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Maoism and the Liberation of the Poor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Edward Friedman
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Type
Review Article
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World Politics , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , April 1987 , pp. 408 - 428
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Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1977

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References

1 Gutierrez, , A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973), 32, 91, 235, 237Google Scholar.

2 Imfeld, , China as a Model of Development (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1976)Google Scholar; cf. Whitehead, Raymond, Love and Struggle in Mao's Thought (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1977)Google Scholar.

3 Gurley, John, Challengers to Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 182 Google Scholar.

4 lmfeld (fn. 2), 157.

5 Gurley has responded to the new data by rewriting Challengers to Capitalism in 1982. Thsingle most up-to-date and easily accessible English-language work with the most comprehensive data is China hooks Toward the Year 2000 (Washington, DC: Congress of the Unite States, Joint Economic Committee, 1986)Google Scholar, two vols. For the data on illiteracy, see vol. 1, p. 319.

6 Myrdal's first three books were Report from a Chinese Village (New York: Signet, 1966)Google Scholar; China: The Revolution Continued (New York: Pantheon, 1970)Google Scholar; China Notebook 1975–1978 (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

7 The Naxalites were a Maoist group in India that was crushed during China's Cultural Revolution when its members tried to establish rural bases among the most miserable rural poor as a tactic to seize power by annihilating landlords, police officers, and anyone who sided with such people. Sendero Luminoso, a self-identified Maoist group in Peru, employs tactics similar to those of the Naxalites.

8 Myrdal, , Confessions of a Disloyal European (New York: Random House, 1968)Google Scholar.

9 See Banerjee, Sumata, In the Wake of Naxalbari (Calcutta: Subarnarckha, 1980)Google Scholar, For a sketch of the personal, organizational, and ideological links of the Khmer Rouge and other Maoist groups, see Friedman, Edward, “After Mao,” Tetos, No. 65 (Fall 1985), 23-46.Google Scholar

10 Myrdal (fn. 6, 1966), xxxiv.

11 Cf, Ashton, Basil et. al., “Famine in China, 1958-61,” Population and Development Review 10 (December 1984), 613-45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Riskin, Carl, “>Feeding China,” paper prepared for UNU/WIDER Conference on Hunger and Poverty, Helsinki, July 21-25, 1986 Google Scholar.

13 Myrdal (fn. 6, 1979), 6, 73. In 1976 alone, according to Renmin Ribao, September 30, 1986, over 300,000 residents fled by train from one southwestern province (Sichuan) to escape from the man-made famine that hit some ten million people; many of them, especially women, were reduced to urban beggary or were even sold into undesired marriages or prostitution.

14 Brodsgaard, K. E., “State, Party, and Economy in the Transition to Socialism in China,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 18 (January-March 1986), 46–55 Google Scholar.

15 Cf. Bernstein, Tom, “Starving to Death in China,” New York Review of Books, June 16, 1983, pp. 36–38Google Scholar, and “Stalinism, Famine and Chinese Peasants,” Theory and Society 13 (May 1984). 339–77Google Scholar.

16 Nolan, Peter and White, Gordon, “The Distributive Implications of China's New Agricultural Policies,” in Grey, Jack and White, Gordon, eds., China's New Development Strategy (London: Academic Press, 1982), 182 Google Scholar; Selden, Mark, “Income Inequality and the State,” in Parish, William, ed., Chinese Rural Development (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), 193–218 Google Scholar; Whyte, Martin, “Social Trends in China: The Triumph of Inequality?” in Barnett, A. Doak and Clough, Ralph, eds., Modernizing China (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), 103–23Google Scholar. Tom Rawski, Nicholas Lardy, and others who have examined the data also reach the conclusion that Maoism greatly increased the gap between richer and poorer regions.

17 Selden, Mark, “Cooperation and Conflict,” in Selden, Mark and Lippit, Victor, eds., The Transition to Socialism in China (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1982), 32–97 Google Scholar.

18 In a private conversation, William Hinton's estimate was 30 percent.

19 For most recent statements on the antipeasant essence of collectives, see Lewin, Moshe, The Maying of the Soviet System (New York: Pantheon, 1985)Google Scholar; Timofeev, Lev, Soviet Peasants: The Peasants' Art of Starving (New York: Telos Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Conquest, Robert, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar.

20 For more balanced overviews of the work of students of modern China, see Perkins, Dwight, “Research on the Economy of the People's Republic of China: A Survey of the Field,” Journal of Asian Studies 42 (February 1983), 345–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harding, Harry, “From China with Disdain: New Trends in the Study of China,” Asian Survey 22 (October 1982), 934–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnson, Chalmers, “What's Wrong with Chinese Political Studies?” Asian Survey 22 (October 1982), 919–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Friedman, Edward, “In Defense of China Studies,” Pacific Affairs 55 (Summer 1982), 252–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Chen, , A Year in Upper Felicity: Life in a Chinese Village During the Cultural Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1973)Google Scholar. Chen's explanations follow each twist of the changing party line, but his descriptions of events seem reliable and insightful.

22 Fei's classic work is Peasant Life in China (New York: Dutton, 1939)Google Scholar.

23 On China's integration into the world market, see Brandt, Loren, “Chinese Agriculture and the International Economy, 1870–1930,” Explorations in Economic History 22 (1985), 168–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See, for example, Scott, James C., The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976)Google Scholar, a pathbreaking work. I would put more stress on peasant religion, however, than does Scott. See Friedman, Edward, Backward Toward Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), part 3Google Scholar, “Rural Revolution,” 115–64. Even Samuel Popkin, who argues powerfully that peasants are profit maximizers, finds that, to be successful, leaders of peasant revolution must act in harmony with local religious notions and their initial organization must be “focused on local goals and goods” ( The Rational Peasant, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, 261 Google Scholar). In Confucian China that often meant issues touching on matters of lineage survival such as marriage and mourning.

25 Dangshi yanjiu ziliao [Materials for the study of party history] 3 (Chengdu: Sichuan People's Publishing House, 1982), 693–708 Google Scholar.

26 Liulin (Willow Grove), the village described in Myrdal's four books, was poor, but uniquely endowed. As early as 1969, there were more wrist watches than families; girls in nursery school wore colorful skirts; roads were paved and lit by electric lights; and sufficient fertilizer was available. Such access to scarce resources (available to no more than two percent of hinterland villages) could only come from special political connections. The village was a commune headquarters; it regularly sent delegates to Beijing for national meetings, which was impossible for 99 percent of China's hundreds of thousands of villages. Liulin villagers sat on key county committees in Yan'an. The whole area seems to have benefited from resources related to connections to the top of the socialist state, linked in part perhaps to Liulin's neighboring Date Garden commune, once the headquarters of the ruling party's Central Committee. By 1972, Liulin was visited by a stream of tourists. In 1985, the Chinese government announced an end to special subsidies for Yan'an County.

27 Lin, Zhu, “The Web,” Renditions, No. 16 (August 1981), 113–21Google Scholar. The only information we have on Li Jian's work comes from attacks on the story.

28 This was revealed long ago in captured 1961 army documents about Henan Province. See Cheng, J. Chester, ed., The Politics of the Chinese Red Army (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

29 See Friedman, Edward, Pickowicz, Paul, Selden, Mark, with Johnson, Kay, Chinese Village, Socialist State (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming 1987)Google Scholar.

30 See Greene, Felix, China: The Country Americans Are Not Allowed to Know (New York: Ballantine, 1961, 1962), chap. 32Google Scholar, “Food and Famine.” Anna Louise Strong, who wrote an irregular Newsletter from China, complained privately: “I am not allowed to admit that anyone in these three years ever starved to death.” Strong, Tracy and Keyssar, Helen, Right in He Soul: The Life of Anna Louise Strong (New York: Random House, 1983), 318 Google Scholar.

31 Avedon, , In Exile from the hand of Snows (New York: Random House, 1984), 237 Google Scholar.

32 Ruo-wang, Bao and Chelminski, Rudolph, Prisoner of Mao (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1973, 1976), pp. 242, 225, 219, 216–17Google Scholar. A woman living just west of Beijing—that is, in a relatively privileged area—reported how famine diets caused constipation: “The mothers would even have to dig the feces out of their children's rectums with sticks.” Further, “I always had to take with me [to the latrine] a long, stout stick to keep away the desperately hungry pigs who would follow me and try frantically to snatch the fresh excrement right from my body as I squatted. They were large animals and dangerous because of the extreme hunger, making me dread the daily ordeal of having to strain to move the bowels and at the same time fight off the pigs.” Daiyun, Yue and Wakeman, Carolyn, To the Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 82 Google Scholar.

33 Boying, Jiang in Hua, Hu, ed., Zhong gong dang shi renwu zhuan [Personal biographies from Chinese communist party history] 7 (Nanchang: Jiangxi People's Publishing House, 1983), 372–74Google Scholar. It is not surprising that Chinese interviewees would not reveal truths to shortterm foreign visitors.

34 Unger, Jonathan, “The Decollectivization of the Chinese Countryside,” Pacific Affairs 58 (Winter 1985–1986), 601 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Smedley, , The Great Road (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), 260 Google Scholar.

36 Womack, , The Fountain of Mao Zedong's Political Thought (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1982), 128 Google Scholar.

37 See the work of Scott, James C., especially “Socialism and Small Property—Or—Two Cheers for the Petty Bourgeoisie,” Peasant Studies 12 (Spring 1985), 185–97Google Scholar.

38 There is a huge literature by Christian teachers and missionaries—who were persecuted, jailed, or deported during this period—on how the state invented its accusations. According to one pastor, “the purpose of their reform was to do away with the church. Pretty soon we weren't allowed to teach children religion anymore.” See Bao and Chelminski (fn. 32), 58. In the post-Mao era, communist reformers have tried to woo everyone from Daoists to Lamaists by halting the persecution of religion.

39 Hinton, William, Fanshen (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

40 Moore, , Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), esp. chaps. 2, 7, 8, 9Google Scholar.

41 For a summary of Chinese analyses of social fascism, see Friedman, Edward, “The Societal Obstacle to China's Socialist Transition: State Capitalism or Feudal Fascism,” in Mozingo, David and Nee, Victor, eds., State and Society in Contemporary China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 148–71Google Scholar.

42 “In Hitler's Germany as well as Mao's China, one sees a paradoxical obsession with largescale industrialization combined with a spiritual revolt of the countryside with its völlkisch values against the decadent cosmopolitan cities.” “The Nazi's killed cosmopolitan Jews, the Japanese persecuted citified Chinese in Southeast Asia (often to the applause of the rural Malays), and so did the Vietnamese and Cambodian communists thirty years later.” (Ian Buruma, “Japanese Lib,” The New Yoi^ Review, May 13, 1986, p. 4.)

Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge embodies this social fascism. This “fascism is produced” by a joining of the “peasants's ancient distrust of the city and towns, the tax collector and the intellectual” with the theories of leaders about commerce and imperialism “and the role that the city, the bureaucrats, the middle class, and the intellectuals play to help imperialists and corporations oppress the peasant.” Becker, Elizabeth, When the War Was Over: The Voices of Cambodia's Revolution and Its People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 152 Google Scholar.