balance sheet of this experiment serves to point up both the successes of thes poncy tradictions, are piling up at a faster and faster rate.
The successes are essentially in two areas. The first is increasing production and accelerating growth. raising culture of both the urban and rural the standard population. In these two areas, achievements have been tacular. Proportionally, given a much lower starting point, those in the USSR under the NEP, or even during the entire period that inplan, that is, 1921 to 1932.
also undergone a certain ting only 4.5 workforce outside agriculture. market higher proportions USSR under the NEP.
Grown
and its conmore than 50 per cent.
The second is on life expectancy living and 68 for women, the those for Romania and Turkey.
they far exceed more economic, cludes the NEP and the first five-year production has more than doubled, above all owing to the flourishing of small and medium enterprises in the countryside. State industry has increased its production by about 90 per cent, and the private sector has expansion.
Since 1978, agricultural production has doubled. Some 300,000 peasants currently own tractors. About 11 million private bosses employ 15 million wage workers, the latter however represencent or une lolas The cooperative sector, which exists mainly in the countryside, employs 100 million people. But a total of 85,000 state enterprises account for more than inflation 80 per cent of industrial production and more than half of the national income, than those in the The rise in the standard of living has been no less impressive. It is estimated that peasants' incomes have grown by The situation is summed up well today by the statistics Republic or China - is years for mes the People's comparable to the figures for the USSR and higher than However, the picture is not without its dark spots, far from it. Deng Xiaop- workers' ing's course is giving rise to more and social and political SINCE DECEMBER last year China has been in political turmoil. Mass student demonstrations were followed by the resignation of Communist Party general secretary Hu Yaobang. Since then there has been a campaign against bourgeois liberalism' and the beginning of a purge of university academics. In a wide ranging survey ERNEST MANDEL looks at the background to the political crisis in China. contradictions. The fact that these contradictions on the whole repeat those ot the NEP between 1921 and 1928 confirms the clear-sightedness of the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky Zinoviev, at the time and the historical validity of its analyses, its criticisms and its concrete constructive proposals against Stalin.
In the economy, what is most striking is the difference between the almost continual progress in the countryside, at least as regards production and per capita income, and the much more fitful advances in industry and in the urban areas. In the latter, we see spurts of unemployment periodically dim the picture of the NEP in the eyes of vast strata of workers.
"he reasons tor inis contrast are manifold. But I do not think that we would be wrong in saying that one of the main causes for this lies in the fact that the obstacles to the self-interest of itiative of the peasants have been largely removed. And the Chinese peasantry is one of the world's most skilled in intensive agriculture, despite the modest equipment it possesses.
. On the other hand, the obstacles to the workers lakıns an mterest m production and expressing their initiative have not essentially been removed, inasmuch as industry continues to be run by the bureaucracy, and there is no self-management, howeve this concept may be defined.
In the area of agricultural production and rural society, however, there are two striking tempestuous expansion in commodity production is provoking a shift from cereals toward products whose sales bring in more, a dangerous tendency for a country as populous as China so long as there is no sharper increase in the productivity of cereal crops as a result of investment - which for the moment is lacking.
Family Moreover, even though curbed by brutal limitations on family growth ('negative family allowances' after the third child) and the increase in productivity are swelling the overpopulation of the villages, for which the expansion of rural industry is not offering a sufficient outlet. short or even medium term this probiel burcalcus to become expiosive industry as a whole, balances are appearing, at once between the volume of investment and that products (especially of modern technologies) and exports, between the money income of the population and the production of consumer goods, between growth of production and productivity. A big gap remains between the average income of the peasants and that of the workers To get an idea of the progress this represents, you need only look at the pictures in TV and movie films of the big cities mainly Shapghai, Tiensin, (Mukden), Harbin, Canton, Chongqing showing replacing the millions of rickshaws, the pictures of villages with well-nourished children in place of millions of starvlings and beggars; tens of millions women without deformed feet, from servile subordination to patriarchs and mothers-in-law This progress is a belated but real produci ot revolution of 1949. repeated enough, in the face of all the thai shortsighted and sceptical, including in the ranks of the Chinese CP, and their acolytes in the West and elsewhere.
Rate Can the 'Four Modernisations' the 'modernisations' advocated in the economic scientific, military fields by Deng - go on at the average rate of these last seven years? Deng Xiaping's team hopes so. mises that by the year 2000, capita income will have reached $1,000 that is the present level in Turkey and double that in Egypt. 2010-2015, it $2000, that is, the present level of Mexico and Portugal. become a semi-industrialised country.
Specific promises of this sort are contradictions.
present data, demographic growth, culture, the national growing imLead privileged layers, Peking, literacy, Wuhan Shenyang millions of bicycles of 'China's per free per cent lower.
These socialist That can never be falling unemployment in La remedy.
ment the wake rate in industry. technical It pro quality the per In the years is supposed to reach 'enrich yourself China would then risky, as shown by the precedent of the Twenty-Second Congress of the Com munist Party of the Soviet Union wher Khruschev, in a vain boast claimed that the Soviet Union would catch up with and surpass the per capita production and income of the United. States in 1980. External constraints and internal social contradictions may put a brake on growth before this goal is attained. Nonetheless, on the basis of the it is not as devoid of realism as Khrushchev's boasting 25 years ago. Even if the goal is not achieved, the gap between the reality and the promises will not be catastrophic.
In the area of raising the level of education, skills and culture, the vances have been no less spectaculat. China has been opened up to world stupidly called bourgeois by the Maoists, on a scale out of all proportion to what occurred there before 1949 or what has taken place in India since independence.
As regards more specialised and India undoubtedly has acquired a lead. But as regards the masses, or at least the majority of thems because some rural areas and even poor backward - China is way out ahead o the capitalist countries of the so-called third world that started off from a ley comparable to it in 1937, or 1949 magazin publishing, the number of new titles published annually, hospital beds, cess to technical. education number of students finishing secondary education. India's illiteracy rate is more than 50 per cent higher than China's.
•capita daily calorie consumption and life expectancy are 25-30 imbalances being reflected by periodic surges of infla tion, balance-of-payments deficits (and exchange reserves)
Deng' reforms have not yet been able to offe , This leads to successive rec tifications'. Abrupt cutbacks in inves imports, marked slowdowns in the growth of urban in comes come every two or three years of veritable phases 'overheating' in growth. At present, w are seeing a rapid drop in the growth The economic contradictions of th Chinese NEP lead inevitably to soci and political contradictions. Social ine is becoming sharply accen tuated both in the countryside and urban areas. In the countryside new course las been and contluc be carried out under the watchword — a slogan coined by Bukharin in the 1920s. It is no acciden that Deng has rehabilitated Bukharin, totally, and even enthusiastically, while Trotsky's rehabilitation remains pure
NA general, with managers have more extensive rights in the rural cooperative sector and in rura industry than in state industry in the cities.
these conflicts in order to avert social Socialist Action respect to workers, Liberal criminals The Deng team is trying to arbitrate 20 Feb 1987 ment of the extreme right nationalist tendencies within premier Nakasone's Democrati This resurgence of militarism is going hand hane wim renaoo orme wa even of the whole political course that led to the outbreak of the war against China in the 1930s.
schoolbooks, the Japanese