Introduction
In dealing with the topic of China, I have decided Firstly, to break the input into different sections with their own headings. Secondly, I hope to use the sections to go through the long sweep of Chinese history. Thirdly, after each section, I have tried to indicate the relevant lessons for South Africa. Lastly, it is hoped that the history of China should help us as we grapple with the theoretical issues that arise from the Chinese history, which hopefully would help enrich our own theory and practice. I have decided not to insert references in the main text but to cite the sources at the end of the document.
When discussing China, it is easy to confine the topic to three phenomena: the enduring ideas of Confucius; the history of the different Dynasties and the analyses of the rule of the Communist Party of China. While these are important in dissecting and understanding China – historically, culturally, politically and economically – the three areas do not necessarily tell the fullness and richness of this populous country of 1.4 billion people whose landmass spans the equivalent of five time zones and borders fourteen countries. Its total land area makes it the third largest country in the world. It has 22 Provinces, four municipalities, five autonomous regions and two semi-autonomous special administrative regions. In 2023 its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was $17.7 trillion and growing.
In the centuries before the Birth of Christ period, China was defined by at least six important philosophical and political belief systems. Two of those – Confucianism and what the Western world had narrowly termed ‘Legalist’ have endured to the present era. Firstly, Confucianism which focussed on the importance of personal ethics and morality, laid the foundation for much of Chinese and indeed some Asian inter-generational cultures. Confucius was a philosopher and teacher who lived from 551 to 479 BCE. His thoughts on ethics, good behaviour and moral character were written down by his followers in several books. Confucius believed in ancestor worship and human-centred virtues for living a peaceful life.
Secondly, the ‘School of Legalists’ tradition, which in Chinese is called ‘Fajia’, was an intellectual current that gained considerable popularity during the years 453-221BCE, years after Confucius had died. The Fajia thinkers were political realists who sought to attain ‘a rich state and a powerful army’. The followers of these two Chinese philosophical traditions had serious disagreements – Confucius believers insisting that the virtues of benevolence, ritual propriety, ethics, morality and social harmony were the only legitimate and effective basis for good government. Those of the Fajia tradition rejected Confucian ideal of a government by virtuous scholars ruling over a peaceful and harmonious agrarian society. Instead, they defined the proper goals of the ruler and his officials in one simple exhortatory phrase: ‘Enrich the state and strengthen its military power’.
In one of their memorable debates, Confucians openly decried those of Fajia tradition on the latter’s fixation on ‘wealth and power’, arguing that ‘propriety and
righteousness are the foundations of the state, while power and profit are the destroyers of government’.
Meanwhile, China was unified for more than two millennia, being governed by several imperial dynasties. Some of the important historical achievements of China are the invention of gunpowder, paper, the first country to use petroleum as fuel as well as the creation of the modern civil service and government structure in the years 206 BCE to 220 CE. For most of the two millennia, from the 1st to the 19th century, China together with India were the world’s biggest economies. China accounted for one-quarter of the global GDP until the late 1700s and about one-third of the global GDP around 1820 as the Industrial Revolution was beginning in Britain.
Indeed, between 1405 and 1424, China had built some formidable maritime vessels such that they sailed to India, Arabia and Africa including the south of our continent engaging in lucrative trade. One of those fleet comprised of 63 large ships and 255 smaller vessels carrying a total of 27,800 men, including 95 commanders, 543 military officers, 868 civil officers, 180 medical officers and assistants; ambassadors, secretaries and ordinary workers as well as more than 26 000 soldiers. Chinese engagement with Africa was around trade. This was a century before Portugal started their own seafaring into Africa that was to lead to the enslavement and colonisation of Africans and their countries.
By the end of the 1700s, Chinese were regarded as being at the apogee of their prosperous empire. Government was strong; population had reached three hundred million, making the country not only most populous in the world but also with the citizens living better than those anywhere in the world. China’s affluent regions rivalled those of Britain and Netherlands, then the wealthiest parts of Europe.
It was at this time that the Chinese ruler at the time, Emperor Qianlong deigned to receive Lord Macartney, Britain’s emissary of King George III. Macartney arrived in China with an embassy of ninety-five men, carrying the latest in European technology and artwork as gifts. The mission was to establish diplomatic relations between Britain and the Celestial Kingdom – as China was known.
Despite its military and economic might, Britain was running an unsustainable trade deficit with China because there was no British export that the Chinese consumers were buying in great numbers. When the British delegation met Emperor Qianlong, he dismissed them, writing to King George III: “As your ambassador can see himself, we possess all things. I see no value on objects strange and ingenious and have no use for your country’s manufactures”.
LESSONS:
From the above we take the important lessons from both the Confucians
and those of Fajia tradition, even though they themselves did not agree.
- From the Confucians we learn the importance of morality, ethics,
benevolence, ritual propriety and the need to foster community and social harmony. - These are critical lessons at the time when communities believe that the ANC – the leader of society – is no more a leader because of the unbelievable traction of malfeasance, corruption and many deviant behaviours that have disfigured our nation;
- Even those wrong things that are not done by ANC members, the general feeling is that the ANC rule has allowed and tolerated these negative things;
- We therefore have a duty to self-correct, especially as we will be going to our people to urge them to continue to vote for us because, in reality, there is no party that can help the country to truly bury the demons of the past and take the nation forward;
- As far as those of the Fajia tradition are concerned, it is indeed important to build a developmental state with strong institutions, similar to what the Chinese of antiquity envisaged with their phrasing that may have been relevant during that time – ‘Enrich the state and strengthen its military power’;
- As far as the treatment by Emperor Qianlong on the British emissary is concerned, the lesson is that, we should learn to be humble. Even if one holds a powerful position, we should be aware that arrogance and complacency leads to defeat. The emperor did not have a comprehensive report of the balance of power between China and Britain at that time (although he believed China was more powerful). His dismissive attitude did not help his country to know the strengths and weaknesses of their soon-to-be adversaries. He should have taken lessons from one of the greatest Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu in the Art of War: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.”
The Humiliations
But after China’s emperor had smugly dismissed the British delegation, by the middle of the 19th century, China was to decline. Why? Briefly: During the Chinese age of prosperity and flourishing, when together with India they were the biggest economies in the world, the people of this vast country used opium for medicinal purposes and in limited amounts. At that time, British addiction to tea had caused an annual trade deficit in favour of China. But then, British traders stumbled upon a clever but wilfully hurtful way to stop the haemorrhaging of British silver bullion at Canton (today’s Guangzhou), the only Chinese port where Europeans were allowed to bring their goods.
The British traders started selling high-grade opium, grown in India, which was a British colony, to Chinese middlemen. These traders, many linked to the government-backed British East India Company, were the drug cartels of their day.
In so doing, they managed to turn Britain’s chronic trade deficit with China into a growing surplus. The opium trade became so successful that the British Parliament agreed to expand it beyond Guangzhou – by force if necessary. China was now faced with a double problem of silver bullion suddenly flowing out rather than into the country, but most devastatingly, the opium addiction catastrophically began ravaging many lives in the country.
In response, the Chinese government decided to stop the importation of opium, including confiscating and destroying the drug. Britain was furious and decided to go to war. So, China and Britain confronted each other in one of the most destructive drug wars. Indeed, in both Opium Wars, the first in 1839 to 1842 and the second one in 1857 to 1859, Britain in the first war, and, Britain and France in the second one, delivered crushing defeats to China and forced onerous terms, through what was known as ‘unequal treaties’. The terms of the treaties included Britain taking over of Hong Kong, forcing China to pay damages for the destroyed opium and opening China market for skewed trade relations, including the freedom to sell opium.
Further, China was forced to allow Western Countries and Tsarist Russia to engage in businesses as they wished and for over a century they continued to exploit unhindered the resources and riches of the country. The first of these treaties, was signed aboard a British warship anchored at Yangtze, not far from the Temple of Tranquil Seas. Ironically, through the humiliating treaty, the symbolism of the Tranquil Seas turned into combined realities of turbulence, distress and humiliations.
This was the beginning of an interminable series of military and political setbacks leading to upheavals that consigned China to an age of economic and social declines. All these brought about deep levels of poverty and backwardness such that China was to be derogatorily called ‘The Sick Man of Asia’.
These were not the last humiliations. In 1894, the first China-Japan war erupted and after six months, Japan had won and regional dominance in East Asia shifted from China to Japan. For many years Chinese reformers and leaders wrestled with these humiliations, regularly speaking about ‘a century of humiliation’. Indeed, by the 1940s they had even established a National Humiliation Day. To this day, China encourages their children ‘never to forget national humiliation and thus strengthen our national defence’
.
LESSONS:
- The first lesson comes from the previous section when the Chinese were over-confident and did not know their potential enemy. The question for us today is: do we fully know the whole range of political and social forces
opposed to the ANC? - Do we know why the DA and the EFF get whatever support they get? What are the issues that attract people, some of whom were ANC members and supporters to the opposition? At the societal level, there are many forces that are opposed to the ANC Alliance who use different platforms to undermine and weaken the ANC. At times, they even use ANC members to deepen the divisions and self-mutilate with the ultimately objective of undermining the party’s support among the people.
- The Chinese have a National Humiliation Day and they teach their children ‘never to forget the humiliation previously suffered’. What are we doing about our commemorative days? Why are we not commemorating these days in every township and village like during apartheid days?
- We hardly take our kids to these events or to the Freedom Park, Hector Peterson Memorial and others as a way of ensuring that they never forget the problems and challenges that helped us to attain our freedom. Just check how the Voortrekker Monument is visited throughout the year but especially on the 16 December, because the Afrikaner don’t want their children to forget their history.
The Burden of Dreams
When China was unravelling, following a series of these historical setbacks from the mid-19th century into the 20th century, a number of Chinese intellectuals and thinkers offered a combination of practical and optimistic proposals as well as visionary dreams of a country that had to reclaim its past centuries of glorious scientific innovations, maritime dominance and economic prosperity.
In 1826, before the first Opium War of 1839, which presaged China’s decline, Wei Yuan, an intellectual state technocrat, produced a practical field guide for government officials and a compendium of theories on political and economic reforms – An Anthology of Statecraft Writings from the Present Dynasty. In the centuries before the Christian era, the term statecraft, or jingshi, literally meaning ‘ordering the world’, was used by Chinese Fajia scholars of the more pragmatic political bent to distinguish themselves from Confucian intellectuals who emphasised only the attributes of moral and ethical self-cultivation as well as metaphysical philosophy.
Importantly, Wei Yuan used the old term of ‘wealth and power’ as an overarching goal for his reform agenda. What Wei did was to expertly and in the most nuanced ways, combine the opposing views of the Confucians and those of the ‘School of Legalists’ or Fajia. This was clearly Weir’s burden of dreams, because these views never saw the light of day once the Opium Wars began and China went through a series of debilitating episodes of political and economic decays for over a century.
Indeed, the intellectual sophistication of Wei Yuan was lost to many, even in modern days, especially among those who see the current rulers of China, through the Communist Party of China, as being the latter-day saints of the Fajia, who are interested merely in the pursuit of national strength, investing in a technologically advanced military, encouraging commerce through a mixture of private enterprise and state monopoly over key industries and maintaining social order through a brutal set of laws enforced uniformly by an authoritarian state.
Again, at the beginning of the 20th century, while China was experiencing countless upheavals – combined pressures of internal decay and foreign assaults – a political essayist, Liang Qichao wrote a novel, The Future of China, through which he contradicted the real living conditions of his country at that time. This was a blend of patriotic reverie and science fiction, conjuring up what a rejuvenated China might look like in sixty years hence. This China, according to Liang Qichao, would be rejuvenated, strong, prosperous and globally respected. This was Liang’s burden of dreams.
LESSONS:
- One of the most important lessons here is that the people affected by events must write their own stories. It is a regrettable fact that few within the ANC write about their stories, their struggles, experiences all of which are part of the rich South African narrative;
- Even during the times of stress – whether economic, social and even political, we don’t write. We don’t even dream about the kind of a better society we wish to see.
- We hardly write to dissect and analyse the current conditions. There are many who write and being strongly opposed to the ANC and are against the transformative measures taken by the democratic government so that the majority who are unemployed and poor should be fully empowered.
- We then take whatever is trending as the gospel truth and even engage issues based on those negative narratives. The result is that we end-up not knowing ourselves and leaving many, especially the youth, with what Friedrich Engels in the 1893 letter to Franz Mehring called ‘false consciousness’, whereby a class assert itself towards goals that do not benefit it.
The Long March and Mao Zedong’s Rule
The Chinese Communist Party was formed on 23 July 1921, five months after the formation of the South African Communist Party. This was the time after China had seen the end of the last Qing Empire in 1911, which collapsed after a minor revolt by government troops in Wuhan. This made one of the influential thinkers of early 20th century China, Liang Qichao, to comment that it was: “A revolution in ink, not in blood”. Then, in 1912, Sun Yat-sen, assumed power through his Nationalist Party. A patriotic Chinese who studied in America, Sun proved to be anti-imperialist even when he saw the need to learn from both the West and Japan.
Sun Yat-sen was particularly inspired by Vladimir Lenin’s Communist Party, especially on the party structure built on strong leadership, party discipline and centralised messaging. Therefore, the Chinese Nationalist Party leader urged his colleagues to: “learn from Russia, its methods, its organisation, its way of training party members (and) only then can we hope for victory.” When Lenin wrote his seminal Paper: ‘Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism’, and posited that anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles in Asia were critical part of the larger global revolution against capitalism, Sun Yat-sen and many Chinese who were to form the Communist Party of China in 1921, felt that they belonged to the bigger global forces for freedom.
Accordingly, in 1923, being urged by the Soviet Union, both the Chinese Nationalist and Communist parties formed what they called the United Front, the agreement being signed by the respective leaders – Sun Yat-sen and Chen Duxiu, the founder of the Communist party. Sun Yat-sen died in 1925 and was replaced as the leader of the Nationalist Party by Chiang Kai-shek. However, within two years, Chiang shocked the country when he launched what was to be called the ‘white terror’ massacring many leaders of the Communist Party with whom his mentor had entered into alliance. Thus, not only did Communist Party members go underground, they decided to retreat into rural areas where they were getting greater support. As the Nationalists pursued them, they divided into different units and started the ‘Long March’, away from government strong holds into remote areas.
The Long March was a military retreat by the Communist forces being attacked and pursued by the Nationalist government army. The most famous of the marches was to be the one under Mao Zedong, which marched over 9,000 kilometres through some of the most difficult terrain of high mountains, forests and raging rivers. Having started with over 65,000 soldiers, they ended being around 8,000. The leadership that Mao Zedong demonstrated throughout the march earned him the position of Chairman. Henceforth, Mao Zedong was to be known as Chairman Mao.
After a long war that also included having to fight the invading Japanese forces, the Communist Party ultimately became victorious in 1949 and established the People’s Republic of China, along Marxist-Leninist principles. Undoubtedly, Mao Zedong had an incredibly strong and enduring historical imprint on China. He fought and led a difficult and brutal struggle for freedom – form both reactionary nationalists as well as imperialists forces. The Chinese revolution, led by Chairman Mao achieved independence and sovereignty. His reforms started an important process of empowering poor rural people.
Of course, some of Mao Zedong policies were disastrous. In particular, the Great Leap Forward, aimed at rapidly transforming China’s economy from agrarian to industrial. This led to the catastrophic famine that led to deaths variously cited as between 15-55 million. Again, in 1966, he initiated the Cultural Revolution aimed at removing ‘counter-revolutionaries’ elements in China. This was characterised by widespread destruction of important artistic and cultural artefacts; attacks on intellectuals, especially university lecturers by gangs of youths as well as attacks on those committed communist party members seen as being against the programme.
Many revolutionaries were targeted, including the future president of the country, Deng Xiaoping. Deng was ultimately banished to a remote rural area and his son, a university student attacked and thrown out of a 4-storey building, tragically becoming a paraplegic. Indeed, Mao Zedong cultivated a cult of personality. This was perhaps
not surprising because Mao was a great worshipper of Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union whom Mao seemed to be emulating on everything he did.
When Nikita Khrushchev, who replaced Stalin, started the de-Stalinization of the USSR, Mao and the Chinese leadership were appalled. This was the beginning of the China-Soviet split. By 1961, the Chinese communist leaders issued a formal denunciation of Soviet communism as the work of ‘revisionist traitors’ and ‘social imperialists’. Again, when the Soviets promoted ‘peaceful co-existence’ with the West, to reduce the threat of nuclear confrontation, China saw this as a retreat from the global struggle against imperialism. From then henceforth, among others, the two countries competed in trying to influence, especially the developing countries in their struggles against colonialism and imperialism.
In Asia, China aligned more with Cambodia, even supporting the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party – Khmer Rouge. While they started as an anti-imperialist force, once they took power, Khmer Rouge they tried to emulate China’s programmes – both agrarian and cultural revolutions. The disastrous consequences resulted in about 2 million deaths with the country’s professional and technical class destroyed.
On the other hand, the Soviet Union supported and was an ally of Vietnam. The China-Soviet tensions were transferred to these Asian countries. When Vietnam attacked Cambodia to stop the murderous campaign of Pol Pot, a Chinese ally, China in turn, attacked Vietnam in 1979. In that war, China suffered disproportionately more casualties.
The competition of supporting different organisations happened also in Africa – in South Africa the Soviet Union supported the ANC while China supported the PAC; in Zimbabwe ZAPU received help from the Soviet Union while ZANU was assisted by China while in Angola the MPLA was supported by the Soviet Union while China assisted UNITA.
LESSONS:
- An important lesson is that struggles for freedom have been fought under very difficult conditions. The story of the ‘Long March’ resonates with our own long history of struggle for freedom. As in the previous section, these stories must be fully chronicled, communicated and passed on to the next generations;
- Has the ANC of today learned why the Movement was very strong in the past – the discipline that defined the Movement during the difficult periods of struggle and how Oliver Tambo held the organisations strong and united under very difficult conditions.
- The alliance between the Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party asserts the inevitability of alliances. Indeed, these alliances may be for short, medium and long terms. What is important is to interrogate the aims of such alliances and whether they help to advance, in our situation, the objectives of the national democratic revolution.
- The issue of alliances is important, especially in the light of the reduced electoral support for the ANC. So, whatever tactical or strategic alliances that may be forged, the aims and objectives of such approaches should be very clear and the general membership should have the required information, political education as well as possessing the required tools of analysis to interrogate and understand the reasons for whatever positions being taken.
- Importantly, the ANC should, as it were, have the pulse of the people when determining whatever alliances that needed to be forged. A critical question should be, if the observation still holds that, there is a social distance between significant sections of the leadership and the masses, will the same leadership be able to adopt positions that are consistent with the political mood, especially of the ANC’s biggest support base, the African majority?
- Again, although he was such a brave and fearless leader, Mao Zedong
committed some strategic mistakes while in government. These may not have been deliberate. But they tell us that we should be able to fearlessly and comradely fully interrogate the programmes and decisions we take and have the courage of our convictions to change course when we realise we committing strategic errors; - Importantly, we must avoid the cult of personalities. We saw how Mao Zedong nearly destroyed the Chinese Communist Party when he unleashed the young college students against what he perceived as his enemies, including some of the most disciplined and committed members of the party.
Mao Zedong Contribution to Leftist Thoughts
The Soviet-China tensions also influenced many revolutionaries and progressives throughout the world. Depending on which organisation people belonged, it was always easy to dismiss ideas either from the Soviet Union or China. However, gradually, it was accepted that there are progressive ideas to be found on both sides of the Sino-Soviet split. Accordingly, Mao Zedong is universally recognised as one of the important socialist philosophers, military strategist, poet and revolutionary. One of Mao’s most important theoretical contributions is on contradictions.
Mao Zedong expanded and gave concrete examples on Lenin’s theory of contradictions. According to Lenin: “Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradiction in every essence of objects… The two basic conceptions of development are: development as decrease and increase, as repetition and development, as a unity of opposites.”
Mao wrote that to have a fundamental understanding of materialist dialects it is important to grasp; “… the particularity of contradiction, the principal contradiction and the principal aspect of a contradiction, the identity and struggle of the aspects of a contradiction and the place of antagonism in contradiction.”
Further: “…In order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and in its relations with other things. In order words, the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and interacts on the things around it… contradictions within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelation and interactions with other things are secondary cause.”
Again, Mao said: “In studying a problem, we must shun subjectivity, one-sidedness and superficiality. To be subjective means not to look at problems objectively, that is, not to use the materialist viewpoint in looking at problems. …To be one-sided means to understand only China but not Japan, only the Communist Party but not the Kuomintang (Nationalist), only the proletariat but not the bourgeoisie, only the favourable conditions but not the difficult ones, only the past but not the future, only individual parts but not the whole, only defects but not the achievements… only underground revolutionary work but not open revolutionary work. In a word, it means not to understand the characteristics of both aspects of a contradiction. This is what we mean by looking at a problem one-sidedly. Or it may be called seeing the part but not the whole, seeing the trees but not the forest.”
This is consistent with what Lenin said, on whom Mao relied on the issue of contradictions. Lenin said: “…in order really to know an object we must embrace, study, all its sides, all connections and ‘mediations’. We shall never achieve this completely, but the demand for all-sidedness is a safeguard against mistakes and rigidity.”
What this means is that it will be self-defeating not to consider the characteristics of a contradiction in its totality, nor the characteristics of each of its component parts. It means as Mao said: “To deny the necessity for probing deeply into a thing and minutely studying the characteristics of its contradiction, but instead merely to look from afar and, after glimpsing the rough outline, immediately to try to resolve the contradiction.”
LESSONS:
- Cadres of the movement must be well-grounded in the theoretical issues of the Alliance. Political education is the guarantor both for the successful revolution and its defence;
- Without political education, members of the Movement would forever be available to be bought so as to act, only as voting cattle during various elections; Hence, in many ANC conferences, branch members are given sheets of papers with names to be voted, some of which are not even known to the delegates. Unfortunately, because of this lack of political education, only a limited number of people actively participate in policy discussions.
- Indeed, there are a number of important political education programmes. We may want to work-out whether they do produce the intended results;
- Because the ANC is an important member of the Left, it is critical that its members fully grasp the ideology and theoretical concepts that have guided the ANC, the Alliance as well as revolutionaries and progressive forces for centuries. There is no better place to find those progressive theoretical concepts than within the rich treasure trove of Marxist literature.
- For decades, leaders and activists of the ANC and the entire Movement were grounded in the concepts of Dialectical and Historical Materialism and Theory of Knowledge. Even those who would complain that Das Kapital was difficult,
they at least knew some of the basic concepts within that important literature. - A leader who does not know and understand the issue of contradictions would not be able to navigate the fast-moving political milieu that defines both our country and the world today. Indeed, as the country enters the politics of alliances, without the grasp of contradictions and their applications in the real theatre of struggle, there would be serious tactical and strategic mistakes whose negative consequences may take long to reverse.
- But it is not just Marxism with which we must be conversant. We need leaders and activists that understand the meanings of the whole spectrum of political concepts and ideologies. These include socialism, communism, liberalism, capitalism, fascism, imperialism, conservatism, anarchism, authoritarianism and others. This should be basic.
Deng Xiaoping: ‘It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice’.
In 1957 when Mao Zedong and his delegation met Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow, the Chinese leader said to his Soviet Union’s counterpart: “See that little man over there,” Mao pointing at Deng Xiaoping, “He is very wise man, sees far into the future.” According to Khrushchev memoirs, Mao then “lavished praise on Deng in every possible way as the future leader of China and its Communist party.”
After taking over in China Deng Xiaoping declared: “Socialism does not mean poverty; to get rich is glorious.” Again he said: “Backwardness must be recognised before it can be changed. One must learn from those who are more advanced before one can catch up with and surpass them.”
Deng Xiaoping is rightly regarded as the father of the modern Chinese development and economic advancement. Following Mao Zedong’s death, Deng assumed power after out-manoeuvring the Gang of Four. During Mao Zedong’s reign, Deng Xiaoping was wrongly accused of being a ‘Capitalist Roader’ because of his unwillingness to support Mao’s extreme policies during the Cultural Revolution. He then suffered the indignity of being wrongly accused, including being physically attacked by radical pro-Mao college students, and then banished from the party and the government to a remote rural area. What was more traumatic, was when he was banished, his son was attacked and fell from the fourth-four of a college residence. He was refused proper hospital treatment and became a paraplegic.
Yet, when Deng Xiaoping made a political comeback, he never harboured any ill-feelings against his tormentors, including Mao Zedong, who had passed on by that time. Instead, Deng doggedly worked hard to transform both the Communist Party and the rest of the Chinese society. He started a process of opening the Chinese economy, initiating reforms that were necessary to defeat poverty and the backwardness that had defined the lives of the Chinese people for over a century.
But, in so doing, Deng Xiaoping never abandoned his socialist ideals, teachings and orientations. To his eternal glory, he managed to refresh those socialist ideals, ensuring that through hard-nosed practises, they become alive, modernised and relevant to the specific Chinese concrete conditions. Many capitalist ideological doctrinaires continue to refute his firm assertion of China system being ‘Market Socialism’, doing so because they cannot fathom the reality of socialists, using their specific historical conditions and indeed borrowing from, and tapping into the technological advancements of capitalism itself, to build a socialist society.
An old Chinese adage says: the empire can be conquered from horseback but not governed that way. Deng perfectly understood this adage. Indeed, while Mao Zedong used old guerrilla tactics to demobilise his opponents – real and perceived – Deng effortlessly made the transition from a guerrilla fighter to a competent political administrator and a transformative leader who embraced the challenges of his time, especially around the issues of the modern economy and technologies.
Deng Xiaoping changed the trajectory of Chinese development from the one based on the Maoist emphasis on seemingly radical yet impractical and destructive programmes, as well as political agency based on personality cult as the driving forces for societal transformation. Deng insisted that there must be greater emphasis on advancing the material productive forces as the fundamental and necessary conditions for building an advanced socialist society.
In fairness, Mao Zedong may have also believed in advancing material productive forces as necessary conditions for building an advanced socialist society. But his fixation on copying everything that Joseph Stalin was doing, including the forceful collectivisation of villages made him to fail in finding creative ways of dealing with China’s backwardness even when he professed ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’.
But, Deng Xiaoping was to adopt a more realistic approach to deal with China’s backwardness. This included emphasis on science and education; embracing as well as encouraging many intellectuals who were attacked during the Cultural Revolution.
He further incentivised productivity and efficiency by allowing individuals and households to earn and retain any surplus profits they made. He opened the economy for foreign investments. He decentralised the economy and ensured that China was one of the few countries where industrial clusters and Special Economic Zones (SEZs) were not just successful, but became some of the critical pillars and engines of economic growth. He creatively combined private entrepreneurialism with many strong state companies that spanned many important economic clusters. He called this system ‘Market Socialism’.
Clarifying the Marxist-Leninist theoretical basis that has confused many about the economic reforms that he introduced from 1978, Deng Xiaoping said: “Marxism holds that, within the contradictions between the productive forces and relations of production, between practice and theory and between the economic base and the superstructure, the productive forces…and the economic base generally play a principal and decisive role. Whoever denies this is not a materialist.”
Accordingly, for “productive forces and the economic base to play a principal and decisive role” in advancing the development of a country, these forces must be nurtured, developed, modernised and strengthened to be simultaneously globally competitive as well as nationally advanced so as to defeat poverty and backwardness. Thus, as Deng opened the economy for foreign investments and mobilising the enormous working energies of the people, he ensured that the state was central to these processes, through the strong regime of laws and regulations as well as the numerous active and productive government-owned state enterprises, the government-controlled economic clusters and special economic zones. All these, together with private businesses, played transformative roles in enhancing the productive forces and the economic base which were necessary for the development of China.
While Deng Xiaoping called the Chinese economic system, ‘Market Socialism’, his detractors from the West have consistently argued that China was a capitalist economy because of its adoption of the ‘free market’ system. In response, Deng rebuked those who tended to use reductionist approaches to explain economic concepts: “Planned economy does not equal socialism; and market economy does not equal capitalism. Socialism can have market mechanisms as well and government planning and market are both economic means.”
Economist, Steven Nickolas, explains the difference between capitalism and the free market: “Capitalism is focussed on the creation of wealth and ownership of capital and factors of production, whereas a free market system is focussed on the exchange of wealth or goods and services.”
In this ‘market socialism’ or ‘socialist market economy’, there are strong elements of a command economy within which are different components: central state-owned enterprises; privately-owned enterprises and collective/township-village enterprises.
Are there no individual capitalists in China? The answer is there are plenty of them, some of them fabulously rich. But the Chinese system of a market economy is largely defined by the predominance of public ownership and state enterprises. To suggest that the presence of individual capitalists in China means it is a capitalist country is the same as saying that, the fact that there are state-owned enterprises in the West, then those countries are socialists.
Market socialism or socialist market economy is presented as an early stage in the development of a fully-fledged socialism. This is when public ownership coexists alongside a diverse range of non-public forms of ownership, including the privately-owned enterprises, public-private partnerships, co-operatives and others. China, which has perfected this system cannot be called capitalist because despite the co-existence of private capitalists alongside state-owned and collective enterprises, the party and the government has a range of legislative, political and other mechanisms to retain control over the process of advancing the material productive forces as the fundamental and necessary conditions for building an advanced socialist society. Those opposed to these measures refer to them as ‘totalitarian’.
Importantly, the above-mentioned economic processes are not left merely, to ‘capitalist market forces’. To those who saw issues of socialism and capitalism in purely black and white lines, and with their rigid dogmatic lenses dividing phenomena into ‘either or’, with no areas of overlapping, Deng Xiaoping replied: ‘It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice’. This quote and his economic market reforms have been wilfully misinterpreted to suggest that he abandoned socialist ideas for capitalist ones. Indeed, many high priests of capitalism, eager to claim credit for the Chinese phenomenal growth and development continue to argue that China practises ‘state capitalism’ or ‘party-state capitalism’. Yet, they don’t call their Western countries with strong state enterprises, ‘state-socialism’!
LESSONS:
- The first important lesson from Deng Xiaoping is the political discipline he showed even after he was subjected to some unfair treatment by Mao Zedong;
- The second critical lesson is the comprehensive cadre development. This happened when equipping both party members and the rest of the Chinese society with education, science, technology, economics and politics. This happened because of the appreciation that for party members and the people being highly trained and skilled, is sine qua non for the development and growth of the country;
- Further, Deng was not afraid to learn even from his ideological opponents.
This is important, because to assume that knowledge and wisdom can only be found among those with whom you agree is fallacious and the recipe for disaster and decay; - Deng Xiaoping embarked on economic reforms in China because he knew that he was ideologically firmly grounded such that many of those who believed he had ditched his socialist views, scrambled for false ideological explanations when he proved to have been tactically dexterous in using aspects of capitalist development to drive his socialist agenda;
- In using the metaphor of a black and white cat, Deng was able to explain that to achieve the desired developmental goals, it was not necessary to cling to a whole command economic model (tool), which had earlier failed, when the free market model (tool) can achieve the stated objectives. Indeed, he dynamically fused the two models to advance his socialist project.
The Return of History – Enter the Dragon
As we meet today in 2023, China has regained most of the status that made it one of the biggest economies in the world from the 1st to the 19th century. Indeed, China of 2023 has fulfilled the dreams that burdened Liang Qichao, when 100 years ago he wrote a visionary wish in his, The Future of China. And to repeat, he did this with a blend of patriotic reverie and science fiction, thus conjuring up what a rejuvenated China might look like – developed, strong, prosperous and globally respected.
- In the past 30 years or so, China has achieved phenomenal economic growth which is an unprecedented development miracle in human history;
- China is the world’s second largest economy after the USA, with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $17.7-Trillion. But, China is the world’s largest economy when measured by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). It has an upper middle income, developing, mixed socialist market economy that incorporates industrial and strategic five-year plans;
- Some of the most important engines for economic growth in China are the strong regimes of laws that are enforced; an industrious labour force; numerous functionally diverse industrial clusters and Special Economic Zones (SEZs) that cover larger land areas than any types in the world; foreign investment; combined state enterprises and private companies; an effective education system that is centred on science and technology as well as technology transfers from all over the world.
- Indeed, the industrial clusters and SEZs have significantly contributed to gross domestic product, employment, manufacturing, innovation, exports and the attraction of foreign investment. They have also helped in bringing new technologies to China and ensured the adoption of modern management practices;
- The economy consists of a strong public sector, dominant and efficient state-owned enterprises (SOEs); mixed-owned enterprises, as well as a large domestic private sector. China’s State Banks are among the biggest in the world, with four of those being in the top ten. Nowhere in the world do you have such a strong state, the durable and efficient SOEs, SEZs and public-private partnerships that are the main drivers of economic development;
- In 2020 China had 778-million workers; 500-million people being regarded as middle class, 242-million as upper middle class. Only 5.3% of the working population is unemployed. In February 2021, President XI Jinping announced that extreme poverty in China had been eradicated;
- China is the world’s largest manufacturing economy and exporter of goods. It is also the world’s largest consumer of numerous commodities and accounts for about half of global consumption of metals. It is also the largest trading nation in the world. In 2020, it was the second largest country after Japan in terms of outward foreign direct investment. China has the world’s largest foreign-exchange reserves, at $4-trillion, when including foreign assets of
China’s state-owned banks; - The Chinese economy covers many areas – resources including different metals and petroleum; huge armaments industry; construction; consumer products including textile, apparel, footwear, toys and electronics; chemicals, fertilisers and food processing; massive transportation networks and equipment, including automobiles, locomotives, ships, aircraft, railcars; telecommunications equipment; commercial spaces, launch vehicles,
satellites and more; - By 2020, China was Africa’s biggest lender, holding $73-Billion of Africa’s debt and $9-Billion of private debt. While in 2018, China had pledged $60-Billion at the China-Africa Co-operation (FOCAC), this was cut to $40-billion in 2021. In January 2023, China asserted a commitment to helping Africa’s debt burden by joining G-20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative. (it must be stated that most of Africa’s debt is to Western countries);
- Chinese system of governance and selecting leadership has been described by Zhang Weiwei as Meritocracy. This system, as explained by Zhang, is ‘selection plus election’, where competent leaders are chosen on the basis of performance and broad support, through a rigorous process of screening, opinion surveys, internal evaluations and various types of elections in line with Confucius system of meritocracy. Criteria is based on poverty eradication, job creation, local economic development and increasingly environmental protection.
- Leaders in China are chosen also on how they had performed at the local level, provinces and municipalities whose GDP are larger than many countries. As Zhang puts it, Chinese system of Meritocracy makes it inconceivable that ‘weak leaders like George W. Bush and Donald Trump’ would ever be chosen leaders’. Zhang further asserts that: ‘China leadership 16 is more about ‘leadership than showmanship as in the West’ and Chinese leadership challenges the stereotypical dichotomy of democracy versus autocracy. Chinese believe that ‘the nature of the state, including its legitimacy had to be defined by its substance, that is good governance, competent leadership and being able to meet the needs of the people’.
- From 2013, China initiated what it called One Belt and One Road Initiative through which is engaged in infrastructure projects in different parts of world, but mainly Asia, Africa and Europe. In Africa, as of 2022, China had signed agreements with 52 countries on this Initiative.
- Projects started in East Africa region, with rail, road and port infrastructures.
These includes the Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway; Ethiopia-Djibouti Water Pipeline; Ethiopia Eastern Industrial Zone; Mombasa-Nairobi Railway, which was Kenya’s biggest infrastructure project since independence and helped to cut the journey between the two towns from 12 hours to 4.5 hours. In Tanzania, the 2,561-kilometre rail connects Dar es Salaam in the Indian Ocean to Mwanza on Lake Victoria. In Uganda, China built the Karuma power Station, Isimba Hydroelectric Power Station and the Entebbe-Kampala Expressway. Other projects were done in Mozambique and Sudan. - In Nigeria, the Abuja-Kaduna railway line was built and opened in 2016. In Algeria, a railway line that connects the country with neighbours – Morocco and Tunisia was built by the Chinese.
- Other countries to benefit from Chinese One Belt One Road Initiative include Mozambique, DRC, Senegal, Egypt and others.
- Indeed, as Africa and South Africa deepens its relationship with China, especially economically, it should jealously guard its sovereignty and independence. Importantly, the continent should avoid entangling itself into unsustainable debt in the same way that the West did to many African countries. There must be avoidance of the continent being the junior partners on political and diplomatic matters. Indeed, the continent should fearlessly confront any and all cases of unacceptable behaviours by some Chinese companies, including reports of bad working conditions for workers and environmental damage by some Chinese companies.
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