China between two worlds

Simon Jenkins

This week the world's greatest political organism, the Chinese Communist Party, has reportedly gathered in Peking to decide on the immediate fate of one-fifth of mankind — reportedly, because in China even such an event is an unconftrmable mystery. The method will be wholly Chinese to pass judgment on the future by passing it first on the past. The meeting of the long-delayed 'sixth plenum of the central committee' is to hear a final reassessment of the three decades during which China was ruled by Chairman Mao, and by implication of the twists and turns in Chinese policy since his death in 1976, 'Only thus,' visitors are told, 'can national unity be maintained and a clear course steered into the future.'

Any journalist reporting back on a visit to China is torn between his own awe at the sheer vastness of the place and the cloud of guides, spokesmen and sinologists which settles on his shoulder from arrival to departure. If he relies on the former, his report is a mere congerie of travellers' tales. But if he places too much faith in the latter, he can find himself instantly lost in a political and historical labyrinth.

Sinologists have disentangled three phases to what is now called the 'post-Mao era': first, the ascendancy of Chairman Hua and his four modernisations, then the period of reconstruction (1978-9) with its dramatic open door policy towards the West, and now the phase of retrenchment, culminating in what is expected to be the victory of the anti-Maoists at the sixth plenum and the toppling of Chairman Hua.

Behind these twists moves the diminutive figure of the 76-year-old vice-premier Deng Xiaoping, securing one power base after another with his battle-hardened Sechuan followers. Twice disgraced during the Cultural Revolution — derided as a 'pimple on the backside of capitalism' — he has fought his way back under a banner of revolt against the humiliations and failures of the Maoist period. But as to what ideology should succeed Maoism — and indeed what departures from Maoist doctrine should be permitted — he is less sure. Hence the opaque, largely unreportable, power struggle of the past year in Peking. And hence the holding message passed down to cadres throughout the land: pragmatism and experimentalism are the orders of the day.

It is hard for the visitor to see Deng as the hardened dictator suggested by his rise to power. He seems more like an elderly but inexperienced signalman, suddenly put in charge of a particularly chaotic rail junction. He experiments with power, pulling one lever after another to see what each does to the nation now under his charge. Some he pushes instantly back again, appalled at the disastrous results: the famous democracy wall or expensive Japanese steelworks, or cultural freedom, or even fraternisation with foreigners. But one lever he seems to hold tenaciously forward is labelled personal incentive. It is this lever which most fascinates any visitor to modern China. Its visible impact is everywhere, and its ideological implications seem cataclysmic in a country where portraits of Marx, Lenin and Stalin still gaze down from municipal buildings. Are the Chinese communists really ready to embrace personal pecuniary advantage as the driving force of a prosperity which has eluded every communist regime in the world? And if greater economic freedom is a sincere ambition of post-Maoism, can greater political liberalism be far behind?

At this point the professional sinologist tends to retire bowing. The visitor is left talking with the delightful Miss Liu, eagerly describing her work bonus scheme in a Manchurian ball-bearing factory; or Mrs Cherig extolling her private vegetable market garden on a Sechuan collective; or Mr Chiang, showing off his television set in his steel company house in Chungqin. He sees a well-dressed Peking girl cycling off to buy her supper in the free market, beneath a large Mitsubishi advertisement. He is pressed to buy privately-made bamboo chairs from a young man on a Chengdu street corner. A couple running a private snack bar shout their wares at him on a Canton pavement. Is this `to each according to his needs'?

The official guide is only too ready with answers. Time and again it is 'of course today we believe in personal incentive. proclaimed with all the enthusiasm of a salesman with a new washing ingredient. The early post-Mao bonus schemes, he explains, were not a success. They were spread too wide and the benefit derived by the individual was not sufficient to make him work harder. Now the incentive unit is made as small as possible — reduced to workshops, teams, households, even individuals. Unfettered by union rates or by official egalitarianism, one Chinese worker may take home up to 20 per cent more than another doing comparable work (but less assiduously). On the collective farms, the much-abused work-points system by which personal input was measured purely in, terms of time, is giving way to production quotas ascribed to the lowest feasible unit of accounting. This unit is no longer the commune or collective as a whole, but the household or group of households.

Crucial to this reform is that any time (or any produce) the worker has left, once his quota has been met, is for his own or his family's gain. The quota system, at least in theory, thus emerges as a form of preassessed taxation. As much as 15 percent of all agricultural land is now made over to private production (double the amount under Mao), and this is now responsible for most of China's output of livestock and garden produce. The latter, in the night-soil rich environs of towns, has become the chief source of wealth of China's new 'millionaires', individual plot owners who can distribute their produce direct to local markets. The result has been a staggering 20-30 per cent rise in vegetable and livestock production over each of the past two years (and a fall in cereal production, which is serious). In more prosperous farming communities, up to a third of family income can derive from private activities. Personal savings in rural areas rose last year by an astonishing 53 per cent. Such are the forces of privatisation unlocked by vice-premier Deng.

How far such official information is accurate must be doubted— especially when set alongside the famine in Hebei province, which last year led China to lose face by requesting a United Nations disaster fund and Much is still continuing today. The Chinese are experts at giving visitors the facts they think they want to hear. Yet if the statistics are doctored, they are doctored to make an intriguing ideological point. One spokesman after another parrots the new party line: state-owned industries have been found to be inert and uncompetitive, and should now be reorganised to promote efficiency rather than conformity to bureaucratic convenience. They should be converted into self-regulating collectives, with the state's role limited to taxation and overall planning (which admittedly includes financial control on investment through the banks). Even that paragon of incompetence, the centralised Chinese system of materials supply and distribution (which leaves the country littered with piles of iron rods, concrete sections and half-finished buildings), is giving way hesitantly to local supply and marketing collectives. Sechuan collective managers were exhorted to take greater entrepreneurial risks with the splendid slogan, 'Dare to eat the hairy crab for the first time'. These collectives, again, at least in theory are no different in management and incentive potential from the agricultural co-operatives of western Europe.

Even the concomitant of an expanding economy and greater personal mobility, urban unemployment (now at some 20 per cent in China), is being met with 'pragmatic fervour'. Job creation, Chinese style, involves The establishment of urban collectives wherever a handful of youngsters can team up to make a convincing argument for financial support. With a reserve of capital provided by the authorities .through the bank, they are launched on to the city economy to fend for themselves as craftsmen, stall-holders, cafe-owners, tradesmen (and in Shanghai even a travel agency to compete with the awful official China Travel). It is claimed that six million jobs have been created through such pump priming in 1980 alone. And they are no-nonsense private sector jobs, subject only to a pre-assessed profits tax on the collective.

Official China thus emerges as the apotheosis of the 'unofficial' economy, a land where marginal personal income tax is effectively zero, where labour is plentiful, start-up capital freely available and demand booming. Guangdong province, with its proto-capitalist city of Canton, is already dotted with Deng's 'enterprise zones', in which foreign investors are invited (on a profit sharing basis) to see whether 'anything the Chinese can do in Hong Kong or Singapore they can do equally well at home. The government have announced that, after the lapses of last year, the budget must be in balance this year (with scant hope). And the central bank is countering an advancing inflation rate by stating that there will be no increase in money supply this year at all.

So, the visitor asks, is this not indeed the Thatcherite Garden of Eden, where small and private is beautiful and the corporatist serpent is at last in retreat?

At this point the sinologist has heard enough. He points out bitterly that this is not the first time a ruler has sought to unlock the mercantilist potential in the Chinese character, or conducted ham-fisted experiments with the lives of one billion subject people. Time and again party leaders have poured out of the Forbidden City to confess their errors, depose previously idolised personalities, calmly tot up the casualties (20 millions dead in the Great Leap Forward) and promise China a new deal. Yet time and again the apostles of economic or political freedom have fallen foul of the traditional elites — the party and the armed forces — and been forced to backtrack. Remember Mao's 'hundred flowers' campaign of 1957. And remember Russia at the height of the Kruschev era: the same demythologising of a fallen leader (Stalin, Mao), the same buck-passing, the same rewriting of history.

Certainly any visitor to China rapidly tires of hearing each host in turn cataloguing the errors of the Cultural Revolution and proudly boasting his 'capitalist roader' humiliations at the hands of the Red Guards. Like Harold Wilson's '13 years of Tory misrule', the Cultural Revolution has become the catch-all for every failing of modern China. It ended five years ago (and many would argue ten years ago with the death of Lin Piao). Yet the ideological mah jong continues inside the Forbidden City.

Why for instance has the Sixth plenum ' been so long delayed, and preceded by such verbose press controversy?' Was Mao 30 Per cent wrong, or 40 per cent wrong or as some counter-revolutionaries claim 100 per cent wrong?'asks the Peoples Daily, regarded as a bastion of Dengite progressivism under deputy editor An Geng. 'Socialism is nothing to do with egalitarianism,' it declaims. 'Some people must even become rich faster than others if all are not to remain poor. 'Mr Huang of the party central disciplinary committee replies in the more Maoist columns of the Peoples Liberation Army Daily: 'Party members truly fighting for the cause of the people must struggle against tendencies to defame Mao Zedung thought.' And the party's research chief, Mr Deng Liqun, feels it necessary to affirm that 'Mao was a great national hero whose merits came first and whose errors were secondary.' The lot of the sinologist is not an easy one. He is a blindfold commentator and must describe the, course of the fight, guided only by the intermittent grunts and cries of the participants.

His conclusion at present is that Deng is in the classic dilemma of the radical dictator: how to reform and revitalise a deeply conservative nation without engaging the open antagonism of those whose position is most threatened by that reform. The army and party bureaucracy are heirs to two thousand years of mandarin legalism. Their rigid outlook and love of perks and privileges, drove Mao himself to the frenzy first of the Great Leap Forward and then of the Cultural Revolution, They survived even the great Mao, and they are now happy to lurk under the mantle of Maoism to resist Deng's bid for decentralisation and privatisation. For if Deng should fall, they argue, how might some future ruler not rewrite present history? In Peking, the art of survival is an ability to predict the past. And so, claims the sinologist, Deng can only play the old game: appeal over the heads of the army and party direct to the greed of the masses. Hence the television sets, the cameras, the works outings and the requests to party apparatchiks to 'keep their, noses out of management'. Deng is no democrat — was he not general secretary of the world's most totalitarian communist party? Nor is he a closet capitalist. His career has bestraddled some of the most monstrous outrages ever committed in the name of revolution. Deng knows well that the occasional show trial, the jailing of dissidents, the suppression of free speech, are a small price to pay to ward off a politburo critic.

Cynicism is the occupational hazard of political commentary. And recent Chinese history offers raw material enough for the cynic. The wise journalist dons the cloak of humility on leaving China, and talks instead about the glorious food, the adorable children, the paper houses and the wellscrubbed streets. Yet Deng Xiaoping's experiment with the Chinese micro-economy is grounded in a fundamental truth about human motivation just as Mao's denial of personal incentive was grounded in fundamental error — which is as applicable to China as to any other nation. If Marxism is to wither from the face of the globe it will be through the strivings of families and individuals to better their lot with a minimum of interference from state or community.

Others must tell whether the present Chinese leadership is remotely sincere about this experiment, or realises its devastating implications for the survival of socialist centralism and the Communist party.

That is why (to a western capitalist with Schumacher tendencies) Deng represents so intriguing a phase in history. It is also why many in Peking must want it to fail, and will fight to ensure it does.

Yet the visitor is mean of spirit who does not leave China at present in some state of optimism. On the plane home, I opened a Chinese history book at the rise and fall of the terrifying Ch'in Dynasty. The Ch'in were demolishers of cities, murderers of scholars and burners of books, but they were the first true unifiers of the Chinese people, and as a result they were always Chairman Mao's favourite dynasty. Ch'iri only executed 460 scholars,' he once boasted, 'We've executed 46,000!'

The Ch'in collapsed in the year 206BC, after just 15 years of bloodthirsty rule, to be followed by a brisk civil war. But what came next, says the historian, was stupendous. 'There emerged out of Ch'in a new dynasty called Han, which moderated Ch'in harshness and capitalised on the strength of its political institutions, to build a new system which was to endure for 400 years. Contemporaneous with the Roman Empire in the west, Han China rivalled Rome in its achievements. For when Ch'in gave way to Han, it ushered in a long period of political ,unity and cultural glory.'

Is it too much to hope?