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CONTENTS
Vol. 15, No. 1: JanuaryFebruary 1983
Peter Van Ness and Satish Raichur - Dilemmas of Socialist
Development: An Analysis of Strategic Lines in China, 1949-1981
Edmund Lee - Economic Reform in Post-Mao China: An Insiders
View
Ellen Judd - Chinas Amateur Drama: The Movement to Popularize
the Revolutionary Model Operas
Robert B. Marks - Class Relations and the Origins of Rural
Revolution in a South China County
Elizabeth Lasek - Imperialism in China: A Methodological Critique
Roland Higgins - Prince of Pirates: The Temenggongs and the
Development of Johore and Singapore, 1784-1855, by Carl Trocki /
A Review Essay
Carl Trocki - In Response to Roland Higgins Review of Prince of
Pirates
BCAS/Critical AsianStudies
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CCAS Statement of Purpose
Critical Asian Studies continues to be inspired by the statement of purpose
formulated in 1969 by its parent organization, the Committee of Concerned
Asian Scholars (CCAS). CCAS ceased to exist as an organization in 1979,
but the BCAS board decided in 1993 that the CCAS Statement of Purpose
should be published in our journal at least once a year.
We first came together in opposition to the brutal aggression of
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suring American domination of much of Asia. We reject the le-
gitimacy of this aim, and attempt to change this policy. We
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perverted scholarship and alienated many people in the field.
The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars seeks to develop a
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ize that to be students of other peoples, we must first understand
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CCAS wishes to create alternatives to the prevailing trends in
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nity for the development of anti-imperialist research.
Passed, 2830 March 1969
Boston, Massachusetts
Vol. 15, No. 1 / Jan.-Feb., 1983
Contents
Peter Van Ness and Satish Raichur 2
Edmund Lee 16
Ellen Judd 26
Robert B. Marks 36
Elizabeth Lasek 50
Roland Higgins 65
CarlA. Trocki 68
71
Dilemmas of Socialist Development: An Analysis of
Strategic Lines in China, 1949-1981
Economic Reform in Post-Mao China: An Insider's View
China's Amateur Drama: The Movement to Popularize
the Revolutionary Model Operas
Class Relations and the Origins of Rural Revolution
in a South China County
Imperialism in China: A Methodological Critique
Rulers without Subjects/review essay
Prince ofPirates: The Temenggongs and the Development
ofJohor and Singapore. 1784-1855. by Carl A. Trocki
InResponse to Roland Higgins' Review ofPrince ofPirates
Correspondence and Errata
List of Books to Review
Contributors
Roland L. Higgins: Department of History, Keene State
College, Keene, New Hampshire
Ellen R. Judd: Department of Anthropology, University of
Victoria, Victoria, B.C., Canada
Elizabeth Lasek: Graduate student in Sociology at SUNY
Binghamton currently studying at Beijing University
Edmund Lee: Political economist from China now studying
in the United States
Robert B. Marks: Department of History, Whittier College,
Whittier, California
Satish Raichur: Associate Professor of Economics at the
University of Denver before his death in 1980
Peter Van Ness: Graduate School of International Studies,
University of Denver, Denver, Colorado
Carl Trocki: History Department, Thomas More College,
Ft. Mitchell, Kentucky 41017
Dilemmas of Socialist Development:
An Analysis of Strategic Lines in China, 1949-1981
by Peter VanNess and Satish Raichur*
... how to build this future-which is not something to be
received by men, but is rather something to be created by
them.
-Paulo Freire
The end is the means by which you achieve it. Today's step is
tomorrow's life.
- Wilhelm Reich
Chairman Mao has been officially laid to rest, and the
process of leadership transition begun at his death in 1976
appears to be largely completed. The Central Committee
of the Chinese Communist Party at its meeting in June
1981, on the 60th anniversary ofthe Party's founding, both
chose a new Party Chairman, Hu Yaobang,and approved a
35,OOO-word resolution evaluating Mao Zedong's contribu
tions and mistakes during the period of his rule.
1
The new
Deng Xiaoping leadership, comprised principally of Mao's
opponents from the Cultural Revolution, has adopted a
new design for development in China and has proposed
new methods for achieving socialist construction. The time
seems ripe for an evaluation of socialist development to
date under the People's Republic of China. 2
We are grateful to the following for their criticisms and suggestions for
revision of earlier drafts of this paper: to members of the University of
Denver's FGOD Seminar, especially Xu Ming and Huang Fanzhang; to
participants in the Center for Chinese Studies Regional Seminar at the
University of California, Berkeley, to which this paper was presented in
March 1981, especially Irma Adelman and Laura Tyson; and to the
reviewers for the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. In addition, we
would like to thank the students over the years in our seminar on the
Political Economy of the PRC with whom we have investigated most of
the central problems addressed in this paper.
1. Renmin Ribao, June 30 and July 1 and 2, 1981.
2. For comprehensive data on economic performance under the PRC, see
the following sources: Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the
United States, Chinese Economy Post-Mao, Vol. 1, (Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978); the nine-volume study by the
World Bank, China: Socialist Economic Development, June 1, 1981 (Report
No.3391-CHA) (The Economist, June 20, 1981, pp. 44-45 summarizes and
comments on the World Bank report); and the annual reports of the PRC
State Statistical Bureau on the economic performance ofthe previous year
(e.g., "Communique on Fulfilment of China's 1981 National Economic
Plan," Beijing Review, May 17, 1982, pp. 15-24).
2
The purpose of this article is to identify, to describe,
and to analyze the implications of the principal alternative
strategic lines of socialist development which have been
attempted in China during the first thirty-two years of the
People's Republic, from 1949 to 1981. In our view, there
have been three such lines (iuxian) , each of them a dis
tinctly different approach to socialist development con
ceived in terms of its own particular logic and basic
theories, and implemented in China during a particular
historical period. We have labelled them: Strategy A (the
strategic design for the First Five Year Plan, 1953-57);
Strategy B (the Great Leap Forward, 1958-60); and Stra
tegy C (so far only partially implemented under the Four
Modernizations, 1978-present).3
Each strategic line is familiar to students of compara
tive socialist development. Strategy A is the Stalinist model
which emphasizes centralized bureaucratic planning and
resource allocation, or what Western economists have
called "command economy." Strategy B is 2. social mobili
zation approach, based on Party-directed mass movements
to create a communist "new man." And Strategy C or
"market socialism" is an effort to build a market mecha
nism into a socialist planned economy in order to increase
productivity, to achieve greater economic efficiency, and
to stimulate the intiative of workers and managers through
material incentives.
In our judgment, the first two strategies have failed for
different reasons as systematic attempts to achieve socialist
construction in China, and the third is fundamentally
flawed. We will try to explain how and why.
In the theoretical and comparative literature on social
ist development, a number of authors, both Marxists and
non-Marxists, have identified alternative strategies of so
cialist development approximately in terms of what we are
calling Strategies A,B, and C. For example, Sweezy in his
3. Those years since 1949, other than the time periods specified here as
representative of Strategies A, B, or C, were, as we will argue below,
years of rehabilitation, readjustment, or intra-Party struggle. See Table 1
below.
debate with Bettelheim
4
describes three alternative roads
very similar to what we have found in the case of China.
Another example is Eckstein.
5
Eckstein died before the
Chinese leadership began systematically to implement a
market-socialist strategy in 1978, but he, like Sweezy, iden
tified the same three alternative approaches. Eckstein rec
ognized, even in the readjustment and recovery from the
Great Leap period in China, 1961-65, how decentralizing
decision-making to production units, emphasizing material
incentives, and increasing the scope of the market all
seemed to fit together as one potential approach to socialist
development - a market socialism approach (our Strategy
C) which was later adopted by the Deng Xiaoping leader
ship in 1978 under the so-called Four Modernizations.
Clearly there are a number of parallels between the
Chinese experience and that of other socialist countries.
For example, the Soviet Union under Stalin attempted to
impose Strategy A, the Stalinist model, on virtually all
socialist countries that Moscow could influence; and,
therefore, most socialist countries have had a significant
experience with that strategic line. Regarding Strategy B,
the social mobilization model, there are some striking par
allels, for example, between Cuban policy during the peri
od 1966-70 and China during the Great Leap Forward,
1958-60.
6
And, finally, the present Chinese leadership has
been studying and emulating certain aspects of the Strategy
C, the market socialism model, drawing on the experiences
of Yugoslavia and Hungary. 7
In order to maximize opportunities for cross-socialist
country comparisons, when analyzing the Chinese experi
ence, we will describe the three models which have been
attempted in China in terms which could be applied to any
other socialist society. See, for example, our Figure 1 and
Table 2 below.
Franz Schurmann provides the best clue to the histori
cal relationship among these three approaches to building
socialism when he characterizes them as: centralization
(Strategy A), decentralization II (Strategy B), and decen
tralization I (Strategy C). 8 As Schurmann's labels suggest,
Strategies Band C-two different kinds of decentraliza
tion-are both reactions to an initial experience with Strat
egy A, the centralized Stalinist model. They are micro
answers to problems created as a result ofthe macro preoc
cupations of Strategy A (stifling of initiative and enthusi
asm at the production unit level, economic sector imba
lance, low productivity of labor and capital, etc.). Strategy
4. Paul M. Sweezy and Charles Bettelheim, On the Transition to Socialism
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
5. Alexander Eckstein, China's Economic Revolution (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 1977). For a somewhat different but provocative
perspective, see also Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New
York: Basic Books, 1977).
6, See Carmelo Mesa-Lago, C"ha in the 1970's (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1978), pp. 2-3.
7. For example, Luo Yuanzhen, Deputy Director of the Institute of
World Economy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is head of a
national society in China for the study of Yugoslav political economy,
Nansilafu lingji Yanjiu Hui.
8. Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968 edition), pp. 175-178.
B, by means of social mobilization, proposes a more politi
cal solution to these problems; Strategy C, through use of
the market and material incentives, suggests an economic
solution. To our knowledge, the best descriptions of each
of these general strategic lines which are available in Eng
lish are: for Strategy A, Stalin's Economic Problems of So
cialism in the U.S.S.R.;9 for describing Strategy B, Mao
Zedong's A Critique ofSoviet Economics; 10 and, finally, with
regard to Strategy C, a book by the Czech economic theo
rist of the "Prague Spring" in 1968, Ota Sik, Plan and
Market Under Socialism. I I
By 1955-56, Mao had apparently concluded that the
time was ripe for building socialism-socialism on a
Chinese design fitted to China's concrete conditions
and that the Soviet-style First Five Year Plan should
not be continued. Indeed high rates ofeconomic growth
and an immense development of heavy industry had
been achieved, but at the same time, differences be
tween mental and manual labor , city and countryside,
and worker and peasant were growing greater.
As an interpretation of China's development history,
our analysis differs markedly from interpretations that
have characterized PRC history in terms of "pendulum
swings" alternating between radical and pragmatic phases,
or, for example, from the Skinner and Winckler model
(1969) which has interpreted PRC history as essentially
cyclical, involving little or no qualitative change.
12
Our
analysis also differs from those who interpret the Cultural
Revolution period, 1966-76, as reflecting a significant de
parture in development strategy. 13 Instead, we argue that
9. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1972 (first published in 1952 in
Russian).
10. Translated by Moss Roberts; New York: Monthly Review Press,
1977. This is a collection of translations from Mao Zedong Sixiang Wansui
(Long Live the Thought of Mao Zedong), 1967 and 1969. For concepts
related to Strategy B, see also: Mao, On the Correct Handling ofContradic
tions Among the People (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1957); Mao,
Four Essays on Philosophy (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1966); and
Stuart Schram (ed.), Chairman Mao Talks to the People, Talks and Letters:
1956-197J (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
11. Translated by Eleanor Wheeler; White Plains, New York: Interna
tional Arts and Sciences Press, 1967. Regarding Strategy C and its justifi
cation and implementation in China, see also Xue Muqiao, China's Social
ist Economy (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981).
12. G. William Skinner and Edwin A. Winckler, "Compliance Succes
sion in Rural Communist China: A Cyclical Theory," in Amitai Etzioni
(ed.), A Sociological Reader on Complex Organizations (New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston, 1969). See, also, Andrew J. Nathan, "Policy
Oscillations in the People's Republic of China: a Critique." and Edwin A.
Winckler, "Policy Oscillations in the People's Republic of China: a Re
ply" both in China Quarterly, December 1976.
13. For example, see Suzanne Paine, "Balanced Development: Maoist
Conception and Chinese Practice," World Development, 1976, No.4, pp.
277-304; and David Mamo, "Mao's Model for Socialist Transition Recon
sidered," Modern China, January 1981, pp. 55-81.
3
the Cultural Revolution is better understood as a struggle
in the realm of so-called "superstructure," an intra-Party
leadership conflict which became a mass movement in the
years 1966-69 but which did not involve important innova
tions in development strategy.
Definition of Terms
We use the term strategic line to mean a conceptual
model for development. It is a systematic design which
spells out both the ends and the means
action. Strategic lines, if adopted by a ruhng commUnIst
party, are implemented by specific development'p0licies. If
the policies are thought to be successful and If they are
sustained over time, they create a particular social system, a
social order and way of life which has its own characteristic
division of labor, culture and social values, and form of
political rule. Thus, the Strategy A line was successfully
implemented in terms of the policies of the First Five Year
Plan, which in tum created a social system in China charac
terized by a centralized, bureaucratic command economy.
Subsequently, the mass mobilization line of Strategy B was
attempted during 1958-60 under the policies of the Great
Leap Forward and the communes, but it was never success
fully implemented. In 1961-62, the basic policies were
changed in order to reverse the economic downturn of
1959-61. Finally, the third alternative, Strategy C, the
market socialism line, to date has only been partially imple
mented under the policies of the Four Modernizations,
and the results so far are mixed.
The term socialism has been used in many different
ways. For the purposes of this analysis, socialism is under
stood to be a process of basic societal transformation, an
historical period of planned transformation from capital
ism to communism, undertaken in a society ruled by a
communist party. We assume that the various communist
party leaders and planners will often have very different
notions about what socialism in concrete terms means and
what the central characteristics of socialism as a process of
transformation should be, but they all agree that commu
nism is the end and that all of them are trying to achieve it.
Hence, proponents of different strategies of de
velopment may disagree about the means, SOCialism; but
we assume that they agree about the end, communism.
Quite frankly, we feel that much of the debate concerning
which communist party-ruled countries are "socialist" and
which are not has been unproductive. One of the main
reasons for our decision to define socialism as a process is to
emphasize the importance of focusing on the direction of
social change produced by the implementation of each of
the three strategies as a basis for evaluating the different
approaches. 14
There is no textbook definition of communism in the
classical Marxist literature. Here, we assume that the pro
ponents of the various strategies of socialist
would all agree on a definition limited to three charactens
tics; ownership of the means of production, the process of
14. For a contemporary Chinese notion of treating socialism as a process,
see Xue, China's Socialist Economy, p. viii.
production, and less ambigu<?us charac
teristics of communist society. Hence, we define a com
munist society as one in which: 1) the means of production
are owned by the whole people (e.g., in Mao Zedong's
terms, the means of production have been redistributed to
all the people); 2) the production process is fully socialized;
and 3) distribution of that which is produced is on the
of "need" rather than an individual's "work"-commodl
ties are no longer produced for exchange but rather pro
ducts are allocated on the basis of need. We will limit our
definition to these characteristics. Communist party lead
ers and planners might well disagree about other defining
characteristics of communism: for example, what level of
social output in production is essential to provide the mate
rial basis of support for communist society; what the disap
pearance of social classes might mean in concrete terms; or
what procedures would replace the state and perform the
continuing necessary functions of organizing production,
allocating that which is produced, and regulating social
interaction in a communist society.
Finally, the debate-or, more accurately, the strug
gle-among proponents of the different strategic lines of
socialist development is carried out within the conceptual
context of Marxist economic theory. The advocates of all
three different strategies of socialist development similarly
conceive of the process of achieving communism as one
requiring the concurrent development of both forces of
production and relations ofproduction in to t?e
material conditions required for a transition from SOCIalist
to communist society. They identify the main contradic
tions in the socialist historical period as those between the
forces of production and the relations of production, and
between the superstructure and the economic base. 15 The
forces of production have been defined as "the relation of
society to the forces of nature, in contest with which it
secures the material values it needs," and relations of pro
duction as "the relations of men to one another in the
process of production."16 The forces of production
labor, the means of production (land, tools, or machmery,
15. For example, ibid., pp. v-viii.
16. Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., p. 64. Marx in
Critique ofPolitical Economy writes:
In the social production oftheir life. men enter into definite relations that are
indispensable and independent oftheir will. relations of production whIch
correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productIve
forces. The sum IOtal of these relations of production constitutes the eco
nomic structure of society. the real foundation. on which rises a legal and
political superstructure and 10 which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the
social. political. and intellectual life process in general. It is not the
consciousness ofmen that determines their being. but. on the contrary, their
social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage oftheir
development. the material productive forces ofsociety come in conflict with
the existing relations ofproduction, or-what is but a legal expressionfor
the same thing-with the property relations within which they have been at
work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these
relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch ofsocial revolution.
With the change of the economic foundations the entire immense super
structure is more or less rapidly transformed.
David McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings (London: Oxford University
Press, 1977),p.389.
4

Figure 1
Strategies of Socialist Development:
Compared in Terms of Relations of Production and Forces of Production
Relations of Production
Fully Socialized Communism
-I,
S,r
. ~ - - - - , .
&. ,,"
Capitalist
Feudal
Subsistence
and raw materials), and technology. Relations of produc
tion essentially comprise the ownership of the means of
production, the social organization or administration of
production, and the distribution of that which is produced.
In terms of Marxist theory, the two together (the forces of
production and the relations of production) constitute the
economic base or material foundation of any society. The
superstructure of society, which includes government and
other social institutions, legal systems, culture and ideol
ogy, is usually conceived of as a reflection of the economic
base-i.e., the economic base of any society is thought
largely to determine the structure of classes, government,
and prevailing ideology.
..... _-_ ..
Forces of Production
Aftluence
Preliminary Comparisons: Theoretical and Historical
Figure 1 depicts the three strategies of socialist de
velopment in China in terms of the contradiction between
relations of production and forces of production. Forces of
production constitute the horizontal axis and are specified
in terms of a continuum indicating changes in capacity to
produce "use values" (i.e., the productive capacity of the
economy) running from subsistence to aftluence. Changes
in relations of production, indicated on the vertical axis,
are specified on the basis of the main characteristics of
different kinds of societies: feudal, capitalist, and then
classless society under communism. The northeast comer
of Figure 1, towards which all three strategies are directed
is "communism."
5
1\
.\
I \
,
The three strategies are compared in Figure 1. The
pattern depicted for each strategic line represents the logic
of the strategic design, not necessarily the actual performance
of the strategy when it was implemented in China. Strategy
A, implemented during the First Five Year Plan, 1953-57,
conceived of a fairly linear relationship between the de
velopment of forces of production and relations of produc
tion. An initial period of sharp changes in relations of
production (e.g., the takeover of state capitalist enter
prises, the establishment of joint state-private enterprises,
and the collectivization of agriculture) would be followed
by a consistent pattern of planned incremental changes
initially intended to cover three five-year-plans, 1953-67
in both relations of production and forces of production
moving toward communism. By contrast, Strategy B, Mao
Zedong's design for the Great Leap Forward, 1958-60,
sought to achieve qualitative leaps in relations of produc
tion as a part of a dialectical process leading to more rapid
development of both relations of production and forces of
production. During 1958, for example, the hope was often
expressed that this approach could significantly shorten the
road to communism. Finally, Strategy C, the present Four
Modernizations development strategy, places great em
phasis on the development of the forces of production or
economic capacity through retrenchment with respect to
relations of production (e.g., by seeking to combine mar
ket with plan, encouraging foreign private investment in
China, and emphasizing individualized material work
incentives). Although the characteristics of Strategy A and
Strategy C are very different, the two strategic lines are
similar in envisaging a continuous pattern of incremental
change, rather than the dialectical pattern described by
Strategy B. .
Table 1 places the three strategies within the thirty
two year history of the People's RepUblic. It is our conten
tion that the alternative approaches which we have labelled
Strategies A,B, and C were the principal strategic lines of
socialist development attempted during this time in China.
The first period in the economic history of the PRC,
1949-52, was essentially a time of rehabilitation. For over a
century (since the first Opium War in 1839-42), China had
experienced the agonies of foreign invasion and domestic
turmoil. Worst of all had been the Japanese invasion of
China (1937-45) and the subsequent four years of civil war
between the Guomindang government of President Chiang
Kai-shek and the revolutionary movement led by the Chi
nese Communist Party. Once victorious in 1949, the CCP's
principal tasks were to establish order under CCP rule, to
resume production in industry and agriculture, and to carry
out a basic land reform in the rural areas of China. As the
prominent Chinese economist Xue Muqiao pointed out in a
recent interpretation of the PRC's economic history, "By
the end of 1952 the work of agrarian reform and economic
recovery had been successfully completed. "17
Having consolidated their regime and achieved a level
of production comparable to pre-1949 peak years, the CCP
leadership in 1953 was prepared to launch its first major
Table 1
Periods in PRe Economic History &
Strategies of Development 18
Policies Strategies
1949-52 Rehabilitation of
the economy
1953-57 First Five Year Plan Strategy A
1958-60 Great Leap Forward
and Communes
StrategyB
1961-65 Read justment and
Recovery
1966-76 Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution
1976-77 (CCP leadership transi
tion: deaths of Zhou
Enlai, Zhu De, and Mao
Zedong; and defeat of
the "Gang of Four")
1978-present Four Modernizations StrategyC
effort to achieve socialist construction in China. This was
the First Five Year Plan, 1953-57, and Strategy A.
Although the Chinese leadership never completely copied
the Stalinist strategic line (especially with regard to the
collectivization of agriculture), many aspects of Strategy A
were borrowed from Soviet theory and the U.S.S.R.'s
development experience. Moreover, Soviet economic sup
port and technological assistance were central factors in the
design and success of the First Five Year Plan. Xue
Muqiao, in his review of Chinese development, comments:
In the First Five Year Plan we emulated the Soviet Union and
implemented a policy ofgiving priority to the development of
heavy indsutry. With the help of the Soviet Union, China
carried out the construction of 156 key projects (mainly
heavy industries) to lay the initial foundation for socialist
industry, and the achievement was colossal. 19
Although there was continuing debate in China re
garding many aspects of this first effort at socialist develop
ment, it seems that all of China's top Party leaders agreed
that it was the correct approach. Mao Zedong as well as the
comrades with whom he would later disagree profoundly
(e.g., Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and Peng Dehuai) all
favored the Strategy A approach at that time.
By 1956, however, Mao with his speech, "On the Ten
Major Relationships," began to press for an alternative
approach. The Great Leap Forward, 1958-60,and the
people's communes constituted his design for achieving a
faster transition to communism by employing an approach,
17. Xue Muqiao, "Thirty Years of Hardship in Building Our Country," 18. See footnote number 3.
Hongqi, 1979, No. 10, p. 40.
19. Xue, "Thirty Years," p. 44.
6
Strategy B, built upon ideas proven to be successful during
China's struggle against the Japanese during the Yanan
Period. Rejecting reliance on heavy industry, Mao called
for simultaneous development of agriculture and industry
to be combined with a massive social mobilization to re
lease the productive energies of the Chinese people. A new
kind of social organization, the people's commune, would
be the vehicle for resolving the contradiction between
China's two economies (the collective agricultural econo
my and state-owned industry) and serve as the institutional
basis for the transition from socialism to communism. For
Mao:
The characteristic of the people's commune is that it is the
basic level at which industry, agriculture, the military, edu
cation, and commerce are to be integrated in our social
structure. . . . The commune is the best organizational form
for carrying out the two transitions, from socialist (the pre
sent) to all-embracing public, andfrom all-embracing public
to communist ownership. In the future, when the transitions
have been completed, the commune will be the basic mecha
nism ofcommunist society. 20
The Great Leap failed. Publicly, three reasons were
given: 1) natural disasters; 2) the abrupt cutoff of Soviet aid
and the withdrawal of all Soviet technicians in the summer
of 1960; and 3) a rather ambiguous category oforganization
and administrative problems having to do with the imple
mentation of the Great Leap approach. During 1959-61,
China experienced a decline in output comparable in mag
nitude to the American Great Depression of the 1930s
but in a country having a material standard oflife which was
only a fraction of that enjoyed in the United States. C.IA
economists estimate that China's agricultural productIon
dropped thirty-one per cent from the peak year of 1958 to
the bottom of the economic decline in 1960. Industrial
production is estimated to have dropped forty-two per
in just one year, from 1960 to 1961. 21 Such sharp economIC
reverses caused great hardship throughout China. Party
policies sought to equalize food consumption among the
population in order to avoid large-scale starvation.
The Party leadership divided over its interpretation of
what went wrong and what should be done. Most coura
geous among those who opposed Mao Zedong was Peng
Dehuai, Defense Minister and long time associate of Mao,
who circulated a "letter of opinion" criticizing the Leap at
the Lushan plenum of the CCP Central Committee in July
1959.
22
Mao subsequently attacked Peng, and the meeting
passed a resolution dismissing him from office.
20. Mao, A Critique ofSoviet Economics, p. 134. For further discussion of
Chinese hopes for the commune during this period, see the documents
collected in Robert R. Bowie and John K. Fairbank, Communist China
1955-1959: Policy Documents with Analysis (Cambridge: Harvard Univer
sity Press, 1965), pp. 389-529. See, also, "Sixty Points on Working
Methods-A Draft Resolution from the Office of the Centre of the CCP,"
(London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 57-76. And, fi.nally, for
internal criticism of the communes and the Great Leap, espeCially from
Peng Dehuai, and the discussion surrounding it, see Union
Institute, The Case of Peng TehHuai 19591968 (Hong Kong: Umon Re
search Institute, 1968).
21. Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the US, Chinese Economy
Post-Mao, p. 208.
22. Union Research Institute, Case ofPeng Teh-Huai, pp. 7-13. 7
Significantly, the communist party leaders who . . .
call for mass mobilization strategies of development
are the original leaders of the struggle for state power,
men like Mao and Castro, who apparently retain in
their minds a vision of the ideals for which the revolu
tion was made in the first place, and for whom, unlike
most of their Party comrades, achieving state power
and the privileges that go with it are not enough.
By 1961-62, the Party had agreed upon a number of
expedient measures to readjust the economic system in
order to halt the decline and to restore economic growth.
These measures constituted a substantial retreat in rela
tions of production from the surges in a communist direc
tion attempted during the Great Leap Forward.
23
For
example, in agriculture, the 25,000 large-scale communes
of 1958-59 were reorganized into 75,000 smaller com
munes (about the size of the xiang or administrative
village); the production team (approximately the size of a
small village) was made the basic accounting unit; and
peasants in the collective economy were once again permit
ted "private plots" on which to raise crops for household
consumption and even for sale.
24
This structure of collec
tivized production has remained largely the same since
1962, in spite of efforts at different times during the decade
from 1966 to 1976 to alter it.
The policies of read justment during 1961-65 were suc
cessful, and economic recovery and the beginning of a
general pattern of growth of output ensued. However, the
consensus within the Party leadership that expedient poli
cies should be undertaken in the short run to deal with the
economic decline began to break down once a pattern of
substantial economic growth had again been restored.
Many CCP leaders had opposed Mao's Strategy B concept
of development as early as 1955-56 when he first pressed
for its implementation. After the collapse of the Great
Leap and the extreme price that the Chinese people paid
for its failure, presumably many others were determined
not to permit another such experiment in social change in
China. But Mao would not remain content with the status
quo. Precisely at the time that the policies of economic
readjustment were being formally adopted as Party doc
trine, Mao Zedong sought to reverse the retreat from
socialism in the relations of production and superstructure
in China by launching a Socialist Education Campaign. By
means of education and propaganda, the campaign was
designed to build on the poor and lower-middle peasants in
the countryside, revitalize the class struggle, and to press
Chinese society once again in a communist direction.
23. See the seventy articles regarding industrial policy and the sixty
regulations for the people's communes in Documents of the Chinese Com
munist Party Central Committee, September /956-April 1969 (Hong Kong:
Union Research Institute, 1971), pp. 689-725.
24. James Townsend, Politics in China (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980),
Table 1, pp. 120-121.
Differences about the correct road for China's future
came to a head in 1965 and 1966. The Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution became a struggle over policy and
power, each side convinced that its approach to socialist
construction was the best for China, and that the opposi
tion's strategy would lead to disaster. In June 1966, Mao
Zedong and Lin Biao, frustrated by Party obstruction and
sabotage of their initiatives, turned the Cultural Revolu
tion into a mass movement to remove their opponents from
power. "Bombard the Headquarters" was their motto as
student Red Guards besieged government and party of
fices. Mao, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party,
had gone to the streets to recapture control of his own party
organization. Cadres at all levels were thrown out of office
between 1966 and 1969, and head-of-state Liu Shaoqi and
CCP General Secretary Deng Xiaoping were singled out as
the most prominent "persons in authority taking the capi
talist road." The Cultural Revolution focused largely on
superstructure, and it had surprisingly little effect in
reshaping the economic base of Chinese society. 25 It was a
struggle which remained unresolved for ten years, 1966
76, and which resulted in no fundamental and consistent
new direction with respect to Chinese development.
Hence, for the purpose of this analysis, the Cultural
Revolution does not represent a separate strategic line of
socialist development.
The Ninth Party Congress in April 1969 seemed to
signal at least a limited victory for the cultural revolution
aries, but it was followed by further struggles-especially
between Mao and Lin Biao. Ultimately, Lin died under
mysterious circumstances in a plane crash in September
1971, and was charged with having attempted a military
coup d'etat.
26
Struggles within the Party over policy and
power continued until Mao's death in September 1976.
Looking back over the period from the beginning of
the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to Mao's death in 1976, the
present leadership tends to lump together the entire decade
as ten years lost to Cultural Revolution. The inconsistency
of the policies implemented during this ten years is
explained by some as due to virtually continuous struggles
within the top Party leadership resulting in no agreement
about a clear new strategy, and by others as reflecting
popular resistance to policies that did not make any sense.
25. However, the Cultural Revolution did have some impact on the
economic base in some parts of China in the following ways: some fac
tories were sent to the countryside; some collectives in the cities, espe
cially in service industries (e.g., restaurants and laundries), were put
under state ownership; in some rural areas, attempts were made to make
the brigade rather than the team the basic accounting unit; and the policies
of "politics in command" in both industry and agriculture sometimes
reshaped the organization of production and patterns of distribution. For
example, Parish and Whyte in their study of rural Guangdong Province
found significant changes undertaken beginning in 1968-69 due to imple
mentation of the Dazhai work-point system and a different system for the
distribution of grain. William L. Parish and Martin King Whyte, Village
and Family in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978), pp. 63-66.
26. See: Michael Y. M. Kau (ed.), The Lin Piao Affair: Power Politics and
Military Coup (White Plains, New York: International Arts and Sciences
Press, 1975); and, more recently, Beijing Review, December 22, 1980, pp.
19-28.
In autumn 1979, Ye Jianying, in his speech celebrating the
thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the People's
Republic, analyzed the impact of the so-called Gang of
Four and concluded: "In everything they did they set them
selves against the overwhelming majority of the people in
the Party and country." The ten years, according to
Ye Jianying, were "an appalling catastrophe suffered by all
our people. "27
The traumatic year for China was 1976. First, in Janu
ary, came the death of Premier Zhou Enlai, and later, in
April, the Tian An Men demonstrations (now usually
called the April 5th Movement) in support of Premier
Zhou and against the policies and power of Jiang Qing
(Mao's wife), Zhang Chunqiao (a Deputy Premier), and
others in the group which would later be called the Gang of
Four. During the summer the old veteran and acting head
of-state Zhu De died, and one of the most destructive
earthquakes in history killed 240,000 people in Tangshan.
Finally, in September, Chairman Mao died, and the final
stage in the process of leadership succession began. In
October, the Gang of Four was arrested, and during the
following year, a new leadership was formed around Hua
Guofeng, supposedly chosen by Mao to succeed him;
Ye Jianying, a veteran cadre closely linked to the military;
and Deng Xiaoping, once again rehabilitated to become
the mainstay of the new regime.
After the new leadership had consolidated its power in
1977 , a new strategy of socialist development began to take
shape. The Four Modernizations-a plan to turn China
into a powerful socialist country with modern agriculture,
industry, national defense, and science and technology by
the year 2000-had its roots in Premier Zhou's report to
the First Session of the Third National People's Congress in
1964 (before the Cultural Revolution) and the Fourth
National People's Congress of January 1975. But the Four
Modernizations as an approch to socialist construction was
not duly adopted as policy until after the First and Second
Sessions of the Fifth National People's Congress and the
Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the
CCP- meetings held in 1978 and 1979. Even today, certain
aspects of the strategy are still being debated in China, and
much of what apparently had been decided has not yet been
fully implemented.
Nonetheless, the general patterns of the new strategy
are fairly clear. The Deng Xiaoping leadership has pro
posed a combination of market mechanism with state plan,
more autonomy for production units, a strategy which
overwhelmingly emphasizes the development of produc
tive forces, and an appeal to workers based on greater
material rewards and consumer benefits. In 1979, Zhao
Ziyang, more recently elevated to the Standing Committee
of the Party Politburo and the position of Premier, defined
socialism as having two central principles: 1) public owner
ship of the means of production, and 2) distribution on the
basis of "to each according to his work." "With these two
principles as the prerequisites," Zhao Ziyang asserted,
"we should adopt whatever system, structure, policy and
27. Beijing Review, October 5,1979, p. 19.
8
Table 2
Strategies of Socialist Development: Dimensions
Strategy A
1. strategy focus: social system (country
wide infrastructure)
2. structural point of center
policy initiative:
3. economic base/super relations of production
structure emphasis: & forces of production
together
4. economic sector emphasis heavy industry
(assuming that "balance"
and integration of sectors
is always important):
5. strategy implementation: plan
6. work incentive emphasis: individual, material
incentives
7. international economic integration with Soviet
relations: Union and socialist camp
economies
8. role of the communist party: centralized rule from
top down
method are most effective in promoting the development
of the productive forces. "28 In other words, according to
Zhao, if those two principles are kept inviolate, almost
anything else might be attempted in China iIi an effort
to develop the economy.
Logic and Implementation
Table 2 identifies the key differences among the three
major strategies of socialist development which have been
attempted in China. Our analysis will focus on comparing
Strategy B and Strategy C, but let us begin with a brief
description of Strategy A to set the scene in concrete terms
for the subsequent discussion of the other two strategic
lines. Rather than analysing the separate dimensions of the
strategies (i.e., reading Table 2 horizontally, across the
three alternatives), we will emphasize the integrating logic
and how the separate dimensions fit into a logical whole as
a strategy of development (i.e., reading down the three
columns).
Strategy A
The Chinese never fully adopted even those ideas that
were proffered by the Soviets during the First Five Year
Plan, so Strategy A in its implementation was always a
mixture of Soviet advice and the dynamic of the CCP
experience up to that point. Soviet influence was greatest in
the heavy industry sector during the first ten years of the
People's Republic, and pervasive as well in military organi
9
StrategyB
individual ("new man")
intermediate level
(commune in China)
relations of production
& superstructure
simultaneous develop
ment of industry &
agriculture
social mobilization
within plan
moral plus material
incentives on group basis
self-reliance
29
social mobilizer in
process of
"continuous revolution"
StrategyC
production unit
(management of enterprises)
production unit
forces of production
agriculture and light indus
try (consumption emphasis)
plan-market combination
individual, material
incentives
integration into the
world market economy
contradiction between eco
nomic decentralization and
Party political power
zation and science and technology. However, in agriculture
(from which seventy per cent of output was derived in
1949), the CCP kept its own counsel, and the success of the
collectivization of Chinese agriculture between 1953 and
1956 was in no sense due to Soviet advice but was rather the
result of tried and tested CCP mobilization strategies from
pre-1949 and the initial land reform program.
As has been mentioned, the First Five Year Plan was
originally intended as the first of three five-year-plans, to
be implemented in connection with a comprehensive pro
gram of Soviet economic and technological assistance to
China. Soviet aid commitments were part of a combination
of military security and assistance pacts negotiated by
Chairman Mao himself in Moscow from December 1949 to
February 1950. These negotiations came at a time when the
Cold War was reaching fever pitch and only shortly before
the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Chinese
intervention came in October-November to help defend
North Korea after the United Nations forces crossed the
38th parallel in an American-led rollback operation.
Already in June 1949, Mao Zedong had put forth the policy
I
!
28. Beijing Review, November 23, 1979, p. 3.
I
29. The Great Leap Forward did not begin with an emphasis on self
reliance in 1958. Self-reliance was only adopted as policy later, after 1960 r
when the Soviets cut off their aid to China. Nonetheless, theoretically,
self-reliance fits very well the general logic of a Strategy B approach to ~
socialist development.
I
!
of "leaning to one side," cooperating with the socialist
countries against the imperialists. By the end of 1950, the
CCP had little alternative since the American reaction to
the outbreak of the Korean War included efforts to clamp a
global embargo on trade with the People's Republic and to
isolate it diplomatically. The CCP had no choice after 1950
but to rely on their Soviet and East European comrades.
In this sense, Strategy A for China was an imposed
system, especially as it affected heavy industry. The Soviet
Union provided approximately $1.5 billion in credits to
China during the 1950s, and thousands of Russians and
East Europeans worked in China as technical advisors in
positions critical to China's economic modernization.
3o
Soviet planning concepts, patterns of industrial and
scientific organization, and a wide variety of technologies
had important influences in China during these years.
Strategy A -a "command economy" -gave clear priority
to developing central planning; it emphasized heavy
industry in an effort to build a country-wide industrial
infrastructure; and the strategic design was one which
seemed to assure a roughly proportional concurrent
development of relations of production and forces of pro
duction in the direction of communism (see Figure 1).
Initially, Strategy A was tremendously successful as a
design for achieving economic growth and modernization.
For example, during the five years from 1953 through 1957,
industrial production increased by 128.6% and
agricultural production by 24.8%. Heavy industry
increased an annual average of 25.4% during these years,
and light industry an annual average of 12.9%.31
Strategy B
By the mid-1950s, the international situation had
changed. Stalin had died in March 1953, and a negotiated
conclusion of the Korean War had been reached soon there
after. Gradually China had broken out of the American-im
posed diplomatic isolation, especially after the successful
Bandung summit conference of Afro-Asian states in 1955.
Domestically, the First Five Year Plan had been successful
in laying the material foundations for socialist construction
in China, and internationally, conditions were shifting, it
seemed, in favor of the socialist camp. Prompted by the
Soviet launching of the first earth satellite in October 1957,
Sputnik I, Mao Zedong put forward a new interpretation of
global politics using the metaphor of East Wind over the
West Wind.
32
By 1955-56, Mao had apparently concluded that the
time was ripe for building socialism-socialism on a Chi
nese design fitted to China's concrete conditions-and that
the Soviet-style First Five Year Plan should not be con
tinued. Indeed high rates of economic growth and an
immense development of heavy industry had been
30. John Gittings, Survey of the Sino-Soviet Dispute: A Commentary and
Extracts from the Recent Polemics, 1963-67 (London: Oxford University
Press, 1968), pp. 130-132.
31. Xue Muqiao, "Thirty Years of Hardship," p. 44.
32. Donald S. Zagoria, The Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1956-1961 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1962), Chapters 4 and 5.
achieved, but at the same time, differences between mental
and manual labor, city and countryside, and worker and
peasant were growing greater. Building socialism for Mao
was a dynamic, mass-participant process, not simply the
imposition of a centralized social system which gave direc
tions to the populace. It has been a working assumption
among many American political scientists, especially since
the Cultural Revolution, that the state system in China is
fundamentally unstable. On the contrary, for Mao in the
mid-1950s, the PRC state system was seen to be too stable,
too centralized, too rigid, and too given to running the
country by issuing commands from the Center.
The logic of Strategy B, which in our view is best
represented in the approach attempted during the Great
Leap Forward, begins with a particular epistemology and
emphasizes transforming individual citizens as both the
means and the end of socialist construction. For example,
compared with the logic of Strategy C or market socialism,
Strategy B as a concept ofsocialist development is different
in many fundamental ways, especially regarding epistemol
ogy or how one attempts to understand the world, assump
tions about human motivation, and theories about how
societies change.
The Strategy B approach, which is conceptually
founded on dialectical materialism, begins with the propo
sition that contradictions exist in all things and that life
should be understood as a dialectical process. There are
"laws" which govern the evolution of human affairs, but
these laws are different for the various countries because of
the particularities of the concrete conditions of each. Thus,
a strategy for socialist development (like a struggle for
national liberation or any other purposeful collective
action) must be undertaken as a process of discovery. No
one knows in advance what the objective laws are. Hence,
the correct strategy must be discovered through experi
ence. According to Mao:
At the beginning no one has knowledge. Foreknowledge has
never existed. If you want to know the objective laws ofthe
development of things and events you must go through the
process ofpractice, adopt a Marxist-Leninist attiude, com
pare successes and failures, continually practicing and
studying, going through multiple successes and failures;
moreover, meticulous research must be performed. There is
no other way to make one's own knowledge gradually con
form to the laws. For those who see only victory but not
defeat it will not be possible to know these laws. 33
For Mao, "Human knowledge and the capability to
transform nature have no limit. "34 We are limited only by
our capacity to understand. Therefore, those who aspire to
achieve socialist construction must work in the unknown to
discover those laws of transformation which apply in the
particular conditions of any country. Socialist transforma
tion is not achieved by anyone's imposing a system. Trans
formation, by definition, is anti-system.
In Mao's view, the Chinese Communists would have
to be as inventive and imaginative in designing strategies
33. Mao, Critique ofSoviet Economics, p. 72.
34. Ibid., p. 137.
10
for socialist construction in a non-industrialized country as,
for example, Marx was original in his analysis of capitalism
in the middle of the 19th century. They would have to find
ways of doing what had never been done before.
People must liberate themselves, Mao insisted-they
must transform themselves. For example, land was not
given to peasants in China during the period of land
reform. Rather, under the leadership of the Party, they
waged a class struggle to take the land away from the
landlords.
Mao argues that contradictions are the motive force in
the development of socialism, and that "a thoroughgoing
socialist revolution must advance along the three fronts of
politics, economics, and ideology."35 In his view, "no line
of development is straight; it is wave or spiral shaped ....
The development of all things is characterized by imbal
ance. "36 According to Mao Zedong, in a process of social
ist construction, changes in relations of production must be
closely linked to changes in forces of production, and the
impact of superstructure is also important in creating the
ideological and political bases for intitiatives in the trans
formation of the economic base ofthe society.n
The Great Leap approach clearly draws on an analogy
with the successful mass mobilization strategies of the
Yanan Period during the war against Japan. In socialist
construction, as in waging revolutionary war, Mao assumes
that the key to success is a motivated population. Party-led
efforts to mobilize and to sustain support should be
designed to tap the basic enthusiasm of the people through
the implementation of the "mass line." It is not a matter of
moral versus material incentives for Mao Zedong, but
rather political mobilization to achieve greater collective
efforts in which all will benefit. In terms of the logic of
Strategy B, those who "serve the people" also serve them
selves as the collective effort moves forward both relations
of production and forces of production at an unprecedent
ed rate. At a micro level, as has already been mentioned,
the commune was for Mao the basic social unit of socialist
transformation, and the creation of the "new man" in
China was in a sense both the means and the ends of
Strategy B. The success of the Maoist concept of socialist
development during the Great Leap depended on individ
ual Chinese making a commitment to work selflessly and
energetically for the collective good. If such mass attitudes
could be inculcated and such behavior sustained, both the
productive energies needed to develop productive forces
and the ideological and political prerequisites for commu
nist society could be attained simultaneously.
StrategyC
Finally, let us tum to Strategy C, the market socialism
approach.38 Although there are a number of different
35. Ibid., p. 48.
36. Ibid., p. 80.
37. Ibid., pp. 67-68.
38. It should be noted that a number of socialist countries are presently
experimenting with varieties of the Strategy C model, including Vietnam.
See, for example, Far Eastern Economic Review, February 27-March 5,
1981, pp. 28-34; and June 19, 1981, pp. 56-57.
thinkers contributing theory to the Four Modernizations
strategy of socialist development (e.g., Chen Yun, Hu
Qiaomu, Xue Muqiao, Deng Liqun, and Ma Hong) and
there are some disagreements among them, it seems to us
that the strategy as a general line is fairly clear and consis
tent. Moreover, Chinese economists confirm that the ideas
underlying the Four Modernizations are largely in agree
ment with the theoretical argument made in Ota Sik's Plan
and Market Under Socialism. Therefore, Sik can also be
helpful in illuminating this approach.
The Deng Xiaoping leadership has proposed a combi
nation of market mechanism with state plan, more
autonomy for production units, a strategy which over- .
whelmingly emphasizes the development of produc
tive forces, and an appeal to workers based on greater
material rewards and consumer benefits.
The Strategy C concept seems to assume that the
laws for the development of socialism are fairly well under
stood. Unlike Mao, who calls for discovering laws of
development, Hu Qiaomu has written an important article
calling upon the people of China to observe economic
laws.
39
In the minds of the theorists of Strategy C, these
laws call for an overwhelming emphasis on the develop
ment of forces of production. They condemn the policies of
the Great Leap as utopian and conceived on the basis of
idealism rather than concrete materialist analyses of the
potentialities of Chinese society. Unstated in their argu
ments-but clearly implied-is the understanding that to
reconsolidate Chinese society after the ten lost years of
Cultural Revolution, 1966-76, Chinese development strat
egy must make a short term retreat from socialism in rela
tions of production (see Figure 1) in order to get the
economic system running efficiently after such prolonged
dislocations-attributed to the Gang of Four (and Mao
Zedong).
In order to increase efficiency and economic output,
Strategy C calls for the combination of a market mecha
nism with state plan; the competition of production units
within a given industry; much greater autonomy to be
permitted to individual enterprises; and appeals to Chinese
workers to produce more and better quality products in
39. "Observe Economic Laws,Speed Up the Four Modernizations," (a
three-part article) appearing in Peking Review, November 10,17, and 24,
1978. Some other useful Chinese-language sources for identifying the
basic ideas of Strategy C in China are: Xue Muqiao, Shehuizhuyi Jingji
Lilun Wenti (Theoretical Problems of Socialist Economy) (Beijing:
People's Publishers, 1979); Ma Hong, "The Reform of the System of
Economic Management and the Expansion of Enterprise Autonomy"
Hongqi, 1979, No. 10, pp. 50-58; and Deng Liqun, Tantan Jihua Tiaojie he
Shichang (A Discussion on Planning Regulation and Market Regulation)
(Beijing: People's Publishers, 1979).
I
I
I
I
I
I
II
return for individual material rewards. The production unit
is the focus of this strategy, and improving enterprise
management is one of its principal tasks.
The pattern of development envisaged by Strategy C is
continuous and incremental, not wave-like as in Strategy
B, on the assumption .. that after certain levels in the
development of productive forces are achieved, somehow
changes in the relations of production moving sharply in a
more communist direction would take place. One problem
here is that there is no theory as yet spelling out how or why
that would take place. On the contrary, Xue Muqiao, for
example, is theorizing about how the collective economy
should be expanded as one way of dealing with unemploy
ment, rather than designing ways to transform the collec
tive economy into the more socialist form of ownership by
the whole people.
40
Underlying Strategy C is the assumption that human
beings are basically motivated by individual material
interests, and that the best way to increase efficiency and
productivity is to encourage competition among workers
and enterprises through promises that those which produce
most will be rewarded most. This, it would seem, is the
main intended function of the market and the concept of
distribution on the basis of "to each according to his
work. "41 In evaluating the Four Modernizations approach
as it is implemented in China, some of the central theoreti
cal and empirical questions which should be considered, we
think, are: 1) the role of "law of value" in both circulation
and production; 2) treating means of production as "com
modities" and what implications follow from that for the
principle of public ownership of the means of production
(especially in light of Mao's notion of the redistribution of
the ownership of the means of production as one of the key
elements in a process of socialist transformation); and 3)
greater enterprise autonomy combined with distribution
based on "to each according to his work" and their influ
ences on worker income differentials, social stratification
in Chinese society, and the politics and socialist conscious
ness of a socialist society. 42
Finally, with regard to international economic rela
tions, Strategy C calls for China to become integrated with
the world market system for the purpose of gaining access
to foreign capital and technology-in a manner parallel to
40. Renmin Ribao, July 20, 1979, p.2.
41. See, for example, "Implementing the Socialist Principle 'To Each
According to His Work,'" Peking Review, August 4 and 18, 1978. One
Chinese economist, Huang Fanzhang, has suggested that the market
mechanism and "consumers' sovereignty" should be central elements in a
socialist economy in order to mediate the different economic interests
which inevitably would develop among different enterprises and individu
als. The market, according to Huang, would permit those who serve
China's consumers better to earn more, and those who serve badly to earn
less. Moreover, such a mechanism would encourage Chinese producers in
the aggregate to be more productive and efficient. Huang Fanzhang,
"Comment on 'Consumers' Sovereignty, '" JinKJi Guanti (Economic Man
agement), 1979, No.2, pp. 25-27.
42. Irma Adelman, for example, has commented that based on her in
vestigations of other economic systems, she could not see how a successful
implementation of Strategy C could avoid increasing income inequality at
least in the short run (comment at the Centerfor Chinese Studies Regional
Seminar, University of California, Berkeley, March 21, 1981).
international economic relations under Strategy A which
call for integration with the economies ofthe U.S.S.R. and
the socialist camp. Strategy A, "leaning to one side," is
based on economic integration with the East; Strategy C,
leaning toward the other side, seeks integration with the
West. Both differ markedly in this regard from the "self
reliance" policy of Strategy B.43 At year end 1981, interna
tional economic policies that were anathema under Mao
Zedong's rule were being pursued by the Four Moderniza
tions leadership: establishing joint ventures in China with
multi-national corporations;44 joining the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the two key multilat
eral institutions linking the capitalist industrialized coun
tries with the Third World; accepting long-term foreign
loans; building a tourist industry;4S importing foreign con
sumer goods for sale to Chinese citizens; and sending
thousands of Chinese students and scholars abroad for
academic training in capitalist countries.
Implications and Evaluation: Dilemmas of Socialist
Development
Only one of the three approaches to socialist construc
tion considered here, Strategy A, has ever been completely
implemented in China in the sense of a strategic line being
translated into public policies which ultimately transform
the structure of society into a particular kind of social
system. In fact, in terms of its fundamental characteristics,
the social system of China in 1982 was still that which was
created during the First Five Year Plan, 1953-57: i.e., a
centralized command economy, under the political regime
of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." Hence, the evidence
available is only sufficient for an empirical evaluation of
Strategy A. With regard to Strategies Band C, we must
rely more on the implications of the conceptual design and
on evidence from the experiences of other socialist coun
tries. For example, "market socialism" strategies have
been implemented for a number of years in both Yugosla
via and Hungary. Evidence from the economic history of
these two countries can suggest implications for the
implementation of the Four Modernizations approach in
China. To our knowledge, Strategy B, the mass mobiliza
tion line, has never been successfully implemented in any
country. We will return to this point.
43. See Peter Van Ness, "China and the Third World," Current History,
September 1974, pp. 106-109 and 133.
44. Beijing Review of April 5, 1982 (p. 11) reports: "More than 1,000 joint
ventures and co-operative and compensatory trade items with foreign
businesses, totalling 2,900 million US dollars in investment, have been
approved by the Chinese Government since the adoption of the open
door policy and the promulgation in 1979 of the Law Governing Joint
Ventures with Chinese and Foreign Investments."
45. China's State Statistical Bureau reports that during the year 1981:
"The total number of foreigners, overseas Chinese and Chinese com
patriots from Xianggang (Hong Kong) and Aomen (Macao) coming on
tours and visits and for trade, sports, scientific and cultural exchanges
reached 7,767,000, a 36.2 percent increase over the previous year. In
cluded were 675,000 foreign tourists, a 27.6 per cent rise over 1980.
Annual foreign exchange income was 1,380 million yuan Renminbi, 49.7
percent increase over 1980." Beijing Review, May 17,1982, p. 22.
12
Strategy A
The successes of the Stalinist model in China were: 1)
establishing an infrastructure for industrial development;
2) achieving high rates of economic growth, especially in
heavy industry; and 3) bringing about significant social
change, principally the nationalization of industry and the
collectivization of agriculture.
With regard to the shortcomings of Strategy A, proba
bly the most telling criticisms are those made by Mao
Zedong and Ota Sik, both proponents of alternative
development strategies.
46
Critics find that, economically,
Strategy A: 1) produces economic sector imbalances and
bottlenecks through its emphasis on heavy industry; 2)
leads to irrational resources allocation and production
priorities, because of the inefficiencies of administered
allocation; 3) stifles the enthusiasm and initiative of work
ers and enterprise managers; and, over the long run, 4)
leads to low rates of capital and labor productivity.
Politically, the critics say, the social system created by
Strategy A becomes a dictatorship by the ruling communist
party in the "new class" sense of Milovan D jilas
47
or what
some Poles during the strikes of 1980-81 were calling the
"red bourgeoisie. "48 Applying Lenin's State and Revolution
to the analysis of socialist societies under Strategy A, one
can argue that the communist party having established a
"dictatorship of the proletariat" does not own but comes to
control the means of production and emerges as a new
ruling class, enjoying tremendous power through their cen
tralized bureaucratic direction of the economy under state
planning, and their formal monopoly of political power. As
a result, the initial process of social transformation toward
communist society begun under a Strategy A-type social
system stops, because of the vested interest developed by
the "new class" in the established order. In addition, it
would seem that S'.lch a system has a tendency to stratify
into privileged and less privileged groups, and to rigidify
under bureaucratic rule.
If socialism is understood as we have defined it in this
paper-i.e., as a process of basic societal transformation
and an historical period of planned transition from capital
ism to communism-then, under Strategy A, the term
"socialist state" becomes a contradiction in terms.
"Socialism" calls for basic social transformation, but the
"state" stands for defense of the established order. Empiri
cally, in contemporary history, it seems that the principal
function of any state has been to preserve the established
order, and those leaders who hold state power (including
revolutionaries who have won state power by force)
develop an interest in preserving that order which sustains
them in power. From this perspective, it should not be
46. Ota Sik's Plan and Market Under Socialism contains the most thorough
critique of the economics of the Stalinist model that we are aware of.
However, it is important to note that given certain historical conditions,
Strategy A does seem to provide very substantial economic benefits for a
time. See, for example, Sik's distinction between "extensive" and "inten
sive" development of production (pp. 49-51).
47. Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System
(New York: Praeger, 1957).
48. New York Times, September 5, 1980.
13
surprising to find that in socialist societies, state officials
and economic planners do not write theory of socialist
transformation. Instead, they write designs for the devel
opment of productive forces-strategies to achieve wealth
and power which do not threaten the established order.
One wonders, therefore, how under a Strategy A social
system there can ever be a successful socialist state in the
sense of those who hold state power directing a process of
basic social transformation which must ultimately under
mine their own power.
Strategy B
In these terms, however, Strategy B is an exception. Of
the three strategic lines, it is the only one designed to pro
duce repeated attempts to achieve social transformation
toward the communist-society ideal. Significantly, the
communist party leaders who write Strategy B theory and call
for mass mobilization strategies of development are the
original leaders of the struggle for state power, men like Mao
and Castro, who apparently retain in their minds a vision of
the ideals for which the revolution was made in the first place,
and for whom, unlike most of their Party comrades, achiev
ing state power and the privileges that go with it are not
enough.
Mao Zedong believed that the two objectives of social
transformation (continuing fundamental change in the
relations of production) and economic modernization (the
rapid development of productive forces) were congruent
objectives which could both most rapidly be achieved
through strategies of social mobilization. Unlike the
theory of Strategy C which conceives of a trade-off rela
tionship between the two objectives at least in the short run
(see Figure 1), Strategy B theory argues that the key to
socialist development is to achieve both goals simultane
ously by means of social mobilization.
In fact, however, the Great Leap line in China,
1958-60, failed to achieve either sustained social transfo'r
mation or economic modernization. Instead, the Great
Leap Forward resulted in a sharp economic downturn and
widespread hardship for the Chinese people. Moreover,
social mobilization strategies have never been successful in
achieving both objectives over a sustained period of time
in any other socialist country either.
In China after Mao's death, the prevailing view was
obviously that the theoretical design of Strategy B was
fundamentally wrong, that it was an "idealist" notion
inappropriate to the objective conditions (the present
stage of the development of productive forces) in China,49
or even that it was a theory contrary to human nature. At
least one senior member of the CCP has concluded that
Mao Zedong "was never a Marxist. "SO Yet, Mao's concept
of mass mobilization did indeed succeed as a strategy dur
ing the struggle for state power before 1949. Why did it fail
as a design for socialist construction in the late 1950s?
49. For a parallel critique of Strategy B in general terms, see Ota Sik,Plan
and Market, pp. 361-364.
50. Personal conversation in Beijing, December, 1980.
I
\
I
In the critics' view, the Great Leap failed because the
Chinese people would not support it. For example, some
argue that the Yanan analogy, which Mao invoked, was at
best inappropriate. During the Yanan Period, the Chinese
people were fighting for their lives against invading Japan
ese, and later fighting fo overthrow a corrupt and rapacious
Guomindang government before it exterminated them.
Radical solutions, they argue, were appropriate to the
radical problems of the time. But by the late 1950s, condi
tions were very different. The people of China felt rela
tively secure from foreign attack and had become con
cerned with the more prosaic problems of increasing their
material living standard, planning careers, and aspiring to
brighter futures for their children. Radical policies of mo
bilization and continuous remobilization failed, therefore,
to gain necessary popular support.
Another way of trying to understand the contrast be
tween Mao's success during the struggle for state power
and his failure during the Great Leap Forward might be to
compare the importance of popular support for the CCP
leadership before and after 1949. During the struggle for
state power (both against the Japanese and the
Guomindang government), the Party's survival was at
stake. If the Party's mass mobilization policies were not
successful in winning the support of the Chinese people,
the CCP leadership as well as its followers would be
destroyed. However, after gaining state power, the
Maoist Party, although it still needed the support of the
people it governed like any modem state leadership does,
no longer depended to such a great extent on popular
support for its own survival. Popular support as the
critical test of the success of Party policies was no longer
so important. Perhaps inevitably, Mao and the Party
leadership became less responsive to the desires and
demands of the Chinese people, and more likely to engage
in "commandism"-ordering things done, rather than
designing policies responsive to the people's concerns and
requirements. In China today, people joke that Mao's
approach after the mid-1950s was not so much based on
the "mass movement" (qunzhong yundong), as "moving
masses" (yundong qunzhong)-i.e., Party leaders manip
ulating the Chinese people for their own selfish purposes.
The actual reasons for the failure of the Great Leap
and other Strategy B attempts remain, in our view, an
open empirical question-a question of critical signifi
cance for the hope of socialist transformation under any of
the established socialist systems in the world today.
Empirical research in China and Cuba, for example, will
have to determine the reasons for the failure to implement
successfully the Strategy B approach to socialist
development. We suggest, however, that the answer to
this question should be sought not only in investigations of
the appropriateness of the theory to existing conditions
and the willingness of citizens to support policies of
radical transformation, but also in research on the
resistance and possible sabotage by a communist party
"new class" fearful of losing its privileges and power.
Strategy C
As we have seen, advocates of the Strategy C ap
proach criticize the inefficiencies of centralized state plan
ning and the emphasis placed by the Stalinist model (Stra
tegy A) on achieving rigid output quotas, arguing that such
a system does not produce what is needed and desired by
consumers and that the system stifles both workers' en
thusiasm and managerial initiative. By combining socialist
planning with a competitive market system, they say, a
Strategy C approach can inspire enthusiasm among work
ers and managers, and reverse the pattern oflow productiv
ity and inefficiency. Enterprises should be required to com
pete against each other within the market, and they should
earn material rewards on the basis of comparative effi
ciency and profitability. Workers, similarly, should be
compensated for the quantity and quality of their work as
measured by the market, thus directly linking production
performance to material reward.
5
I
The market is the heart of this design for socialist
development. Moreover, a market is not something that
can be turned on today and off tomorrow. It is a structural
phenomenon which must be permitted to function accord
ing to its own dynamic in order to produce the promised
economic benefits. The market mechanism is intended to
reshape individual and institutional expectations and be
haviors, and ultimately, the success or failure of Strategy C
is dependent upon the implementation of a market
mechanism.
Politically, it seems, especially from the experience in
Yugoslavia, that under Strategy C, there arises an almost
inevitable contradiction between the communist party's
formal monopoly of political power and the economic
power enjoyed by production units under this kind of de
centralized economic system. Hence, the implementation
of Strategy C would seem to challenge the customary no
tion of the communist party's leadership role under the
"dictatorship of the proletariat." At the same time, how
ever, Strategy C may provide the best available means to
date of democratizing the Stalinist social system-the eco
nomic power of worker-managed enterprises increasingly
cutting into the centralized political power of the Party.
The struggle over implementing market socialism reforms
in China during 1980 and 1981 seems to have been prin
cipally a struggle between Strategy A and Strategy C ad
herents-the advocates of Strategy A fearful, among other
things, of the threat to the power of the Party and State
Center represented by Strategy C efforts to decentralize
economic decision-making. 52
Economically, market systems do seem, through com
petition, to force upon production units requirements for
greater efficiency, and therefore, we should expect a fully
implemented Strategy C to result in higher rates of pro
51. For a good example ofStrategy C reforms in both theory and practice,
see the articles describing changes undertaken in 417 enterprises in Si
chuan Province, in Beijing Review, April 6, 1981, pp. 21-29. See, also:
Nicholas H. Ludlow, "Who's the Boss? After Ten Years They Still Don't
Know," China Business Review, January-February 1981, pp. 14-16; and
Thomas H. Pyle, "Reforming Chinese Management," China Business
R e ~ ' i e w , May-June 1981, pp. 7-19. Regarding agriculture, see David
Bonavia, "China Rediscovers the Family Farm," Far Eastern Economic
R e ~ ' i e w , June 19, 1981, pp. 56-57.
52. See, for example, Martin Wei!, "The Collapse of Construction Proj
ects," China Business e ~ ' i e w , January-February 1981, pp. 9-13.
14
ductivity.S3 However, the incorporation of a market
mechanism in a socialist planned economy can also lead to
new problems for communist-party planners-especially
inflation and unemployment. For example, Yugoslavia,
the socialist country having the longest experience with
market socialism, illustrates some of these problems.
Yugoslavia registered a record balance of payments deficit
in 1980, and was suffering from significant unemployment
and a perennial foreign trade deficit. Furthermore, the
September 1980 cost-of-living in that country was 35.8%
higher than the 1979 average. S4 Reports from China in
early 1981, where Strategy C has thus far only been par
tially implemented, indicate that the Deng Xiaoping lead
ership is reevaluating China's economic reforms because of
similar problems: government budget deficits, inflation,
overcommitment in contracts for major purchases of plant
and equipment from abroad, and failure to complete suc
cessfully foreign plants in China or to bring them into pro
duction as designed. ss
Ultimately, the central problem regarding Strategy C
as an approach to socialist development, in our view, is that
no matter how economically successful it may tum out to
be, market socialism inevitably involves a serious reversal
in the relations of production. It leads away from develop
ment toward communist society without offering any im
mediate prospect that these trends will be changed. To be
blunt, Strategy C in both its domestic and international
characteristics amounts to "taking the capitalist road. "
Once implemented by government policies, the stra
tegic line ofmarket socialism creates its own particular kind
of social system, through reshaping both the social struc
ture and people's way of life. For Mao Zedong and many
communists, the heart of socialist culture is the collective
spirit represented in the slogan "serve the people." By
contrast, the culture of a market system enjoins each to
"serve thyself." Strategy C in its practical implications is
not a design for socialist construction but rather a formula
for restoring the central structural characteristic of a capi
talist economic system, the market.*
53. Xue Muqiao writes that in China, "Six times more workers are
needed in light industry and 11 times more in heavy industry to produce
the same quantities of goods as in developed capitalist countries" (China's
Socialist Economy, p. 201). Xue argues that "The transition from socialism
to communism requires a level of productive forces much higher than what
is already attained in developed capitalist countries. . . . If we fail to
develop the productive forces or raise our labour productivity much
higher than that under capitalism, the final victory of communism will be
out of the question" (p. 307).
54. Associated Press in Rocky Mountain News, October 31, 1980, p.75.
55. By the end of 1980, Strategy C reforms had been undertaken in 6,600
enterprises in the state-owned economy in China which together in 1980
accounted for sixty percent of total industrial output value and seventy
percent of profits turned over to the state. However, because of problems
arising from the effort to implement a Strategy C model, the Deng
Xiaoping leadership decided at a December 1980 work conference of the
CCP Central Committee not to extend the reforms. Instead of "reform,"
it was decided that "readjustment" would be the central task of the Sixth
Five Year Plan (1981-85). For a summary, see Beijing Review, May 11,
1981, p. 3.
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15
Economic Reform in Post-Mao China:
An Insider's View
by Edmund Lee
Introduction
This paper reviews general developments in the eco
nomic and political situation of post-Mao China; in particu
lar, it focuses on the weaknesses of economic institutions in
that country, the necessity for reform, and some political
aspects of economic development and reform. *
The discussion is organized as follows: Part I analyzes
the failure of the "Ten Year Plan" of February 1978, as a
means of highlighting the principal problems affecting
China's economy. Part II treats the nature and limits of the
economic reforms that began in the latter part of that year
and the change in the underlying political conditions. The
policy of readjustment, which halted the spread of reform,
is taken up in Part III. Finally, brief speculation is offered
as to possible future developments in China's political
economy.
The "Ten Year Plan" and Its Failure
Industry
In general, the process of economic development in
post-Mao China can be divided into three stages: the "Ten
Year Plan," the Economic Reform, and the Economic
Readjustment. The "Ten Year Plan" was formally put
forward by the First Session of the Fifth National People's
Congress in February 1978. Although economic reform
was also mentioned at that time, it was not initiated until
the end of 1978, when the profound weaknesses of the
"Ten Year Plan" became apparent and the political situa
tion changed. Finally, Economic Readjustment was intro
duced in the middle of 1979 and actually became the main
economic strategy from mid-1980.
It is not necessary to dwell in detail on the over-ambi
tious Ten Year Plan, which is now moot. 1 Suffice it to say
The author would like to take this opportunity to express his sincere
appreciation to many friends who made extensive comments and criticism
on drafts of the manuscript. In addition, special thanks are due Dr. Carl
Riskin and Ms. C. B. Francis, who did a lot of editing work.
1. For details of the Plan, see Beijing Review, March 1978, pp. 7-40.
16
that the Plan rapidly added to the difficulties already faced
by the economy. Accumulation increased to 36.5 percent
of net material output, but at the expense of efficiency and
living standards. Large numbers of heavy industrial proj
ects, based on imports of equipment from Japan and West
ern Europe, were begun only to be cut back or abandoned
before completion. The government ran a deficit of over
ten billion yuan annually from 1978 to 1980; and open price
inflation became a problem for the first time in many years.
Because the Plan itself was poorly conceived, an ex
planation of its failure must include the reasons for its
adoption in the first place. These are essentially two: first,
policy-makers understood at that time that after more than
ten years of "Cultural Revolution," the majority of Chi
nese people were impatient for improved living standards
and increasingly weary of political slogans. Second, the
power struggle in the leadership was at a delicate stage.
Consequently, the "Four Modernizations" became a ban
ner by which Hua Guofeng, the formal Chairman of the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and his supporters
sought to bolster their popularity among the people.
Most economists in China were later to ascribe the
failure of the Plan primarily to imbalances in the develop
ment of the national economy, i.e., (a) the rate of accumu
lation was too high; (b) investment in heavy industry,
chemical industry, basic construction, and military industry
was too great, while investment in agriculture and light
industry was inadequate. Certainly, unbalanced develop
ment of the national economy was an important reason for
the failure of the Plan, but it was not the major one. The
most important and general reason was the overcentralized
and bureaucratic system of economic planning and man
agement. This was recognized at the time, and explains
why, in the latter half of 1978, both academic people and
the Reform Group2 in the leadership claimed to favor
political as well as economic reforms.
2. The Reform Group, which included people such as Deng Xiaoping,
Vice Chairman of CCP and Chen Yun, Vice Chairman of CCP, claimed to
favor economic and political reforms from 1977 to 1979.
The processofmaking the Ten Year Plan itself expres
sed the dangers of the Chinese-type planning system. First,
as suggested above, political factors were always more
important than economic realities to planners, whose polit
ical power and positions determined their economic bene
fits,
3
and whose decision making went unchecked by any
market mechanism.
4
For example, when the Petroleum
Groups controlled the planning process, the greater part of
total investment was put into heavy industry, chemical
industry, basic construction, and military industry, which
led directly to the imbalance described above.
Second, the ability to construct a reasonable macro
economic plan was lacking. Economists and technicians
were not given an important role in plan making, and most
of them could not even get basic data about the national
economy because of the "security system." On the other
hand, many planners lacked the technical knowledge
needed for economic planning. The statistical system was
so backward and confused that planners at the central level
also were deprived of accurate information. This was in
part because the arbitrary pricing system did not link social
demand with supply, and in part because managers and
cadres on every level were able to-and did-falsify fig
ures. For instance, the Dazhai Production Brigade, an
"advanced" unit in the nation, falsely reported its output
by more than twenty percent for many years.
6
Thus, de
spite the fact that some forty percent of iron and steel
output could not be sold, ten new large-scale iron and steel
complexes were included in the Ten Year Plan; and the
decision to build ten oil and natural gas fields was made
before it was known whether and where such oil and gas
resources existed in China.
The system of management, like that of planning, has
been insufficient and bureaucratic. At every level of man
agement, from ministry and local industrial bureau to com
pany and factory, down to the workshop, there are two
separate lines of control: the Party organization and the
state administration. Unlike in most Eastern European
countries, the Party organization directly controls the ad
ministration. For example, ministers are usually first sec
retaries of the Party organizatin in their ministries. The
director of a company or factory, however, is often only
vice-secretary of the Party organization in the unit. All
important issues have to be first discussed and decided
upon at the Party meeting. Nevertheless, unlike most East
ern European countries or even the Soviet Union, where a
3. Those who lose their political position or power lose their economic
privileges. On the other hand, people might commit terrible mistakes in
their plan making and waste over a billion yuan of investment without any
punishment, if they are still in power.
4. Concerning this point, W. Bros as well as O. Sik provide some excel
lent arguments. See: W. Bros, The Market in a Socialist Economy; Ota Sik,
Plan and Market Under Socialism (Prague: Czechoslovak Academy of
Science, 1967), and The Communist Power System (New York: Praeger,
1981).
5. The Petroleum Group, backed by Li Xiannian, Vice-Chairman of the
CCP, includes people who were heading the Ministry of Petroleum and
controlling the State Planning Commission and many other industrial
ministries from the early 1970 s to the first half of 1980.
6. Renmin ribao, December 24, 1980, p. 2; November 22, 1979, pp. 1-2;
and December 29, 1979, p. 2, and Hongqi 1981, no. 2, p. 2.
large number of cadres and Party members received ad
vanced training in technology and management after
World War II, in China some cadres attended colleges in
the 1950s, but most of them studied the social sciences.
Moreover, not only were many of these (along with many
intellectuals) criticized during the ensuing political move
ments,
7
but the political opinions and background of the
cadres became the overriding, if not the only, criterion for
promotion. As a result, most surviving managers were pure
political people, and management became politics.
8
In ad
dition, because "redness," i.e. political loyalty , and "polit
ical education" were emphasized, managerial training was
underdeveloped. Before 1966, China had a total of only
four or five colleges to train managers, and students even in
these colleges spent the greater part of their time studying
politics rather than management and technology. During
the Cultural Revolution, all programs of management
training were stopped and management became synon
ymous with "class struggle," i.e. direct political control. As
a result, the general standard of management in industry
was very low.
By the latter half of 1978, it had become apparent that
if China were to avoid an economic or even a political
crisis and at the same time implement the "Four Mod
ernizations" policy, a change in economic strategy
from the "Ten Year Plan" to economic reform was
needed.
A second reason for failure was that most intellectuals
did not and could not play an active role in production. No
doubt, after the failure of the "Gang of Four," most in
tellectuals have felt much freer than before. However, the
continuing problem of bureaucratism remains a source of
discouragement. In addition, most intellectuals were not
Party members, and therefore could not make important
decisions about production. On the contrary, in many cases
managers or political people erected obstacles to techni
cians' work, which threatened to expose the technical in
competence of the former. Moreover, because the system
of allocation of labor was very rigid and bureaucratic,
especially for intellectuals, no one could choose or change
jobs without permission from the cadres. Finally, most
intellectuals' living conditions were unsatisfactory even
compared with the workers'. For example, many got a
lower salary than workers, and husbands and wives were
often assigned to different cities. Especially in large urban
7. For example, in 1957, more than half a million intellectuals were
criticized as "rightists," and, according to Mao, China had a total of 5
million intellectuals (including primary school teachers in the countryside)
at that time.
8. Lack of a strong Party-technology stratum is an important difference
between China and most Eastern European countries or even the Soviet
Union, where this group has strongly influenced processes and effects of
economic and political reforms. In China, the Reform Group complained
that the cadres' standard of education was too low.
17
centers, very few young families were able to get an apart
ment with two rooms. All of this undermined the intellec
tuals' enthusiasm.
Third, since the end of the 1960s, the working class has
undergone important changes. More than thirty million
young graduates have left high schools or technical schools
to enter factories. Certainly, they have much stronger
training than older generations both in reading and anal
ysis. Half of them spent several years working in the coun
tryside, where the serious shortcomings of the social struc
ture were more apparent than in cities. More importantly,
people learned a deep lesson from the ten years of political
upheaval, the bureacracy's privileges, the worsening situa
tion of the national economy, and greater information from
abroad after 1976. As a result, worker alienation and the
practice of "work slowdown" became very popular, and
young workers were called "a [independently] thinking
generation. "
Fourth, the system of wages (including bonuses) did
not accord with "equal pay for equal work" and was not
linked with the social value of production. For more than
fifteen years, wages and salaries remained unchanged.
Finally in 1978, some workers' wages were raised, but
partly according to their seniority and partly by managers'
and cadres' decision. Before 1978, bonuses were fixed (five
percent of total wages) and distributed evenly as an addi
tional wage to everyone except absentees. Since 1978,
many factories have changed this system and workers
bonuses now accord more closely with their performance in
production. However, the following problems remain:
(a) managers and cadres consistently get the highest b0
nuses everywhere. (b) The production targets are raised
too quickly, and are used to control the workers. (c) Be
cause of differences in the technical structure of production
in different industrial sectors or different product types,
some enterprises find it easy to exceed their production
target while for others it is difficult or even impossible. As a
result, gaps in bonuses between different sectors and fac
tories became large. (d) For the government, the new
system contributed to widening the budget deficit. On one
hand, the government spent more money for bonuses; on
the other, the bonus system led many enterprises to exceed
their target by wasting energy, raw materials, and labor.
Here again the culprit was the absence of a link between
bonuses and the social value of products due to the lack of
an efficient price structure based on some kind of market
mechanism.
Fifth, large imports of capital, technology and equip
ment constituted the main strategy of the Plan. The results
were disastrous, in part because of the pitfalls of the plan
ning system, weaknesses in the process of decision making
for investment, and inadequate management. However,
weaknesses in the foreign trade system itself should also be
mentioned. For the import of large-scale projects, each
industrial ministry could usually negotiate directly with
foreign companies without intervention from the Ministry
of Foreign Trade. But much unofficial information suggests
that trained personnel were often kept from playing much
of a role in such negotiations, while the cadres who made
the important decisions lacked knowledge or experience of
technology and world market conditions.
Finally, there was the problem of assimilating and
digesting the imported equipment and technology. Not
only did the "Cultural Revolution" interrupt technical edu
cation for ten years, it also disrupted scientific research.
Many technicians were left doing work they were not in
terested in or which did not utilize their knowledge.
By the latter half of 1978, it had become apparent that
if China were to avoid an economic or even a political crisis
and at the same time implement the "Four Moderniza
tions" policy, a change in economic strategy from the "Ten
Year Plan" to economic reform was needed. From the
lessons of the Plan the following conclusions were drawn:
Bureaucratic control ofthe economy had to be reduced.
Economic planning and decision making had to make use
ofthe market mechanism.
A direct link was needed between economic benefits for
planners and managers and their record ofperformance.
The pricing system had to express the relation between
social demand and supply.
Politically oriented managers had to be gradually re
placed by technically oriented managers, and workers
given a significant role in enterprise management.
Direct links were needed between production and social
demand and between the quality and quantity ofworkers'
output and their income.
Enterprises needed greater autonomy in deciding what,
how, and how much to produce for the market.
Agriculture
The situation in agriCUlture was different. In general,
because of the lack of capital and technology, as well as the
low standard of education, geographical location and the
weather are still very important determinants of output and
income. Moreover, institutional shortcomings had an even
greater negative effect in agriculture than in industry.
The "People's Commune" has been the basic eco
nomic, political, social, and militia unit in the countryside.
Before 1979, local government at the province and county
levels sent production target figures (determined by the
central government's economic plan) to each commune.
Cadres in the communes directly controlled production
(what, how, how much, in what proportions, or even when
peasants had to plant) and completion of state purchase
quotas. On the production brigade and production team
levels, cadres were able to decide how every household
and peasant did their work each day and how products and
income were distributed after taxes and sales quotas were
fulfilled. Theoretically, peasants' incomes depended on the
harvest, which would determine the "value of a work
point," and on how many work points they accumulated.
Nevertheless, because of cadres' power and loopholes in
the accounting system,9 the cadres' income was usually
several times that of the peasants. 10 Even when the harvest
9. In fact, accountants were appointed or dismissed by cadres; usually the
accountant's work was not supervised by peasants. One reason was that
many peasants were illiterates or semi-illiterates.
10. No statistics can show this situation; however, during the past three or
four years, many newspapers in China, such as People's Daily, (Renmin
ribao), have published articles criticizing this situation. See People's Daily,
July 30, 1982, p. 5, August 27, 1982, p. 5, and September 16, 1982, p. 4.
18
was very poor and many peasants had to leave their villages
to become beggars, the government could still get agricul
tural products from the cadres, while the latter still enjoyed
economic benefits and privileges.
The state economic plan and political movements
strongly influenced agricultural production, because the
whole process of production and distribution was con
trolled by cadres, the state's representatives, whose eco
nomic and political benefits were not linked to their success
in stimulating production, and because many cadres were
political people and knew little about agriculture. For ex
ample, the movements to "Learn from Dazhai" and "take
grain as the key link" destroyed agricultural production in
many places.
Therefore, both cadre privileges and the arbitrary
leadership of production gave rise to "work slowdowns"
among peasants and retarded agricultural growth. 11 In ad
dition, because of the large gap between prices of agricul
tural and industrial products and the state monopoly of
purchase and marketing, peasants could not earn enough
to permit investment and savings.
Consequently, mitigation of the conflict between peas
ants and cadres, relaxation of state control of production
and distribution, and increased peasant autonomy in pro
duction became the peasants' chief demands and the princi
ples of economic reform in agriculture.
Political Development
The failure of the "Gang of Four" did not stop the
struggle among the top leadership. Alignment and realign
ment of political forces was continuously occurring. Before
the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee,
held in December 1978, there were basically three contend
ing forces: the "New Gang of Four"12 (including their
followers), who achieved their position during the Cultural
Revolution; the Reform Group; and the Moderates, 13
at that time were concentrated in the Army and the Petrol
eum Group. The position of the "New Gang of Four" was
weak since it was opposed by both the Reform Group and
the Moderates, and, more importantly, by the majority of
Chinese people as well. On the other hand, because the
"New Gang of Four" retained some power at the center
while the Reform Group itself was not very strong there,
the political support from the populace was very important
to the latter. To mobilize this support, the "liberation of
thinking" was put forward, several important theoretical
discussions were held, and "Democracy Wall" was
created. 14
11. For example, in many places, in poor areas, output of
private plots was two to five times that of collective fields.
12. The "New Gang of Four" included Wang Dongxing, fonner Vice
Chainnan of CCP and three other members of the Political Bureau.
13. The "Moderates" in this case means the people who viewed the
pre-"Cultural Revolution" situation as the best model for China's future.
Basically, they are a majority in the Party, -the government, and the Army_
14. "Democracy Wall" was a wall in Xidan close to Tian An Men Square,
Beijing. At that time, "Big-Character Posters" were put up on it. Most of
them criticized the bureaucracy and discussed "socialist democracy."
Therefore, people called it "Democracy Wall." In the autumn of 1979 it
was "cancelled."
The state economic plan and political movements
strongly inftuenced agricultural production, because
the whole process of production and distribution was
controlled by cadres, the state's representatives,
whose economic and political benefits were not linked
to their success instimulating production, and because
many cadres were political people and knew little
about agriculture.
Compared to the "Prague Spring" of a decade earlier,
the "Beijing Spring" at the end of 1978 and the beginning
of 1979 was very short and weak. InBeijing and other large
cities, "Big-Character Posters" at first mainly criticized the
"New Gang of Four," and leaked information about the
struggle at the top to support the Reform Group. Conse
quently there was high-level indirect support for the
"Democracy Wall" before December 1978, probably from
Deng Xiaoping himself. However, after the Third Plenary
Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, the situation
began to change. On the one hand, the "New Gang of
Four" lost power and the Reform Group was strengthened.
On the other hand, the nature of "Democracy Wall" (some
people called it the "Democracy Movement") was also
changed. Some young students and workers, 15 not satisfied
with confining their criticism tothe "New Gang of Four,"
tried to criticize the system itself. In addition to the "Big
Character Posters" on "Democracy Wall," many private
magazines and newspapers were published; mass rallies
and discussions were held; small groups were organized;
and demonstrations occurred in many cities. No doubt,
such a "Democracy Movement" strayed far from the per
mission granted by the system. In particular, Army criti
cism of the movement became stronger and stronger.
Many workers and intellectuals sympathized with
some aspects of the "Democracy Movement." However,
they were also becoming increasingly weary of political
movements in general and more interested in economic
benefits. Moreover, at that time they placed great hope in
the Reform Group's ability to bring about political and
economic changes. And, although the "Democracy Move
ment" made some incisive criticism of the bureaucracy,
theoretically its arguments were still very weak and at times
confused. For all of these reasons, political support for the
15. Several points about young students and workers should be
mentioned here: (a) Many of them were Party members or League mem
bers. (b) Most of them opposed the "Gang of Four" before Mao died
although some of them were Red Guards at the beginning of the Cultural
Revolution. (c) After 1968 many of them were sent to the countryside. (d)
Although most of them did not have an opportunity to study in colleges,
they organized study groups to discuss social,political, economic, and
theoretical problems before 1978. (e) The failure of the "Gang of Four,"
especially the "liberation ofthinking" and the creationofthe "Democracy
Wall," afforded them an opportunity to express their opinions. (f) The
policy of openness after Mao died gave them more information from
abroad. (g) Theoretically, they can be divided into "left" and "right" as
with people in some Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union.
19
movement from workers and intellectuals was limited and
passive.
The Economic Reform
From the latter half of 1978, reforms began to be
implemented in industry, foreign trade, and agriculture.
This process lasted about a year, after which the main
economic strategy began to change to one of Readjust
ment, the momentum of Economic Reform was stopped,
and high level centralization was once again emphasized.
In general, the Reform was more talked about than
acted upon, and most arguments were made by schol
ars and professors rather than by planners and mana
gers with practical experience in economic work.
More importantly, the Reform never had behind it the
requisite political conditions for success. Besides the
change of political line by the Reform Group, it was in
fact the Petroleum Group and not the Reform Group
that controlled power in the economic sphere during
the crucial period.
In general, the Reform was more talked about than
acted upon, and most arguments were made by scholars
and professors rather than by planners and managers with
practical experience in economic work. More importantly,
the Reform never had behind it the requisite political con
ditions for success. Besides the change of political line by
the Reform Group (see below), it was in fact the Petroleum
Group and not the Reform Group that controlled power in
the economic sphere during the crucial period. In addition,
the cadre system remained intact, and the Reform Group
could not find a strong Party4echnician stratum to support
its policies. Discussion and implementation of the Reform
therefore were left to political people at every level, who in
fact, directly or indirectly, opposed most of its measures.
Basically, the central administrative planning system was
not changed much; i.e. plans and targets from the central
level still commanded the activities of enterprises. Com
pared with the situation before the Reform, localities
(especially provinces) received more rights and were freer
to make decisions regarding finance, investment, price reg
ulation, and foreign trade. However, the fulfillment of
state plans and targets was still the precondition for such
freedom. Similarly, for most enterprises selected as "re
form experiment" sites, the "expansion of enterprise
autonomy" did not go very far (see below).
On the other hand, the process of plan making on the
high level was not changed; that is, it was still a top-down
process, and more importantly, the plan was not based on
an accurate perception of social scarcities. The central level
still controlled price making, allocation of most raw mate
rials, energy, taxation, wages and most investment. Thus,
the reform of the planning system actually amounted to:
(a) the attempt to fashion a reasonable state plan without
recourse to a market mechanism; and (b) the attempt to
stimulate local and enterprise plan fulfillment by permit
ting enterprises to keep a somewhat higher percentage of
total enterprise profits. Consequently, the Reform was
basically modeled after the Soviet type.
Generally prices in China were "planning prices";
they were directly made and controlled by the central and
local price bureaus. Certainly, except on the free market,
every commodity's price was equal to its cost of produc
tion, plus enterprise profits, commercial cost, commercial
profits, and taxes. However, rates of enterprise profit and
taxation were decided arbitrarily and not in accordance
with enterprise productivity or the social value of the com
modity. Therefore there was not a direct or even an indirect
link between price and productivity, or between profit and
productivity. In addition, because the planned price usu
ally was stable or even fixed, there was no movement of
prices to express social demand or the changing productiv
ity of the individual enterprise. As a result, planners were
not able to get correct information about the relationship
between social demand and supply to make a reasonable
plan.
In some Eastern European countries, such as Hungary
and Czechoslovakia (1968), commodities were divided into
three groups in the reform of the price system:
(A) food, energy and some basic necessities,
(B) general consumer goods,
(C) luxury goods and means or production.
For type A, both governments made it their policy to keep
prices stable; they understood that price reform would
suddenly and sharply increase the price of Type A goods,
since both supply and, especially, demand for such goods
had been constrained for a long time. Such a sudden and
sharp inflation of type A would be very dangerous for their
reforms, both economically and politically. This was the
case with respect to Poland's economic reform. Therefore
at the beginning of their reforms, only prices of type C
goods were allowed to float freely, while type B prices were
allowed to float within limits. This contrasts with the ap
proach taken by China, which did not change the price
structure for type B and C goods, but raised food prices
(type A). At first, because of the reform in agriculture,
price of staple and subsidiary foods on the free market
increased, which had a strong impact on the state market.
Then the government tried to control the inflation by fiscal
(and even administrative) measures, such as by subsidizing
prices of agricultural products. But this contributed to en
larging the budget deficit, and did not in any case stop
inflation in the free market. At the same time, imbalances
and inefficiency in industry prevented the supply of suffi
cient industrial products to meet the demands of the peas
ants. Therefore, though prices on the state market were
controlled, the potential inflation was very strong. Finally,
the government raised the retail prices of eight main sub
sidiary foods by an average of 33 percent. The effects of this
planned inflation were as follows: (a) the government spent
a lot of money on a food subsidy for workers and staff
members (five yuan per worker per month), which is still
maintained; (b) many workers and low level staff members
were made unhappy by the fact that, for most families, the
food subsidy was not enough to compensate for the in
crease in inflation;16 and (c) the budget deficit grew larger.
The system of allocation of energy and raw materials
was relatively unchanged during the Reform. The State
Planning Commission still controlled most raw materials and
20
energy, although communes could get more agricultural
products than before for their small-scale and less efficient
industry because of the reform in the countryside.
Investment decision-making was reformed. The sys
tem of bank loans for industrial enterprises was given a
greater role than before, but that of allocation of financial
resources was weakened. The banking system was given
greater freedom to make loans without the permission of
the central bank. As a result, it was much easier than before
for local governments, enterprises, and communes to bor
row from local banks at low interest rates (less than 1
percent per year). However, there were two problems.
Because the price structure was not reformed (i.e. price
was not linked to either productivity of enterprises or the
relation between social demand and supply), inefficient
enterprises could still make profits if they produced high
price but low cost commodities. Second, such decentraliza
tion of the financial system had a strong impact on the
national economic plan with respect to the allocation of
both financial resources and raw materials: the government
lost control of both finance and investment.
The system of labor allocation was partially reformed.
For example, in 1979, some cities established an examina
tion for placing high school graduates in jobs. However,
their parents' social position remained a very important
determinant of their employment prospects. For an ordi
nary graduate, the type of job held by a brother or sister
usually was a determining condition for getting a job or
qualifying for "waiting for employment." But very soon
the examination system was given up. Later, an important
change was made to solve both the problem of unemploy
ment and the problem of backward social services: the
government permitted skilled unemployed persons to or
ganize small workshops, stores, restaurants, and some pri
vate services. The interesting thing is that some of them
have been permitted to hire up to five workers. 17 However,
a person already in a job could not leave that position.
Certainly, this measure has been very helpful in providing
more jobs for young graduates, and it also has created a
competitive situation in the social services. On the other
hand, although people, especially intellectuals, are still not
allowed to choose or change their jobs or to emigrate from
one city to another, they are allowed to exchange jobs with
each other, if they are fortunate enough to find another
person in a similar position and willing to make such an
16. The food subsidy is given to each worker or staff member but not to
their nonworking family members. For most families, food expenditure is
50 to 60 percent of total income, and 80 percent of the food expenditure is
to buy subsidiary foods. For example, if a family's income is 100 yuan per
month (two persons, i.e. both husband and wife work and have one child),
plus the food subsidy, 10yuan, the total income is 110 yuan per month. On
the other hand, if the food expenditure was 55 percent of total income
before planned inflation, i.e. 55 yuan, the expenditure for subsidiary foods
was equal to 44 yuan. Now the expenditure for subsidiary foods became 44
yuan + 10 yuan = 54 yuan, but the price of subsidiary food went up by 33
percent. As a result, the expenditure for subsidiary foods would be 44 x
133 percent = 58.52 yuan, which means that for this family, real income
decreased 4.52 yuan, or 4.47 percent of its total income per month. In
addition, prices of many other manufactured consumer goods and social
services were also raised. Finally, many families have more than one child.
17. At last count (the end of 1980) there were 700,000 private individuals
engaging in handicraft and small commercial services.
21
exchange, and if both sides can get permission from their
units, Such exchanges have been more difficult for intel
lectuals than for unspecialized workers,
In general, the wage system was not reformed much.
For most workers and staff, the number of years employed
was still the most important determinant of wage level.
During the Reform, only a few people (less than 5 percent)
received differentially high (by six or twelve yuan per
month) wage increases, and most of these were cadres and
model workers. On the other hand, the bonus system was
reformed in several ways, but because the compensation
system as a whole remained largely unchanged, the bonus
reform was of limited effectiveness. Later, the government
announced a policy of limiting bonuses to less than 10 or 15
percent of wages, and some workers and staff reacted to
this policy with "work slowdowns. "
In publications, many people (from the Reform
Group to many economists) talked extensively about the
reform of the management system, and, in fact, experi
ments with decentralization were made in some enter
prises. Nevertheless, in general the system of management
was not markedly changed, especially at the enterprise
level. Concerning this situation at least four problems
should be discussed here: autonomy of the enterprise; the
relationship between the political and the technical people;
the position of workers and democratization of manage
ment; and scientific methods of management.
The "expansion of enterprise autonomy" was imple
mented in a large number of enterprises. In this experiment
an enterprise was able to produce limited types of com
modities for the local market after fulfilling its plan target.
It was also permitted to pay higher bonuses than other
enterprises if it exceeded its target and successfully made
profits from its market sales. In addition, an enterprise was
able to keep a percentage of its profits (enterprise funds).
Finally, it held the right to appoint its own middle-level
managers without permission from high level administra
tion officials. Some investigations indicated that this exper
iment was successful-most of the experimental enter
prises increased their output and exceeded their plan tar
gets, and they made higher profits than other enterprises in
the same sectors. Consequently, their workers and staff
received higher bonuses. However, the experimental en
terprises were carefully chosen: they held some prior ad
vantages over other enterprises in the same sectors. Also,
the government favored the experimental enterprises with
superior access to credit, energy, raw materials, technol
ogy, and markets. IS Therefore, their experience was of
limited relevance to other enterprises, for the government
would not have been able to provide similar advantages to
all.
Moreover, the success of the experiment was further
limited by developing contradictions with the old planned
and overcentralized system. For example, the old arbitrary
price system could not properly reveal the strengths and
weaknesses of the experiment, and the old system of alloca
tion of raw materials and energy was not always able to
18. See Jingji guanli 1981, vol. 6, nos. 16-23, and nos. 24-26; and 1980, vol.
6, nos. 13-21.
I
I
I
1
provide enough energy and raw materials. In addition, for
the government, there was a conflict between the experi
mental units and other enterprises.
Besides this moderate change, a handful of enterprises
in 1980 experimented more radically with a system called
"self-responsibility for profits and losses." These enter
prises could make their own decisions about what, how,
and how much to produce, according to the market situa
tion. They were permitted to keep about half their gross
profits, on the average. Very few enterprises were involved
in this experiment, and its scale has not subsequently been
expanded. 19
The relationship between political and technical peo
ple concerned not only the system of management, but the
political system as well. The government emphasized that it
wanted to promote more intellectuals to positions of lead
ership, and that the political people had to study technol
ogy and management. However, only a very few techni
cians were appointed leaders of enterprises (and then usu
ally only as assistants), and the power was still held by the
political people. The reason many political cadre opposed
management reform was not only that they feared losing
their positions (which entitled them to political and eco
nomic benefits) to technical people, but also that they
really were not able or willing to learn more about tech
nology and management after thirty years of political
indoctrination.
According to publications, some elections of leaders
and managers were held, and Congresses of Workers and
Staffs took place in many enterprises. Nevertheless, un
official information indicates that political cadres often
won such elections; and the Congress of Workers and Staff
were often controlled by these people. In fact, the situation
of alienation in enterprises was already very serious. Both
"political education" and the "class struggle" had already
lost their appeal to workers. During the Reform, the new
bonus system and a system of heavy penalties for nonfulfill
ment of production targets, absences, etc., became the
"economic method" for cadres to control workers. Never
theless, the cadres' widespread incompetence, bureauc
ratism, non-responsibility, privileges, waste, and in
efficiency all contributed to increasing worker alienation,
and also provided an important basis for the sympathy and
support that many young workers extended to the
"Democracy Movement." .
Although scientific management was greatly empha
sized during the Reform, very few enterprises actually
employed it. The reasons were that general knowledge of
modem management science was quite underdeveloped in
China, most managers were not trained in economics, busi
ness, or management, and under a socialist system, modem
scientific management should also be democratic manage
ment in which workers and low-level staff play a more
active and important role in shaping the enterprise's ac
tivities. However, such a role was in conflict with the
bureaucracy's position.
Some important reforms were made in the foreign
trade area. In particular, the system of foreign trade was
19. Carl Riskin: "Market, Maoism, and Economic Reform in China,"
Bulletin ofConcerned Asian Scholars. vol. 13, no. 3 (1981), p. 37.
decentralized, the import of capital, especially direct for
eign investment, was permitted, and Special Economic
Zones (SEZ) were established. All this affected both the
economic and political structures.
Decentralization of foreign trade took the following
course. First, the old overcentralized top-down system was
changed into a more pluralistic system, in which local gov
ernments, particularly on the provincial level, and even
some enterprises, became increasingly active and had
greater freedom to engage in foreign trade. They could, for
instance, directly negotiate and sign contracts with foreign
companies. Second, they were allowed to keep a percen
tage of foreign exchange earned. This policy was a strong
stimulus to local governments and enterprises to increase
exports. However, a number of problems arose. The large
price gap between the domestic and world markets gener
ally caused importing enterprises to en joy high profits but
exporting enterprises to incur losses; decentralization of
foreign trade conflicted with the state macro-economic
planning system; inefficiency and low productivity due to
weaknesses in the domestic system of planning and man
agement were exposed by international competition, and
hindered the development of trade; and people skilled in
foreign trade work were in short supply. Actually, except
for the last, these problems could be solved only by further
and more thorough reform of the whole economic system.
By the end of 1980, the government had borrowed $14
billion from Japan, Italy, West Germany, Sweden, Bel
gium, Argentina, Canada, and Britain. To facilitate the
borrowing, the Bank of China had 114 branches abroad,
and 20 branches of foreign banks were established in
Beijing. In 1980, China became a member of the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Perhaps more
importantly, by the end of 1980 three SEZ's were created
under the "open door" policy, and these absorbed more
than $500 million in foreign capital. From the SEZ, the
goverment could get foreign exchange, learn about inter
national competition, and train managers. However, the
SEZs have also made the Chinese people more aware of
the major problems of China's own economic system. In
addition, the management system in the zones might well
be seen as a threat to the cadre system outside of the zones.
Moreover, the income gap between workers within and
outside the SEZ threatens to become a political problem. 20
Finally, there is the broader issue of what ought to be the
relationship between the Special Export Zone and the
whole national economy.
Another area where the Reform had been significant is
agriculture. As mentioned earlier, for the Chinese peas
ants, there were three overriding issues: autonomy in pro
duction from bureaucratic control; distribution according
to output and without the bureaucracy's economic privi
leges; and expansion of the free market to make cash. The
Reform in agriculture spoke to all three issues.
First, since the end of 1978, the system of fixed farm
20. Workers and staff working in the zones have an income which is over
40 percent higher than outside the zones, on the average. See "China's
Special Economic Zones as Seen from Conditions in Export-Processing
Zones in the Developing Countries and Areas," by Tang Huai, June
1981 lingji Yanjiu. pp. 62-68.
22
output quotas for each household, or the system of produc
tion responsibility, has become widespread. Cadres' con
trol of production has therefore been weakened and peas
ants have been able to make their own decisions about
production. Because income has become directly linked to
output, and team and brigade cadres have had to take full
responsibility for output quotas on a piece of land and earn
their own income through labor, it has been more difficult
for them to command special privileges. Second, the size of
private plots has grown, permitting peasants to produce
more subsidiary foods for the market. Third, state monop
oly of purchase and marketing has been limited to grain,
cotton, and some oil crops, allowing the free market to
develop very quickly. For peasants, the free market has
been a very important way to make cash, since without it
they could only get cash annually at the end of the year.
Finally, because the government's control in the country
side has been weakened, small-scale industry has had more
opportunities to develop.
It has been a very difficult process to implement the
Reform in agriculture. Many cadres in the countryside
have opposed it. Their view has gained strength from the
fact that the free market has contributed to inflation, espe
cially with the government unable to provide enough in
dustrial products to the countryside. Competition for raw
materials, energy, and markets between urban large-scale
industry and usually inefficient rural small-scale industry
has been another complicating factor. Moreover, this Re
form with its fragmentation of land poses a barrier for the
mechanization of agriculture. However, the rural popula
tion is still more than 80 percent of the total population in
China, and spending large amounts of foreign exchange to
import grain and cotton is a heavy burden on the govern
ment; it will thus be difficult for the policy-makers to stop
the Reform, though there may be continuing struggle over
it in the future.
Political development during the Reform occurred at
both the leadership and the grass roots levels. At the top,
the power structure was being continuously reorganized.
After the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central
Committee, more and more "old cadres" were returned to
their former positions and regained power. Many of these
old cadres opposed the Reform, and favored restoring the
pre-Cultural Revolution situation. Together with the
Army, they became the new Moderates among the lead
ership. At the grassroots level, as we have seen, the
younger generation continuously expanded the "Democ
racy Movement," especially in large cities during the first
half of 1979, and their arguments became more and more
philosophically challenging, systematic, and radical. In the
face of this, the Moderates exerted strong pressure upon
the Reform Group to suppress the movement. The move
ment was banned, private publications were limited, and
some people were arrested and sentenced to prison terms.
In the end, the Reform Group itself changed its em
phasis from the "liberation of thinking" to the "Four
Persistences": to persist in the Party's leadership, the Pro
letarian Dictatorship, the Socialist Road, and Marxism,
Leninism, and Mao Zedong Thought. As a result, eco
nomic reform in China lost its necessary political founda
tion, in contrast to what occurred in Yugoslavia, Hungary
(1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968).
It has been a very difficult process to implement the
Reform in agriculture. Many cadres in the country
side have opposed it. Their view has gained strength
from the fact that the free market has contributed to
inflation, especially with the government unable to
provide enough industrial products to the countryside.
The Economic Readjustment
Although the Economic Readjustment was put forth
in the middle of 1979, in fact, it replaced the Reform as the
main economic strategy in the first haH of 1980. At that
time, the Moderates had gained considerable power in the
economic sphere and the Petroleum Group had begun to
come under criticism. Except in agriculture and foreign
trade, the Reform had made little headway, and the gov
ernment now seemed alarmed at the continuing budget
deficits and the development of open inflation.
In general, the strategy of Economic Readjustment is
recentralization, strengthening the central government's
control of planning, finance, and investment decision
making. According to official opinion, the Readjustment
should solve the problems of imbalance in the national
economy, inflation, and deficit spending. The following
measures were taken: the amount of investment in the state
plan was cut down, experiments with the expansion of
autonomous jurisdiction of enterprises were slowed down,
wages and bonuses were generally frozen, many enter
prises and institutions in heavy industry and military in
dustry were closed, and some uncompleted large-scale pro
jects were stopped. 21
However, the Reform in agriculture and foreign trade
has not yet stopped, since the government has required
more grain and raw materials from agriculture for light
industry and for the reduction of imported grain and cot
ton, in order to create more foreign exchange and to attract
more foreign capital.
The results of the Readjustment have not been en
couraging. The e n ~ r a l government has cut expenditure for
and investment in heavy industry and military industry.
However, on the local level, investment has not been
reduced-but has increased quickly-since the banking
system has been decentralized, small-scale industry in the
countryside has been encouraged, and more importantly
the price system has not been reformed. As a result, on the
national level, total investment has increased according to
government initiative.
22
Furthermore, the efficiency of
investment, productivity, and the condition of manage
ment have been poor because the management system has
not been markedly reformed. And finally, the political
cadre have continuously controlled production, but techni
cians and workers have not yet played an active role and the
system of wage and bonus, and the economic plan have not
been based on the market mechanism.
21. Unfortunately, no statistics about such "stopping, closing, and chang
ing" have been found yet, but unofficial information suggests that the
losses suffered were heavy.
22. See Jingji yanjiu, March 1981, pp. 3-12.
23
According to official statistics, the inflation rate de
creased markedly in 1981. However, the price of food as a
whole rose 3.7% (4.1 percent for non-staple foodstuffs,
including a 10.6 percent increase for vegetable priceS.)23 In
addition, some sold shoddy goods as quality
goods, decreased the quantity of produce per unit price,
and otherwise raised prices in disguised forms. This in
creased the burden on the consumer. The reasons were that
industrial production, including light industry, has been
poor; there arose a conflict between the free market and
the state market; the pitfalls of the old pricing system have
not been overcome; and the management of the commer
cial sector has not been improved.
The structure of industrial production has been re
adjusted to the extent that the proportion of investment,
raw materials, energy, and labor force going to light in
dustry has been increased. As the result, the value of
output of light industry increased to over 50 percent of the
total gross industrial output value in 1981. Nevertheless,
the government has continuously criticized this situation
because a large number of light industrial products could
not be sold.
The economic strategy of Readjustment is to continue
for several years. These are to witness more decreases in
total investment, investment in heavy industry, and budget
expenditures at both the central and local level; further
strengthening ofthe centralized planning system; tightened
control of prices; and a return to centralized decision
making regarding investment, finance, prices, wages,
foreign trade, and the allocation ofimportant raw materials
and energy. However, the Reform in agriculture will con
tinue and greater "openness" in foreign trade will be main
tained.
However, the Readjustment has given rise to and will
continue to encounter the following problems.
Recentralization has strengthened and will further
strengthen the power of planners of the central level but
weaken that of planners at the local level. As a result, the
activity of the local level has diminished and the pitfalls of
the overcentralized planning system, which are the most
important reasons for imbalance in the national economy,
have been deepened.
The conflict between the Reform in agriculture and
the Readjustment in the national economy has been and
will continue to be sharp. For example, when the govern
ment is not able to provide enough industrial products for
peasants, the production responsibility system and the de
velopment of the free market must strongly stimulate infla
tion. In addition, the decline of cadre control in agriculture
has been in conflict with the recentralization in industry,
and it has been and will be opposed further by the bureauc
racy (and even the Army) in both countryside and cities.
Moreover, the development of small-scale but inefficient
industry has not only become a threat to the state-owned
light industry in cities, but has also disrupted the state
market and price structure.
The contradiction between the recentralization and
the Reform in foreign trade will be another difficulty for the
23. See Beijing Review, May 18, 1981, p. 17 and May 17, 1982.
government. For foreign trade, a reformed price structure
and management system are necessary conditions for com
petition in the international market. However, those mea
sures conflict with the strategy of Readjustment.
The attitudes of workers and intellectuals toward
their work will be a continuing problem. On the one hand,
during the Readjustment period, wages and salaries have
been frozen, bonuses have been limited, and the reform
and democratization of management have slowed down.
On the other hand, inflation has still been a problem to the
government, and the bureaucracy's position has been
strengthened.
Even local cadres have opposed the Readjustment,
because their power and privileges have been reduced.
Lack of energy resources has been and will further
be an important problem for the Readjustment, particu
larly under the planned but bureaucratic system of alloca
tion of energy. In addition, at the present time, many heavy
industrial enterprises have closed or stopped their produc
tion under the Readjustment, and, according to some
publications, the utilization rate of equipment in industry is
only about 75 percent because of the lack of energy. How
ever, further development of small-scale industry in the
countryside and increased production in the petrochemical
industry are still the Readjustment's focal points.
The international environment is not very helpful to
the Readjustment. The economic situation in most western
countries and many semi-industrialized countries is not
good, and international competition especially in manu
goods is very sharp. Therefore, if China does not
reform its inefficient economic structure, its position in
international competition must be weakened. Also,
although several measures (for example, the establishment
of the SEZ and the Investment and Trust Company) to
attract foreign capital have been taken, the stability of the
political situation and of economic policy, the incomplete
legal system governing foreign investment, and the dangers
of the overcentralized economic system are still concerns of
foreign investors. For example, the Readjustment stopped
some large-scale projects, which were imported from
Japan and West Germany. This measure had a strong
impact on Japanese and other investors.
24
And finally, in
the near future, China will continuously have to import a
lot of grain and cotton for its food supply and textile in
dustry. However, the price fo grain and cotton is increasing
and will continue to increase on the world market.
Officially, Readjustment is a necessary precondition
for further reform of the economic system in the "future."
But to sum up the above arguments, it is unlikely that the
Readjustment will succeed fully, especially with respect to
efficiency of investment. Readjustment is a process of re
centralization of the economic system, and it therefore will
further strengthen the position and power of the central
bureaucracy, which is an important obstacle to future
reform.
Recently, Hu Yaobang, the Secretary General of the
CCP, clearly stated at the Twelfth Party Congress that by
the end of this decade the basic economic strategy will still
24. See, e.g., Shijie jingji daobao (World Economy Herald), July 27, 1981,
p.l.
24
I
(
be "Readjustment." In particular, he emphasized a neces
I
sity to "concentrate funds on key development projects."
In addition, upholding both the "leading position of the
state economy" and a planning system of a "mandatory
nature" were strongly emphasized, while economic reform
was given very little attention. It is still unclear how the
government can improve balance in the national economy
without further reform of economic institutions, and how
central administrative control of industry can be made
compatible in the long run with decentralized agricultural
policy relying heavily on the free market. 25
A Brief Prospectus
The future course of events will probably depend
heavily on whether the strategy of Readjustment succeeds
or fails. If it succeeds, a number of results would follow.
The sectoral proportions of the national economy would be
changed. Although no concrete proportions or models are
proposed, the government obviously is determined to bring
about a "strategic change" -that the output value of light
industry exceed that of heavy industry, as indeed happened
in 1981. The rate of accumulation would be kept at 25
percent, although there is no satisfactory explanation of
why this particular rate would be the perfect one for China.
The government deficit and inflation would be reduced or
eliminated by means of fiscal austerity. Industry would
become somewhat more efficient in the use of energy, and
the problem of unemployment would be solved. Finally,
export of manufactured goods would increase, although it
seems very difficult or even impossible to make further
reforms in the management system of foreign trade.
At present, people avoid discussing what type of
economic system would be created by the Readjustment.
However, analysis of the strategy of Readjustment sug
gests that it will further strengthen the centralized
administrative planning system and thus lead back to the
Soviet model, even though the issue of Reform in agri
culture will cause some struggle. The problems of chronic
inefficiency, low labor productivity and absence of incen
tive to innovate would thus remain endemic to industry. In
addition, except for the Special Export Zones, which are
very weak and strictly controlled, and other projects of
direct foreign investment, the system of foreign trade
would again be likely to become more centralized. More
over, although the system of allocation of labor has be
nefited from the revival of independent businesses, their
position is very weak and opposition and criticism from
cadres is becoming increasingly strong. Therefore, if the
economic situation should improve, some kind of control
(for example, transforming them into cooperative enter
prises) would be likely to be imposed.
Finally, the problem of agriculture is more complex.
On the one hand, the Reform in agriculture has increased
both output and peasant income. On the other hand, it has
been more difficult than before for the government to
procure agricultural products from the peasants. Addition
ally, the development of the free market has contributed to
inflation. More importantly, the bureaucracy's power, pos
25. See8eijingReview. September 13,1982, pp. 11-40.
ltlon, control, and privileges have been reduced in the
countryside, which has also weakened the political system.
Chinese peasants must be worrying about whether the new
policies will be rolled back, as happened in 1964-65 after a
similar period of liberalization.
In case of the failure of the policy of Readjustment to
surmount the difficulties discussed earlier, both the
economic and political situation will be very complex. On
the one hand, the Moderates will search for new policies
with the support of the Army. On the other hand, the
"Democratic Movement" may well become active again.
As a result, there would be the possibility of a situation
arising similar to that of Poland. In comparing the situa
tions in China and Poland, however, there are at least three
questions that must be addressed: (a) What role do the
armies of each play in political life? (b) What opinion do
most cadres hold about political and economic reform? (c)
What international environment does each country
operate in? *
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25
\
China's Amateur Drama: The Movement to
Popularize the Revolutionary Model Operas
by Ellen Judd
Introduction
Throughout the Cultural Revolution, new dramas and
controversies about drama were prominent in both culture
and politics. The centerpiece of the new drama was the set
of works proclaimed as revolutionary model operas in
1966.
1
These occupied the professional stage and also
formed the basis of the post-1970 amateur movement.
Through this amateur movement much larger numbers of
people could be reached than by reliance on professionals
alone, and, more importantly, they could be involved as
active participants rather than passive spectators.
The molders of China's amateur drama movement had
long been aware of this potential and by the time of the
Cultural Revolution China had an established amateur
tradition and an extensive network of amateur organiza
tions.
2
However, amateur drama had been discontinued in
the early years of the Cultural Revolution as most of the
heritage of the past seventeen years of cultural activity was
repudiated. Beginning in 1970 with the movement to popu
larize the revolutionary model operas, amateur drama was
revived but with substantial changes. The model operas
were authoritatively presented to amateurs as the definitive
model not only of repertoire, but also of ideological con
tent and creative method. The amateur movement was
intended to break new ground by performing a wholly
I would like to acknowledge the comments and assistance of Daniel
Bryant, Richard King, Paddy Tsurumi, and Ed Wickberg. I am solely
responsible for remaining errors.
1. The original five model Beijing operas were: Taking Tiger Mountain By
Storm. The Red Lantern. Raid on the White Tiger Regiment. Shajiabang. and
On the Docks. The two ballets were The White-haired Girl and The Red
Detachment of Women. The symphony was another version of Shajiabang.
By 1974 there were several more models: the Beijing operas The Song of
Dragon River. The Red Detachment of Women. Fighting on the Plains. and
Azalea Moutain; the ballets The Song ofYimeng and Son and Daughter ofthe
Grasslands; the piano concerto Yellow River; and the piano accompani
ment The Red Lantern. A few more were announced in the next two years,
but those did not have time to become incorporated into the populariza
tion movement.
2. See Colin Mackerras, Amateur Theatre in China 1949-1966 (Canberra:
Australian National University Press, 1973).
contemporary and inspirational repertoire and by develop
ing the amateur movement itself along unprecedented
lines. There was to be a break with pre-revolutionary
drama and, moreover, with pre-Cultural Revolution drama
as well. This was a major initiative in recreating the expres
sive culture of China.
As an officially sponsored movement backed by the
highest leadership of the Cultural Revolution, it was in
separable from some of the central political controversies
of the time. Jiang Qing claimed that the model operas were
the first success in the world in establishing a truly proletar
ian literature and art.
3
The new amateur movement had to
substantiate this claim to a correct revolutionary cultural
policy, a claim upon which wider political claims rested.
This meant that the model operas and the movement to
popularize them were deeply involved in the political con
troversy between Jiang Qing and associates and their op
position. Further, the movement to popularize the model
operas involved changes in the organization of popular
expressive culture which were connected with the wider
changes in social organization arising from the Cultural
Revolution. The controversy, therefore, extended far be
yond the question of the evaluation of the model works
themselves. Another aspect of this issue was its connection
with China's development strategy. From the point of view
of the post-1976 leadership, the model operas are marginal
to this question, but the development strategy officially
promoted in the early 1970's relied very heavily on moral
incentives. The movement to popularize the model operas
was intrinsically part of this development strategy, and
claims for its value were primarily expressed in terms of its
efficacy in promoting increased production and social
change, and less so in terms of cultural enrichment.
This paper will examine the reconstitution of amateur
drama during the movement to popularize the model op
eras from 1970 to 1976. The direction of the movement and
its general outline will be presented, followed by a more
3. Hongqi 4 (1977), p. 39.
26
I
I
f
detailed examination of one particular case showing seri
ous contradictions within the practice of amateur drama in
this period. A view of the concrete social activity of drama
in the Cultural Revolution can add a dimension by showing
how workers responded to the contradictory demands be
ing placed upon them. The different political purposes of
this period-carrying through a cultural revolution and
asserting a new type of central power-posed difficult
problems for activists in the official movements of the last
years of the Cultural Revolution. The account of Yimin
Factory which follows traces the efforts of workers in one
such movement to carry on in a revolutionary direction as
the Cultural Revolution faltered.
I will argue that the majpr problem in this movement
was that it was a popular movement promoted on rigidly
hierarchical principles. While retaining the popular rheto
ric of the early Cultural Revolution years, the movement
was based on a fundamental distrust of popular spontane
ity. Further, as the movement proceeded, some units be
gan to appear as models or potential models ofhow to carry
it out-but the public presentation of these units diverged
significantly from their actual practice. This divergence was
too great to be unintentional and indicates a serious ele
ment of falsification of the movement, while at the same
time showing independence and initiative on the part of the
amateurs involved.
The Movement
The revolutionary model operas are a set of works
based on earlier texts dating back to the 1940s but pre
sented in revised form in 1966 as a qualitatively new de
parture leading the proletarian cultural revolution in the
area of literature and art. The original eight models (five
Beijing operas, two ballets, and one symphony) of 1966
were augmented by a larger number of model works in the
early 1970s, but the focus of the movement to popularize
the revolutionary model operas was on a few of the Beijing
operas, and especially on the two addressing contemporary
issues: The Song of Dragon River and On the Docks. The
operas were the focus of the movement for the simple
reason that singing could form the basis of a mass move
ment whereas ballet and Western instrumental music could
not. While some aspects of the movement to popularize the
model operas involved only measures to reach larger audi
ences (by filming the operas, adapting them to various local
forms, and constantly performing them), the more signifi
cant measures involved broad active participation. Almost
anyone could learn to sing a song or two from one of the
operas, and everyone was encouraged to do so. Beyond
that, the movement to popularize the revolutionary model
operas could and did form the starting point for the reor
ganization of amateur drama in China.
The movement began in the summer of 1970. It was
publicly introduced in an authoritative article in People's
Daily in July,4 addressed toward both professional and ama
teur activities. The amateur movement as it subsequently
developed followed the lines prescribed in this article. The
4. "Zuo hao puji geming yangbanxi de gongzuo," Renmin ribao, 15 July
1970.
Another aspect of this issue was its connection with
China's development strategy. From the point ofview
of the post-1976Ieadersbip, the model operas are mar
ginal to this question, but the development strategy
officially promoted in the early 1970's relied very
heavily on moral incentives. The movement to popu
larize the model operas was intrinsically part of this
development strategy, and claims for its value were
primarily expressed in terms of its efficacy in promot
ing increased production and social change, and less so
in terms of cultural enrichment.
article emphasized the leadership role of Party and revolu
tionary committees, specifically assigning them responsi
bility for running study classes on the model operas and on
literary and artistic policy. Mao's "Yan'an Talks" and
other writings on literature and art were prescribed for
study, and the importance of proletarian hegemony in lit
erature and art was emphasized. Amateurs were instructed
to ensure that their activities were frugal and did not in
terfere with their work in production. The article further
presented the movement's fundamental theme of emula
tion of the opera's revolutionary heroes. The significance
of the movement was supported by reference to Mao's
position on the close relation between popularization and
elevation.
For some time before this, the press had featured the
model operas prominently and this continued from the
summer of 1970 with the addition of the slogan "energeti
cally popularize the revolutionary model operas" (dali puji
geming yangbanxi). Among the numerous articles relating
to the model operas which followed, one was of particular
relevance to the amateur aspect of the popularization
movement. "Energetically Develop Worker, Peasant, and
Soldier Amateur Literary and Artistic Creation" was one
of the few articles on literature and art to appear in Red Flag
in the very early 1970s. It is significant in marking the move
toward a new stage in the movement-the creation by
amateurs of new works patterned on the models. The
model operas were presented as not only model texts but
also as demonstrating the ideal method of creating literary
and artistic works, making that also a model for study and
emulation. This experience included such features as creat
ing works in the course of carrying on the two-line struggle
in art, consulting audiences and doing repeated revisions,
and engaging in ideological criticism and self-reform. A
further noteworthy point in this article was the explicit
statement that "spirit changes matter" (jingshen bian
wuzhi), a philosophical underpinning of the entire move
ment. In other respects this article reaffirmed some basic
ideas mentioned above: the importance of strong Party
leadership in the movement, the role of the popularization
27
movement in opposing bourgeois and revisionist influences
in art, and the strictly spare-time nature of amateur litera
ture and art. The popularization movement of the follow
ing years largely responded to these demands and guide
lines from the central leadership.
Perhaps because there had been a widespread amateur
movement before 1966 providing something of a basis, it
was not long before amateur groups performing songs from
the model operas appeared and soon broadened their rep
ertoire to include other material as well. At least some of
these groups created new works themselves or adapted
works created by others. This amateur movement was offi
cially promoted and supported through various means,
such as organizing professionals to help amateurs, publish
ing numerous pamphlets and songsheets of suitable per
forming material, and broadcasting lessons on how to sing
songs from the model operas. Even people outside amateur
networks were incorporated into this popularization move
ment by periodically organizing everyone for group singing
of a few songs from the model operas at recurrent intervals
through the early 1970s.
6
Of special importance given the role of models, not
only in the arts but in social movements in China in general,
was the emergence of some units as models of amateur
literary and artistic activity. Although not as well-known as
Xiaojinzhuang in poetry, a few units in Shanghai were
being promoted as outstanding successes (in effect, mod
els) in popularizing the model operas by the mid-1970s. The
most prominent of these was Yimin Shipin Sichang, or the
Number Four Benefit the People Food Products Factory
(hereafter Yimin Factory). It was exemplary in several
respects. Most notable was its "Granny Li Team" offifteen
older women who sang songs from the model operas with
energy and excellence, and, in the mere fact of performing,
constituted yet another breakthrough which could be cred
ited to the new literary and artistic line. Women oftheir age
group were not accustomed to performing and were rarely
encouraged to do so, the amateur movement concentrating
on the more willing young people (who also had more free
time). The Granny Li Team's renown was well-suited to
the period with its prominent claims of breakthrough in the
difficult forms of Beijing opera, ballet, and symphony. In
addition, Yimin Factory was exceptionally successful in
generating widespread participation in its amateur activi
ties and in moving beyond the model operas toward its own
creative work, demonstrating the potential of the populari
zation movement for reviving amateur drama and stimulat
ing creative work. Its example was promoted through
numerous public performances by the Granny Li Team, a
film of that team's activities, articles in the press, connec
tions with teaching and writing in universities, and contacts
with foreigners. Had other events not intervened in 1976,
this factory might well have becomes as renowned as Xiao
jinzhuang.
In late 1975 a volume
7
of reports on these Shanghai
models in the popularization movement appeared, promi
6. Personal communication from a participant in these activities.
7. Shanghai shifan daxue zhongwenxi gongnongbing xueyuan diaocha
xiaozu, Yizhi ehang dao gongehanzhuyi. Gongnongbing puji geming yangbawci
diaoeha baogao (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chuban she, 1975).
nently featuring a report on Yimin Factory. A few of these
reports were concerned almost wholly with the results of
the movement, but some provided details on how the
movement was initiated and carried out, especially the one
on Yimin Factory. This factory is a valuable case to study
because of the exemplary character of its work in the move
ment to popularize the revolutionary model operas and the
comparatively plentiful material available about it. The
existence of partially inconsistent material from written
sources compared with first-hand investigation provides
much of the basis for the argument of this paper, although it
is supplemented by further written material and by investi
gation in many other units, including one of the other cases
in this volume, during the period from October 1974 to
May 1977 when I was studying current literary and artistic
activities in China.
The public presentation of the ideal in the movement
to popularize the model operas, as expressed in the 1975
volume, was consistent with the guidelines provided ear
lier. The movement was presented as initiated from above
during the summer of 1970,
8
and led by the Party commit
tees of the various units involved. The beginnings and the
development of the movement were described as strictly
separated from pre-Cultural Revolution literary and ar
tistic activities in the same units, and also from what are
described as "underground" (dixia) literary and artistic
activities which appeared in the late 1960s when there was
no officially approved amateur movement. In one rural
case folk artists were mentioned, but only as a bad in
fluence.
9
In brief, no amateur activities other than those
officially encouraged were mentioned with approval. In
part, this is connected with the emphasis on continuing
ideological criticism of the pre-Cultural Revolution "black
line" and ensuring proletarian hegemony in literature and
art, an important theme in this period, but in part it also
indicates distrust of popular spontaneity.
The audience for the new amateur movement was
defined somewhat differently than in previous years. While
references to workers, peasants, and soldiers continued,
the literature and art of this period was aimed more nar
rowly at the proletariat and poor and lower-middle peas
ants, despite the problematic nature of such class terms
long after socialization of the economy. This was congruent
with the emphasis on creating a distinctively socialist litera
ture and art, rather than a broader popular literature and
art.
In building this movement there was a heavy influence
on ideological study and criticism. The movement began
with study of Mao's works on literature and art and of the
ideological import of the model operas. The ideological
emphasis continued in several ways, of which three were
especially important. The first was the intrinsic focus of the
movement on propagating the ideology expressed in the
model operas. This was the pivot of the movement and was
most commonly expressed in terms of emulating the heroes
of the model operas. The second was the set of measures
8. Ibid., p. 55. In one case the People's Daily commentarydiscussed above
is presented as the starting point. In other cases the starting point is not so
precisely identified.
9. Ibid., pp. 55, 66.
28
..----
t
I
taken to reform activists in the movement. Even those from
desirable class backgrounds and with unblemished per
sonal histories were held to require ideological vigilance. In
these successful cases the problem often pointed to was that
of pride. Third, there were activities aimed at criticizing
undesired past or present trends in literature or art or in the
wider society, through criticism meetings, organized criti
cism within groups of movement activists, or formation of
special criticism groups. The objects of criticism were di
J
verse, including Confucius' view of music, pre-Cultural
I
Revolution literature and art, and recent works currently
I
under criticism, such as Going Up Peach Peak Three Times.
Such activities were linked with wider political movements

t
underway at the same time, especially the movement to
criticize Lin Biao aRd Confucius. 10
I
Form varied, with the model operas being adapted to
\ local opera styles or to other genres, such as storytelling.
I
Each unit had an amateur propaganda team but the degree
of wider participation was variable. In general, the articles
in the 1975 volume on Shanghai models lauded the effec
tiveness of the model operas in promoting approved ac
tivities and ideas. Emulating the hero(in)es of the model
operas was held to make people improve politically and
become more productive in their work. Such emulation
was also presented as effectively promoting other social
changes, such as the liberation of women.
Yimin Factory
Yimin Factory is a middle-sized factory in urban
Shanghai which produces lUXUry foodstuffs, largely for the
export market. Previously an American-owned company,
in 1975 it was a state-owned factory with a staff of over
1,300, half of whom were women. II They worked day-time
and evening shifts in several workshops producing expen
sive cookies, chocolates, and dried vegetables. There was
also a period during the U.S.-Vietnam War when the fac
tory produced something like hardtack for export to Viet
nam. While its luxury products are presumably highly val
ued at present as sources of foreign exchange, this eco
nomic value was not emphasized in the early 1970s. In
to. For examples of such criticism by amateurs as part ofthe movementto
popularize the model operas, see two articles from Yimin Factory in Pipan
Kong Laoer de fandong yinyue guan (Beijing: Renrnin yinyue, 1975): Shen
Hua. "'Tianming guan' he 'linggan lun' shi yilu huose" and Lao mama
hechangdui, "'Zhonghe' zhi dao, sha ren zhi dao," both reprinted from
Wenhui bao 17 August 1974).
11. At the time of this investigation, I was one of a class of foreign
students studying modem Chinese literature at Fudan University. As part
of the four months of our course devoted to the model operas, we were
given the opportunity of investigating the movement to popularize the
model operas.
Further information is available in "Yizhi chang dao gongchanzhuyi" in
the volume of the same title cited above and in Shanghai yimin shipin
sichang lao gongren hechangdui, "Geming yangbanxi yue chang yue yao
chang" Wenyi qingqi 2 (1976), pp. 63-68.
I am grateful to Daniel Bryant for making inquiries on my behalf in
Shanghai in the summer of 1982. He was unable to directly contact the
factory but did speak with a senior official at a university which was
formerly closely connected with Yirnin Factory. This official stated that
that connection was viewed as an error and had nothing positive to say
about the factory. Apparently Yimin Factory has not yet managed to
extricate itself from the consequences of being a model unit in the mid
1970s.
In building this movement there was a heavy influence
on ideological study and criticism. The movement be
gan with study of Mao's works on literature and art
and of the ideological import of the model operas.
1975, Yimin Factory had several types of organized spare
time activity available for its staff: an international affairs
study group, a fine arts group, and a literary criticism
group, as well as a large performing propaganda team.
Its propaganda team became renowned only in the
1970s, during the movement to popularize the revolution
ary model operas. Prior to the Cultural Revolution, it had
had a propaganda team of some twenty members which
performed traditional opera. It reportedly did little writing
of its own and no critical or theoretical work. Except for a
period of more intense popular activity during the Great
Leap Forward, this factory lacked wider involvement in
literature and art and was undistinguished in this area.
These activities stopped early in the Cultural Revolution
with the denunciation of the pre-Cultural Revolution
"black line" in literature and art. In the following years
there were some spontaneous underground activities in
music, acrobatics, and story-telling. There are no detailed
accounts of these: they are briefly described in print as
corrupting people with feudal, bourgeois, and revisionist
ideas in the name of enriching the workers' off-hours.
This situation changed in August 1970 in response to
the official call to energetically popularize the revolution
ary model operas. At first this resulted only in singing songs
from the model operas in an unorganized fashion. Then the
factory's Party committee initiated a more systematic ap
proach to the development of a movement. First, cadres
were organized in classes to study policy on literature and
art and the model operas. Then a mass criticism meeting
was held in the factory to involve the staff as a whole in the
movement. The Party committee moved to provide a lead
ership and organizational framework to develop and sus
tain the movement. The first significant measure-and the
continuing showpiece-of Yimin Factory's movement to
popularize the model operas was its team of older women
workers who sang the songs of the grandmother characters
in the model operas. This team, the Granny Li Team, was
named after the grandmother in The Red Lantern. As of
1976 it consisted of fifteen women ranging in age from
forty-three to over sixty (some were retired). This was
unusual for several reasons: most amateur activists were
young unmarried people; married women have a heavy
burden of domestic labor; and ideas about the unsuitabil
ity of women performing still held force, especially among
women of that generation. There had previously been
a group of women performers over sixty years of age
in a Shanghai neighborhood but it had been disbanded.
Much of the attention given this factory derived from its
success in organizing such a group. 12 The explanation given
12. By 1975 there were at least three "grannie" and three "grandad"
teams in various units in Shanghai. See Oin Wenzu, "Zai jingju gerning de
daidong xia kuobu qianjin-1974 nian Shanghai qunzhong wenyi shup
ing," Wenyi qingqi (1975), pp. 57-61.
29
for beginning with older women was that if that could be
done successfully, all else would go well. In fact, the
Granny Li Team gave vivid and excellent performances,
not just singing well but also performing with dramatic
presence and flair. The group of gray-haired women in
identical costume, moVing and singing in unison, effec
tively recreated the heroic granny characters of the model
operas, while at the same time avoiding any trace of indi
vidual prominence.
Soon a second team was organized, consisting of
young women and named after the granddaughter in The
Red Lantern, Tiemei. Men seem to have been organized
more slowly, with the one male team, the Lei Gang Team,
being formed much later in 1974. This team included men
of all ages; an effort to establish a team for older men
parallel to the Granny Li Team had failed. This may have
been connected with an apparent effort to restrain male
dominance. The obvious character to have chosen as a
model for the men's team was Li Yuhe, completing the
family scene from The Red Lantern. It seems likely that this
choice was avoided as Li Yuhe is the central figure and
"main heroic character" in that opera. Lei Gang is only a
secondary hero in another opera, Azalea Mountain, in which
the main hero is a woman. Still, the factory-level teams as
they existed by 1974 incorporated men and women of all
age groups with the exception of younger married women,
who carry a heavy burden of domestic labor. These three,
together with a fourth all-male team of accompanists
formed the factory-level propaganda team.
The next major step occurred in 1972 with a move
toward creating new works within the factory's amateur
movement. This again was initiated from above, with the
factory's Party committee organizing study of the process
by which the model operas themselves were created in
order to guide the factory's own creative work. This may
well have been part ofa more widespread development as it
coincided with the Red Flag article calling for amateur
creative work mentioned above. Certainly this step was
implicit in the movement and necessary for its develop
ment: the few models could not be performed or adapted
indefinitely, and the very purpose of having models was to
inspire and guide further work.
Another addition to the factory's literary and artistic
activities was made some time during the movement to
criticize Lin Biao and Confucius. This was a criticism group
(wenyi pinglun zu) which began with criticism of the views
on literature and art of Lin Biao and Confucius, and con
tinued to do criticism suiting later political movements, for
example, criticizing Water Margin in 1975.
The popularization movement in Yimin Factory was a
highly organized one operating at several levels and under
definite political guidance. Credit for leadership was given
to the factory's Party committee, although there was also
some ambiguous reference to its revolutionary committee,
which presumably overlapped with theParty committee. In
the mid-1970s, the two were often nearly identical bodies,
but it was the Party structure which was credited with the
leading role in this essentially ideological movement. The
Party committee followed higher level political directives
and prescribed the general direction and expectations for
the movement in the factory. One member of the Party
committee was assigned responsibility .for literature and art
30
(including this movement), and it was made part of the
regular work of the Party committee. More specific gui
dance was exercised by requiring the Party committee's
approval for the quarterly plans of the factory propaganda
team and criticism group. There was no Party cadre leading
either the propaganda team or the criticism group directly
from within, but Party and League members involved were
expected to be exemplary. A further channel for Party
guidance was the Party branch in each workshop, each of
which similarly had a person assigned responsibility for
literary and artistic activity.
Yimin Factory was exceptional on two levels: that orits
propaganda team and that orits mass activities.
The actual organizational work was not carried out by
the Party directly, but rather by the union, with some
assistance from the Youth League and the women's organi
zation. This was the standard practice of exercising Party
leadership through the medium of mass organizations, a
strategy also used before the Cultural Revolution. The
union had one cadre who gave half her time to literary and
artistic work, organizing, rehearsing, and directing the fac
tory propaganda team. (The other half of her time was
spent on women's issues.) In the mid-1970s, this cadre was
a middle-aged woman who had formerly been a worker in
the factory. She did most of the actual organizational work
involved, although she was not on the union committee,
nor was she a Party member. Her role seemed not to be
political, but rather to be one of carrying on routine organi
zational work and providing a degree of expertise. Al
though she had apparently not received specialized train
ing, observation ofa rehearsal she conducted indicated that
she was a capable music director. She may have been
trained by a professional who was previously present in the
factory. This cadre works only with the factory propaganda
team-no other literary or artistic activity in the factory
has the benefit of even a part-time cadre. While time off
work is sometimes provided at the workshop level to
people involved in literary and artistic activities, that was
not regularized as at the factory level.
Yimin Factory was exceptional on two levels: that of
its propaganda team and that of its mass activities. It com
bined high quality with popularization to a rare degree.
Both aspects of this combination require attention. The
factory's propaganda teain consisted ofover fifty members,
which was slightly larger than most comparable amateur
teams I have seen perform. Members of the team were
described as selected according to four criteria: politics,
work, popular trust, and talent, of which the last was said
not to be the most important. The emphasis placed on the
other three was partly connected with the political stri
dency of the period, but also indicated the importance of
the performers in this political movement. Given that the
goal of the movement to popularize the model operas was
to change people and that this was to happen by way of
emulating the inspiring hero(in )es ofthe operas, it was then
important that the performers be plausible in their roles.
I
;
1
I
,
Whereas professionals seen only on stage could rely on
stagecraft, amateurs performing for their fellow workers
had also to consider their personal reputations. Further,
there was an emphasis in this movement on the transform
ing potential of singing the model operas for those who did
1
so-if it were clearly not efficacious for the propaganda
I
team members, surely it would not work for their audi
1
ences.
The propaganda team's main activities were to per
J
form songs from the model operas and to create new works
along similar lines. It performed within the factory and also
J
very widely outside it, serving to spread the movement
I
further. The team was considered to be an amateur one but
1
the intensity of its activities raises some questions. By early
!
1976, the Granny Li Team had performed almost six hun
I
}
dred times and it or other teams (including the criticism
group) had given over one hundred talks on popularizing
the model operas and related topics. Clearly, these ama
teurs were, in effect, partly subsidized by relief from regu
; lar work, except in the case of those who were retired.
i
j
Also at the factory level, there was a criticism group of
ten mostly younger people studying and writing about is
sues in literary and artistic theory. They came together as a
group for half a day each week, taking some members off
work, according to their shifts. Their role was to lead
literary criticism and theory work in the factory. Given the
importance of literary issues in Chinese politics, this occa
sionally put the team in the centre of attention-as in
criticizing Water Margin-but generally this group was less
prominent than the propaganda team.
The success of Yimin Factory in achieving wide partic
ipation in the popularization movement was the result of
sustained organizational work dating from 1971. This was
based on a schedule of two or three performances in the
factory each year for which each workshop prepared a
presentation. Much of the activity in popularizing the
model operas, other than that of the factory propaganda
team, was associated with these periodic performances.
Usually about four hundred people took a tum on the
stage, usually in large group performances, and this was
presumably the grounds for the factory's claim that one
third of its staff were activists in the movement. In some
cases, everyone took a tum on stage, blurring the perform
er-audience distinction.
While songs from the model operas were performed
on these occasions, by 1975 about half of the items were
new works created within the workshops. Considering the
time for writing and rehearsal, preparing for the perform
ances meant a fairly sustained movement with regular
peaks of activity. A routine of a song or two in work groups
before and after work was encouraged. Yimin Factory also
provided the usual cultural amenities of state-owned fac
tories in the cities: a television, movie showings in the
factory, and some tickets to professional performances in
theatres.
In a summary of Yimin Factory's popularization
movement in December 1975, the vice-chairperson of the
revolutionary committee emphasized the importance of
organizational work in developing the movement. While
she gave first place to the ideological recognition of the
importance of the movement, she indicated quite precisely
the necessity of appropriate organizational steps. These
have been outlined above, but the conscious attention to
organizational detail, including scheduling and ensuring
adequate time for these activities, deserves particular men
tion. Aside from the conspicuous success of the Granny Li
Team, it is this organizational work which was the special
achievement of Yimin Factory and which allowed it to
sustain and develop the movement through successive
stages rather than simply stage repeated sessions of singing
songs from the model operas.
A major aspect of this progress was the creation of
numerous original works within the factory since 1972. By
1975, Yimin Factory claimed thirty-seven comparatively
good and countless other less successful items. These were
all short, in line with the long-standing policy for amateurs
of using small and varied forms (xiaoxing duoyang). The
forms included singing in many variations, comedy in the
popular crosstalk (xiangsheng) form, clapper tales (kuai
ban), and recitations (langsong). All were performed in the
Shanghai dialect, unlike the model operas which were per
formed in standard Chinese. The creative process was a
collective one. This was a feature of the model operas
themselves and a longstanding tradition of Chinese drama
in general, a procedure much promoted since the Yan'an
period.
The creation of a new work typically involved several
people working together, perhaps with only one doing the
actual drafting. There were ten to twenty people involved
on this level in eachworkshop. Each draft was presented to
fellow workers for comments and suggestions, and a work
might go through numerous revisions before being per
formed for the whole factory. The goal of this procedure
was not only to improve the works but to involve everyone
in the creative process. Even those unable to make sugges
tions on music or dramatic structure might have comments
on theme, plot, or characterization as all these were based
on real events and issues within Yimin Factory. This was
representative of a division of labor whereby the major
professional troupes created and performed large-scale
works on fairly general topics, regional troupes served
regional interests, and so on until at the amateur level very
specific topics and issues were dramatized with local color.
Creative participation included as many ordinary
workers and staff as possible, in addition to the leadership
in the workshop and the factory. The leadership facilitated
the creative work by arranging time and other resources
and by giving encouragement. It made suggestions on
topics or themes. And both the leadership and fellow work
ers had to approve the final product. The incorporation of
the leadership in creative work was an unacknowledged
continuation of practices extending back as far as the
soviets of the early 1930s.
One of the more notable original works of Yimin
Factory may serve as an illustration. "Quality and Quan
tity" (Zhi yu liang) was a crosstalk created in the eggroll
workshop on the problem of combining large quantity with
high quality in production. It is illustrative of the creative
process at the workshop level and of new initiatives by
women. It was created by a "three-in-one" group com
posed of workshop leaders, workers, and literary and
artistic activists. Most of the work was done by a group of
four people who did the drafting. The workshop leadership
and staff participated in discussions on the topic to be
31
I
t
I
i
i
chosen, arranged for others to take over some of the regu
lar work of the four people most involved, and criticized
and made comments on each of the more than ten versions
through which the work progressed. The final version has
been performed in other factories in Shanghai and in the
local cultural palace.
It was performed by two women in their thirties one
of whom was in the factory's pre-Cultural
propaganda team and was one of the four-person writing
group that had produced this piece. Their performance was
adept and one of the attention given this work,
for crosstalk IS traditIOnally and still almost invariably per
only by men. In almost three years of attendance at
Innumerable amateur and professional performances, this
only crosstalk I heard performed by women. This
Initiative was clearly and explicitly linked to the movement
to criticize Biao and which was taking place
at the tIme, and which was characterized by an attack
on patnarchy and by organized entry of women into previ
ously all-male spheres of activity. But while this initiative
can be mainly attributed to the movement to criticize Lin
Biao and it was also supported by the model
operas which gave emphatic prominence to female leader
ship, especially in the model operas set after 1949. The two
mo".ements shared and reinforced elements pro
motIng the lIberation of women. The prominence of wom
en in Yimin Factory's lite.rary and artistic work, although
they formed only half of ItS personnel, was another of its
outstanding features.
The results of the movement to popularize the model
operas in Yimin Factory were various. Perhaps most obvi
for Canadians or Americans accustomed to a very
different type of industrial milieu, was the cultural enrich
ment of the workplace. This did not consist only in more
access to literature and art or even to revolutionary litera
ture and art. On a more profound level, it represented a
in the. of literary
and artistic actlVlty-puttIng It directly in proletarian
hands-and also a different view of the nature of the
workplace as not solely concerned with production. The
introduction of amateur literary and artistic activities to
g?es to in Shanghai and was always
Viewed as Intnnslcally InvolVIng exhortation to action. But
in the late Cultural Revolution period, these activities were
connected with a development policy which put an un
emphasis on ideological, and especially ar
tiStiC, factors as powerful motivating forces for social and
economic development. When the participants in the
movement in Yimin Factory spoke of their accomplish
ments, they spoke not only of cultural enrichment, but
even more of these secondary effects: improved production
of food for Vietnam); working despite ill health
or InJury; and changed attitudes to social development. For
example, one middle-aged woman recounted how studying
The Red Detachment of Women enabled her to send three
children to the countryside (the norm being only one). The
operas were presented as improving the participants
In the movement and inspiring them to contribute more to
Chi.na's they did this was through
theIr activIties to proletanaOlze literature and art in the
movement to popularize the model operas.
Problems
There are features of the popularization movement in
Yimin !'actory which are apparent from my investigation
but which do not appear in the published accounts. These
inconsistencies are significant for they raise some serious
questions about the popularization movement. First there
is the issue of political struggle and of a clear dema;cation
from pre-Cultural Revolution literary and artistic activities
and from later unofficial or underground activities. This
is much emphasized in print, both in general
and In relation to this factory. 13 It was fundamental to the
Cultural that there be a complete break with
the years and unceasing vigilance against class
enemies In all quarters, including amateur literature and
art. During investigation at Yimin Factory this was very
much in the background. My records show that the only
comments on this topic (excluding general comments on
literature and art) were in response to ques
tIOns. Even then, the replies were very low key. The under
ground activities cited in print in vociferous if vague
terms
14
were handled by education and mild criticism
(piping) as contradictions among the people. It was re
ported that some people in the factory preferred the old
operas t? new ones but that there was little in the way of
contradictions the people and the enemy in litera
ture and art In YImIn Factory. No cases were cited.
Activists in the popularization movement spoke of the
pre-Cultural Revolution amateur situation in Yimin Fac
tory as consisting of old opera and as not extending beyond
a factory-level propaganda team. This team was said to
been by revisionism, in response to in
qUlry, but lIttle more was said about it. The creator and
of the crosstalk "Quality and Quantity" did not
heSitate to. say she ha? to that earlier propaganda
team. WhIle a repudiation of the pre-Cultural Revolution
amateur group would not necessarily have applied to every
member, the apparent success of Yimin Factory in bridging
of the Revolution years was noticeably
from The picture that emerges
here IS that while stnct and narrow lines of demarcation
were being advocated for the popularization movement
this model factory was achieving its success with a
approach,. reminiscent of that of earlier years in
.the emphaSIS was on drawing more people into such
actiVIties rather than excluding them.
A second area of concern involves resources available
to amateurs in Yimin Factory. As indicated by the previous
presence of a professional in the factory, there is reason to
suppose that this factory may have received more profes
assistance than was usual. More clearly, amateurs at
Y ImIn Factory regularly used working hours for their liter
ary and artistic activities. The extent of this was undefined
as my questions on the subject were answered with
to the problems of scheduling such ac
tivities In off-hours given the factory's two-shift system.
However, some specific references to time provided as well
as to the very heavy performing schedule of at least the
13. Shanghai shifan daxue, Yizhi chang dao gongchanzhuyi, pp. 2x3.
14. Ibid.
32
1
Granny Li Team make it certain that more than a little it to serve as such at all. (Questions which might have been
working time was available. The use of working hours for raised about the direction of China's economic develop
the amateur movement was not denied at the factory, but ment were not mentioned.) Yimin Factory played a more
!
neither was it mentioned. in publications presenting this
team as a model for amateurs elsewhere. Obviously, this
meant that Yimin Factory's cultural life did not accurately
represent what was possible in an amateur movement oper
ating within the publicly stated guidelines that amateur
activities should be strictly spare-time. The publicity given
j
J
this factory is therefore difficult to explain as a measure
promoting the movement, unless that is understood as an
error, since the setting of an impossible goal would seem
.. counter-productive. It may, perhaps, be more easily ex
plained as an effort to demonstrate the success of the
movement within a context of intense political struggle and
in the apparent absence of a more suitable case.
A connected problem area lies with the issue of in
creasing production. While other comparable models such
as Xiaojinzhuang were notable for their claims for in
creased production. Yimin Factory presents a more comp
licated picture both in the published reports and in the
investigation. No specific claims were made or statistics
cited for increased production during the course of the
movement. The factory had expanded its workforce and
carried out technological innovations since the 1950s, ap
parently allowing an acceptable level of production so that
appreciable working time could be used for amateur drama
and for open door schooling. Still, certain claims, of two
definite types, were made with regard to production. The
first concerned food for Vietnam during the U .S.-Vietnam
War. The factory staff was extremely proud of having
supplied a large amount of basic foodstuff in a short time. A
connection was made with On the Docks in a careful recheck
of the sealing of the packages reminiscent of the similar
search in that model opera (although sabotage was not at
issue). The second concerned changed working attitudes
on the part of the factory staff from lack of enthusiasm and
laziness to conscientiousness. Where this involved feelings
that work in such a factory lacked glamor or a promising
future, On the Docks was used as a tool for persuasion. IS
What was lacking was mention of the model opera
inspiring improvements in the factory's ordinary produc
tion. There are two possible reasons for this. It might be
argued that this shows that increased production was not a
real purpose of the movement, but that would require
ignoring plentiful evidence to the contrary on the level of
general policy and also on the level of other specific cases.
A more likely explanation is related to the usual products
of this factory-a luxury goods beyond the reach of ordi
nary Chinese workers, peasants, or soldiers. A strategy of
increasing production by promoting a revolutionary con
sciousness of serving the people surely has difficulties here
which it does not have with goods for Vietnam. Yimin
Factory was not well suited to be a model for increasing
production, and only the production for Vietnam enabled
15. Wh.atever may be said about the artistic merits ofOn the Docks, by just
presentmg the problems of contemporary urban life in dramatic form it
provided a tool for discussing these problems and promoting their pre
scribed solutions. Consequently, even though some of the other model
operas are artistically superior, On the Docks andSong ofDragon River were
most prominently used for concrete persuasion.
specialized role as a model of how to successfully organize
amateurs in the creation of a revolutionary culture.
The differences between the actual movement in
Yimin Factory and the policy of the movement are best
seen as signs of creativity and independent vigor in the
factory. An impressive proportion of Yimin Factory's staff
actively joined in the movement, going beyond the model
operas to create numerous new works and devising an
organizational approach capable of sustaining and devel
oping the movement. The organizational question is funda
mental because the movement was not only aimed toward
certain specific goals (such as increased production) but
was also designed to revolutionize processes of literary and
artistic creativity. Yimin Factory's divergence in this re
spect is therefore significant.
Proletarian Literature and Art
The model operas and the movement to popularize
them were presented in China as marking the beginning of
a period of proletarian literature and art surpassing all
previous revolutionary literature and art. This claim ap
plied to all aspects of literature and art: the works them
sel,:es, the. organization of literary and artistic activity, and
policy on literature and art. It was not easy to reconcile this
claim with the continuing favorable assessment of the
Yan'an period. While repudiation of the literature and art
of the 1949 to 1965 period was not then contentious some
of its aspects were connected with the Yan'an period, such
as the denunciation of Zhou Yang. But Mao's "Yan'an
Talks" were still viewed as definitive and the Y an'anperiod
was in high repute.
The Yan'an period and its policies on literature and art
were especially important as the dominant revolutionary
tradition in China's literature and art prior to the Cultural
Revolution. Consequently, supplanting this tradition was
essential for the dominance of the Cultural Revolution line
and art. In its divergence from official policy,
Ylmm Factory's literary and artistic activities were im
plicitly closer to the Yan'an policy.
The Yan'an and Cultural Revolution approaches did
share a few common features. Both had a primary concern
with political issues and proposed to restructure literature
and art accordingly. Both were also concerned with pro
moting production. And both depended upon initiatives
from the political hierarchy in organizing local amateur
activities along innovative lines. However, there were also
differences, partly connected with the differing p0
lItIcal contexts of the two periods. Whereas the Yan'an
period was characterized by united front politics and an
effort to maximize CCP influence and support, the early
1970s were characterized by political rigidity and a demand
for complete adherence to new political standards. This
was clearly expressed in the description of audiences and
participants. The Yan'an policy was primarily directed to
ward workers, peasants, and soldiers with all these cate
gories defined in very broad terms. In the early 1970s
workers, peasants, and soldiers were still mentioned but
revolutionary literature and art came to be aimed less the
33
"masses" in general and more at the narrower categories of
the proletariat and poor and lower-middle peasants. Leav
ing many people out of the more restricted audience, or
ambiguously marginal to it, was connected with maintain
ing vigilance and the constant possibility of identifying
quite ordinary people (not landlords or capitalists) as class
enemies: hence the stridency and emphasis on class strug
gle permeating even amateur literature and art among
factory workers and Commune members. Building a mass
movement in literature and art on this basis may prove
difficult, and it is instructive that Yimin Factory was mod
erate in this respect ..
The same political shift was associated with a further
major contrast between the two policies on the issue of
contemporaneous literature and art. In the Yan'an period,
non-official popular forms and works continued publicly
and the approach adopted toward them and their folk artist
creators was one of accommodation, with an increasing
effort to bring them within the official orbit. Even the
officially approved literature and art of the time was closely
associated with traditional elements, such as yangge (folk
dances), albeit in altered form. In the early 1970s the
official policy toward alternative literature and art was an
exclusive one, repudiating such activities and rejecting co
operation with folk artists. Even the approved forms of the
model operas were removed from the popular folk tradi
tion. This approach, paradoxically, must have undercut the
popularization movement's goal of involving almost every
one in spreading the model operas. As indicated above,
Yimin Factory's record in this sphere is somewhat mixed.
Alternative literary and artistic activities in the factory
were terminated but in a reportedly mild way. And while
the model operas were performed-in Beijing opera style,
even-local popular forms using the Shanghai dialect com
prised a substantial portion of the factory's literature and
art.
A further difference concerns mobilizational strategy.
The Yan'an approach was to begin with the easiest to
mobilize and later spread the activities to a wider range of
people. While wide participation was sought, policy em
phasized that all participation must be voluntary. The early
1970s model differed from this in adopting an approach
which claimed to be able to include everyone. This was, of
course, a major factor behind the choice of such forms as
Beijing opera for the model operas. Yimin Factory exemp
lified this approach in its selection of older women to lead
off its amateur movement. Another notable feature of
amateur activities in Yimin Factory was that everyone in
the factory participated in the movement on at least the
minimal level of occasional group singing. This may have
been comparatively easy to achieve in Yimin Factory due
to the rewarding prestige gained. Certainly, universal par
ticipation in the numerous officially sponsored movements
of the period remained an elusive goal for most units.
A major difference between the 1940s and the 1970s
was the degree of female participation. This could not
easily be promoted in the 1940s due to strongly held views
then that respectable women did not perform, and because
women usually had less opportunity to acquire training and
experience in the performing arts. Thirty years later, in the
cities at least, there was less resistance and the remaining
obstacles largely involved women's heavier burden of do
mestic labor. Women's involvement in the arts was cer
tainly being promoted in the 1970s. The model operas
contained major heroic roles for women, and the campaign
to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius was partly focused on
issues involving the liberation of women. Yimin Factory
was notable in that women were not only the most promi
nent participants, but also gave leadership to the move
ment despite being only half of the factory's personnel.
While this aspect of Yimin Factory's popUlarization work
was not greatly emphasized, it was certainly obvious, at
least at the level of participation. While such an initiative
would have been unrealistic in the countryside, conditions
in urban Shanghai had changed by the 1970s. This may
therefore be seen as an aspect of policy change which
matched wider social changes during the intervening years.
Except for the increased emphasis on female partici
pation, these changed policies were part of a misdirected
approach which can, with almost equal accuracy, be de
scribed as ultra-left or rightist. It was ultra-left in the in
tensity and extremity of its demands for social change. It
was rightist in its exclusion of many potential participants
and in having confidence only in the leadership of the
higher levels of the political hierarchy. This combination
was a particular feature of the early 1970s when trust in
popular spontaneity was gone but the rhetoric of popular
revolution remained. The evident inappropriateness of late
Cultural Revolution policy limited its effectiveness. Even
exemplars of this policy, such as Yimin Factory, achieved
their successes by diverging from the policy and partially
continuing in the Yan'an tradition.
The hegemony of the late Cultural Revolution literary
and artistics policy depended upon replacing the previous
revolutionary policy and also upon demonstrating its own
efficacy in terms of economic development and sociopoliti
cal transformation. The movement to popularize the model
operas was part of a broader strategy which relied largely
upon moral incentives and changed relations of production
to generate economic development and more extensive
revolutionary changes, as well. This view was being prom
oted intensively in the 1970s, especially by Jiang Qing and
associates' presentation of Tianjin's Xiaojinzhuang
Brigade as a model along these lines. 16 Its mass poetry and
other cultural activities had had numerous positive results
including that of greatly increasing its agricultural produc
tion. This approach met with opposition from those prom
oting policies of the type currently being followed. Deng
Xiaoping was quoted as having said in 1975, in reference to
Xiaojinzhuang, "You can hop and jump, but can you jump
across the Yangtze?"17 describing its cultural activities in
less than flattering terms.
The movement to popularize the model operas in par
ticular was important in this strategy because its actual and
potential audience was huge and because actively partici
pating amateurs might be especially moved by performing
the model operas. The popularization movement was pre
16. Two of the major sources on Xiaojinzhuang are Xiaojinmuang shige
xuan (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chuban she, 1974) and Yong Mao Zedong
sixiang zhanling sixiang wenhua mendi (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chuban
she, 1975).
17Guangming ribao, 27 February 1976.
34
sented as effecting results through inspiring participants to
identify with and emulate the proletarian hero(in)es they
were portraying. This was reiterated again and again in the
movement and expressed in compact form in the common
phrases "sing the hero(in)es, study the hero(in)es" (chang
yingxiong xue yingxiong )-or ''play hero(in )es, be hero(in)es"
(yan yingxiong zuo yingxiong). The main goals, aside from
the proletarianization of literature and art, were the raising
of production and the consolidation of the Cultural Revo
lution (as that was understood in the early 1970s). Despite
some assertions that those leading policy in the period prior
to October 1976were not concerned with production, there
is plentiful evidence to the contrary in documents of the
period and in observations of China at that time. Produc
tion may have been subordinated to politics and was pre
sented as relying on superstructural factors, but increased
f
production within a context of socialist economic develop
ment was consistently cited as a consequence of the Cul
tural Revolution and a major goal for future years. The
movement to popularize the model operas was clearly di
rected toward increasing production, and examples of its
1 efficacy in this were repeatedly cited. Restricting the move
ment to the workers' spare time was basic to the policy, as
production might otherwise suffer. Beneficial effects were
cited in the form of voluntary overtime, energetic labor,
reduced waste, and so on. Precise or quantitative measures
are necessarily unavailable as it is difficult if not impossible
to isolate the effect of the movement from other cotermi
nous measures to raise production. Still, the claims should
not be quickly dismissed for there was demonstrable ec0
nomic growth in the early 1970s.
As noted above, Yimin Factory does not, perhaps,
I
I
best exemplify the movement's effects on production. Its
practice does, however, permit raising some questions
about moral as opposed to material incentives. Since moral
incentives rely upon convincing people of what is right and
proper, some degree of choice on their part is implicit. In
I
Yimin Factory, what may have happened was a decision
that production for the national liberation struggle in Viet
nam was seen as worthy of full support, while production of
luxury goods could give way to the important political work
of popularizing the model operas. Material incentives, in
contrast, are more easily controlled from above. This is
1
simply to underline the point that economic development is
not simply a question ofincreased production. The strategy
of relying upon moral incentives had the potential-if not
fully realized-of permitting and even promoting political
decisions on production by the workers directly involved in
production.
The question of the political efficacy of the movement
is even more difficult. This involved a range of immediate
considerations as well as the far-reaching problem of con
solidating the political positions of the late Cultural Revo
lution period. Published reports and activists in the move
ment claimed general improvements in political under
standing and commitment, pointing, for example, to more
people joining the Communist Party or becoming cadres.
Specific claims included increased internationalism re
flected in foreign trade-related work, improvements in the
status of women, and willingness to send one's children to
the countryside, all of which were aspects of the policies
promoting social transformation. But the gap between offi
cial policy and social reality apparent in the mid-1970s may
well have undermined the inspirational potential of such
mobilization strategies. Certainly, whatever the specific
successes achieved, the larger goal of political consolida
tion was not reached. The change in direction after 1976
had sources beyond the sphere of literature and art, but
contradictions within that sphere also played a part in the
events of that year. The leaders of the movement to popu
larize the model operas and associated movements were
seeking to mobilize support for their leadership and pol
icies, especially in Shanghai and in the drama world. Their
failure is amply demonstrated by the silence that greeted
their fall in October 1976.
Conclusion
The fundamental problem of this strategy of mobiliza
tion and of the popularization movement, specifically, was
the contradiction betweenpopular (or proletarian) cultural
and hierarchical distrust of the populace. The
ideology ofthe early 1970s retained the rhetoric of the early
Cultural Revolution years while abandoning its reliance on
spontaneous action. Popular activity and large
scale mobilization were still sought, but only in accordance
with official objectjves and in officially sanctioned forms.
Not surprisingly, this authoritarian approach was self-de
feating. A second severe problem lay in the effort to reject
much of the valuable heritage of China's popular revolu
tionary literature and art. The portion of that heritage that
involved extensive organization of both amateurs and pro
fessionals continued, but the reach outwards to draw in
wide-ranging popular support was rejected as non-revolu
tionary. The weakness ofthis approach was that it excluded
potential supporters and restricted the popular base. A
further problem was that of the presentation of a model for
activity which did not accurately represent reality, the mis
representation surely being intentional.
These problems account for the major weaknesses of
the popularization movement but do not explain its partial
success. The investigation of Yimin Factory suggests that
some success was achieved by unorthodox means-con
tinuation of pre-Cultural Revolution and specifically
Ya.n'an period approaches-and that, in that sense, revo
lutionary popular literature and art continued to flourish
even within the orbit of official literary and artistic ac
tivities. The limits of official control are seen not only inthe
extent or intensity of approved activities, but in contradic
tions in the actual practice of officially sponsored literature
8:nd art. Participants could avoid following official prescrip
tions and. e.ven different lines, as shown by the
model of Ylmm Factory. If they were not explicit
therr divergence from policy, this is not surprising
given the ideological complications of the period and the
of the state and Party leaders whose policy it was.
The history of the popularization movement in Yimin Fac
tory is one of workers pursuing a revolutionary path in a
post-revolutionary society. The difficulties of such activity
it runs .nominally socialist leadership are
formidable. As mcreasmg numbers of revolutionaries find
themselves in such situations, efforts to find a way forward
are of crucial and increasing importance. The workers of
Yimin Factory, striving to "sing all the way to commu
nism," were among the many productively grappling with
* this problem at the end of the Cultural Revolution.
35
Class Relations and the Origins of Rural
Revolution in a South China County
by Robert B. Marks*
Introduction
To understand revolutions, we need to understand
social structures. That is Theda Skocpol's message in States
and Social Revolutions. 1 However obvious that may seem,
analyses of the Chinese revolution more often than not
ignore structural questions and focus instead on the politics
of revolution. This is true not only of adherents of "organi
zational weapon" theories, but also of more sympathetic
treatments of the Chinese revolution.
2
To focus on revolu
tionary ideas (Marxism or the thoughts of Mao), or on the
practice of the Communist Party, gives those elements
a causal weight greater than they deserve. Skocpol
eschews such "voluntarist" explanations of revolution
and denies that ideology or the conscious actions of
revolutionaries in themselves have any causal rela
tionship whatsoever to revolutionary outcomes.
Attention to structural questions can lead to a
form of structural determinism, as is evident in Jeffrey
Paige's Agrarian Revolution.
3
In this 1975 work, Paige
argues that certain agrarian class structures lead inex
orably to equally certain forms of rural social move
ments. In this formulation, classes, parties, individu
als, and ideologies are swept along willy-nilly by the
logic of the class structure chemistry. Skocpol is not
that deterministic, allowing additionally for "histori
cal conjuncture," which is defined as "the coming
This article is based on my forthcoming book, Peasant Rebellion and
Rural Revolution in South China: Peasants and the Making of History in
Haifeng County, 1570-1930 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press). A
slightly different version of this article will appear in Kathleen Hartford
and Steven Goldstein, eds., Single Sparks: China's Rural Revolutions, forth
coming. I would like to thank Kathy Hartford, Bryant Avery, Ben Kerk
vliet, and Joe Moore for commenting on various drafts of this article.
1. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1979).
2. For the former, I am thinking especially of Roy Hofheinz Jr., The
Broken Wave: The Chinese Communist Peasant Movement, 1922-1928 (Cam
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), and for the latter Mark Selden,
The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1971).
3. Jeffrey Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Ag
riculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York: The Free Press, 1975).
36
together of separately determined and not consciously
coordinated (or deliberately revolutionary) processes" on
the one hand, and "group efforts," presumably the con
scious activities of revolutionaries, on the other. Although
this formulation is hidden in a footnote (p. 298 n. 44) and
contradicts the main thrust of her argument, it is nonethe
less an analytically useful concept. I would only rephrase
the idea of historical conjuncture as follows: social forces
and structures beyond anyone's control or even awareness
may create historical conditions which enable revolutionar
ies and revolutionary ideas to have (or at least are not
inhibited from having) historical significance. To under
stand revolutions, then, we must investigate these conjunc
tures of changing social structures and human intention
ality.4
The following is a modest attempt to do so. It is not a
sociological but historical analysis that focuses on an admit
tedly small and in some ways unique part of south China
Haifeng county-during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. This article thus does not pretend to
explain the causes of the Chinese revolution, but only the
social origins of a revolutionary movement in one Chinese
county. Although the geographic area is small, the issues
are large and should be of concern to anyone interested in
understanding revolutionary processes. The main problem
I intend to examine is how rural class conflict emerged as
the predominant form of rural social conflict in Haifeng
county, preparing the way for the organizing activities of
members of the newly formed Chinese Communist Party.
Overview of the Haifeng Peasant Movement
Haifeng county has long been celebrated in the
People's Republic of China as the birthplace of China's
modem rural revolution. It was in Haifeng, located in the
4. This idea is hardly new. As Marx wrote in the third of the "Theses on
Feuerbach"; "The coincidence of changing circumstances and of human
activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutioniz
ing practice. "
I
4
I

J
)
To understand revolutions we must investigate the
conjunctures of changing social structures and human
intentionality
,
I
eastern coastal region of south China's Guangdong prov
r
ince, that a radical peasant movement emerged during the
1920s, culminating in the establishment of China's first
,
rural soviet. Led by Chinese Communist Party members
Peng Pai, Peng Hanxuan, Lin Daowen, Zheng Zhiyun and
others, the Haifeng peasant movement was nationally re
I
\
nowned as a model for the "National Revolution," carried
out in rural areas under the joint auspices of the Guomin

I
dang (Nationalist Party or GMD) and the Chinese Com
I munist Party (CCP). The county was even nicknamed
"Little Moscow" in 1926. Observers from other Guang
dong counties and central China provinces visited Haifeng,
and it became a major attraction for leftist writers, who
spread Haifeng's fame through short stories and poems.
Haifeng's reputation among Chinese leftists, how
ever, was not built on what the revolution could accomplish
through peaceful change. The peasant movement rather
had a history ofradicalism and struggle which began in 1923
when thousands of peasants under Communist leadership
crowded the streets of Haifeng city demanding a rent re
duction. Thereafter the peasants of Haifeng often were
regarded as the vanguard of the rural movement. Indeed,
by 1926 nearly every adult peasant in Haifeng belonged to a
union. Local unions had taken control of village affairs,
and peasants were strong enough to mandate rent reduc
tions totaling 64 percent.
I
Following the 1927 break between the CCP and the
GMD, Haifeng peasants under Communist leadership rose
up three times in seven months, finally bringing about the
establishment of the Haifeng Soviet on November 21, 1927.
The Soviet government supervised a radical "land revolu
tion" in which poor peasants and tenants expropriated and
redistributed the land not only of landlords, but of rich and
middle peasants as well. The rural struggle was so fierce
and peasant hatred of landlords so intense that nearly 2000
r
landlords were officially executed, while peasants sponta
j4
neously killed countless others. The Soviet was repressed
l
four months after its inauguration.
;
A considerable amollcDt is known (and more is rapidly
coming to light) about the Haifeng peasant movement and
the Soviet. Far less attention has been given to their con
nections with the historical and social setting in which they
emerged. Yet it is difficult to understand the of
the growth of the Communist movement in Hatfeng with
out understanding its historical setting. No communist
party, regardless of the numbers of brilliant organizers in
its ranks, could create a revolutionary movement ex nihilo.
By the time Peng Pai, an organizer extraordinaire, began
working in the Haifeng countryside, processes of social
change had already created an environment in which class
conflict could erupt at any time. The peasant movement of
the 1920s was not the first incidence of intense rural social
conflict in Haifeng. It was, however, social conflict in a new
form. Here I will argue that, while rural social conflict
during the late nineteenth century had been characterized
by factional strife cutting across class lines, by the early
twentieth century social and economic changes were creat
ing a historical conjuncture under which rural conflict along
class lines could emerge.
Family and Flag: Rural Social Structure
in the Nineteenth Century
During the last half ofthe nineteenth century, agrarian
conflict grew endemic in Haifeng and its sister county of
Lufeng. The causes were complex, and in individual cases
sometimes impossible to fathom. But clearly, they were
related to increasing population pressure on the available
land. Haifeng's 1750 population of about 100,000 more
than doubled in the following century, and by the begin
ning of the twentieth century hovered around 300,000.
reclamation could not begin to keep pace with popu
latton growth. Already by the mid-eighteenth century, all
land was under cultivation in the fertile areas around Hai
feng city. By 1900 little arable land was left anywhere in the
county. Thousands from Haifeng migrated to Guangzhou,
Hong Kong, or the South Seas as a result of the pressure on
the land. S For those who remained, tensions rose and con
flicts flared.
These conflicts initially took the form of factional
struggles between competing groups comprising both land
lords and peasants. The frustrations engendered by demo
graphic pressure on the. land found expression, but only
after bemg channeled mto particular forms by existing
social organizations. In the mid-nineteenth century, this
meant organizations closely linked to the formation, and
elaboration of marketing systems.
6
The two principal such
social organizations in Haifeng were the lineage and the
factional group.
Lineages
Much of the rural conflict in Haifeng during the second
half of the nineteenth century was caused by lineage feuds.
Lineages were important and powerful forms of social or
ganization, and people commonly identified themselves
not by locale, but by lineage. The lineage provided services
benefits to its members, rich and poor alike, who then
Jealously defended the lineage against all outsiders. The
resulting feuds are well-known features of southeastern
C.hina. But if the feuding was endemic and ubiquitous,
dIfferent patterns are nonetheless discernible. And those
patterns are made more intelligible by reference to market
ing systems.
7
5. Haifeng ::cianmi (1877), 1:6a-b; Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of
China, 1368-1953 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 283;
Qiu Guochen, Fengti yusheng lu (Hong Kong: Tianfeng yinshu chang,
1972), p. 7.
6. Peng Pai, "Haifeng nongmin yundong," in Di}ici guonei geming 1Jran
zheng shiqi nongmin yundong (Shanghai: Renmin chuban she, 1953), p. 84.
7. G. William Skinner has analyzed the importance ofmarketing systems
in structuring China's rural society, stressing that "marketing structures
37
Haifeng and Lufeng Counties, ca. 1900
Where two or more lineages lived within the same
marketing system, they sometimes clashed in attempts to
gain absolute dominance over the land within the area. In
some instances, the struggle resulted in one lineage com
pletely eliminating all others from the marketing area. "On
the plain that I have traversed, north of Swatow," Adele
Fielde reported in 1894,
there was, a few years ago, a littLe village inhabited by a
small and weak clan, surnamed Stone [Shi]. There were
tweLve neighboring viLLages, chiefly of the PLum [Tao] clan,
and these all combined against the Stones, whom they far
outnumbered. The Stones pLanted and watered their crops,
and the PLums reaped the harvest. There were perpetual
raids on the property of the Stones, and they, having no
redress for their wrongs, were in danger of utter extinction
. . . After continuous conflict many of the Stones entered
other clans, taking their names, some had gone into volun
38
tary exile in distant cities, and others fled to foreign lands
... Now the clan Stone no longer exists, and the place of
their habitation knows them no more.
8
inevitably shape local social structure and provide one of the crucial
modes for integrating peasant communities into the social system which is
the total society." Arguing that the standard marketing system, not the
village, was the basic unit of peasant society, Skinner suggested that the
standard marketing area provided the framework for marriage arrange
ments, religious organizations, agnatic lineages, and secret societies, and
that local political control was unlikely to be divorced from control over
the market town itself. G. William Skinner, "Marketing and Social Struc
ture in China," Journal of Asian Studies, nos. 1-3 (1964-65), pp. 3-43,
195-222,363-399, respectively; see pt. 1.
8. Adele Fielde, A Comer of Cathay (New York: MacMillan and Co.,
1894), pp. 128-31. For a general discussion of lineage feuds, see Maurice
Freedman, Lineage Organization in Southeast China (New York: Humani
ties Press, 1965), pp. l07ff.
Conflict often occurred over issues of religious impor
tance to the contending lineages. In Lufeng county, for
example, a certain Lu lineage had an ancestral cemetery in
the wooded hills separating them from the Zhuo lineage.
An official reported that "it had been the custom for many
years for the Lu to give gifts and money to the Zhuo when
they performed their ancestral services. Because of a bad
year around 1880, the Lu did not have the money or the
grain to give to the Zhuo, so the Zhuo plastered Lu grave
stones with manure and knocked some over." Unable to
obtain an official judgment against the Zhuo for repara
tions, and feeling that their fengshui (the natural forces of
"wind and water" which controlled good fortune) had been
irreparably harmed, the Lu retaliated by kidnapping mem
bers of the Zhuo lineage, razing their houses, and desecrat
ing temples.
9
With the rising demand for wood and wood products
in the nineteenth century, many conflicts centered on the
control of woodlands. Before the nineteenth century,
,
woodlands and other untilled areas classified as wasteland
.
had been subject to common rights. With the nineteenth
century, their status as common lands was eroded. As
I
J Jamieson wrote of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries,
I
the waste and hilly land adjoining villages appears in many
cases to be subject to the rights of common, which the
villagers enjoy for the purpose of cutting wood and under
growth for fuel . ... But certain villages have by custom
appropriated to themselves the exclusive right ofcutting the
I
t
growth on waste lands in the neighborhood-a right which
by reason of propinquity of situation and facility of access
has a certain commercial value.
Struggles over woodlands also were expressed in terms of
fengshui when one lineage felt its good fortune would de
cline if a particularly auspicious stand of trees was cut for
lumber. 10
1
Another major source of friction between lineages was
I
1
control over water for irrigation. Competing claims to
water rights sparked lineage feuds which then continued
sporadically for decades, sometimes over the original issue
and sometimes over other problems. II The most spectacu
lar lineage conflict over water rights in eastern Guangdong
during the late nineteenth century occurred in Puning
county to the east of Haifeng.
t
In the early 1870s, a conflict flared between two line
ages in Puning, soon expanding to include most of the
villages and other lineages in the central part of the county.
9. Xu Gengbi, Buziqie zhai mancun (Taibei: Wenhai chubanshe reprint of
1883 text), pp. 455-57. See also Hsien-chin Hu, The Common Descent Group
in China and Its Functions (New York: Viking Fund, 1948), p. 91.
10. George Jamieson, Chinese Family and Commercial Law (Shanghai:
Kelly & Walsh Ltd., 1921), pp. 103-104; Bao Shuyun, compo Xing an hui
Ian (Shanghai, 1887), ch. 29:15a.
11. As late as 1950, lineages in Haifeng were reported fighting over water
rights. Some decades before the establishment of the People's Republic of
China, for example, one Guo lineage had built a dike to reclaim river
frontage and to irrigate their land. The neighboring Lou lineage then
complained that the dike was "like an arrow shot into our lineage temple. "
Only under considerable pressure from the new government did the Guo
and Lou agree to cooperate in the building and repairing of irrigation
There were long-standing tensions in the area. Some line
ages evidently had wealthier and more powerful neighbors
from whom they rented land and upon whom they de
pended for water supplies.
12
Exactly what sparked the
fighting is not known, but once it began, local authorities
were powerless to stop it. According to William Ashmore,
who visited the region in 1898, "the mandarins were weak
and powerless. They often set at defiance [sic], and they
and their soldiers would be driven in ignominious flight
from the villages they came to reduce to order." The magis
trate decided to let the fighting continue in the hope that
both sides would be destroyed. But the fighting intensified:
There would not only be occasional pitched battles, but
marauding parties would assail wayfarers and make it peril
ous, for months and even years, to be out of safe running
distance. Roadways would be blocked, fields would be dev
astated, houses would be plundered and left with doors and
roofs battered down. 13
Since the local authorities could not or would not
control the escalating conflict, a Oing general, Fang Yao,
was called upon to restore order. General Fang himself
belonged to a large lineage involved in the fighting. He
restored an order advantageous to his own lineage. Ac
cording to Ashmore, the conflict
was brought to an end by the noted General [FJang ... He
effectually stamped out the feuds by stamping to death many
ofthe men engaged in them. Before he got through with it he
had burned some twenty towns and villages and cut offabout
four thousand heads. . . . Peace and order were restored.
General Fang then awarded water rights, among other
things, to the victors. 14
In many cases, one lineage was able to exercise com
plete dominance over the social and economic lives of the
villages within the marketing system. The most powerful
lineages in Haifeng controlled not only the market town
itself, but also vast amounts of land in nearly every village
in the marketing area. In the dependent area around Mei
long market town, the Lin lineage controlled the land of
nearly every village that traded there. The Lin had come to
Haifeng from Denghai county during the early Qing pe
riod, initially engaging in commerce under the name of
"Guifeng" (literally "Returning Prosperity"). By the early
nineteenth century, at least one member of the Meilong
Lin had become an official of the senior licentate rank. And
by the early twentieth century, about three thousand adult
members of the Lin lineage lived in the market town of
Meilong from which they oversaw the activities of the
villages in the marketing area. The He lineage of liesheng
market town in the southern part of Haifeng held predom
12. Huazi ribao, 22 January 1926.
13. William Ashmore, "A Clan Feud Near Swatow," The Chinese Re
corder 5 (1897), pp. 214-15.
14. South China Morning Post, 30 May 1912. The Fang lineage was the
wealthiest in Puning county, owning shops in the city and land in the
countryside. Struggles against the Fang continued for many years, reach
ing a climax in the 1920s. For a discussion of the Puning peasantry, see
Robert B. Marks, "The World Can Change! Guangdong Peasants in
works. Nanfang ribao, 13 August 1950, p. 2. Revolution," Modern China 1 (1977), pp. 89-96.
39
inant power in the Jiasheng marketing system. By the
1920s, it was claimed that every He was a landlord. Like the
Lin of Meilong, the He not only controlled the market
town, but also had members who had become officials, and
organized and controlled the local armed forces. In Lu
feng, the ten thousand-strong Zhuang lineage dominated
the Shangsha marketing system, the equally powerful Chen
dominated Nantang, and the twenty thousand-member
Peng lineage controlled Hetian market. 15
Control of the marketing system provided lineages
with a mechanism for protecting and perpetuating lineage
power; in an era of rising population and declining
resources, conflict between lineages inevitably arose and
took the form of contention over the market. Where a
lineage did not have or could not gain control over the
market town, it sometimes tried to extend its power by
establishing a new market near the existing one. In an area
just east of Lufeng county, for instance, one lineage
established a new market nor more than half a mile from a
rival's market town. Kulp reported that "it is a market
center that was deliberately created by the leaders of Phe
nix Village in 1904 in order to compete with 'Tan' Village,
which contained a numerically stronger population." Al
though conflict did not break out while Kulp was there,
these actions often precipitated armed struggle. In one area
near Guangzhou, according to a Hong Kong news report,
"the dispute arose over the question of the boundary
between the new and old country-markets. As a result of
the fight, over 300 shops belonging to the Lam clan were
razed to the ground with fire while 200 dwelling-houses of'
the Lo clan met the same fate. 16 And in Lufeng, according
to the county magistrate, conflict among lineages in the
mid- to late nineteenth century was endemic. 17
Since the marketing system was dominated by ex
tremely powerful lineages, weaker lineages established
new village settlements within the neutral zones between
marketing systems. These new villages did not really
"belong" to one marketing system since peasants had the
option of marketing at two or more, giving them a limited
amount of leverage in dealing with those who controlled
the markets. Unless coerced, these villagers could gravitate
toward whichever market paid them the best prices for
their produce and handicrafts, charged them less for essen
tial items, dealt honestly in calculating exchange rates
between copper and silver money, allowed use of water
ways for transportation, offered them better terms of ten
ancy, shielded them from taxation, or, in times of rural
disorder, provided protection.
But if villagers could provide a market for themselves,
they were even better off. When the villages in these areas
15. Information on the Lin was compiled from: Fr. Gerado Branbilla, II
Missioni (Milan, 1943), vol. 5, p. 302; Chen Xiaobai, Hailufeng chihuo ji
(Guangzhou: Peying yinwu ju, 1932), p. 29. The information on the He
lineage was kindly supplied by Liu Youliang, once a resident of Jiesheng,
in a July 1975 interview with the author. For the Lufeng lineages, see Chen
Xiaobai, Hailufeng chihuoji (Guangzhou: Peiying yinwu ju, 1932), pp.
39-43. Doubtless other lineages had controlled many of the remaining
market towns, but documentary evidence is not available.
16. Daniel H. Ku\p, Country Life in South China (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1925), p. 13; Hong Kong Telegraph, 14 January 1911.
17. Xu Gengbi, Buziqie zhai mancun, pp. 441-42, 482.
increased to six or seven, the inhabitants often banded
together into religious and community organizations or
fictive lineages, sometimes claiming common descent from
traditional popular heroes or establishing other organiza
tions to withstand the encroachments of stronger lineages.
For example, seven villages inhabited by several different
families in a neutral zone near Haifeng city established an
"association" (she) which provided a common temple for
group religious services. IS
Neutral zone villages, having established a means of
common identification and consequent growing solidarity,
tended to form marketing systems themselves, though not
as well developed as existing systems. Those who con
trolled the existing market, however, did not welcome a
new market, because it cut substantially into their reve
nues. Since the establishment of a new market furthermore
reduced the human and other resources for religious or
military organization, and therefore had significant politi
cal consequences understood by all concerned, those who
controlled the market hardly viewed such actions by the
villagers with favor.
Red Flags and Black Flags
The process of marketing system formation in Haifeng
and Lufeng counties during the second half of the nine
teenth century was rendered even more explosive by the
development of the Red Flag and Black Flag societies.
While the origin of these societies is somewhat obscure,
they appeared initially in the period following the Opium
War of 1840-1842 and the Red Turban uprising of 1854,
probably for local self-defense. An 1878 memorial by Xu
Gengbi, a Lufeng official, reported that the Red and Black
Flags had grown out of mounting lineage struggles:
The mid-section ofLufeng is inhabited by powerful lineages
which have many members, while other lineages are very
much isolated . ... At first, only the strong fought among
themselves, and there was always fighting and kidnapping.
The weak lineages did not get involved in such things. But
beginning around the end of the Xianfeng reign {ca. 1860} ,
village alliances sprang up between the weak lineages in
order to resist the strong. Thus arose the fights between the
Red and Black Flags. There was much disorder, roads were
blocked, and fields laid to waste . ... When fighting oc
curred, it often expanded as the Flag villages linked up with
other villages. 19
Flag conflict was endemic during the second half of the
nineteenth century, the period when new markets were
rapidly multiplying. As villages spread in the neutral zones,
villagers (and villages) allied under Flag societies. The Flag
organizations went one better than the religious or fictive
lineages to which some neutral zone villagers had resorted.
Membership in the Flag societies was not limited to a
common;sumame or worship at a common temple-all
that was required was a flag. The Flag societies were com
mon throughout the Haifeng and Lufeng countryside. Why
they should have become so widespread and important for
18. Hu, Common Descent Group, p. 94; Qiu Guochen, Fengdi, pp. 26-27.
19. Xu Gengbi, Buziqie zhai mancun, pp. 440-41.
40
--
KEY. R= Red Flag Village
~ approximate boundary of
I

B= Black Flag Village
Hudong market system
= Market town
= approximate boundary of
Jieshi market system
i
i
I
Mountains
r
- -
-- ---
--
-

'{
Mountains
B
I
I
\ I
I
B
J
.
I
I
}---'l...__"-----\ South Chi na Sea ~ - - - - - - - - - - f
t----.----:l1 miles
Red and Black Flag Villages in Eastern Lufeng. 1880
,
I
I
I
social organization is not at all clear. The most likely reason graveland locations, the emergence of the Red and Black
is that with the rapid development of marketing systems Flags provided a social network for calling together much
following the surge in world demand for sugar (see below), larger forces. A Flag society conflict which erupted in 1878
weaker lineages in neutral zone villages saw the possibility in the southern part of Lufeng county illustrates the rela
t
of forming market towns and sought alliances with villages tionship between marketing system formation and the Flag
I
in similar positions vis-a-vis the established market inter societies (see Map 2), and shows how the scope of conflict
ests in order to strengthen their positions. To these neutral could expand beyond the areas immediately concerned.
zone villagers, most of whom had different surnames, tra The fighting occurred on the coastal plain where standard
ditional lineage ties clearly were not important. Looking market towns delimited the eastern and western poles.
beyond the lineage structure for new forms of social organi Jieshi on the west was the larger marketing system with
zation, they created the Red and Black Flags. eight villages in the inner ring and well over twenty in the
The evidence suggests that the stronger lineages which outer. Hudong on the east was a smaller marketing system
controlled market towns made alliances under the Red with only eight villages firmly in its marketing area. In the
Flag with other market towns, while weaker lineages in neutral zone between the two marketing systems was a
neutral zone villages tended to unite under the Blak Flag. cluster of about ten villages which had the option to trade at
By the late nineteenth century, the Flags had polarized either market.
Haifeng and Lufeng counties into two great camps-the The open conflict began in the autumn of 1878 over
Reds and the Blacks-and the countryside took on the opposing claims to a woodland located between the
appearance of a giant checkerboard with neighboring areas Hudong marketing system villages and a few of the neutral
under opposing flags. zone villages. On September 18, the small Chen and Xue
Indeed, where previously only two lineages or villages lineages (about 100 to 200 members each) came to blows
had taken part in conflicts over woodlands, water rights, or after one cut down some trees in a stand claimed by the
41
This was localism at its purest-the passionate defense
of one's territory against all outsiders. To peasants,
the enemy was not the local landlord. It was other
lineages, the other Flag, or the state. As long as these
social ties and the forces generating them remained
strong, there was little chance for the open emergence
of rural conflict along more clearly defined class lines.
other. But on the next day, a large-scale battle com
menced, involving hundreds, if not thousands, of people
from several other lineages and villages as well. The new
county magistrate, perplexed as to how an affray concern
ing two small lineages could explode into a civil war involv
ing a significant part of the county, reported in his
to provincial authorities for more troops that others
the fighting "because they belonged to the allIed
villages. . . . As soon as the call went out, the re
sponded immediately and before breakfast tIme one
thousand people were gathered." Xu Gangbi reported that
"this fighting began on a small scale, and no one was hurt.
But when the allied Flag villages joined the fray, seven
were killed and scores wounded. "20
The village alliances under the Red and Black Flag
societies corresponded with the division between market
ing system and the neutral zone villages. The villages in the
Hudong marketing system inner circle joined the fray as
Red Flags, while their opponents in the neutral zone vil
lages came under the Black Flag. In Shitang district in
eastern Haifeng a similar pattern emerged with neighboring
areas flying different flags. Shagang market town posted
the Red Flag, while the neighboring neutral zone area
united under the Black Flag. In the mid-nineteenth century
severe Flag fighting had forced several families to flee, and
in 1902 a recrudescence of Flag conflict destroyed the
market town of Nantu. 21
In both cases, Red Flags were identified with the
market town and the immediately surrounding villages,
while the Black Flags were affiliated with neutral zone
villages in the process of forming marketing systems. This
pattern suggests that as a marketing system developed and
new villages became established in the neutral zones be
tween markets, those villages formed social organizations.
Much like lineage organizations, the Flag societies in
cluded both peasants and landlords. The landlords pro
vided the leadership while peasants were the actual com
batants. The leader of the Black Flags in the area ofLufeng
discussed above was a relatively wealthy man with a pur
chased imperial degree who used his wealth and position to
bribe officials, obtaining favors for himself and his less
advantaged supporters and followers. 22
20. Ibid., pp. 519-21.
21. Liu Youliang, interview with the author, July 1975; Haifeng tianmu
jiao gishiwunian dashi ju, 1902.
22. Xu Gengbi, Buziqie mai mancun, p. 561.
The Flag leaders, who were paid for delivering fight
ers, guaranteed the participation of peasants from one Flag
village in a conflict which started in a different area. Money
changed hands between the leaders, while peasants
received no remuneration except for food and lodging ex
penses, and possibly a share of the loot. Peasants' loyalty to
their Flag was based not only on the protection they re
ceived against the enemy Flag society, but also on their
leader's ability to protect them, through connections and
bribery, against state demands for taxes.
When Xu Gengbi arrived in the late 1870s as a new
magistrate in Lufeng, he was not too surprised to find that
even with a very low tax assessment, only sixty percent of
Lufeng's tax had ever been collected. But he was much
more surprised to learn that tax records had not been kept
in the yamen office for decades and that the yamen staff had
no idea what the tax assessments even were. They had
farmed out the tax collections without ever investigating
who owned land or how much they held.
23
Xu, an en
terprising, aspiring, and reform-oriented official, person
ally investigated landholdings and taxes in a few areas.
discovering that many landowners had paid only one-tenth
of the assessed taxes, he concluded that the Flags promoted
tax resistance: "Since the fighting of the Red and Black
Flag societies began, the common people have taken tax
resistance as a custom." In order to increase tax collec
tions, and possibly to break the Flag societies as well, Xu
decided to establish tax collecting stations in the market
towns and larger villages. But when tax collectors
approached the villages, villagers yelling and waving their
red or black flags at the village gates confronted them,
daring them to enter. If they were brave (or foolish)
enough to go in, Xu Gengbi quickly discovered, the villa
gers "seized the officials, beat them, and gathered in great
numbers to resist. "24
During the late nineteenth century the major form of
rural social conflict in Haifeng and Lufeng counties was
primarily factional strife between lineages or Flag societies.
The local alignments of political, military, and religious
power which these organizations represented were based
on the dynamics of marketing system formation, while
attempts of "neutral zone" organizations to consolidate
their power was a major cause of conflict. While un
doubtedly not as frequent, officials' attempts to quell local
disturbances or collect taxes also sparked armed clashes,
albeit directed against the state. By protecting local resi
dents against outsiders' encroachments and state taxation,
these social organizations secured peasants' loyalty, de
spite their control by the wealthiest and most powerful
people in the area. Indeed, in a rural world of strife and
conflict, these people could generate loyalties precisely
because of their wealth and power.
This was localism at its purest-the passionate defense
of one's territory against all outsiders. To peasants, the en
emy was not the local landlord. It was other lineages, the
other Flag, or the state. As long as these social ties and the
forces generating them remained strong, there was little
chance for the open emergence of rural conflict along more
23. Ibid., p. 446.
24. Ibid., pp. 470, 489, 491-92.
42
clearly defined class lines. It was only with the changed
social and economic conditions of the early twentieth
century that the prospects for class-based conflict
improved.
The Capitalist World Market and
Rural Social Relatio..
The Imperialists' Sugar Trade and
,
The Haifeng Agricultural Economy
(
The pace of marketing system formation in Haifeng
..,
county quickened during the last two decades of the nine
teenth and the early years of the twentieth centuries when
peasants began to produce and market large amounts of
sugar cane and raw sugar. The increasing commercializa
tion of Haifeng agriculture occurred as a response not to
local demand but to an expanding world market for sugar.
I
I
The demand for Guangdong-grown sugars increased
initially in the late 1860s when two British trading firms
entered the Chinese sugar trade. Jardine Matheson and
Co. and Butterfield Swire and Co. were two of the largest
and most important Western enterprises operating in
t
China following the Opium Wars of 1840-42. In 1867,
Jardine obtained a monopoly of the south China trade
routes, and began to transport sugars from Guangzhou and
Shantou to the Shanghai and Bei jing-Tian jin areas, return
ing south with raw cotton and beancake fertilizer.25
For the next decade, Jardine's was not directly in
volved in manufacturing enterprises. In 1869 the firm had
established an ill-fated sugar refining operation near
Guangzhou, under nominal Chinese ownership. In a rare
case of documented Chinese Luddism, attacks by local
handicraft sugar pressers caused the refinery to close. In
1877, finally, the firm expanded in earnest into manufactur
ing enterprises, and established the China Sugar Refining
Co. in the Britsh colony of Hong Kong.
26
The following
year Jardine's set up a China Sugar branch in Shantou, a
treaty port in eastern Guangdong. Butterfield and Swire
soon followed suit by establishing its own Taikoo Sugar
Refining Co. refineries in Hong Kong and Shantou.
27
The
total value of raw and refined sugars exported from China
(primarily from Guangdong and Fujian provinces) rose
from 407 ,000 ounces of silver in 1868 to a high of 3,860,000
25. Kwang-Ching Liu, Anglo-American Steamship Rivalry in China (Cam
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 60-61.
26. According to Edward LeFevour, "the firm's initial plan, drawn up in
1877, did not call for Western ownership; rather it followed the 'govern
ment supervision, merchant operation' ... principle in encouraging the
formation of a. . . company under official supervision and Chinese mer
chant management with Jardines using its close industrial and commercial
relations in Britain on behalf of such a Chinese company." Western Enter
prise in Late Ch'ing China: A Selective Survey 0/Jardine, Matheson & Com
pany's Operations, 1842-1895, Harvard East Asian Monographs (Cam
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 40-41. In fact, no other
course of action was possible before the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki by
which Japan had won the right for all imperialist nations to open factories
on Chinese soil.
27. Wang Jingyu, "Shijiu shiqi waiguo chin hua yiye zhong de huanhang
fugu huodong," Lishi yanjiu 4 (1965): p. 60; Yan Zhongping et aI., eds.,
Zhongquo jindai jinqji shi zonqji ziliao xuanji (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe,
1955), pp. 120, 258; "A Study of the Sugar Industry in China," Chinese
Economic Journal (October 1927), p. 868.
ounces in 1887. The total dropped to 2,723,000 ounces in
1889, but increased again until the tum of the century,
when the value once again reached three million ounces of
silver. 28
U ntiI 1907, nearly all of the raw sugar refined in these
modem factories was purchased from peasant producers in
Guangdong. The profits to be made from cane cultivation
were ample incentive for peasants to switch crops. The
Imperial Maritime Customs reported from Shantou in east
ern Guangdong, for example, that "this year [1890] was
quite profitable for those families who plant sugar cane as
the price exceeds last year's. . . . It is said that the land
planted in sugar cane will be double this year's
amount.... The raw sugar exported next year should be
30 percent greater than this year. "29
While most of the increase in Guangdong exports
undoubtedly came from the Guangzhou and Shantou delta
regions, Haifeng county was also beginning to ship raw
sugar to Shantou and Hong Kong on junks that plied the
coastal trade routes. In the 18908, a solid link was forged
between Haifeng county and the Hong Kong and Shantou
refineries when Jardine's established a steamship company
for the Shantou-Hong Kong route, stopping on the way at
Shanwei, the port of Haifeng. The amount of raw sugar
e?,ported from Haifeng undoubtedly was considerable,
SlDce the Taikoo Sugar Refining Co. also established a
steamship line calling at Shanwei. 30
Before the modem refineries in Hong Kong and
were established, sugar entering China's growing
natIOnal market had come largely from the delta regions
around Guangzhou and Shantou. Growing and refining
sugar, regardless of where it was undertaken, was an ex
pensive operation which only the few wealthy peasants in
any village could afford. Cane-growing required large ex
penditures for fertilizer, and further outlays were needed
to transform the cane into raw and refined sugar. Even a
small-scale crushing and refining operation required con
siderable amounts of capital to buy or rent the bullocks to
tum the millstone and to hire a "sugar master," a bullock
driver, fire tenders, and cane strippers. Occasionally less
well-to-do peasants who had scraped together the capital
for growing cane sold the standing cane to a merchant who
financed the cutting and refining.
31
Once British merchants had created a national market
with their shipping enterprises and refineries, Chinese
sugar merchants began to advance the necessary operating
capital to poorer peasants in order to expand sugar cane
28. Peng Ziyi, ed., Zhongquo jindai shougongye shi ziliao [Historical mate
rials on China's modem handicrafts industry] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian,
1957),2:54.
29. Ibid., 2:54, 324; Sun Ching-chih, Economic Geography o/South China,
Joint Publications Research Service trans. no. 14,954 (Washington, D.C.,
1957), pp. 42-43; H.C.P. Geerlings, The World's Cane Sugar Industry
(Manchester: Norman Rodger, 1912), p. 75.
30. Yan Zhongping et aI., Zhongguo jingji shi zangji, pp. 223-24; Haifeng
tianzhujiao gishiwunian dashi ji (brush ms. at P.I.M.E. Fathers Mission,
Hong Kong). 1893.
31: comp., Yue haiguan zhi (Guangzhou: 18401), re
pnnted m Jindal zhongguo shiliao congkan xunbian, vols. 181-184 consecu
tive pagination (Taibei: Wenhai chubanshe), pp. 621-28; Li Zhichin,
"Lun yapian zhanzheng yiqian Qing dai shangyexing de fashan," in Ming
Qing shohui jingji xingtai tk yanjiu, p. 295.
43
production, and an agricultural putting-out system
developed. In the early spring, the sugar merchants (tang
hu) went to the villages to advance peasants "sugar capital"
(tang ben) for planting cane. In the winter of the next
they returned to collect the sugar cane and set up refinmg
operations. Unlike wealthy peasants, the poorer
growing cane lacked the surplus necessary to buy fertIlizer
or to refine the cane, and were given loans to produce the
sugar which ultimately entered the world market.
32
One
investigation showed that
sugar cane is the most important garden crop in Guangdong.
Most peasants borrow money from city merchants and sell
their crop to the merchant or usurer in repayment of the
principal . ... In one village where twenty-four peasants
grew sugar cane, thirteen borrowed from merchants and
elevenfrom other usurers.
33
The 1901 Maritime Customs report from Shantou also
observed that cane was grown on "small holdings, culti
vated on 'rule of thumb' methods by peasant proprietors,
often under advances from the exporting merchants." The
agricultural putting-out system, then, was a means for mer
chants to meet the demand for sugar on the national and
world market. 34
Production of sugar cane for the world market had
important consequences for the social structure ?f Haifeng
county. The commercialization of the countrySIde be
gauged by the increase in the number ?fmarkets the
period in which sugar cane productI?n was Its peak.
Standard markets increased from eIghteen m 1877 to
twenty-four in 1908. Moreover, since seven of the 1877
markets had become defunct by 1908, a total of thirteen
new markets had emerged in a thirty-year period. 35
an extraordinary growth of new standard marketmg
systems cannot be accounted for increases
alone' it must be attributed to a massIve mcrease m peasant
and marketing of sugar cane. The region of
Haifeng which experienced the g!eatest gr?wth .of markets
was north and east of Haifeng CIty, espeCIally m the area
around the market town of Gongping, located in the midst
of the cane-growing districts. Where Gongping had
the only market in the northern third of Haifeng county m
1877, by 1908 there were seven markets. In a new
daily market was established near the old market
which still held periodic markets.
36
The area which grew
the greatest amount of sugar thus experienced the greatest
growth of market towns-markets there increased by 700
percent.
But new markets emerged in nearly every area of
32. Ibid., p. 296; guangdong nongmin yundong baogao (Guangzhou, 1926),
p.31.
33. Zhongguo jindai nongye shi ziliao, [Historical materials on Chinese
agriculture] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian), 2:529.
34. China: Imperial Maritime Customs, Decennial Reports, /892-/901,
2:155.
35. Of the seven markets that disappeared, information is available on
only one. In 1902, Nantu was destroyed as a result of Flag .conflicts.
Obviously it would be interesting to know the fate of the other SIX.
36. Haifeng xianzhi, 3:8b, 14b; Guangdongyudi tushuo (Guangzhou, 1908),
Production of sugar cane for the world market
had important consequences for the social structure of
Haifeng county.
Haifeng. Since the marketing system was the basic unit of
rural social and economic organization, the rapid increase
in the number of marketing systems meant that Haifeng's
social structure was being subjected to tremendous forces
of change. During the decades of greatest demand for and
production of sugar cane, many towns in Haifeng probably
had a boom town aura as villages and markets popped up
where none had previously existed. However not everyone
benefited from the change-particularly not those who
dominated the older systems. As shown earlier, the
establishment of new markets impinged upon old market
systems' territory and threatened their economic, political,
and social power.
Once the decades of expansion gave way to contrac
tion of the economy, many more were long-run victims of
the period of prosperity. Boom gave way to bust; in 1907
the sugar market crashed violently. The world sugar
market-like the world market for any agricultural
commodity-was subject to wide fluctuations. Beginning
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, world
production of sugar cane and refined sugar rose rapidly as
new areas were brought into production. With Taiwan
under Japanese control after 1895, a large part of that
island's agricultural production was forcibly converted to
sugar cane. Sugar production also rose significantly-in
under Dutch control, and in Cuba and the Phllippmes,
under U.S. control. In Europe, the extraction of beet sugar
increased supplies. Moreover, all of these areas refined
sugar in modem plants using a process eminently
efficient than the antiquated methods used by Chmese
peasants. With all this new production of sugar, world
supply peaked in the period 1900-1905; prices began to
decline during those years and fell precipitously after 1905,
bottoming out completely in 1907.
37
Jardine and Taikoo purchases of Guangdong raw
sugar reflected the general conditions of t.he market.
Their buying increased until 1900, remamed faIrly steady
for the next few years, and then rapidly declined after 1907
to almost nothing. Jardine's and Taikoo found that locally
produced raw sugars had a downward price limit below
which peasants switched back to rice or some other crop.
Relying on these higher priced sugars, the
found it impossible to compete in the Shanghai market WIth
cheaper Japanese and Javanese sugars. By 1907, the com
petition was severe enough to force the British companies
temporarily to reduce output in the Hong Kong refineries
and to close those at Shantou altogether. Unable to com
pete by obtaining raw sugars from Guangdong at a lower
37. Hong Kong Telegraph, 12 January 1907, 30 March 1907, 4 June 1910;
p.175. H.C.P. Geerlings, The World's Cane Sugarlndustry pp. 22-26, 70-79.
44
1
price, Jardine's simply stopped buying sugar in Guang
d0t;tg, turning instead to Java and the Philippines, areas
which accounted for nearly all of its raw sugar stocks by
1908.
38
Commercialization and Rural Social Relations
The crash of the world sugar market sent reverbera
tions throughout the cane-cultivating areas of Guangdong.
Faced with declining sugar prices, peasants switched back
t
to cultivating rice, vegetables, or peanuts. By 1911, little
!
sugar was being exported. By 1920, only one-tenth of the
land planted in sugar cane during the previous decades was
still devoted to the crop. Some sugar cane was still grown
and refined for local use, but even that was losing out to the
cheaper imported sugars now refined by Jardine's and
Taikoo.39
New cropping patterns were, however, only the more
immediately visible effects of the sugar market crash. What
was far more significant, in light of later events, was that the
market crash radically altered the rural social structure. In
Haifeng, that structural change was rooted in the condi
tions under which sugar cane had been produced. When
the market for Guangdong sugars crashed in 1907,
merchants and peasants alike suffered, but not in like mea
sure. Peasants enmeshed in merchant loans undoubtedly
bore the brunt of the suffering. The putter-outers had
borrowed from larger merchants in Shanghai to lend
money to peasants. There was pressure all along the line
from Shanghai to the peasant in Haifeng to clear the debt,
but the crop was now worthless.
40
Peasants had either to
sell or mortgage their land, or to seek loans from other
sources if they owned no land, in order to repay the putter
outers. Marketing opportunities earlier may have provided
these peasants with an opportunity to lessen their depend
ence on local landlords. The crash meant that these peas
ants now had to seek loans, land, and other favorS once
more from the landlords of Haifeng. And landlords could
now impose more favorable terms of tenancy on peasants
who were too desperate to be in a good bargaining position.
Those whose fortunes crashed with the sugar market
were not the only ones affected. The ensuing bidding and
competition for land affected relations between landlords
and tenants on a far wider scale. Reliable statistics on
tenancy rates in Haifeng are not available, but there surely
was an i':lcrease following the crash. In the early 1920s,
Peng Pal observed that by 1920 about 80 percent of
Haifeng's peasants rented all or part of their land, and
estimated that over the two decades from 1900 to 1920,
peasant freeholders had declined in some villages by 80
percent.
41
38. Hong Kong Telegraph. 14 September 1907, 30 March 1907; Zhongguo
jindai shougongye shi ziliao, 2:471.
39. Ibid., pp. 165-166,287; China: Imperial Maritime Customs, Decennial
Reports, 1922- 31, p. 159; Wen Wenguang, Dongqu shiliu xian nongye
gaikuang ji qu gaijin yijian," Nongsheng 202 (December 1936), p. M4.
40. "Sugar Trade in Shanghai," Chinese Economic Journal 6 (December
1928): 1074-75; Hong Kong Telegraph, 6 January 1911.
41. Peng Pai, "Haifeng nongmin yundong," p. 45. A 1922 survey by
Guangdong l! estimated a tenancy rate of65 percent for Haifeng.
See Zhang Zlqlang, Guangdong nongmin yundong (Guangzhou, 1927), pp.
45
. . But the rate of tenancy is not the most significant
mdlcator of the magnitude of change. Not all tenants had
same terms; indeed, some were more like petty pro
pnetors than tenants. In Haifeng, three systems of tenure
can discerned: permanent tenure, contractual leases
runmng four to five years, and oral agreements renewed
annually.
New cropping patterns were, however, only the
more immediately visible effects of the sugar market
crash. What was far more significant, in light of later
events, was that the market crash radically altered the
rural social structure.
The oldest form was permanent tenure, known in
Haifeng as "manure investment" (rna; fen), the "greater
and lesser purchase" (daxiao rnai), or "patronage" (zuo ge).
tenure prevailed on lands brought into produc
tion the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centunes, when landlords seeking tillers to reclaim lands
laid waste during the seventeenth century disturbances
ga,:e peasants advantageous terms and rights. As one
Halfeng observer wrote, "the special features included a
large amount of land, light rate of rent, freedom to choose
cr<?ps and the right to sublet. Except for collecting rent
tWice a year, the landlord had absolutely no right to take
back land." Under permanent tenure landlords some
times did not even know where their hmd was located.
Holders ?f on tenure had rights rivaling
those of Jundlcal ownership, while in other cases, perma
nent was part and parcel of the lineage organization.
In Halfeng, for mstance, the rights of tenants holding per
I?anent tenure from their lineage were engraved in stone in
hneage temples. And near Shantou, Fielde found in 1883
"much land is held on inalienable leases, given by an
ancient proprietor to the family of a clansman. For such
leases the annual rent is usually one or two baskets ofpaddy
[about one-half the rate for other tenancies] for each
mow."42
Contractual leases had probably emerged when
market opportunities increased. The first to seek con
Because i,?depen.dent earlier periods do not exist, Peng
IS the only one mdlcatmg an Increasmg rate of tenancy. Statistics from
neighboring areas for earlier periods are so unreliable as to be useless for
comparative purposes. Dwight Perkins, for example, cites a 70 percent
figure for the east Guangdong county of Zhenghai around 1888.
Development in China, /368-/968 (Edinburgh: University of
EdInburgh 1969), p;.100. His data are based on a missionary who
collected the mformatlOn from ten owners of land." "It is thought that
three faf'?lers out of four till more or less land that belongs to another."
(EmphaSIS added). See George Jamieson, "Tenure of Land in China and
the Conditions of the Rural Population," Journal ofthe China Branch ofthe
Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 23 (1889), p. 112.
42.. Tieren (pseud.), Minguo shiliu nian Hailufeng chihuo zhi huiyi (Hand
wntten ms. ), ch. 1 :l1b; George Jamieson et ai., "Tenure of Land in China
and the Condition of the Rural Population," p. 13.
tractually fixed obligations would have been those enter
prising peasants seeking to increase their income by apply
ing fertilizer or otherwise improving the land, or by plant
ing cash crops such as sugar cane. They needed a guarantee
that the improved land would not then be let to someone
else, and therefore sought four- to five-year leases. In
periods of general agricultural expansion, such as the late
nineteenth century sugar boom, peasants probably con
sidered contractual leases and fixed rents advantageous
since the fruits of increased inputs would be theirs to keep.
The oral, or koutou, tenancy could have been favorable
to a peasant only under the most extraordinary circum
stances. When the land was to be let, the peasant merely
agreed orally that the rent would be paid on time. Because
the koutou tenancy was based on the peasant's yearly
performance, early twentieth century investigations
revealed, peasants never knew from year to year whether
the rent would be raised or a new tenant sought. Peasants
holding koutou tenancies did not apply fertilizer or make
improvements on the land for fear the landlord would then
raise the rent. 43
Changes in land tenure arrangements are difficult to
document precisely, but the broad outlines of what hap
pened are clear enough. Where the predominant form of
land tenure prior to the expansion of the sugar market had
been permanent tenure, contractualized leases increased
with the commercialization of agriculture,44 and after the
1907 sugar market crash both of these earlier forms of land
tenure gave way to the koutou tenancy.45 The direction o{
change clearly was from relatively secure land tenure
arrangements to increasingly insecure arrangements.
Where in the nineteenth century, according to one source,
the "absolute majority" of tenancies were permanent and
it was said that "the rights of tenants are superior to those
of landlords, "46 by the 1920s most peasants held land on
the koutou tenancy and could find themselves landless from
one harvest to the next.
47
With this insecurity, peasants came to favor share
cropping arrangements for paying rent. Contractualized
fixed rents would now take a larger portion of the harvest
because without money to buy fertilizer, yields were cer
tain to decline. Landlords wanted to retain the fixed rent,
which provided them a guaranteed income and relieved
them of responsibility for keeping up the land or even
answering tax collectors' inquiries-all of that fell on the
tenants' shoulders. Sharecropping, favored by tenants in a
period of economic contraction, was troublesome for a
43. Guangdong nongmin yundong baogao, pp. 25ft; Zhongguo jingji nianyan
(1933), pt. I, G236-237.
44. L. Mad'iar, zhongguo nongcunjingji yan}iu (Shanghai: Shenzhou guo
gang she, 1930), pp. 254-55. For specific examples from an earlier period
in the Yangzi delta, see Zhang Youyi, "Taiping tianguo geming qianqi
weizhou diqu tudi quanxi da yige shilu," Wenwu 6 (1975).
45. Zhongguo jingji nianyan (1937), p. G236.
46. Tieren, Minguo shiliu nian Hailufeng . .. , ch. 1:11b; Peng Pai, "Hai
feng nongmin yundong," p. 70: Guangdong nongmin yundong baogao, p. 25;
Zhongguo jingji nianyan, 0236.
47. Unfortunately, the full story of changes in land tenure in Haifeng will
never be known. During the "land revolution" in late 1927 and early 1928,
peasants burned 58,000 landlord rent books and 50,000 land deeds,
destroying our documentation.
landlord. To prevent cheating, the landlord or his agent
had to supervise the harvest personally. To be sure, there
were elaborate means for ensuring an equal division of the
harvest (e.g., the peasant had the right of drawing the
dividing line across the field, but the landlord had the right
to choose which half he wanted) but all this required more
attention than the landlord was willing to give. 48
If economic changes had altered the desirability of
particular tenancy arrangements, political changes ensured
that the landlords' new preferences won out over the ten
ants'. During the early 1900s, the political power of land
lords increased perceptibly, giving them added leverage to
enforce terms of tenancy favorable to them. Prior to the
overthrow of the Qing state in 1911, there had been a
proliferation of various types of armed groups in rural
Guangdong known under the general rubric of tuanlian or
local defense crops. These organizations were manned by
part-time volunteers drawn from the local populace. In
their origins and organization, they were similar to the Red
and Black Flag societies, the major difference being that
they had official sanction. Just before and increasingly after
the 1911 Revolution, however, the tuanlian were re
organized into full-time armed forces known as mintuan, or
rural police, and heads of the rural police in Guangdong
were given the power to levy taxes to support their forces.
Within a few years. after the 1911 Revolution, this form of
organization had spread to most of rural Guangdong, and
police were used more often to ensure the extraction of
rent.49
Warlordism also took its toll. Chen Jiongming, a
Haifeng native, was one of the military leaders of the 1911
Revolution in Quangdong, and for the next decade his
army was a major force in the seemingly interminable
battle for control of the province. His relatives and cronies
benefited handsomely from the protection afforded by
Chen's army. When Chen's mother and uncle set up the
"Commander's Office" in Haifeng city after the 1911
Revolution, according to Peng Pai, "it goes without saying
that it used political devices to extort a good deal of money.
Though most of it went into foreign banks, part was used to
purchase land in Haifeng or as usury capital." Landlords
who threw in their lot with the Chen family and their
friends prospered, while those who did not apparently were
squeezed out. Local inhabitants called the rising oppor
tunists "nouveau riche landlords" (xinxing dizhu). Peasants
could easily identify many of these by their new Westem
style two-story villas. Often they were the most rapacious
in their demands on peasants. As one investigator reported
with deliberate understatement, "Before the 1911 Revolu
tion, landlords were a bit more polite. "50
In the years following the sugar market crash and the
1911 Revolution, landlords began to alter the terms of
tenure as inflation eroded their purchasing power. 51 They
48. Mad'iar, Zhongguo nongcun }ingji yanjiu, p. 314; Guangdong nongmin
yundong baogao, p. 37; Zhongguo }ingji nianyan, G236.
49. Shenshi mintuanxianz/zang yu nongmin (Ouangzhou, 1926).
50. Peng Pai, "Haifeng nongmin yundong," p. 40; Guangdong nongmin
yundong baogao, p. 34; Zhongguo jingji nianyan, G237.
51. The price ofdaily necessities and other manufactured goods was rising
faster than the price for agricultural commodities. To make matters
46
I
i raised the rent on lands held on permanent tenure, and if
tenants resisted or refused to pay the increase, the landlord
i
I
sought a court order forcing them off the land. Since peas
ants knew they had about as much chance of winning a case
in the magistrate's court "as a sand castle standing in the
ocean," few fought it. Landlords also broke contracts with
impunity. Although leases stipulated terms of four or five
!
years, landlords would now raise the rent after a or
;
two. Since the landlord held the only copy of any wntten
contract, tenants had no legal leg to stand on. And the oral,
t or koutou, tenancy, which by the 1920s was the most preva
lent type of land tenure in Haifeng, was especially con
1
venient for landlords who wished to raise rents, change
tenants, or otherwise alter the terms of tenure.
Under the various types of tenure, as well as the share
cropping arrangement for paying rent, peasants had
claimed the right, recognized by landlords, to a rent reduc
tion in bad years. Even with the emergence of ostensibly
fixed rents, peasants had still claimed this right. But what
peasants had regarded as customary rights, enshrined in
oral tradition and inalienable by contract, landlords
now regarded as favors dispensed at their pleasure. When
the crop failed, peasants had to go to the landlord's
get on their knees and beg three times for a rent reduction.
, 52
And even then, the landlord could deny the request.
Tenancy relations did not stand alone but were imbed
ded in other social relationships, particularly the lineages
and the Red and Black Flags. The lords of the land were
lineage or Flag leaders as well; tenants belonged to lineages
and Flags too. Peasants saw tenancy as an exchange
tionship in which for the payment of rent they received
something in return. Sometimes it was just the use of the
land. But if they belonged to a lineage (40 percent of all
land in Haifeng was lineage-owned) or to a Flag, they
received in addition protection from all kinds of threats,
ranging from armed incursions to and harvest
failure. This may well have been conSidered a faIr exchange
earlier, but increasingly after 1911, lineage and Flag lead
ers violated their side of the exchange.
Lineage leaders, for example, had been obliged to rent
lineage land to members at customary rates, but they now
began to let land to outsiders who could be charged a higher
rent. Poorer members then had to compete on the general
market for land. Wealthy lineage members also began
refusing to make loans to peasant members without consid
erable collateral. Under these conditions, peasants began
to turn to each other for mutual assistance, forming credit
clubs, burial associations, and marketing groups. Daniel
Kulp observed in 1919 in Phenix village northeast of
Haifeng county that these
worse, the Guangdong provincial government in 1901 began to mint new
copper coins highly valued by merchants because they could not be
counterfeited, and merchants drastically discounted the old copper cash.
After the 1911 Revolution, financial policies of the new republican gov
ernment also promoted inflation. See Peng Xinwei, Zhongguo huobi shi
(Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1965), p. 337; Robert Marks, "Peasant
Society and Peasant Uprisings in South China: Social Change in Haifeng
County, 1630-1930," (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, UniversityofWis
consin, 1978), pp. 268-70.
52. Feng Hefa, Zhongguo nongcun jingji ziliao [Materials on the Chinese
rural economy] (Shanghai: Liming shuju, 1933), p. 914.
47
associations arise out of the failure of the familist group to
cope with the needs [of the poorer members], economic,
protective, or recreational. Where the economic family fails,
voluntary alignments of resources and capacities of a co
operative nature secure successful adjustments in special
crises.
s3
The "disintegration," as Kulp called it, of traditional
social organizations affected not only the lineages, but the
Red and Black Flag societies of Haifeng as well. Peasants
no longer saw their interests as protected by the Flags,
having come to see those organizations quite differently, as
the following song suggests: "Unjustly, the village leader
sends us to death; we meet our maker, he collects eighty
cents. "54 Disillusionment with the Flags was sufficiently
widespread to cause peasants to wonder why they fought
each other. It was commonly believed, according to a for
mer resident of the area, that the factional strife had been
created by the alien Manchus in order to prevent unity
among the conquered Chinese: ''They were a So
it was difficult for them to control us Han Chinese. Thus
they created these two factions so the people would fight
each other." Although this creation myth had no basis in
fact it nonetheless does indicate that Flag members had
corr:e to feel strongly that the Flags did not serve their
interests-the Manchus 'had been overthrown, so why did
the fighting continue except to enrich the Flag leaders?55
Because not all areas experienced the same extent or
kind of socioeconomic change, lineage solidarity did not
weaken everywhere. Some places, in fact, were quite iso
lated from the market forces emanating from the coast. In
the northernmost part of Lufeng county, in a sheltered
valley over forty miles from the port of Shanwei, lineages
and lineage conflict remained strong into the 1920s. The
Peng lineage, a large and socially stratified lineage of
20,000, controlled the market town of Hetian and presum
ably inhabited nearly every village in the surrounding area.
While most members were peasants, the Peng also had
long-established ties to officialdom. The first imperial
degree was won in the sixteenth century, and members
continued to hold degrees into the twentieth. Of the four
other lineages in the area, the Ye of Huangtang was the
next strongest, also having degree-holding members. The
Ye in 1726 even produced a jinshi scholar, the highest
achievement in the civil service system. The three other
lineages had no links to state power, and were and
more socially homogenous. In fact, the smaller lineages
probably were tenants of their more powerful neighbors. In
the 1850s for example, two strong lineages fought over
which would collect rent from a dependent lineage. There
was apparently a pecking order in the area, with the strong
est lineage preying on the next strongest, and so on down
the line. During the nineteenth century, conflict between
these lineages was endemic. 56
53. Kulp, Country Life. pp. 214, 109.
54. Gongren ribao. 7 July 1962, p. 4.
55. Liu Youliang, interview with the author, Hong Kong, July 1975.
56. Data on the lineages of the Hetian area discussed in this and the next
paragraph were compiled from Xu Gengbi, Buziqie zhai mancun., pp.
614-17,753; Lufeng xianzhi (1747), ch. 2:15a-16b, ch. 7:3b-14a: Huzzhou
fumi (1688). ch. 4; Chen Xiaobai, Hailufeng chihuo ji. pp. 39-41.
In these remote areas, the forces that had undermined
the traditional solidarity of those lineages located closer to
the coastal trade routes remained weak, and social conflict
still took the form of lineage conflict. This was true even
during the 1920s when peasant organizers tried to form
peasant unions in the area. Unlike the successess in other
parts of Haifeng where peasants more readily formed
unions, here organizers failed to form class-based peasant
unions. Tenants who belonged to these large lineages
simply refused to join. Rather than admit failure, the peas
ant organizers simply dubbed certain lineages "peasant
unions," and every member-landed and landless alike
were enrolled. Nothing changed, except that an outside
agency chose to recognize traditional lineage leaders as
heads of peasant unions, and lineage feuds continued as
they had for the preceding century. Social conflict re
mained defined by lineage rather than class ties, but this
should not be too surprising because of the relative isola
tion of these lineages. Everywhere else in Haifeng, classes
and class consciousness were emerging.
As traditional and localistic ties between wealthy and
poorer members of lineages and the Flags eroded, aware
ness of a commonality of interest among peasants in
creased. A popular saying such as "peasants fear the land
lord like the mouse fears the cat" placed the contradiction
squarely between landlords and peasants, not between
lineages or Flags. Peasants complained that "landlords
collect the rent whether it is a good year or a bad year."
They knew that "peasants work in the fields 'til death,
never with enough to eat; landlords do not work at all,but
always have more than enough." In fact, this last couplet
was so well known during the 1920s that it was no longer
necessary to use the second half-everyone just knew that
landlords took more than their fair share. 57
Peasants did not have the concept of "class" in their
basket of cultural concepts, and this is about as clear an
articulation of peasant class consciousness as we could
reasonably expect to find. Whether these ideas would have
been translated into collective action is unclear. After all,
landlords had their own private police agents so that any
overt opposition met with swift reprisal. Peasant resistance
to what were now considered unjust exactions or unfair
terms of tenancy hence were surreptitious acts of individual
families, such as mixing in a little sand or water with the
rent rice. Sometimes if a whole village felt wronged, every
one pitched in. And they felt wholly justified in doing so,
even if the landlord called it cheating, and the next time
used a larger or expanding basket to collect the rent. All
peasants could do on their own was to attempt by these
covert means to regain a little of what they felt they had
lost. And while in Haifeng county peasants were not on the
verge of rising up en masse til overthrow their landlords,
nevertheless just under the surfac, there now simmered a
nascent class antagonism that could explode at the slightest
provocation and that was not long in coming.
Conclusion
In the middle of a warm August night in 1923, a
57. Guangdong nongmin yUndong baogao, p. 28; Guangdong nongmin yun
dong (Shanghai: Zhongguo quanguo jidujiao xiejinbui, 1928), p. 32.
48
typhoon struck Haifeng county. Peng Pai, the son of a local
landlord and a Communist Party member of two years'
standing, reported being kept awake by the wind, the rain,
and the "sound of houses collapsing." When he peered
from his window he could see trees being uprooted and,
when daylight broke, floodwaters rising. Initial reports
indicated that thousands were left homeless, thousands
were dead, and most of the rice crop was ruined. And each
passing day brought higher totals. 58
Despite the typhoon's severity, this was not a unique
event. Natural disasters were not uncommon, and peasants
had developed various means for dealing with their conse
quences. Traditional peasant rights under these conditions
included either a total remission or at least a great reduc
tion of rent, leaving peasants sufficient grain until the next
harvest. The increasingly important custom during the dec
ades of social change had been for peasants to ask the
landlord to inspect the harvest and then be granted a rent
reduction based on the extent of the damage. Thus in a
crisis, peasants would not harvest the crop until the land
lord had inspected it. The situation in the autumn of 1923
was even more critical because the crop was ready for
harvesting; any delay meant that whatever remained of the
crop would be past saving.
Peng Pai and other young intellectuals had already
organized a few peasant unions in Haifeng and neighboring
counties, attracting members by forming mutual aid
societies and by defending peasants' traditional rights of
tenure against landlord encroachment. Landlords too were
organized, having their own "Society for Maintaining
Grain Reserves" to confront peasants. When the typhoon
hit, peasants looked to Peng Pai and the peasant unions.
But because the union did not decide immediately on a
common policy in the aftermath of the disaster, most peas
ants followed custom by asking landlords to inspect the
fields. Some landlords respected traditional peasant rights,
but many did not, refusing even to inspect the fields. Peas
ants were desperate and outraged. According to Peng Pai,
"countless peasants were very angry. Some were for mur
der some for riot. "59
At a meeting called to discuss what action to take,
most peasants wanted to refuse to pay any rent whatsoever.
They had been grievously wronged and they knew it. But
the union leadership, itself divided over the course of
action to take, settled on a compromise of "thirty percent
rent at most," which only barely mustered a majority vote
of the peasant assembly. In the following days, union rep
resentatives traveled throughout the countryside advising
peasants of the decision. Smaller landlords generally ac
cepted the arrangement, but larger ones refused to reduce
the rent. In order to prompt landlord compliance with
traditionally sanctioned rights, the union called a mass
demonstration in the city. 60
When twenty thousand angry peasants crowded
Haifeng's narrow streets on the morning of August 15
demanding a rent reduction, landlords knew the danger
58. Peng Pai, "Haifeng nongmin yundong," p. 86.
59. Ibid., pp. 61-79,88-89.
60. Ibid., pp. 95-97.
I
,
I
I
they were in. Left to their own devices, peasants would
surely have rioted. Peng Pai and the union leadership re
strained the peasants, and the demonstration remained
peaceful. But early the next morning, several hundred
police and soldiers attacked the Peasant Union office, ar
rested twenty-five people who had not managed to flee
I
when the shooting started, as Peng Pai had, and dissolved
I
the union. Landlords then sent rent collectors under arms
to extract the rent; those who resisted were thrown into
jail. 61 Order was restored.
The consequences of this one repressive action in
I
terms of human suffering were incalculable. Haifeng ex
perienced the worst famine in living memory. The
Rev. E. L. Allen, a missionary stationed in Haifeng, re
ported the following spring that "many families have al
ready died of starvation: reckon 6000 will die unless sup
ported for two months." A month later, Rev. Allen de
tailed the worsening conditions in one village:
The young men have gone abroad. the old people have died
ofstarvation. and only women and children are left. 1 entered
the village at the time of the evening meal: in house after
house the people were without food. while the bowls and
chopsticks were clean and dry as though they had not been
usedfor days . ... Then there are the children abandoned by
their parents. old people dying by the way as they go out to
beg. and children being offeredfor sale. 62
The human issues raised by the aftermath of the natural
disaster had not been created by Communist organizers.
The typhoon simply and starkly revealed that the issue of
tenancy had become a matter of life and death.
In the years after the typhoon, Haifeng exploded in
rural class warfare, culminating in 1927 when peasants
conducted a "land revolution" under Communist leader
ship, burning land deeds and rent books and killing thou
sands of landlords. One interpretation attributes this
movement and others like it to the organizational prowess
and ideological commitment of Communist organizers. 63
A better explanation of the peasant movement of the 1920s
is that Communists were able to operate in a historical
conjuncture created not by themselves but by the changes
in rural class relations caused by the world capitalist
market. Where fifty years earlier the Red and Black Flag
factions had feuded over declining resources, in the 1920s
two class-based organizations-the Haifeng Peasant
Union and the landlord's Society for Maintaining Grain
Reserves-struggled over the terms of tenancy.
Communists had a hand in forming peasant unions, but
they certainly did not organize the landlords. The same
socioeconomic forces that generated nascent class loyalties
did the same for landlords. It was in this environment, one
highly conducive to the formation of class-based organiza
tions not just among peasants but among landlords as well,
that Communists like Peng Pai began to work. The peasant
movement of the 1920s was not created ex nihilio by Com
munist organizers. It had its origin in rural class relations.
*
61. Ibid., pp. 98-99, 133-135.
62. South China Morning Post. 2 May 1924. 4 June 1924.
63. The most recent example is Roy M. Hofheinz. Jr., The Broken Wave:
The Chinese Communist Peasant Movement. /922-/928 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1977). This perspective has a long pedigree,
going back at least to Philip Selznik's The Organizational Weapon: A Study of
Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952).
rr====="lt is rare to receive an issue that does not contain at least one article that belongs on everyone's=====i1
syllabus for the serious study of modern China. "
-Frederic Wakeman, Chairman, Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, Berkeley
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49
Imperialism in China:
A Methodological Critique
by Elizabeth Lasek
The bulk of the writings on imperialism, from the
Chinese political and scholarly analysis of the early
twentieth century to Chinese and Western scholarship of
the present, can plainly be located in the context of a battle
between Eurocentric and Sinocentric interpretations which
characterizes the historiography of modem China. Either
China's subjugation and underdevelopment are under
stood with reference to factors embedded in the internal
fabric of Chinese society, or they are understood to rise out
of external developments centered in the West (and later
Japan). In this paper I will critically analyze the limitations
of this dualistic analysis and suggest in preliminary fashion
an alternative approach to understanding the intertwined
problems of imperialism and development in China.
The Dualistic Analysis
Chinese Conceptions ofimperialism
In the nationalist thinking of both the Guomindang
and the Chinese Communist Party, the extirpation of im
perialism remained the sine qua non of China's emergence
on a path of sustained, self-reliant economic and political
growth.
1
Chiang Kai-shek blamed the unequal treaties for
the "deterioration of China's national position and the low
morale of the people," calling them "China's national
humiliation" and the "main cause for our failure to build a
nation."2 Earlier, the 1924 Manifesto of the First National
Congress of the Guomindang equated "the fight for the
emancipation of the Chinese people" with "an anti
-imperialist movement. "3 At the height of the May Fourth
* I am grateful to Mark Selden and James Petras for providing valuable
comments, suggestions, and references, and to the five a n o n y m o u ~ read
ers from whom the Bulletin solicited comment and criticism.
I. See Ernest P. Young, "Nationalism, Reform, and Republican Revolu
tion: China in the Early Twentieth Century," and Jerome B. Greider,
"Communism, Nationalism, and Democracy: The Chinese Intelligentsia
and the Chinese Revolution in the 1920s and 1930s," in James B. Crowley
ed., Modern East Asia: Essays in Interpretation (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World, 1970).
2. Chiang Kai-shek, China's Destiny (New York: Roy, 1947), pp. 44, 105.
3. J. Mason Gentzler ed., Changing China: Readings in the History o/China
from the Opium War to the Present (New York: Praeger, 1977), p. 200.
Movement, the alliance between the Guomindang and the
Chinese Communists was reinforced by the resentment
against what Sun Yat-sen called China's position as a
"hypo-colony," worse off than a colony since we are "not
the slaves of one country, but of all. "4
The classic statement on imperialism came from Mao
Zedong (in collaboration with others) in "The Chinese
Revolution and The Chinese Communist Party,"
December 1939. Mao wrote:
.. . in their aggression against China the imperialist powers
have on the one hand hastened the disintegration offeudal
society and the growth of elements of capitalism, thereby
transforming a feudal into a semi-feudal society, and on the
other imposed their ruthless rule on China, reducing an
independent country to a semi-colonial country. 5
In a word, Mao shared with many other Chinese
nationalists the view that the contradiction between im
perialism and the Chinese nation was the primary one.
Responsibility for China's ills was given to the Western
nations and Japan.
In the 1930s and 40s a body of Chinese rural economic
literature-produced by such leading Western-trained so
cial scientists as Chen Han-seng, Fei Hsiao-tung, Chang
Chih-i, and H. D. Fong.6 Franklin L. Ho and researchers
4. Sun Yat-sen, San-min chu-i: The Three Principles a/the People (Shang
hai: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1927), pp. -86,88.
5. Mao Zedong, Selected Works (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press,
1965), vol. 2, p. 312.
6. The works by Chen Han-seng include: Industrial Capital and Chinese
Peasants (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1939), Landlord and Peasant in China
(New York: International, 1936), and The present Agrarian Problem in
China (Shanghai: China Institute of International Relations, 1933). Those
by Fei Hsiao-tung include: China's Gentry: Essays in Rural-Urban Relations
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), Peasant Life in China: A Field
Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley (London: Routledge and Kagan
Paul, 1939), and with Chang Chih-i, Earthbound China: A Study of Rural
Economy in Yunnan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945). H. D.
Fong's works include: "Rural Industrial Enterprise in North China,"
Nankai Social and Economic Quarterly 8:4 (1936); Rural Weaving and the
Merchant Employers in a North China District (Tientsin: Chihli Press, 1935),
"China's Factory Act and the Cotton Industry," Monthly Bulletin on Eco
nomic China 7:3 (1934), and Rural Industries in China (Tientsien: Chihli
Press, 1933).
50
contributing to Agrarian China echoed this theme.
7
While
concentrating on different aspects of the Chinese rural
economy, these writers generally agreed that the structure
of trade and foreign investment and the foreigner's unfair
competitive advantages had adverse effects on the develop
ment of China's economy and precipitated a disastrous
decline in rural economy and society.
Central to this conception of imperialism was the con
viction that the real source of China's economic, social, and
political distortions and instabilities lay not so much within
Chinese society as without. The primary enemy was foreign
imperialism. In the face of this external foe, China was
depicted as a passive recipient of various forms of oppres
sion: in Mao's words, "the imperialist powers invading
China... waged many wars of aggression against China,
. . . carved up the whole country into imperialist spheres
of influence," and "forced China to sign numerous unequal
treaties," by which they were able to "dump their goods in
China, tum her into a market for their industrial products,
and subordinate her agriculture to their imperialist
needs." The imperialists proceeded to "exert economic
pressure on China's national industry and obstruct the
development of her productive forces;" they also "secured
a stranglehold on her banking and finance. " The foreigners
"created a comprador and merchant-usurer class in their
service, so as to facilitate their exploitation of the
masses, . . . made the feudal landlord class and the com
prador class the main props of their rule in China," sup
plied munitions to "keep the warlords fighting among
themselves and to suppress the Chinese people, ...
poison[ed] the minds ofthe Chinese people," and "turned
a big chunk of semi-colonial China into a Japanese col
ony." In this manner-in the face of aggression by the
foreign powers-China passively underwent a transforma
tion into a "colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal
society. "8
To sum up, Chinese writers and political figures across
the political spectrum argued that China's developmental
problems were caused by imperialism-a force coming
from the West and Japan and thrusting itself on a helpless
Chinese nation.
Modernization Theory and Imperialism
The 1960s and 1970s saw the revival ofthe debate over
the role of imperialism in China, challenging and reinterp
reting the work of earlier generations of Chinese and West
ern scholars and political figures. The view which has domi
nated U.S. scholarship since the 1950s and set forth most
cogently by the modernization school holds that ". . . on
the whole the Western presence had a favorable impact on
economic growth; and ... , at least prior to the 1930s, it did
not tend to harm traditional activities."9 While it is
7. Franklin L. Ho, "Rural Economic Reconstruction in China," (China
Institute of Pacific Relations, 1936); Agrarian China (Shanghai: Institute of
Pacific Relations, 1939). See also John L. Buck, Land Utilization in China
(Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1937), George B. Cressey, China's Eco
nomic Foundations (New York: McGraw-Hili, 1934), and Martin C. Yang,
A Chinese Village (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trubner, 1948).
8. Mao Zedong, Selected Works, vol. 2, pp. 310-12.
9. John E. Schrecker, Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism: Germany in
Regardless of what feature is emphasized as an obsta
cle to development, researchers of the modernization
school have explained Chinese backwardness by refer
ence to internal factors.
acknowledged that the foreign sector-foreign trade, fi
nance, and investment-"may well have had a negative
impact" on the Chinese domestic economy, it is repeatedly
stressed that". . . this negative impact was on the margin; it
did not wipe out the absolute contribution of the for
eigner. "10 This is to say, the foreigner's "net economic
effect" was "positive. "11 Inthe words of Hou Chiming, a
I
,
leading authority of the modernization school on Chinese
development, ". . . foreign capital was largely responsible
for the development of whatever economic modernization
took place in China before 1937. "12 In Edward LeFevour's
account of "Western Enterprise in Late Ch'ing China," the
role of Jardine, Matheson and Company is described as !
being "closer to current concepts of technical and financial
1
aid for economic development than to late nineteenth
century concepts of economic imperialism."13 For those
I
who blame imperialism for China's uneven economic and
political development, Jack Potter assures us that the ef
I
fects of treaty port industrial development and commercial
expansion was "not as detrimental to the rural Chinese
economy as most previous writers have believed." The
conclusion Potter reaches in his study of a village in the
rural hinterland of Hong Kong is that Western industry and
commerce had "on the whole been beneficial to the rural
villages of the colony. "14
In the words of the leading American text on East
Asia, the reason given for the foreigner's limited contribu
tion, and thus their failure to carry China along the path of
"modernization," was "China's remarkable impervious
ness to foreign stimuli. "15 The positive effect of imperial
ism was reduced greatly by China's unwillingness or inabil
ity to adapt her traditional peasant economy to the de
mands of the international market. Thus, China's inability
to respond to the "positive" stimulus of imperialism, and
therefore China's retarded economic development, is
thought to be "in large measure a function of the interplay
of domestic institutions and conditions"-intellectual,
10. Robert F. Demberger, "The Role of the Foreigner in China's Eco
nomic Development," in Dwight H. Perkins ed., China's Modern Economy
in Historical Perspective (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 46.
11. Perkins, China's Modern Economy, p. 3. Emphasis added.
12. Hou Chi-ming, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China,
/840-/937 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 130.
13. Edward LeFevour, Western Enterprise in Late Ch' ing China: A Selective
Survey of Jardine, Matheson and Company's Operations, 1842-/895 (Cam
bridge: Harvard University East Asian Research Center, 1968), p. 4.
14. Jack M. Potter, Capitalism and the Chinese Peasant: Social and Eco
nomic Change in a Hong Kong Village (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1968), pp. 5, 174).
15. John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer, and Albert M. Craig, East
Asia: The Modern Transformation (London: George Allen and Unwin,
Shantung (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 258.
51 1965), pp. 404-05.
psychological, social, economic, political, admini
strative.
16
According to this viewpoint, for instance, the imperi
alists' treaty ports constituted "a true leading sector which
could have initiated fundamental and favorable changes in
the traditional economy if the Ch'ing bureaucracy had
cooperated."17 Taken overall, in identifying the barriers to
"modernization," various writers have emphasized one
aspect or another of the traditional Chinese order-such as
the Chinese family system;18 a "high-level equilibrium
trap" resulting from technological and resource constraints
exacerbated by population pressures;19 inadequate sav
ings, deficient motivation, government weakness, techni
cal backwardness;20 and lack of government initiative. 21
Andrew Nathan, though not specifically concerned
with identifying those factors responsible for China's mod
em difficulties, finds that the social and economic impact of
imperialism was relatively slight, and that, if anything, the
continuing backwardness of the Chinese economy was
"partially due to the weakness of the effects of imperialism
rather than to the strength of these effects." A more ten
able view of the impact ofimperialism, he suggests, is that it
precipitated a thoroughgoing change in the "national
psyche" of the Chinese, paving the way for "moderni
zation. "22
Regardless of what feature is emphasized as an obsta
cle to development, researchers of the modernization
school have explained Chinese backwardness by reference
to internal factors. In this view, there are "two sources of
change in the societies:" sources "indigenous to the soci
eties" and "sources of change that came from social sys
tems outside. "23 For China"...the best known agent of
change in the nineteenth century was exogenous. "24 China
was "not responsible for the development of the highly
industrialized social systems that provided the factors that
16. John K. Fairbank, Alexander Eckstein, and L. S. Yang, "Economic
Change in Early Modem China: An Analytic Framework," Economic
Development and Cultural Change 9:1 (1960), p. 26. See also Fairbank,
Reischauer, and Craig, East Asia, pp. 349-58.
17. LeFevour, Western Enterprise, p. 2.
18. See Marion Levy, The Family Revolution in Modern China (Shanghai:
Kelly and Walsh, 1949), pp. 350-65, and Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Popula
tion of China 1386-1953 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959),
p.205.
19. Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford Uni
versity Press, 1973), p. 312. See also Potter, Capitalism and the Chinese
Peasant, p. 202; Dernberger, "The Role of the Foreigner," p. 338; and
Albert Feuerwerker, "A White Horse mayor may not be a Horse, but
Megahistory is not Economic History," Modern China 4:3 (1978), p. 338.
20. Albert Feuerwerker, China's Early Industrialization: Shen Hsuan-huai
(1844-19/6) and Mandarin Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1958),p.245.
21. Dernberger, "The Role ofthe Foreigner," p. 47.
22. Andrew Nathan, "Imperialism's Effects on China," Bulletin of Con
cerned Asian Scholars 4:4 (1972), p. 5. See also Akira lriye, "Imperialism in
East Asia," in Crowley ed., Modern East Asia, and Rhoads Murphey, The
Treaty Pons and China's Modernization: What Went Wrong? (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1970).
23. Marion Levy, "Contrasting Factors in the Modernization of China
and Japan," Economic Development and Cultural Change 2 (1953-54),
p.163.
24. Fairbank, Eckstein, and Yang, "Economic Change," p. 3.
Not all critics of imperialism in general and of the
modernization school in particular stress external
factors.
were the external forces of change. "25 Hence, it was inter
nal factors that blocked developmental change.
The Radical Critique of Modernization Theory
Joseph Esherick, in a thoroughgoing critique of the
thesis of the "Harvard modernization school," contends
that the impact of imperialism in China made "successful
modernization of any bourgeois-democratic variety impos
sible. "26 Following James Peck and Chinese nationalist
interpreters, Esherick criticizes those who focus on internal
structures as the impediments to development. While not
totally denying the influence of internal factors, this group
emphasizes, in Peck's words, "the barriers in the nature of
world-wide cal'italism and the influence of imperialism
from without.' 27 For them, " ...China had been a victim
of a world market in which she was an essentially passive
participant. "28 But it is Frances Moulder, employing a
world system perspective, who carries to its logical con
clusion this emphasis on international factors in shaping the
course of China's modem history. She argues unequivoc
ally that China's failure to undergo capitalist industrializa
tion during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
was attributable to its "incorporation" into the world
capitalist economy. 29
Not all critics of imperialism in general and of the
modernization school in particular stress external factors.
Victor Lippit, for example, locates the principal obstacles
to development in internal structures, processes, and rela
tions rather than external influences. That is to say, he
focuses on the domestic class structure and relations of
production in accounting for the "development of under
development" in China. In this view, imperialistic expan
sion is "a contributory but distinctly secondary factor"
retarding Chinese development. 30
Even though these recent studies are widely divergent
in their arguments and our interest in each centers on a
specific problem (Esherick, Peck, and Moulder's economic
conception of imperialism's impact from without; Lippit's
25. Levy, "Contrasting Factors," p. 164.
26. Joseph Esherick, "Harvard on China: The Apologetics of Imperial
ism," Bulletin ofConcerned Asian Scholars 4:4 (1972), p. 10.
27. James Peck, "The Roots of Rhetoric: The Professional Ideology of
America's China Watchers," in Edward Friedman and Mark Selden eds.,
America's Asia: Dissenting Essays on Asian-American Relations (New York:
Random House, 1971), p. 52.
28. Esherick, "Harvard on China," p. 10.
29. Frances V. Moulder, Japan, China and the Modem World Economy:
Toward a Reinterpretation ofEast Asian Development ca. 1600 to 1918 (Cam
bridge: Cambridge 1977).
30. Victor Lippit, "The Development of Underdevelopment in China,"
Modern China 4:3 (1980), p. 255.
52
treatment of the class structure as a constellation of ele
ments arising from domestic forces; Nathan's psycho
cultural-intellectual interpretation of imperialism's
effects), there is a common thread among them: the
methodological terms in which the issue of imperialism and
underdevelopment is drafted are the same. Moreover, this
common thread binds them to the major writings of the
modernization school and indeed of virtually all earlier
Western scholarship. There are two common aspects of
their formulation of the question: the duality of cause and
effect and, derivatively, the division between internalities
and externalities. The central thesis of this essay is that this
frame of analysis, shared by authors of widely different
interpretations, is at the heart of the failure to elucidate the
dynamics of imperialism in a historically informed manner.
The two problematic features comprise the fundamental
critique of this paper and serve as the groundwork for
studying imperialism and its relationship to China's
development.
An Alternative Framework
Esherick, in company with Lippit and Nathan, places
the question of imperialism within the framework of causal
analysis; each is concerned with the hypothesized relation
ship between imperialism as the cause and China's under
development as the effect. Either imperialism is believed to
have had far reaching effects, in which case it "caused" the
underdevelopment of China, or its effects are gauged as
relatively slight, in which case imperialism was not the
causal factor in China's underdevelopment. In any case,
the problem with this line of reasoning is that it simplis
tically implies a one-way direct flow of strength or force
cause-effect, stimulus-response (as in "China's Response
to the West").J1
In approaching imperialism with this one-dimensional
logic of causality, the writers depict China largely as a
passive recipient of the impulses of capital accumulation
unleashed by the capitalist core nations. In substance, this
is to pass over mediative structures through which the
forces of imperialism were refracted, and particularly to
deny or ignore the reciprocal nature of the interaction
between Chinese social forces and the Chinese state on the
one hand, and the imperialist powers on the other hand.
Only in the context of the structured totality which sees the
determination of constituent elements as reciprocal, such
that causes become effects and effects, in their turn, be
come causes, can the reality of China's history be revealed.
As Georg Lukacs observed, " ...a one-sided and rigid
causality must be replaced by interaction. "32
Concretely, on the one hand, China's immiseration,
economic stagnation and subordination, and governmental
deterioration during the late Qing and Republican periods
cannot be explained with exclusive reference to endogen
ous factors but must be thought of as resulting from proces
ses subject to strong external forces. On the other hand,
31.John K. Fairbank and Ssu-yii Teng, China's Response to the West: A
Documentary Survey 1839-1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1954).
32. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist
Dialectics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), p. 3.
however, China must be thought of not as a nation whose
polity, economy, and society had no force ofexpression but
as one whose indigenous conditions affected the manner by
which it was integrated into the world capitalist system,
that is, the degree and form imperialism took in China-by
what combination of military, political, and economic
forces-as well as the points in time in which one form was
transformed into another. To put it in a slightly different
way, imperialist drives for raw materials and labor, trade,
and outlets for industrial, and later, financial capital,
depending on the level and form of capitalist development
in the core, combined with indigenous elements; and,
through a certain interaction evolving through time, the
characteristic economic, political, cultural and military
contours of the imperialist presence in China were con
stituted. In this way were forged the complex and pervasive
linkages between China and the imperialist powers.
In approaching imperialism with this one-dimensional
logic of causality, the writers depict China largely as a
passive recipient of the impulses of capital accumula
tion unleashed by the capitalist core nations. In sub
stance, this is to pass over mediative structures
through which the forces of imperialism were re
fracted, and particularly to deny or ignore the re
ciprocal nature of the interaction between' Chinese
social forces and the Chinese state on the one hand,
and the imperialist powers on the other hand.
I t is perhaps necessary to emphasize at this point that
the picture presented here is not that of an open-ended
interaction. The extent to which the imperialist powers and
China made and refracted each other's histories was
limited in part by the nature and degree of their involve
ment in the world capitalist system. With China's incorpo
ration into the world system, new capitalist contradictions
were generated and superimposed on the intensifying
forms of precapitalist contradictions. In this way, limits
were set to evolutionary changes by the total framework.
In light of the above, the question calling for attention
is the nature of this framework, specifically the identifica
tion of the conditions in China which, after the original
conflict between indigenous elements and imperialist
power, emerged to shape both characteristic features of
imperialistic penetration and the character of the Chinese
state and society. Succinctly, building on the conceptuali
zation of Petras and Trachte, the conditions which shaped
imperialist accumulation in China include: (a) class
structure (mode of expropriation of surplus value and
structure of its appropriation, degree of exploitation, con
centration of the workforce); (b) class and national strug
gle; and (c) the state (and state policy). 33
33. James Petras, Critical Perspectives on Imperialism and Social Class in the
Third World (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), p. 40.
,
I
53
Structural Linkages Between Imperialism
and Chinese Society
To begin to locate the problem of the relationship
between imperialism and underdevelopment, it is neces
sary to unravel the reciprocal linkages between the im
perialist powers and China within which can be found the
determinants of the configuration of social relations and
the form and nature of the state. Specifically, this is to ask
how, in the articulation of indigenous and external ele
ments, the inner conflicts of the Chinese class structure
were deepened and transformed, and how, in turn, the
nature of class and production relations and the state de
flected and imparted new directions to the forces unleashed
in the core.
A vital aspect of this interaction was the creation of
new social classes specific to the colonial situation; that is,
the fashioning of collaborator classes which served as med
iators between the core and China.
34
Beginning with the
opium trade, these comprador classes paved the way for
the subjugation of China by organizing its political and
economic system in congruence with the design of foreign
capital. In the proces, they "grew in proportion to their
capacity to extend and develop their external linkages. "35
The function of these intermediate elites, whose wealth
and power stemmed from their ties to imperialist and
their ability to maneuver within the sphere of Chmese
politics, was to organize production and commerce so as to
facilitate particular patterns of foreign trade. The results,
in addition to their own enrichment, was the flow of a
significant surplus to points of accumulation in the core. In
short, the class whose very existence rested on its collab
oration with international capital had a two-fold set of
occupations: internally, as some of the wealthiest Chinese
entrepreneurs of the era, they benefitted from exploitative
class relations; and externally, they paved the way for the
expansion of international capital in China. Therein lies the
pivotal point at which the action/reaction of social, politi
cal, and economic forces within China began to become
inextricably linked to international capital.
The formation and transformation of these inter
mediate classes which linked China and the imperialist
powers highlights the difficulty of rendering a crude di.stinc
tion between internalities and externalities. Accordmgly,
to analyze the principal features of underdevelopment ex
clusively in terms of the power of external elements or,
alternatively, ignoring the significance of external
elements, is to ignore the interlocking character of class
structures and the critical linkages between foreign and
local capital and between the Chinese state and rival im
perialist powers. Analogously, the formation of a small but
dynamic new social class, an urban proletariat concen
trated in treaty port enclaves and in foreign-owned fac
tories, must be comprehended in relational terms: Chinese
and foreign, not simply as exogenous and endogenous.
34. See Hao Yen-ping, The Compradore in Nineteenth Century China:
Bridge beMeen East and West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1970).
35. Petras, Critical Perspectives, p. 70. See also Hao, The Compradore,
p.216.
54
An approach is required to the question of imperialism
and underdevelopment in China which is holistic and
relational-an approach to overcome the methodological
shortcomings shared by Esherick, Lippit, and Nathan, as
well as by Peck and Moulder, and by earlier literature to
which they responded.
Before suggesting a number of ways in which the pro
posed framework can be used to illuminate particular
historical conjunctures in China, one further point must be
made. Defining class relationships as the analytical
category encapsulating the dynamic of imperialism is not to
shift the discussion away from the question of under
development and dependency. Even though dependency
theory has rightly been subject to extensive criticism be
cause of its overly economistic and passive character, de
pendency as a descriptive category reflects a significant as
pect of the reality of underdevelopment in China. That is, it
calls our attention to mechanisms whereby the Chinese
economy was subjugated through the development and
expansion of international capital in China. Dependency
understood in its interconnectedness, with the dynamic com
ponent of class and state relations linking China and the
imperialist powers, serves as the point of departure for
understanding China's developmental problems. The two
factors are so closely intertwined that to understand one is
necessarily to understand the other. Foreign penetration
and the restructuring of the Chinese economy constitute an
elemental reality contributing to the formation and de
formation of class relationships in China. Thus, a study of
foreign capital penetration, or, stated differently, an
analysis of the distinctive features of the asymetrical and
unequal economic relationship formed by the activities and
structure of industrial and financial capital in China, is
imperative for locating the fundamental determinants of
China's changing class structure.
As a starting point, it is appropriate to turn to
Esherick, Lippit, and Nathan, each of whom draws quite
different conclusions about foreign activity in China. A
major preoccupation of each is with the flow <;>f
commodities and capital and the net dramage of wealth (VIa
unequal terms of trade, foreign investment, loans, and
indemnities) and, thereby, the impact of the foreign pre
sence on domestic markets and handicraft production, on
the growth of Chinese manufacturing, and on the
status of China. These are critical issues. But by focusmg
their analyses on the impact of imperialist power on China,
particularly its economic impact, they have tended to
ignore dynamic and reciprocal issues of class formation,
class struggle, and the state. Social classes, in shaping and
being shaped by the historical process, and in reinforcing or
struggling against imperialism and underdevelopment,
have no place in this framework. In capsule, the
inadequacy of these interpretations of imperialism in China
lies in the failure to explore the dialectic between economic
and political processes and between external and internal
forces.
China's Class Structure and the Forms oflmperialism
Where many authors, including Esherick, Lippit, and
Nathan, and many of the writers they criticize, take the
Opium Wars as the point at which the interface between
China and imperialism comes into being, comprehension
of the essential nature of China's relationship with the
imperialist powers requires a reformulation of the prob
lem. The Opium Wars were not the beginning but the
culmination of the first phase of China's subjection to the
expansionist drives of imperialism in motion throughout
the preceding decades. This was manifest in growing pres
sures by British trading interests to force the Chinese gov
ernment to relinquish its restriction of foreign trade, and
above all in the push of opium, which in turn required the
formation of a new comprador class.
Imperialist Penetration in the Nineteenth Century
The question posed here which captures the dynamic
of this mid-century turning point in China-core relations is
why, at a time when the economic relationship between
China and the powers was largely restricted to trade, the
form that imperialism took at this particular con juncture
was political-military encroachment, thereupon opening
China's doors to the "imperialism of free trade." As
Ronald Robinson suggests, the economic drive to integrate
new regions into the industrial economy did not in
necessitate empire: "One country can trade WIth
another... without intervening in its politics. "36
The thesis that Robinson develops in an attempt to
come to grips with the question of "the external or informal
stage of industrial imperialism" can serve as a useful start
ing point for the inquiry at hand. He proposes that
economic expansion took the form of political-military en
croachment when Western free trade came into fundamen
tal conflict with the non-European (in this case Chinese)
component-that of indigenous collaboration and
ance. It was precisely Chinese resistance to the expansion
of both opium and the textile markets which led to the
British retaliation in the Opium War (1840-42) and a suc
ceeding war, the Second Opium War (1858-60).
Faced with a silver outflow problem, Great Britain had
turned to opium when the impermeability of the Chinese
market had blocked the advance of textiles. From the
inception of the opium the
actively sought to suppress It; an mtenslfied campaign
against the trade which was launched in 1837 almost led to
its complete halt. Though the Chinese government offered
little resistance per se to the import of British textiles
throughout the nineteenth century, the strength of tradi
tional patterns of trade and the results of the free play of
market forces did not produce the enlarged export markets
of manufactured goods sought by the British. In fine, "The
institutional barriers to economic invasion proved intract
able; ... as a result the export-import sector normally
remained a tiny accretion on traditional society, and this
meant that commercial collaborators were few and unable
to win power. "37
The presence on the eve of the Opium War of resis
tance to British capital penetration and the absence of
adequate collaborative mechanisms to open the market to
36. Ronald Robinson, "Non-European Foundations of European Im
perialism: Sketch for a Theory ofCollaboration," in Roger Owen and Bob
Sutcliffe eds., Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman,
1972), p. 119.
37. Ibid., p. 129.
British goods does not, however, determine the feasibility
of the forceful penetration of imperialism. To Robinson's
thesis, it must be added that the crucial coIqponent de
termining the viability of imperialist invasion was the ca
pacity of the target nation (China) to resist. This capacity
hinged on multiple factors including the level of develop
ment of the productive forces, the military, and the nature
of the attendant class/state relationships as well as such
factors as terrain.
Briefly, the Qing Dynasty had been on an overall
course of disintegration-a course already evident at the
tum of the century with the White Lotus Rebellion (1796
1804). In the middle of the nineteenth century, a series of
peasant-based rebellions, including the Nien (1853-68),
Moslem (1855-73), and most notably the Taiping (1851
64), erupted as "an effect of internal social pressures com
bined with external influences. "38 The Qing armies even
tually suppressed them, but only after costly protracted
wars which undermined the strength and capacity to rule of
the Qing state. 39 Consequently, though managing to main
tain its grip into the twentieth century, the dynasty was
progressively weakened under the combined weight of
these foreign and internal blows. The weakening of the
central government due to the peasant rebellions ham
pered its continued efforts to respond to the West.
40
As
Chesneaux, Bastid, and Bergere assert, ". . . the defeats
suffered by the Manchu power were the outward expres
sion of its political inability to win support among the most
vital elements of the populace. "41 External and internal
forces reinforced one another in undermining the power of
the Qing state.
One critical element which exacerbated and brought
to a climax the growing contradictions between the peas
ants and local and traditional power holders was the de
stabilizing foreign influence exercised through the triangu
lar opium trade between China, Britain, and India.
Esherick and Lippit mention the drain of a substantial
portion of the economic surplus out of China via the opium
trade, but they fail to analyze the contradictions which
were reproduced within the socio-economic structure by
these economic processes and, in turn, the limitations
which these contradictions imposed on economic develop
ment.42 The silver outflow that accompanied the expansion
of the opium trade contributed to a decline in the price of
copper, relative to silver, and to a price deflation. Because
peasants paid their taxes in copper, this decline in the
relative value of copper raised their real tax burden by
38. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., The Fall of Imperial China (New York: Free
Press, 1975), p. 142. See also his Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in
South China, 1839-1861 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).
39. Mary C. Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The Tung.
chih Restoration 1862-1874 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957),
pp.96-124.
40. Paul A. Cohen, "Ch'ing China: Confrontation with the West, 1850
1900," in Crowley ed., Modern East Asia, p. 37.
41. Jean Chesneaux, LeBarbier, and Marie-Claire Bergere,
China from the 1911 Revolution to Liberation (Hassocks: Harvester Press,
1977), p. SO.
42. Esherick, "Harvard on China," p. 10; Lippit, "The Development of
Underdevelopment," p. 275. Nathan, in "Imperialism's Effects," con
spicuously neglects the topic of opium.
55
reducing the peasants' cash income. Commenting on these
economic difficulties associated with the trade, Wakeman
concluded that opium was "undermining the agrarian foun
dations of the entire society. "43 Moulder aptly sums up
what this meant:
First, the expansion oftrade led to a dramatic increase in the
hardships suffered by peasants throughout China and in
South China in particular. Second, it increased the fre
quency and intensity of contacts among dissident groups
merchants, lower gentry, peasants, and artisans-thus
facilitating the spread ofrevolt. 44
At the same time, the rising peasant population was
placing increasing pressure on the land, the state desperately
sought to increase taxes in order to fight its internal and
foreign foes. The proliferation of militia was in part a
response to a dramatic rise in the frequency and scale oftax
resistance.
45
The mounting threat of peasant rebellion was
one important reason among others-such as the loss of
China's silver reserves, not to mention the narcotic effect of
opium on the population-for the Chinese government's
opposition to the sale of opium. The repeated capitulation
of the Manchus to voracious foreign demands made
China's weakness still more obvious and further contrib
uted to the outbreak of peasant movements challenging
variously the Manchu state and the landlord class in the
years between 1850-1870.
46
The surge of these great political and social move
ments in the mid-nineteenth century accentuated the rela
tionship between foreign penetration via the Opium Wars
and the impoverishment of the Chinese populace. In a
report for the New York Daily Tribune, Karl Marx made the
connection:
The tribute [an indemnity of $21 million] to be paid to
England after the unfortunate war of 1840, the great unpro
ductive consumption ofopium, the drain ofprecious metals
by this trade, the destructive influence offoreign competition
on native manufactures, the demoralized condition of the
public administration, produced two things: the old taxation
became more burdensome and harassing, and new taxation
was added to the 01d.
47
In addition to those distressed by oppressive taxes, the
growing army of unemployed-in particular, boatmen,
porters, stevedores, peddlers, rural artisans (often itin
erant), and charcoal burners-many of them displaced
when Guangzhou's monopoly over commerce was broken
and Western ships began to dominate China's coastal and
inland waterways, supplied an ample base for the popular
movements.
48
As Chesneaux remarks with respect to the
most important of the mid-nineteenth century popular
43. Wakeman, The Fall ofImperial ChintJ, p. 128.
44. Moulder, Japan. ChintJ and the Modern World Economy, p. 152. See also
Elizabeth Perry, Rebels and RevolutiontJries in Nonh China, /845-/945
(Stanford: University Press, 1980), p. 80.
45. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries, p. 86.
46. See Wakeman, Strangers at the Gate, p. 79.
47. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Colonialism (New York: Interna
tional Publishers, 1972), p. 21.
48. See Wakeman, Strangers at the Gate, pp. 98-100.
movements, the Taipings, "It was no mere coincidence that
this powerful peasant outburst occurred in the period of the
Opium Wars and the 'opening' of China by the Western
powers_ "49 Nor was it coincidence that unemployed OOat
.men, displaced by Western shipping on southern Chinese
inland waterways, provided the core of the early Taiping
armies. 50 "After the Taiping Rebellion it was no longer
possible to distinguish between hermetic Chinese develop
ments and outer influences. "51
To argue, as Nathan does, that it is a mistake to project
the existence of severe economic distress in China back
much before 1910, or to contend that it was a result of
structural features of the Chinese economy plus imperial
ism, is to present a distorted picture of the economic well
being of a large portion of the population during these
years. It is also to ignore the refraction of the impact of
imperialism through the class structure and its relationship
to class struggle. The trend toward pauperization through
out the countryside was real, not an impression caused by a
"revolution of rising expectations among Chinese intel
lectuals" or "a tendency to overgeneralize from specific
cases of worsening conditions. "52
In his description of China's prosperity, Nathan does
admit to exceptions, that is, areas where rural poverty got
worse-areas devastated by flood or drought-but fails to
relate this to structural features of the economy and polity.
Natural disasters were, to an extent, a product of an en
crusted system of social relations which retarded develop
mep.t of the productive forces and, with the collapse of
dynastic power, left a complete inability to respond effec
tively to crisis. 53
At the same time, imperialism, in the interest of "sta
bility," sought both to prop up an ailing dynasty and to
preserve the class status quo in the countryside. By the
mid-nineteenth century the decline of the imperial regime
was seen in the deterioration of public works. Floods
caused by unattended dikes contributed to the affliction of
the peasants of North China, one factor which precipitated
the Nien Rebellion. 54 The peasant movements of the nine
teenth century expressed discontents conditioned by the
two Opium Wars and the "opening" of China in con
junction with a long developing pattern of internal
disintegration.
In political terms, the Opium Wars helped to discredit
the Qing dynasty, thereby opening the way for the great
popular movements. The imperial regime proved its weak
ness when it signed the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. The
imperialist powers proceeded to fashion an increasingly
rationalized institutional framework and fostered new
elites, drawn mainly from ruling oligarchies and landlords,
which facilitated economic penetration and incorporation.
The terms of the bargain were such that the Qing state
would be permitted to divert financial resources for the
49. Jean Chesneaux, Peasant Revolts in China /840-/949 (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 23.
50. Wakeman, The Fall ofImperial China, pp. 140-41.
51. Ibid., p. 142.
52. Nathan, "Imperialism's Effects on China," p. 4.
53. See Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries, p. SO.
54. Ibid., pp. 118-19.
56
i
I
purpose of maintaining the status quo in China contingent ent threat which it posed thereafter, and finally by the
on its protection of European enterprises. A tacit-though revival of its activities between 1900 and 1911.
antagonistic-political alliance thus emerged linking the A dissection of the basis of these peasant rebellions
Qing state and the imperialist powers. 55 With the joint which proliferated throughout the late nineteenth and
suppression of the Taiping Rebellion, for instance, these early twentieth century calls for an analysis of the mechan
ties were strengthened. The period after 1870 was one of isms through which imperialism subjugated China. Here it
relative stability; on the basis of the treaties and the politics is useful to examine closely the analyses of Esherick, Lip
of "limited Westernization," China and the Western pit, and Nathan. One argument that especially warrants
powers arrived at a temporary balance in relations. mention concerns the impact of foreign imports on handi
Another wave of peasant activity-sometimes re craft production. In assessing this aspect of the impact of
inforced by the explosive demands of a newly formed pro China's incorporation in international markets, Lippit and
letariat-from 1895-1911, corresponded to a new thrust of Nathan concur that there is inadequate evidence to support
imperialistic pressure upon China and in the end contrib the claim of general rural decline. 60 Esherick, on the other
uted to the fall of the dynasty. Many studies of imperialism hand, shows the extent to which the influx of foreign manu
in China, including those of Esherick, Nathan, Lippit, and factured goods caused a damaging decline of native handi
Moulder, leave this phenomenon unexamined. 56 In their craft production.
61
Of course, foreign products never en
preoccupation with the economic effects of the Treaty of tirely replaced native handicrafts. The extensive network
Shimonoseki (1895) and the beginning of foreign direct of domestic marketing, urban and rural handicrafts, and
investment, the treaties and conventions arising out of the productive self-sufficiency, restricted the penetration of
"scramble for concessions" (1895-98), and the Boxer Pro foreign goods. However, the effect of foreign imports on
tocol of 1901, they fail to capture the underlying institu Chinese markets was hardly as "superficial" as Nathan
tional and structural mechanisms of imperialism. claims.
62
China's imports of foreign goods expanded
rapidly in the late nineteenth century with the value of
Imperialist Penetration in the Early Twentieth Century imports quadrupling between 1868 and 1913.
63
The implications of increasing foreign imports for the
At this time the mode of penetration and incorpora
dislocation of the traditional rural economy belies Lippit
tion shifted from free trade imperialism to occupation and
and Nathan's conclusion. The import of factory-spun yam
"partition" of China. A step toward understanding this
had a disastrous impact on China's largest handicraft in
change in form is to recognize that neither the superceding
dustry of the nineteenth century, the spinning of yam.
of competitive by monopoly capital
57
nor great power
After the 1858-1860 treaties, cotton yam imports began to
rivalry necessitated the "break-up. "58 Rather, the stress of
increase significantly, and between 1875 and 1905 it grew
free trade imperialism-financial crises, intensifying for
by leaps and bounds. The quantity of imported yam in
eign intervention, and anti-foreign reaction-and the con
creased twenty-four times during this period.
64
This rise in
sequent rupture of the collaborative system of the informal
cotton yam imports was accompanied by a fall in output of
type compelled the core powers to change their type of
domestic handicraft-spun yam. The absolute output of
penetration. 59 The increasing ability of the core powers to
handicraft yam as well as its share in total yam supply
impose their will on China is explained in significant part by
declined between 1875-1905 from 632.3 to 392.2 million
the costly impact of peasant rebellion on the Chinese state,
pounds-a reduction of over 40 percent. The decline in
a phenomenon we have already located as a response both
output of handicraft yam thereafter proceeded more
to internal decay of the Qing state and imperialist penetra
slowly, but by 1931 production stood at just 173.3 million
tion. The Chinese state surrendered quickly and gave away
pounds, leaving handicrafts with only 16.3 percent of total
financial, territorial, and political privileges in part because
yarn supply. 65
it feared the instability of the countryside. In the end, the
To be sure, not all handicrafts were equally affected.
peasant movement thus contributed to the fall of the
Handicraft weaving, for example, experienced some de
dynasty in at least three ways: by gravely weakening the
cline in its market share of total cloth supply in the years
Qing state in the mid-century rebellions, by the ever pres
1875-1919, but total production increased during this
period.
66
As Albert Feuerwerker notes, however, the
55. Robinson, "Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism,"
pp. 129-30.
60. Lippit, "The Development of Underdevelopment," pp. 277-78;
I
56. In Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and
Nathan, "Imperialism's Effect on China," p. 5.
Hubei (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), Esherick does
61. Esherick, "Harvard on China," p. 11.
gives us an analysis of social classes and political change. However in his
early article where he specifically concentrates on the issue of imperialism
62. Nathan, "Imperialism's Effect on China," p. 5.
in China a similar analysis is lacking. 63. Yu-kwei Cheng, Foreign Trade and Industrial Development in China: An
I
57. See V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New
Historical and Integrated Analysis through 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Uni
I
York: International Publishers, 1939), and J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A
versity Press of Washington, 1956), p. 12.
Study (London: Allen and Unwin, 1938). 64. Bruce Lloyd Reynolds, The Impact ofTrade and Foreign Investments on
58. See Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present
Industrialization: Chinese Textiles 1875-1931 (University of Michigan
Day (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), and Michael Barratt
Ph.D., 1974), p. 31 table 2.4. See also Kang Chao, "The Growth of a
i
Brown, "A Critique of Marxist Theories of Imperialism," in Owen and
Modem Textile Industry and the Competition with Handicrafts," in Per
Sutcliffe eds., Studies in the Theories ofImperialism.
kins ed., China's Modem Economy in Historical Perspective, p. 172.
59. Robinson, "Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism,"
65. Reynolds, The Impact ofTrade, p. 31 table 2.4.
I
pp.130-31. 66. Ibid.
57
I
growth of this sector "would certainly have been larger in
the absence of foreign cloth imports. "67 Furthermore, de
spite the growth that did occur, only 10 to 20 percent ofthe
total labor displaced by the decline in handspun yam could
have been absorbed by the increment of six or seven hun
dred million yards of handwoven cloth.
68
Thus a substan
tial part of those peasants for whom spinning provided
important sources of income faced heavy new pressures
threatening their very subsistence.
While the dislocation occasioned by foreign yam de
stroyed the single most important supplement to rural in
comes, other handicraft sources of income also declined or
disappeared under the assault of imported products.
Native iron and steel production in Hunan and Jiangxi,
nearly disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century.
The use of vegetable oils and candles for lighting was
steadily supplanted by Standard Oil's kerosene imports
from the 1890s.
69
From 1883-1884 kerosene imports
jumped from 384,000 to 839,000 gallons.
70
While it is im
portant to avoid exaggerating the destructive effects of the
marketing of foreign goods on native Chinese handicrafts,
there is evidence that by 1925 fully 50 percent of imports
were competitive with handicrafts-wheat flour, sugar,
tobacco, paper, chemical, dyes, and pigments, in addition
to cotton piece goods and yam. Other cases of handicraft
displacement by foreign manufactures include: embroid
ery, leather processing, knitted goods, tea processing, silk
reeling, china, and ceramics; and writing brushes were
replaced by pencils and fountain pens.
71
In many sectors
where imported goods were in direct competition with local
products, the handicraft industry survived only by cutting
wages.
This leads to the conclusion that in the course of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the handi
craft sector began to disintegrate under the foreign impact.
Just when population pressure reduced income from the
land, peasants were increasingly cut off from handicraft
sources ofcash income on which their livelihood depended.
The results included largescale migration, rising tenancy
rates, and the formation of a labor pool from which a
significant portion of a modem industrial proletariat would
be drawn.
Lippit asserts that the demand for cash crops, which
provided alternative sources of cash income, offset any
decline in earnings occasioned by the decline of handi
crafts.
72
The best available evidence indicates that a signi
ficant growth in cash crops took place between 1890 and
1910. However, cash crops, particularly the significant pro
portion destined for export, were highly vulnerable to in
ternational price and market fluctuations. 73 As Hou notes,
67. Albert Feuerwerker, The Chinese Economy ca. 1870-19/1 (Ann Ar
bor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1969), p. 29.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., pp. 29, 31.
70. LeFevour, Western Enterprise in Late Ch'ing China, p. 144.
71. John K. Chang, Industrial Development in Pre Communist China: A
Quantitative Analysis (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), p. 97.
72. Lippit, ''The Development of Underdevelopment in China," p. 277.
73. Albert Feuerwerker, State and Society in Eighteenth-Century China: The
Ch'ing Empire in Its Glory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for
" ... China specialized in exports" and "... the largest
part of Chinese exports were agricultural products" -close
to 50 percent.
74
For producers of important agricultural
commodities such as raw silk, bean cakes, tea, wood oil,
and sheep's wool-a high proportion of which were sold
abroad
75
-the instabiity of the external market period
ically brought ruin in its wake.
The two most important examples are tea and silk. A
high proportion of China's tea and silk was sold abroad. 76
Together silk and tea accounted for up to 94 percent of
China's trade exports in 1868. The percentage dropped to
46 percent in 1900 and 34 percent in 1913.
77
By 1931, silk
accounted for no more than 14 percent of China's total
exports. 78 The collapse of the world silk market in the early
1930's and the keen competition of Japanese goods re
duced the share of silk to only 7.8 percent of China's total
exports in 1936.
79
The rapid growth of the export of India
and Ceylon teas to the world market at the tum of the
century impeded the Chinese tea trade. In 1910 India and
Ceylon exported twice as much tea as did China.
80
By
World War II the market for Chinese tea and silk had dried
up, leading to the displacement ofthousands of peasants. 81
The development of a market for such export cash crops
followed a course of creation, control, and closure leading
to the deprivation of thousands of peasants who originally
shifted their resources to crop production in response to the
dislocation of the traditional rural economy and the grow
ing demands of the market. 82
A different case in which the planting of a cash crop
was detrimental to the Chinese peasantry was that of to
bacco. During the late 1910s the British-American Tobacco
Company's willingness to subsidize production and offer
peasants special inducements to plant bright tobacco "led
more and more peasants in certain localities . . . to aban
don food crops in favor of this cash crop in the 1920s and
Chinese Studies, 1976), p. 86; Dwight H. Perkins, Agricultural Develop
ment in China 1368-/968 (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), p. 115.
74. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, pp.
201-02, 168. See also Cheng, Foreign Trade and Industrial Development 0/
China, p. 35 and Albert Feuerwerker, Economic Trends in the Republic 0/
China 1912- 1949 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Centerfor Chinese
Studies, 1977), p. 105.
75. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, p. 194.
76. Boris Togasheff, China as a Tea Producer (Shanghai: The Commercial
Press, 1926), p. 167; Ta-chung Lin and Kung-chia Yeh, The Economy o/the
Chinese Mainland: National Income and Economic Development /933-/959
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 135; Hou, Foreign Invest
ment and Economic Development in China, p. 194.
77. Cheng, Foreign Trade and Industrial Development o/China, pp. 14-15.
See also G. C. Allen and Audrey G. Donnithome, Western Enterprise in
Far Eastern Economic Development (New York: Macmillan, 1954), p. 259,
and Feuerwerker, Economic Trends, pp. 102-05.
78. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, p. 190.
79. Cheng, Foreign Trade and Industrial Development a/China, p. 213. See
also Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, p. 190.
80. Cheng, Foreign Trade and Industrial Development a/China, p. 15.
81. See Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, pp.
190-94; D. K. Lieu, The Silklndustryo/China (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh,
1941), pp. 254-57; Han-seng Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants
(Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1939), p. 24.
82. See Esherick, "Harvard on China," pp. 10-11.
58
1930s."83
One crop which rapidly expanded in acreage during
the last decades of the nineteenth century was opium. This
is evidence that the character of foreign trade also had a
detrimental effect on the allocation of agricultural re
sources connected with production geared toward do
mestic consumption. As a response to the demand created
by the massive importation of opium through the nine
teenth century, the rural population was motivated to shift
acreage from grain and vegetables to poppy cultivation. By
1870, this trend spread throughout Fujian, Guangdong,
Zhejiang, Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Shenxi, Shaanxi,
Hubei, and Shandong provinces. The great famine of 1877
in North China can be substantially atrributed to the exten
sive cultivation of the poppy.
In sum, the evidence seems to support Frederick
Wakeman's general conclusion that "The decline of rural
self-sufficiency coincided with an increase in cash
crops, . . . "84 The problem with the skewing of the rural
economy toward the production of cash crops for foreign
markets was that it deprived significant portions of the
peasantry of a steady, predictable flow of funds. Moreover,
the demand for some agricultural products is relatively
inelastic and prone to fall as manufactured substitutes are
developed. Silk weaving, for example, declined with the
advent of rayon. 8S At one point, in response to new world
demand, hog bristles reached major proportions in China's
exports, only to be replaced subsequently by nylon. 86
China's tung and linseed oil was replaced by goverment
subsidized production in the United States. Further,
China's heavy emphasis on agricultural exports increased
vulnerability to the effects of the declining terms of trade.
The evidence shows that this was indeed the case. The
trend of the terms of trade was against China over the
period 1867-1936. This trend adversely affected the peas
ants since the prices commanded by their export crops
would pay for only 71 percent of the imports in 1936 that
they had bought in 1867.
87
The displacement and deprivation of the peasantry
caused in part by the decline in handicrafts and the instabil
ity of the international market for commodities illuminates
an important connection between the imperialist impact
and successive waves of peasant movements. Marx was
among the first to make the connection with regard to
spinners and weavers: "In China the spinners and weavers
have suffered greatly under this foreign competition, and
the community has become unsettled. "88 In addition, a
83. Sherman Cochran, Big Business in China: Sino-Foreign Rivalry in the
Cigarette Industry 1890-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1980),p.204. .
84. Wakeman, Strangers at the Gate, p. 188.
85. Feuerwerker, Economic Trends, p. 29. See also Esherick, "Harvard on
China," p. 11.
86. Cheng, Foreign Trade and Industrial Development of China, pp. 35-36,
231.
87. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, p. 197.
See also Dernberger, "The Role of the Foreigner," pp. 33-34, Esherick,
"Harvard on China," p. 11, and Charles Remer, Foreign Investments in
China (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968), p. 202.
88. Marx and Engels, On Colonialism, pp. 20-21. See also Arthur H.
Smith, China in Convulsion (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1901; re
printed by AMS Press, 1973), pp. 90-91.
59
number of large-scale riots were sparked by peasant resent
ment toward the opium tax and the compulsion to grow
opium on their land.
89
In the end the rural population
carried imperialism's prolonged assaults on China's econ
omy, society, and polity to a logical conclusion: peasant
uprisings culminating in a national liberation movement
and the expUlsion of foreign powers. Under the weight of
foreign invasion and military occupation, dislocation
caused by the penetration of foreign products, vicissitudes
of the market as well as the continued rise in the exchange
rate between copper and silver, price deflations, natural
calamities, indemnities, loans, missions and missionaries,
increasing population pressures, dynastic decline, and con
centration of land ownership, the peasantry revolted, jolt
ing not only the foreign powers but the very fabric of
Chinese society.
To suggest, as Nathan does, that these rebellions must
be understood as a psychological response to imperialism is
not only superficial but rests on a vulgar distinction be
tween the realms of economics and ideas, ignoring the
material roots of class and national struggles. As Marx has
stressed, "the production of ideas" arises from "material
activity and material intercourse of men," and in tum \
shapes social relations and the productive forces. Nathan's
1
contention that the peasant reaction and the broad anti
Manchu and anti-foreign movements can be understood
apart from the social and economic impact of imperialism,
which he discounts,90 but can be explained by the fact that
I
"the Chinese themselves believed in the severity of this
impact," is insupportable. That impact was, to be sure,
highly uneven, centering as it did in the treaty ports and
i
environs along major waterways and railroads and in the
coastal areas. But nowhere were its political, economic,
military, and ideological reverberations absent. As the pre
ceding analysis has shown, the Chinese response to the
onset of imperialism was grounded in material experience;
as indicated, the distress of the peasantry was aggravated
by both the economic and military disruption which ac
companied the penetration of capitalism. This is not to
negate the importance of ideas, but to locate them in their
larger context.
Imperialism and China's Cbuis Strncture
It is not the intent of this paper to develop a full scale
class analysis but simply to suggest, in general terms, how
imperialism provided the impetus for the fluidity of the
class structure. With the incorporation of China into the
capitalist world economy, all old classes did not disapper.
But the new imperatives of capital accumulation, which
were refracted through the medium of China's precapitalist
economy in the form of production, exchange, usury, rent,
and taxation, greatly aggravated internal contradictions
generated from the forces of production, ownership of
property, use of the surplus, and so forth.
In the countryside, the primary classes were landlord
and tenant/peasant. Here, transformation of landlord
tenant relations contributed to weakening the old rural
89. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in Nonh China, p. 101
90. Nathan, "Imperialism's Effects on China," p. 6.
social order. The lure ofcommerce, real estate speculation,
and money lending in the urban areas were important in
turning village gentry or manor owners into urban absentee
landlords. Landlord-tenant relations changed to adjust to
the requirements of the new absentee landlords: landlords
became divorced from production, and bursaries were
established to collect rents.
91
With the increase of interna
tional trade, some peasants were transformed into inde
pendent tenant-farmers who tried to manipulate crop
prices to their own benefit while paying fixed rents to
absentee landlords.
92
In the 1920s and 1930s there was a
reduction in the extent of landlordism in some regions
spurred by falling profitability, rent resistance by tenants,
rising taxes, and alternative investment opportunities. 93
Imperialism, bringing economic crisis in its wake, also
contributed to the formation of new elements in the
countryside in the form of a growing class of dispossessed
peasantry. Increasing numbers of rural inhabitants were in
motion with largescale migration, for example, associated
with Japan's opening up of Mancnuria.
Capitalist penetration in China generated contradic
tions peculiar to the capitalist mode of production in its
peripheral form. The most important new social classes
were the industrial and rural proletariat, and a small but
volatile and centrally placed bourgeoisie. To comprehend
the nature and boundaries of development of the two most
important new classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,
it is appropriate to look further at the discussions by
Esherick, Lippit, and Nathan. The relationship of foreign
investment to the growth of native industry and commerce
is a major point of contention. While Lippit and Nathan
argue that imperialism did not preclude the growth of
Chinese-owned industry, Esherick insists that foreign
capitalism oppressed native Chinese enterprise and held
back its development. 94
Foreign Investment and Class Formation
Esherick and others have shown that foreign capital
dominated the most dynamic sectors of the Chinese econ
omy. In such lucrative and vital sectors as mining, rail
roads, and long distance shipping, foreign firms over
whelmed all native competition. Almost all of the pig iron
and nearly all of the iron ore produced by modem mines in
China before 1937 came from mines controlled by foreign
capital. In 1934 the foreign share in coal output reached 80
percent. In 1980 83 percent of the steamer tonnage entered
and cleared through Maritime Customs and 78 percent of
the shipping on the Yangzi was under foreign control.
Railroads which were either foreign-owned or controlled
via loans accounted for as much as 78,93, and 98 percent of
all railroads in China in 1894, 1911, and 1927 respectively. 95
91. Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China, p. 67.
92. Wakeman, The Fall ofImperial China, p. 14.
93. Robert Ash, Land Tenure in Pre-Revolutionary China: Kiangsu Province
in the 1920s and 1930s (London: Contemporary China Institute S.O.A.S.,
1976), p. 19.
94. Lippit, "Development of Underdevelopment in China," p. 278;
Nathan, "Imperialism's Effects on China," p. 5; Esherick, "Harvard on
China," pp. 12-13.
Foreign capital was also dominant in the import-export
sector; as much as 90 percent of China's foreign trade and
other international transactions were handled by foreign
banks in 1930.
96
Although the share of output claimed by
foreign capital was 35 percent for the manufacturing in
dustries as a whole in 1933, for many key industries the
ratio was considerably higher; in shipbuilding, sawmills,
water, gas, and electric works, foreign-owned firms ac
counted for more than half of the total output. In the 1930s
cotton textiles, the most important light industry in China
prior to 1937, foreign mills accounted for more than 40
percent of the total yam spindles and nearly 70 percent of
all looms. In short, foreign capital dominated the leading
branches of production in the Chinese economy.97
With the concentration of foreign capital in the most
dynamic and lucrative sectors of the economy, the fate of
China's development was virtually placed in foreign hands.
Modem industry was structured by the foreign powers so as
to insure the outflow of capital from China, not to provide
the nation with the resources and infrastructure which
would serve the interests of balanced development. The
in terests of the imperialist powers were well reflected in the
pattern of foreign direct investment in China in 1936. A
strikingly high portion of investment was employed in fields
related to foreign trade: 16.8 percent of all foreign invest
ment was in the import-export trade; 20.5 percent of the
foreign investment went to banking and financial houses
whose chief function was to finance foreign trade and to
'handle foreign exchange transactions; and 25 percent of
total investment was directed toward transportation.
98
A
large portion of this figure was put into constructing a
railway network, which well served the political, military,
and commercial needs of the foreign powers and interna
tional capital but was relatively irrational from the perspec
tive of linkages which would serve domestic economic
needs. In 1933 a large proportion of metals-nearly all of
the tungsten, antimony, and tin, and half of the iron ore
extracted from modem mines in China was exported, the
28. See also Cheng, Foreign Trade and Industrial Development ofChina, pp.
40-41.
96. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, p. 130.
Because the foreign banks monopolized the financing of foreign trade, in
practice they controlled the foreign exchange market. They thus deter
mined the fluctuating gold price of silver. On the passage of the U. S. Silver
Purchase Act and the inflation of the gold value ofChina's silver currency,
silver stocks of foreign banks in Shanghai were depleted by as much as
Chinese $233 million from the end of 1933-1935. The loss in silver cur
rency caused by the appreciation forced the export price below a level
reflecting the combined effect of the silver exchange rates and external
commodity prices. In the wake of this double deflationary pressure,
hundreds of Chinese manufacturing plants, business firms, banking and
financial institutions were forced to close down in Shanghai alone, while
the crisis finally led to the breakdown of the Chinese silver standard.
Cheng, Foreign Trade and Industrial Development ofChina, pp. 78-90.
97. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, p. 130;
Cheng, Foreign Trade and Industrial Development of China, p. 40; Kate L.
Mitchell, Industrialization of the Western Pacific (New York: Institute of
Internatic;mal Relations, 1942), p. 107; Richard Kraus, Cotton and Cotton
Goods in China 1918-1936 (Harvard University Ph.d., 1968), p. 72 table
111.7; Chao, "The Growth of a Modem Cotton Textile Industry, "p. 170;
Esherick, "Harvard on China," p. 11.
98. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, p. 16. See
also Remer, Foreign Investments in China, p. 70, and Esherick, "Harvard
95. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, pp. 127- on China, "p. 12.
60
1
i
largest portion of it directed to Japan. Indeed, the iron and
steel industry developed as virtually an appendage of the
Japanese industry. 99
By 1936, on the eve of the Japanese invasion of North
China and full-scale war, 78 percent of total foreign invest
ment in China was in fields associated with Chinese exter
nal trade. Even in the field of manufacturing, which
claimed only 19.6 percent of total direct foreign invest
ment, a large proportion (nearly 80 percent) went to areas
connected with foreign trade, mainly import substituting
industries and manufacturing for export. To carry on the
foreigner's main business, external trade, related fields also
had to be developed such as ship repairing and building,
silk reeling, tanneries, cotton textiles, breweries, and pack
ing, storage, and processing for export. Tobacco proces
sing, for example, was 63.3 percent foreign. Until the

1930s, foreign enterprise remained almost entirely respon
1
sible for the processing and transport of tea. In short,
foreign capital not only monopolized the leading sectors of
I
the Chinese economy but distorted the overall structure of
industry through its heavy emphasis on external trade. 100
I
To substantiate their argume'nt that foreign capitalism
did not thwart the development of native Chinese enter
prises, both Lippit and Nathan point out that Chinese firms
accounted for the majority of factory output in the begin
ning of the twentieth century and that the number of
Chinese-owned plants grew as fast as foreign ones. 101 To
evaluate the success of Chinese and foreign enterprises in
terms of relative numbers of plants, aside from passing over
the significance of foreign domination in the dynamic sec
tor, is, however, highly misleading. Foreign firms were, in
most cases, far stronger financially because of their larger
size, large paid-up capital, ability to borrow from foreign
sources at lower costs, superior technology, more ad
vanced managerial practices, better access to raw materials
and markets, exemption from Chinese taxes and leyies,
immunity from Chinese official exactions, and the protec
tion of extraterritoriality. This gave them sufficient
strength to crush their Chinese competitors in most sectors
in which they chose to focus. In a study of the cigarette
industry, for example, Sherman Cochran found that the
British-American Tobacco Company, through the priv
ileges of unequal treaties, access to foreign capital, super
ior technology, and the use of coercive business practices
such as price wars, "blocked the development of any sig
nificant competitor within China's industrial sector prior to
1915," "driving its new Chinese rivals to the wall. "102 Simi
larly, by 1905 two of three Chinese steamship companies
organized in 1899-1900 to run between Hankow and
99. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, p. 16,64,
193; Remer, Foreign Investments in China, p. 70; Allen and Donnithome,
Western Enterprise, p. 140; E-tu Zen Sun, Chinese Railways and British
Interests 1898-1911 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1971); Cheng-chang
Chiu, Japanese Investment and Economic Development in China 1914-1931
(Washington University M.A. thesis, 1977).
100. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, p. 16,
IS; Allen and Donnithome, Western Enterprise, pp. 40, 54; Cheng, Foreign
Trade and Industrial Development o/China, p. 40.
101. Lippit, "Development of Underdevelopment in China," p. 27S;
Nathan, "Imperialism's Effects on China," p. 5.
102. Cochran, Big Business in China, pp. 206,216.
Changsha had folded after British and Japanese firms put
ships on the route. 103
Taken overall, foreign concerns had a high concentra
tion of economic power in China. Out of the total modem
industrial capital in China in 1936, Chinese $987.3 million
or 25.9 percent was domestic and Chinese $2820.5 million
or 74.1 percent was foreign. Chinese capital had invested
heaviy in the cotton textile industry. But in 1930, for exam
ple, on the average the capital in Japanese firms was twice
as large as in Chinese ones, and the capital in British firms
was more than double that. The differential was even
greater in mining, shipbuilding, and the manufacture of
cigarettes and soap. 104
Further, statistics on the production cost per bale of
cotton yam reveals that foreign firms operated with greater
relative efficiency. The unit cost of production (manufac
turing and operating costs) of the Chinese mills was twice as
high as that of their Japanese competitors, for example. lOS
Also, on the matter of interest charges, foreign firms
were in an advantageous position. While Japanese cotton
firms could borrow at interest rates as low as 3 percent a
year in the 1930s, the cost of borrowing for Chinese firms
appeared to be a high 8 to 12 percent in most cases. 106 In
the case of the Hanyehping Coal and Iron Company, the
price paid for borrowing proved to be the loss of control
over the company to their foreign creditor. 107
Among the factors most favorable to foreign invest
ment in China was the institution of extraterritoriality
which granted the exemption of treaty port industries from
most Chinese taxation and Chinese law. With regard to the
production cost per bale of cotton yam (twenty counts),
taxes represented 13.2 percent of the cost of production in
Japanese mills, whereas they made up 34.3 percent in
Chinese mills. Foreign mills also benefitted from the tax
rates on cotton yam. Between 1934-1937 the tax rate was
the lowest on fine yams; inasmuch as the foreign firms
engaged primarily in the production of fine grades of yam
(above twenty counts), they were put in a still more advan
tageous position. The same may be said of the tax on
cigarettes; the tax rate on high quality cigarettes was 16
percent and on low quality ones, 58 percent. Foreign firms
primarily produced high quality cigarettes. 108
This advantageous position of treaty port industries
was an important factor which attracted substantial
Chinese capital into foreign enterprises. According to one
estimate, 400 million taels of Chinese capital was invested
in foreign enterprise by the tum of the century. Chinese
then owned about 40 percent of the stock of Western firms
103. Esherick, "Harvard on China," p. 12.
104. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic De'Jelopment in China, pp. 142,
255, 257; Demberger, "The Role of the Foreigner," p. 30; Mitchell,
Industrialization o/the Western Pacific, p. 107; Feuerwerker, China's Early
Industrialization, p. 6.
105. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, p. 143.
106. Ibid., pp. 144-45.
107. See Alfred Feuerwerker, "China's Nineteenth Century Industriali
zation: The Case of the Hanyehping Coal and Iron Company, Limited,"
in C.D. Cowan ed., The Economic Developments o/China and Japan: Studies
in Economic History and Political Economy (New York: Praeger, 1964).
lOS. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China pp. 143,
14S; Mitchell, Industrialization o/the Western Pacific, p. 111.
61
and held shares in roughly 60 percent of all foreign firms in
China.
l09
Whereas Nathan concludes that this Chinese
ownership of stock reflected an equal relationship between
China and the imperialist powers, Esherick aptly argues
that it simply meant that developmental capital needed for
Chinese enterprise was channeled elsewhere, while control
remained squarely in foreign hands.
llo
Real estate specula
tion in the treaty port areas, a prototype of non-productive
investment, was another favored Chinese investment
outlet.
The security of extraterritoriality also attracted sub
stantial Chinese deposits in foreign banks; to the extent
that these banks siphoned capital overseas, vital resources
were removed from the local economy. By granting them
rights to issue bank notes, the institution of extraterritorial
ity enhanced the position of foreign banks. In 1936 the
volume of the circulation of bank notes in China amounted
to Chinese $360.8 million. When the notes were issued to
finance foreign trade, they were "tantamount to an export
of capital from China. "111 When a bank went bankrupt, for
instance, and did not redeem the notes, it was equivalent to
an unpaid debt to the Chinese public. In sum, the protec
tion which extraterritoriality provided the foreign enter
prises gave them a decisive advantage over Chinese com
petitors and created the conditions for an indirect attack on
native Chinese industries. "From the available evi
dence, ... in the absence of foreign competition Chinese
firms might have grown even faster and carried the whole
modem sector of the economy along with them. "112 In
short, the favored position of international capital in China
and the perpetuation of the weakness of the Chinese state
through the uses of imperialist power left Chinese firms
unable to compete effectively in the most lucrative sectors.
In considering the impact of the drainage of wealth on
native Chinese industries, one is again faced with the un
founded assertions of Lippit and Nathan. Lippit and
Nathan both argue that the total outflow, measured against
the massive body of the Chinese economy, was not very
significant; terminating that drain, in itself, was unlikely to
provide a thrust for development. Lippit's conclusion is
based on the annual inpayments and outpayments on for
eign investments (loans and direct investment) in China.
Nathan's conclusion is based on indemnities and unfavor
able terms of trade. 113 It is obvious, first of all, that each
writer ignores important capital flows that the other takes
into account. Throughout the period 1913-1930, the
inflow-outflow ratio based on loans and direct investment
was only one to three. 114 To this must be added the stagger
ing cost of the Boxer and Japanese indemnities. Between
1895 and 1911, the amount paid to foreign creditors for the
Boxer indemnity and for the loans covering the Japanese
indemnity amounted to "more than twice the size of the
109. Murphey, The Treaty Ports, p. 20.
110. Nathan, "Imperialism's Effects on China," p. 5; Esherick, "Harvard
on China," p. 13.
111. Hou, Foreign Investment and Industrial Development in China, p. 57.
112. Feuerwerker, China's Early Industrialization, p. 17.
113. Lippit, "Development of Underdevelopment in China," p. 279;
Nathan, "Imperialism's Effects on China," p. 5.
114. Feuerwerker, Economic Trends, p. 79.
total initial capitalization of all foreign, Sino-foreign and
Chinese owned manufacturing enterprises established be
tween 1895 and 1913."115 In words which appeared, oddly
enough, in Nathan's article, "The treaties involved China
in financial obligations to foreigners that were crippling to
government finance ..."116 As Feuerwerker notes, the
debt service on domestic and foreign loans together with
military expenditure made up at least 8 percent of the total
annual outlay; after administrative costs were met, nothing
was left for developmental investment.
117
The Chinese government was also prevented from
protecting nascent industries against foreign competition
by the foreign restrictions on the use of tariffs through their
control of customs. The evidence does not support Lippit's
claim that". . . in the aggregate. . . foreign control of the
customs was not seriously inimical to Chinese develop
ment. "118 The tariff rates fixed at the time of the Treaty of
Nanking were approximately 5 percent for all imported
articles. For many years after 1903 the effective rate was
never more than 4 percent. Not until 1929 did the ratio rise
to 8.5 percent. 119 Blaming the Chinese government for not
providing similar security for Chinese industry is naive. As
Esherick responds, the coexistence of a strong sovereign
China, "capable of providing a political and economic 'en
vironment conducive to domestic capital formation,' "120
and a foreign presence over which it has no jurisdiction or
control, was inconceivable. The Chinese government did
make such attempts but the imperialist powers refused to
cooperate.
Important testimony with regard to the depressing
effects of imperialism on China's industrial growth is found
in the Chinese experience during World War I. According
to evidence provided by John Chang, Chinese industry
underwent its greatest growth during this period. When the
foreign powers turned their attention to the war, the rate of
industrial growth reached 13.4 percent. Chinese industry
suffered its steepest decline when the imperialists returned;
between 1923 and 1936 the industrial growth rate slowed to
8.7 percent. 121
To show how imperialism contributed to shaping the
bourgeoisie and proletariat, it is first necessary to demon
strate that imperialism did in fact playa significant role in
hindering the development of independent Chinese enter
prise. The portrayal of imperialism outlined above demon
strates important facets of the process of thwarting the
growth of a strong nationalist bourgeoisie. In place of a
strong independent national bourgeoisie, imperialism con
tributed to the shaping of a national bourgeoisie-among
whose ranks merchants and bankers were the majority and
industrialists the small minority 122-and an intermediary
115. Feuerwerker, The Chinese Economy, p. 72.
116. Nathan, "Imperialism's Effects on China," p. 4.
117. Feuerwerker, Economic Trends, p. 78.
118. Lippit, "Development of Underdevelopment in China," p. 280.
119. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, pp.
107-08.
120. Esherick, "Harvard on China," pp. 13-14.
121. Chang, Industrial Development in Pre-Communist China, p. 71. See
also Mitchell, Industrialization of the Western Pacific, p. 99 and Esherick,
"Harvard on China," p. 13.
122. Marie-Claire Bergere, "The Role of the Bourgeoisie," in Mary C.
62
1
,
class of brokers for foreign capital, the compradors. Ches
neaux, LeBarbier, and Bergere suggest, however, that
"Instead of identifying a national wing and a comprador
wing within Chinese capitalism, it would be more accurate
to say that the bourgeoisie oscillated constantly between
comprador activities and national on
the economic circumstances, "123 and, I might add, polItIcal
circumstances. Some businesses capitalized and owned
purely by Chinese, such as the Steam
Navigation Company and the Impenal Bank of
employed compradors. 124 In any case, urban elites m
China remained "bound by a thousand links to the pre
capitalist or semi-feudal system of exploitation of the
land. "125 Many of these elites were absentee landlords.
Referring to this new class as the "urban ref0tn.tist elite,"
Esherick, in contrast to Bergere, asserts that It was not
sufficiently divorced from its gentry origins or sufficiently
committed to bourgeois notions of industrial development
to justify the label "bourgeoisie. "126 the
industrialization effort was too weak, Eshenck gives the
"urban reformist elite" an intermediate position, distinct
from the old gentry but not yet a bourgeoisie. However,
with the undermining of the examination system and the
devaluation of the degree-holding status, the standing of
the bourgeoisie was elevated. 127 In this way, the image of
dual Chinas-one traditional, one modem-is dispensed
with. The bourgeoisie, comprador or an
amalgam of precapitalist elements and a penpheral capital
ist variant.
In like manner the nature of the proletariat can be
depicted. Drawn predominantly from. the
" ... the proletariat was the child of ImpenalIsm m Its
. f h' h t "128 W'th
heyday m the last half 0 t e nmeteent cen ury. I
the beginning of the twentieth century came the enlarge
ment of the proletariat which had begun to form over the
previous decades. Using narrow for a modem
industrial proletariat, we find that thiS class grew from
about one hundred thousand in 1895 to one and one-half
million in 1919, reaching three million in the mid-1920s.
Thus, the proletariat emerged under the of
perialism: it was centered in the areas high foreign
penetration and in foreign industry; and It engaged re
peatedly and directly in conflicts foreign capital
political power. By the early twentIeth century approxI
mately forty percent of the industrial workforce was e?I
ployed in foreign enterprises. Nevertheless, the
was less than one percent of the vast populatIon of
China. 129
Wright ed., China in Revolution: The First Phase /900-/913 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1968), p. 238.
123. Chesneaux, LeBarbier, and Bergere, Chinafrom the /9// Revolution
to Liberation, p. 118.
124. Huo, The Comprador in NineteenthCentury China, p. 5.
125. Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy ofthe Chinese Revolution (Stanford: Stan
ford University Press, 1961), p. 31.
126. Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China, pp. 68-69.
127. Wakeman, The Fall ofImperial China, p. 234.
128. Mark Selden, "The Proletariat, Revolutionary Change and the
in China and Japan, 1850-1950" (Fernand Braudel Center OccasIOnal
Paper, 1981), p. 2.
Conclusion
To return to the original point, imperialism, in its
refraction through the political economy of China, shaped
the new configurations of class and state in China. Im
perialism stimulated and shaped both a bo1;"'
geoisie and a proletariat while to the
cation of the landlord-peasant contradictIon. In both City
and countryside imperialism contributed to establishing
new parameters for the inter-related class and national
struggles. . .
The analysis here has focused on the mteractlOn of
expanding imperialist powers, themselves locked in com
petitive struggle, the peripheral Chinese state, and th.e
changing Chinese class structure. Important aspects of thiS
interactive framework include the role of a comprador class
as an intermediary between the Chinese state and imperial
ist power, the striving by both Chinese and foreign interest
for control of China's surplus for purposes of accumula
tion, and the balance of forces and mechanisms of the class
struggle. To confine the discussion to the
activities and structure of commerCial, mdustnal, and fi
)
nancial capital, as well as the political-military impact, as
I
do Peck, Esherick, Moulder, Nathan, and Lippit, is to miss
the particular quality of dynamism of the phenomenon of
imperialism and revolution.
1
Lippit's work well illustrates this problem, because
among these writers he alone does deal with role of
1
class formation in the underdevelopment of Chma. The
!
problem is that he does so in such a way as t;> class
i
transformation as an autonomous process-It IS mter
nal," as opposed to "external" in his dualistic approach.
locating the principal barriers to economic pr;>gress m
China in an either-or explanatory framework-either for
I
eign or domestic-Lippit fails to fo!,
;
interaction between the economic and polItical lDlpact of
imperialism and Chinese class relationships. Lippit simply
concludes that ". . . the development of underdevelop
ment in China is more properly attributable to the domestic
class structure and relations of production than to external
influence. "130 Contrary to Lippit, China did not develop in
a vacuum: China's emerging socio-economic structure was
bound up with its insertion into an evolving world capitalist
system. 131 . .
For Lippit, China's underdevelopment IS pnmarily a
function of gentry opposition to industrial development.
Indeed, some sections of the gentry, as shown above, rep
resented the most backward relations of production and
hindered the development of China's productive forces.
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), pp. 25-28,4243,47.
130. Lippit, "Development of Underdevelopment in China," p. 323.
131. In "An Afterword," Lippit endorses Griffin's position that
". . . internal and external forces, in a process of mutual causation,
intersect on each other to produce underdevelopment," but he denies this
interaction when he reiterates his thesis that"... this historical process
must be accounted for primarily by domestic factors rather than the thrust
of colonialism and imperialism, and further, that the class structure and
uses of the surplus ... were the key domestic factors." His study fails to
clarify this "mutual interaction." Victor Lippit, "The Development of
Underdevelopment in China: An Afterword," Modern China 6:1 (1980),
p. 90; K. Griffin, "The Roots of Underdevelopment: Reflections on the
129. Ibid., p. 23. See also Jean Chesneaux, The Chinese Labor Movement 63 Chinese Experience," Modern China 4:3 (1978), p. 354.
Much of the rural surplus which they cornered was squan
dered in lUxury consumption rather than productively in
vested. Moreover, imperialism, even while calling into be Critique
ing new social classes, contributed to the perpetuation of
certain precapitalist forms of Chinese social organization.
One aspect of imperialism, as Harold Isaacs observes, is
that it "defended itself by supporting all that was archaic,
conservative, and backward in that society. "132
Lippit recognizes that the network of economic exploi
tation rested solidly on the peasants, workers, and artisans;
however, by treating this as a set of fixed exploitative
relations, he leaves unexamined the crises, strains, and
disequilibria that are engendered with China's incorpora
tion into the capitalist world economy, and thus the limita
tions on imperialist expansion as well.
Another static bias is introduced into Lippit's analysis
when he gives the various elite groups-merchants, land
lords, government-officials, and the educated-a common
class identity. He leaves unexamined the alliances, strate
gies, and conflicts among various groups in China and the
linkages of such groups to the imperialist powers. Lippit
thereby fails to analyze the forces that conflict or collabo
rate in refashioning the Chinese state and economy. Lip
pit's analysis tends to obscure the impact of imperial capital
accumulation on the class structure. As Petras and Trachte
have shown, this includes: (a) class formation/small pro
prietor to landless tenant, proletarian, beggar or rich peas
ant; (b) income concentration/ redistribution/ reconcen
tration; and (c) labor market relations. 133
In sum, understanding imperialist penetration in
China and in the Third World in general requires going
beyond the dualistic and often mechanical methodologies
shared by a wide range of recent writers, besides much of
the earlier literature which they have attempted to tran
scend. The study of imperialist expansion must focus upon
the articulation of imperialist commercial and industrial
capital, supported by the imperial state, with the indige
nous class structure and the state in the periphery. The
'secret' of peripheral capitalist formation is to be found
A Journal of Socialist Theory
Published twice yearlv.
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Critique is an independent scholarly journal ,
fwnded in 1m. It atteDJ'ts to analyse
contanJX)ra.ry societ,r, both E8.st and West, from a
critical, Marxist BtendJX)int. Re jectiJlEr the concept
of Bocialillll in me country, and the idea that a
country could be both socialist and \D'ldaoocratic,
it seeks to show that the problaas of our time are
fO"erned by the DeCe88i ty for daaocratic control
over all aspects of society. absence of
deDOCratic control leads to an ineffiCient,
wsteful and hierarchically structured econaDy,
thrugh in different forms and different 'Ways
accordine to the particular society. Critique
attanrts to analyse the forms, lBvs, tendencies and
relations existillf In different countries, in the
broader perspective of the epoch. It attaapts to
dOClm!ent the developnent of socialist opp:>sition
lDOV8Dents in Dlstern furope but its t'undamentsJ.
endeavour is to develop Marxist method end
poli tical econoo:y both in principle and through
application.
Recent issues have inclooed questions of !'ernst
Jililoeophy such 88 lfilton Fisk, "Ietermination and
Dialectics", (Issues 12 and 13); Scott Meikle, "&8
Marxillll a Future", (13); G. Carchedi, "en law and
Contradiction", (16).
has also been disCllBsions of JX)litical
economy for eXBIDple, a debate between ".EruB end
B.Ticktin, "en the Nature of Market Socialism",
( 14 ); R. I.ey , "}baa Iw:embur F and the AcCUIIUl.ation
of Capital", (12).
articles at Eastern furope have
the JX)litical econany of !bland, (Issues
12,14,15,16); the crisis in the tESR, with respect
to agriculture, lBbour problaas and the second
economy, (Issues 12,13,14,15,16).
neither in the nature of imperial capital nor in the domestic
class structure of the periphery ,but in their mutual interac
tion and transformation. *
132. Isaacs, Tragedy ofthe Chinese Revolution, pp. to-II.
133. Petras, Critical Perspectives, p. 40.
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analyses of the JCF, Anf'Ola ( I 5 J, Cuba (13), the
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,
Review Essay
Rulers without Subjects
by Roland Higgins
It has been a trend for some years in Asian historiog
raphy to show that colonial regimes were not always ter
ribly inventive or creative but in fact were often construc
ted on the foundations of previously existing, indigenous
regimes. Thus, the European powers often unintentionally
ended up imitating local, usually obscured, patterns of
political or economic organization. As a result, they often
helped preserve and maintain certain traditional institu
tional continuities that, once revealed, help demystify and
explain much of the colonizer's apparent political genius in
achieving what would otherwise be inexplicably rapid and
complete transitions to foreign rule. In Malay history, how
ever, studies of such subtle processes are still relatively
rare. Thus, Trocki's book contributes significantly toward
filling this void for the history ofSingapore and J ohor. It is a
welcome addition to the field and should be of great in
terest to other Asianists and comparativists as well as to
those who are interested in the colonization process and the
indigenous response and relationship to it.
Nevertheless, despite the important contribution to
the history of Singapore and Johor that Trocki's work here
represents, the book does contain a couple of troublesome
aspects which detract somewhat from the overall style and
strength of the presentation. Fortunately, these aspects do
not diminish the significance of the impressive research
manifested in this book. Rather, one is merely surprised by
the degree to which certain traces of the colonialist outlook
which he so vociferously decries at the outset have crept
into his presentation in spite of his good intentions. I would
argue in fact that this is partially a consequence of the way
he has chosen to delineate his topic. By focusing almost
exclusively on the activities and perspective of a small
Malay elite and presenting their narrow point of view as
representative of the "indigenous peoples" more broadly,
he actually effaces the bulk of the Malay population from
his story, not unlike those outdated colonialist histories he
is trying to get away from. The author falls short of liberat
I
ing himself completely from the colonizer's perspective in
his interpretations and thus falls into similar traps. This
i
undermines to some extent his purpose in presenting what
is supposed to be a corrective to past histories of the region.
In this brief essay, I will attempt merely to point out more
PRINCE OF PIRATES: THE TEMENGGONGS
AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF JOHOR AND SIN
GAPORE, 1784-1885, by Carl A. Trocki. Singapore:
Singapore University Press, 1979. xxi, 251 pp. $15.00.
Distributed by Ohio University Press.
I
!
specifically what I mean since these particular criticisms
depend on a rather careful reading of the text. The main
point to be made is that a book which proclaims itself from t
I
the beginning to be both non-colonialist and to espouse a
Malay viewpoint should have been much more self-con
scious in drawing certain conclusions from the evidence
presented. Admittedly, other readers who take the book's
I
introductory claims more at face value may not share this
reviewer's sense of uneasiness at the inconsistencies man
l
ifested in various of the author's interpretations and con
clusions.
Did Malay history come to an end after the "foun
ding" of Singapore by the British in 1819? Did the indigen
I
ous people become mere passive pawns to British power?
How was Malaya's contemporary situation of communal
I
politics formed by Malay attempts to accomodate to British
presence and integrate the Chinese immigrants without
abandoning traditional institutions and priorities? These
are some of the questions Carl Trocki proposed to answer I
in his foray into the nineteenth century colonial history of
Singapore and Johor. His choice of perspective and
method differed from many previous investigations and
I
showed promise of fertile results. By inquiring into the
Malay role in the British takeover of Singapore and by
exploring the seldom-used documentation of the Johor
Archives as well as other Malay sources, he has come up
with some new interpretations that not only challenge some
long-held colonial myths, but contribute to our under
standing of current problems in Malaysia and Southeast
Asia generally. Some of his findings demonstrate not only
how the British unwittingly and with Malay aid followed a
rather traditionally Malay scenario of state-building, but
also serve to restore a measure of Malay presence in a
period of history from which they have often been excluded
by the dominating influence of the colonizer's perspective
pervasive in historical sources and colonialist histories.
The author's stated goal, expressed in the Introduc
tion, is to rewrite the history of a former colony from the
viewpoint of the indigenous population, that is in this case,
the Malay viewpoint, and to "remedy the imbalance" (p.
xiv). while nevertheless avoiding "nationalist" history
which he eschews as "presumptuous for a non-Malay to
65
i
I
attempt" (p. xxi). In the first line, the author states, "No
country's history is so well documented yet so poorly un
derstood as a former colony" (p. xiii). Since the time of
Raffles and under British domination, records of all types
began to be kept by the Europeans on the development of
the colony. Subsequently, historians have relied heavily on
archival materials, which, although important, have ten
ded all too often to support the fiction that Malay history
ceased with the arrival of the British and was thereafter
subsumed under British dominance.
Trocki's goal is to correct this imbalance and to bring
this vital, continuous undercurrent of Malay history to the
fore. By focusing on the Temenggongs of lohor and their
long-term contributions to the building of lohor and Singa
pore, he demonstrated that certain continuities of Malay
sian economics and politics not only existed before the
European arrival but played an important though hereto
fore unrecognized role in the historical development of the
colony, giving it a shape it otherwise would not have had,
one which did not always work in the favor of the British,
either. Thus, Trocki's overall aim has been to demonstrate
British accomodation to the historical continuities that
have existed between the Malay past and present and about
which so many writers have been ignorant or insensitive.
To elucidate these hidden continuities that have
marked the recent past, Trocki proposed to "identify and
explain the dimensions of change in the traditional Malay
state system during the nineteenth century" (p. 207). His
method was, first to trace the history of a single line of
indigenous officials, the dynasty of Temenggongs (not a
family name, but a title, one more or less hereditary). They
were second rank officials who originally served the Bugis
chiefs of Riau and lohor, the cultural heirs of the old lohor
empire. The choice of the Temenggongs is a logical one,
since they produced three notable leaders in the history of
lohor: Abdul Rahman (r. 1806-1825), the "Prince of Pi
rates" of Trocki's title; Daing Ibrahim (r. 1841-1862),
"founder" of modern lohor; and Abu Bakar (r. 1862
1895), who, with British approval, became Sultan of lohor.
He was also the wealthiest, most prominent and influential
Malay leader of the nineteenth century. Thus, the Temeng
gongs were indisputably a noteworthy clan. To trace their
history is to discover the origin and history of the state of
Johor. Second, the author followed the development of
Malay political and economic institutions during the colo
nial period, and, third, he wished to use indigenous histori
cal materials as much as possible to complement what is
already known from European records. Although not the
first to use materials from the lohor Archives, the author is
perhaps the first to make extensive use ofthe valuable early
documents on the land tenure system concerning lohor's
gambier plantations which proved fundamental to the pros
perity of the Temenggongs.
In this book, the author has principally done two
things: first, he has traced the history of the Temenggongs
and their rise over a hundred-year period, from officials of
the court of Riau to the Sultanate of lohor. He has shown
us that their story is linked to the origin and development of
the State of lohor up to the time of its takeover by the
British. Furthermore, the way lohor developed was the
result of the Temenggongs' strenuous efforts to secure for
themselves a revenue base (they had lost their former hold
66
on trade) and to maintain a leadership role in the years
after the British acquisition of Singapore (they had lost
their position in Riau and had given up their hold on
Singapore to the British).
Secondly, the author has combined what he has ac
cumulated about the rise of the Temenggongs with infor
mation gleaned from the lohor Archives-in the main a
seldom-studied collection of detailed contractual agree
ments between the Malay leader and the kangchu or river
headmen who organized and dominated the Chinese plan
ter settlements-to give us a detailed description of the
land-based agricultural system of pepper and gambier pro
duction that dominated the lohor economy, tied it inextri
cably to Singapore, and provided the Temenggongs with a
new source of wealth and prestige.
In the author's accomplishment there is much that is
useful and valuable. In piecing together the intricacies of
the kangchu system from the archival documents, Trocki is
among the first to exploit the inherent value of these rec
ords. His account is comprehensive both on the evolution
and the functioning of the system as it developed in lohor.
If the book merits the appellation "definitive" (p. xiv) in
any respect, his discussion of the kangchu system is certainly
it. His presentation provides us with a unique view of the
pattern of agricultural settlement from its earliest stages,
how Johor became tied to the economy of Singapore both
for the financing and marketing of pepper and gambier,
and also on the exploitation of Chinese planters and labor
ers, "a system of servitude which was probably far more
destructive than old-style slavery had ever been" (p. 208).
This was a less than glorious period in Malay/Singa
pore history. The Temenggong's promotion of lohor's ag
ricultural "development" entailed the systematic exploita
tion of thousands of Chinese planters lured by promises of
success few could obtain. It also involved the latter's nearly
complete subjugation through an equally systematic effort
to promote among the planter population indulgence in
such vices as opium, alcohol, gambling, and prostitution.
This was achieved through successful combination of
Malay control, kangchu management and Singapore capital
in what was considered by interested parties as a very
profitable business enterprise. The rights to these mono
polies, known as "revenue farms," were just as eagerly, if
not more sought after by the Singapore financiers working
closely with the Malay government of Johor than invest
ment in agriculture. The planters, meanwhile, barely able
to extract themselves from all their rapidly accumulating
debts, became locked into place with little hope of escape.
Herein lies the real explanation for the relative "success"
of the lohor system in its comparison with other Malay
states of the mid to late nineteenth century.
Aside from these points, which emerge as the core of
the book, we next reconsider the author's stated goals and
the overall framework in which he has presented his re
search. Here, some contradictions seem apparent. First, as
for his desire to present a non-colonialist history that re
stores an "indigenous" or "Malay viewpoint" on events,
some qualifications seem in order. Although he desires to
demonstrate the continuing existence within British Singa
pore of traditional Malay political and economic structures
from the past, the line of argument is less than convincing
mainly because this aspect was not sustained throughout
the narrative. Also, the selection of only a few baseline
concepts from the "traditional system" (such as the divi
sion between land and sea peoples, dependence on sea
borne communications, the strategic location of the port,
and the power of the J ohor ruler, cf. p. 207) for comparison
with the later period was too rudimentary to be very enligh
tening.
On the other hand, a relatively strong case could be
made, when arguing continuities from the past, that the
Temenggongs themselves filled such a role by their sheer
perpetuation in a position of willing subservience and ser
vice to a usurping dominant power. Had they not previ
ously served the Bugis of Riau in similar fashion? When the
British arrived in Singapore, might not the Temenggong's
response have been colored by this previous experience,
this sense of deja vu? By resuming their old role as de
fenders of the entrepot (had they ever really been leaders
of a people?), were they not ensuring their continuance in
the status of members of the ruling elite? In short, the
British, by the mere act of acknowledging their hereditary
status, gained willing collaborators in the Temenggongs.
They had lost that status in the uncertain conditions of their
own Malay world. Clearly, more work in this area of tradi
tional patterns and their repetition needs to be done and
Trocki's approach is a worthwhile one which should be
continued.
Regarding the author's non-colonialist stance, Trocki
presents us on several occasions, especially at the end of
chapter five and the beginning of chapter six, with a surpris
ing overemphasis on overly praiseworthy British assess
ments of the puppet Malay ruler, Abu Bakar, without
furnishing any critical context for evaluating those assess
ments. Given the author's perspective, explicitly stated as
one that seeks to correct imbalances, we find here an unex
pectedly heavy dose of the colonizer's viewpoint served up
as balanced judgment a little too matter-of-factly. Further
along in chapter six, he accepts without challenge biased
British criteria both for contrasting other Malay states
negatively with Johor and for comparing Abu Bakar favor
ably with other Malay rulers of the time. Take the case of
Pahang and its ruler Bendahara Wan Ahmad. Here was a
rather strong Malay ruler who resisted the advances of both
Abu Bakar and the British. Yet we are told that because
Pahang was closed to European investment and followed a
"more traditional course," it was therefore inferior to
Johor (pp. 155-6).
There is perhaps a general lesson to be learned here,
namely, that in a project of this kind, it is one thing to
assume a non-colonialist perspective, whether by introduc
ing indigenous sources or by focusing on an indigenous
group whose role has been ignored or effaced by imbal
anced histories. It is quite another thing to carry one's
approach further by including a conscientious critique of
the colonialist sources, especially when one must depend
heavily on them for basic information. Thus, a more com
prehensive and satisfactory review of Abu Bakar's role in
particular should include such a dual-pronged analysis.
Similarly, one wishes the author had exercised a bit
more caution in determining what constitutes the "indigen
ous" or "Malay viewpoint" as well. The author does not
define the universe of Malays being referred to in his effort
to restore their perspective. Should we infer that the
67
Temenggong's viewpoint is a valid substitute for the Malay
viewpoint? For example, he states that, "From the Malay
viewpoint, the foundation of Singapore was seen as an
attempt to reorganize an empire on the traditional pattern"
(p. xviii). Yet, it remains less than apparent that the major
ity of Malays at the time shared the Temenggongs' view or
perceived the British takeover of Singapore in the sense
Trocki describes.
The Malay world was larger than the Temenggong's
domain and Singapore was by no means the center. At
best, it was merely one of several dispersed economic,
political and religious "centers." Nor were the Temeng
gongs the sole and unchallenged leaders in that larger
Malay world. The Temenggongs were technically out
ranked by many other Malay leaders. The author's goals
might have been better served by selecting a meta-per
spective which took into account a multiplicity of Malay
viewpoints. The result here has been to skew the story
almost as much as the outmoded colonialist histories. The
book comes much too close to being a justification for the
Temenggong's role in the colonization process. For the
most part, the Temenggongs acted quite independently
from the rest of the Malay leaders and in relative isolation
within the rest of the Malay world which in any case they
never dominated or represented.
Did the Temenggongs, on the other hand, represent
any better their own Malay followers, the sea peoples who
were their only real subjects? Consider Abdul Rahman,
the Temenggong who turned Singapore over to the British.
Although he is obviously the "Prince of Pirates" of the
book's title, we have little evidence here for his role as a
pirate leader. One cannot safely assume from scant evi
dence that the Temenggongs themselves really played an
active role in piracy (to say nothing of Abdul Rahman's
"ghost," cf. p. 210). Past tradition says the Temenggongs of
Riau were members of the aristocracy, port officials and
servants of the court. Furthermore, once Abdul Rahman's
relationship with the British was established, we do not
know that he ever left the island. Even if his Malay follow
ers then engaged in piracy, his precise link to them remains
vague. His hold over the sea peoples seems rather weak.
They numbered somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000
(1824 estimates) and, according to Trocki, "the size ofthe
population under his control was probably quite fluid. It
grew or diminished according to the general prosperity and
the strength of his position in the entrepot" (p. 45). This
leaves one wondering just how far bonds ofeither loyalty or
dependence extended between the Temenggong and his
Malay followers.
Whatever the relationship, a significant break seems
to have occurred with the signing of the 1824 Treaty. Abdul
Rahman now gave up his claim to Singapore and agreed to
aid the British in the suppression of piracy. From that date,
the Temenggong and his followers parted company. The
former chose to remain in Singapore, while his followers
became pirates. Significantly, it was the Temenggongs who
cut themselves off from their traditional followers. Thus, it
would be an error to construe that they represented any
thing larger than their own narrow personal and family
interests. In other words, they now lacked a constituency of
any size in the Malay world. At best, the Temenggongs in
the early nineteenth century were little more than disin
herited Malay princes with a small Malay following of
unstable loyalty. Their adherence to tradition did not pre
vent them from abandoning their traditional followers and
exchanging them for new non-Malay subjects.
In brief, the story that lies beneath the surface of this
book is that an uprooted line of Malay officials managed to
regain their lost status during the course of the British
takeover of Singapore by actively collaborating with the
foreigners and, in the process, they contributed to the
development of the satellite state of Johor. The British,
finding them useful, propped them up in return and helped
them maintain the illusion of retaining their fonner power
and prestige, which in any case never depended on their
keeping the trust of their Malay followers. This story re
veals much more of the accomodations, concessions and
compromises made to the British presence by the Temeng
gongs than it does of accomodations made to local condi
tions and Malay institutions by the British. One cannot fail
to notice in this account that Abu Bakar's contemporaries,
the other Malay chiefs, never fully recognized the lofty
status the British usurpers bestowed on him. They never
ceased to suspect his intentions, and stood aloof from this
"Sultan of Johor" who was, after all, appointed to the
position by Queen Victoria.
Finally, in this history of the Johor rulers, one would
have wished for more consideration of the Malay people. It
is a real mystery, one the author frequently acknowledges,
that the Temenggongs' Malay followers often disappear
from view, or so it seems. Many of them, it is true, were
eliminated during the anti-piracy campaigns and, as sub
jects of the Temenggongs, they were replaced by the influx
of Chinese. One wonders, but not too romantically,
whether the remaining, "invisible" Malay population did
not reconstitute itself into another more dispersed "mari
time empire" nearby, in the interstices of the colonial
empire the Temenggongs were in the midst of helping the
British to build. This one had no apparent leaders, but
comprised boat-people (those engaged in local shipping),
pirates, smugglers, and other maritime "gypsies." Like the
Temenggongs, these people were no less "disinherited" in
this story, and, in their own less visible way, they carried
out a prolonged resistance against cooperation with the
new order being imposed in Singapore. Their resistance
was manifested in piracy (what Trocki refers to oddly as, "a
sporadic and fitful guerrilla-style war waged by small men
in small boats-mostly against each other." p. 210), smug
gling (i.e., trade outside the "system") and other officially
outlawed but traditionally acceptable ways of responding
to crises and dislocations within the cultural region. Thus,
not unlike the Temenggongs, these peoples, too, "sur
vived" in their own "traditional" way, even if their way has
yet to be researched and properly brought to light. I
imagine their telling of the Temenggongs' role in Malay
history would read quite differently.
In attempting to present a "Malay viewpoint" as a
corrective to the many biased histories of the early colonial
period, the author has assumed an important but difficult
burden, one requiring great care and critical acumen. To a
large degree he has succeeded in this effort in spite of the
few observations I have made above. The core of his re
search is a solid contribution. However, at this stage, to
fully appreciate the historical context for Trocki's work,
our understanding of the dynamics of the pre-colonial
Malay world, especially regarding such areas as the ac
cepted means by which political power was transferred and
legitimated within the Malay sphere, and conversely, how
usurpations of power were dealt with (problems which
clearly affected the Bugis, British and Temenggongs' rela
tionships with other Malay rulers), still needs to be ex
panded. As these things become better understood,
Trocki's work on the Temenggongs and the kangchu system
of Johor will gain new significance.
In addition to serving as a Malay corrective to co
lonialist histories, this book serves as an illuminating view
of Malay collaboration in the colonization process. The
Temenggongs themselves can be seen as a kind of Malay
institution which the arrival of the British helped to pre
serve long after its original function had come to an end. By
turning this "institution" to their own purposes, the British
cleverly facilitated their own rather rapid intrusion into the
Malay sphere.
In Response to Roland Higgins' Review of Prince ofPirates
by Carl A. Trocki
On the whole, I can only express my appreciation for
Roland Higgins' remarks regarding Prince of Pirates. Any
writer is grateful for a serious attempt to understand his
work, and Higgins' review represents the most comprehen
sive critique that I have seen. Likewise, he shows signifi
cant insight in his comments. That he has found some merit
in the book is flattering, if not gratifying. So far as the flaws
which he has noted, it is only reasonable to accept his
criticism in the spirit in which it was intended, that is, as an
attempt to engage in a dialogue regarding some rather
important issues and problems that one encounters in writ
ing imperial history. My response then, is less an attempt to
defend what I have written rather than an effort to clarify
the issues.
In essence Higgins has called into question a number
of statements made in the introduction and conclusion of
the book. His objections are not without substance. In
particular, he has noted a shortcoming in achieving my
stated objective of attempting to write Malayan history
from an indigenous point of view. His objection, if I am
correct, speaks to my treatment of the Temenggongs of
Johor as representative of the Malay point of view. Accor
68
ding to Higgins, I have "effaced the bulk of the Malay
population from the story." As a result, the work displays
"certain traces of the colonialist outlook" which I vocifer
ously decried at the outset. He suggests that I should have
been "much more self-conscious in drawing certain conclu
sions from the evidence presented." While there were a
number of instances in which I did present the Temeng
gongs as "representative" of the Malays-no doubt I
should have been precise in my discussion-there are
problems here that go beyond mere words. As Higgins
acknowledges, I made the conscious choice to focus "al
most exclusively on the activities and perspective of a small
Malay elite," but surely this is not at all the same as taking a
colonialist point of view.
By way of explanation of that choice, the history of the
Temenggongs provided a vehicle for unifying the study. As
a dynasty, they had a fairly clear position in the pre-British
Malayan state system, and their relations with the colonial
powers are well-documented. Beyond this, they survived.
Their story thus made possible a before-and-after type of
account. Since I was interested in documenting the impact
of colonialism on the indigenous peoples, the Temeng
gongs really provided one of the few suitable examples so
far as my own purposes were concerned. Here one of the
deciding factors was documentation. Without evidence
there can be no history, and so far as the bulk of the Malay
population is concerned, there is very little in the way of
documentary evidence. While I accept Higgins' contention
that the Temenggongs did not represent the Malay outlook,
they certainly represented a Malay outlook. I think that it is
important to understand that, so far as the Malays were
concerned, there was a plurality of outlooks. What is more
important is that among this plurality, all were not of equal
significance.
In the process of formulating my study of the Temeng
gongs, many aspects of colonial rule in other parts of a
laya began to make a certain sense. I discovered that the
Temenggongs had played an important role in helping to
establish the pattern of relations between Malays and Brit
ish in subsequent contacts. The British encountered the
Temenggongs first. Thereafter, their relationship with the
Temenggongs stood as an example-either to be dupli
cated or to be avoided-because it was the prototype.
Likewise, despite the Temenggongs' lack of status with
other Malay chiefs of the period and their rather question
able legitimlij:}', other Malay rulers saw advantages in seek
ing a similar relationship. The Temenggongs' experience is
thus useful in helping us to understand subsequent British
dealings with such states as Perak and Pahang. It is also
important in explaining the current system of domination
in modem Malaysia and Singapore. I believe that I was
rather clear about this in my conclusions. Higgins really
misses one of my basic points when he states:
The book comes much too close to being ajustificationfor the
Temenggong's role in the colonization process. For the most
part the Temenggongs acted quite independently from the
rest of the Malay leaders and in relative isolation within the
rest of the Malay world which in any case they never domi
nated or represented.
I regret having given the impression that the Temeng
gongs either represented or dominated the Malay world.
69
Clearly I would agree that they did not. They did, however,
serve as the model by which the British evaluated other
Malay rulers. They also served as intermediaries-albeit,
in seeking their own ends. At the same time, their very
success in collaborating provided a model which a number
of other rulers, such as Tengku Kudin ofSelangor and the
Mentri of Larut, sought to emulate. I do not think that I
said anywhere that this was a fortunate or a particularly
beneficial development for the mass of the population.
Indeed, the system of rule which they built-autocratic,
exploitative and opportunistic from its very inception-re
mains the very essence of the modem system of one-party
rule which prevails today in both Malaysia and Singapore. I
believe that I was rather explicit about the essentially pred
atory nature of the Temenggongs'government in the con
clusion to chapter three, and in a number ofother places. In
this case, Higgins is far too literal about the meaning of the
word "pirate." A Malay chief never had to leave his home
to be a "prince of pirates." And, insofar as their style of
"government" was concerned, the Temenggongs never
really stopped being pirates.
As for the continuity of the system, I think that it is no
accident that the former Malaysian Prime Minister, Hus
sein Onn, was the great-grandson of Temenggong Ibra
him's major chief. Nor is it surprising that his father, 000
bin Ja'afar, was a founder of the United Malay National
Organization (UMNO). It is likewise noteworthy that
other Johor families who trace their origins to the Temeng
gongs' government have enjoyed a prominence all out of
proportion to their numbers in the upper ranks of the
federal bureaucracy and in the UMNO. If we seek the
reasons for the "failure" of democratic institutions in Ma
laysia and Singapore, I think that the history of the
Temenggongs, and of their Chinese collaborators, offers
something in the way of explanation.
I
Despite certain disadvantages which my focus has en
tailed, I feel that the choice of the Temenggongs was both
I
correct and necessary. That this has occasionally made it
seem that I sympathize with or justify the Temenggongs is,
unfortunately, true. My aim was to attack a number of the
myths promoted by the colonialists which served as justifi
cations for their takeover. In particular, I was interested in I
putting to rest much of what has been said about the role of
the British as initiators rather than imitators. In so doing, it I
was necessary to demonstrate evidence of certain initia
tives on the part of the indigenous peoples-in this case,
the Temenggongs and the Chinese. The problem that arises
here is that it can often lead one into a double bind.
First, there is a tendency to view the interaction be
tween Europeans and "natives" as a struggle between
"good guys" and "bad guys." One develops a certain sym
pathy for the colonized, often seeing them as victims of
forces beyond their control. Being in some sense victims,
there is also a tendency to attribute to the colonized a
measure of virtue. Of course, there was very little that was
virtuous in the Temenggongs. It was not good guys against
bad guys, but an interaction between colonizers and col
laborators, who, over the course of the century, construc
ted a classic dependency relationship.
The other side of the bind is that to stress the short
comings of indigenous leaders, or institutions, vicious as
they indeed were, one runs the risk of providing justifica
tion for the colonial takeover. The colonialist histories,
which emphasize the "misrule and disorder" in the West
Coast states of the Peninsula, have provided the perennial
justification for the British takeover of the region in the
1870s. In attempting to explain why Johor was not subject
to a similar takeover at that time, I found it useful to serve
up "an unexpectedly heavy dose of the colonizer's view
point" at the end of chapter five and the beginning of
chapter six. In this case, the European perception of the
situation (regardless of the reality) determined their ac
tions. Higgins is correct in suggesting that my presentation
could have been more balanced. I did not intend to give the
impression that Pahang was "inferior" to Johor: the term is
Higgins', not mine. Rather, Pahang simply did not have
what Western capitalists would today call a "favorable
investment climate. "
A more fundamental issue is the question of what
constitutes an "indigenous" or a "Malay" viewpoint. Here
there is a real need for further research and much more
rigorous definition. Perhaps I was rather loose with my
characterization of the indigenous viewpoint, but what al
ternatives are there? In the place ofthe Temenggongs shall
we substitute the view of another equally narrow, unrepre
sentative elite such as that of any other Malay principality
of the period? Or, if we are looking for the "bulk" of the
Malay population, shall we put forward the sea peoples?
Or the paddy farmers? Or the jungle peoples? And from
what territory? Do we even know whether they called
themselves orang melayu during this period?
Personally, I have a great many questions about ex
actly what the term orang meJayu actually included at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. Whose definition shall
we accept? I am not sure that it actually meant anything
more than the various elite groups associated with the
Riau-Johor state system at that time. Shall we read the
ahistorical definition of Malaya promoted by the UMNO
back into the nineteenth century? Or, shall we seek one in
the writings of Munshi Abdullah, Raja Haji Ali, the author
of the Sejarah Melayu-all of whom had family trees that
were, ethnically speaking, quite diverse, including Bugi
nese, different groups of Indians, Arabs, and many others.
I wonder if "Malay" is not simply an amalgam of highly
mixed ethnic strains representing the genes ofone conquer
ing race after another. I am not raising this issue simply to
obfuscate my own imprecision. I did not realize the reasons
for that imprecision until I was in the midst of the work. I
suppose that as I went into the study I thought I already
knew what a Malay was. Under the weight of the evidence
this preconceived notion began to break down in my mind.
It did not exist, historically speaking. This is not to say that
there is not something quintessentially Malay, but I could
not name it precisely. The concept is a very elusive one.
What passes for Malay today would seem to be largely
the result of the reaction against the Chinese and the colo
nial experience. The Chinese were unusual among Asian
groups that intruded into the Malay world in that they did
not get into the Malay "gene pool." Perhaps this was
because at first they brought no women, and were thus
unable to exchange daughters for wives with the local peo
ples among whom they lived. Although many attribute the
communal isolation or fragmentation of current Malaysian
society to the arrival of Chinese women in the early twen
tieth century and the solidification of Chinese family struc
ture, I would lay the cause at the absence of women in the
earlier period-a time before colonialism, when marriage
politics might have been practiced for the purpose of mak
ing alliances. The appearance of the Europeans destroyed
the effectiveness of dynastic alliances in the Malay world
and thus helped to solidify the "racial" boundaries.
Beyond this, European perceptions have often struc
tured the very definitions and labels which we attach to the
various ethnic groups of Malaysia. Some nineteenth cen
tury writers generally referred to the Chinese as being
divided into "tribes." Some did not consider the sea peo
ples around Singapore as "Malays." For one thing, many of
them were not Muslims. I suspect that the current UMNO
definition of "Malay" owes more to Hugh Clifford, Frank
Swettenham and Richard Winstedt than to any less system
atic indigenous source. In the creation of a racially-based
power structure in the Malay world, the races themselves
were remolded and often redefined.
None of this, of course, alters the accuracy of Higgins'
comments or the imprecision with which I used the term
Malay in my book. The simple fact is that a great deal more
work needs to be done on these subjects. I am satisfied that
my book has attracted the attention of serious critics. His
comments have been most helpful to me in understanding
my own work. I am also happy to have had the opportunity
to reply to his comments. I hope that the questions we have
raised will stimulate further study and discussion. *
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70
Correspondence Books to Review
To the Editors,
I and my co-authors welcome the review by Tom Grun
feld of our books on Peasants and Workers in Nepal, and The
Struggle for Basic Needs in Nepal (reviewed in vol. 14, no. 3
of the Bulletin). We take note of Tom's remarks regarding
what he terms our "failure to give readers an over-all
context in which to understand the situation in west central
Nepal. Some economic statistics and class analysis for the
whole of Nepal would have been extremely useful. . . . "
This we have tried to do in a third book, Nepal in Crisis:
Growth and Stagnation at the Periphery, published in 1980 by
Oxford University Press. Although actually published a
little later than the other two works, Nepal in Crisis is
intended to provide the over-all context, asked for by our
reviewer, within which Peasants and Workers and subse
quently The Struggle are intended to be read. A further
study, of Population and Poverty in Nepal, is currently under
way with funding from the International Labour Organisa
tion.
Yours fraternally,
David Seddon
School of Development Studies
University of East Anglia
To the Editors:
The citation for the CIA documents which were printed
in vol. 14, no. 3 of the Bulletin is not quite correct. I found
the documents in The Declassified Documents Quarterly Cat
alog (Arlington, VA.: Carrollton Press Inc., 1981) vol. 7,
no. 1, Jan.-Mar., 1981, pp. 9A, 17B. This is a periodical
which publishes CIA, FBI, Dept. of State, etc. documents
which have been declassified. They publish a quarterly
subject index and excellent abstract which accompanies the
index-all in addition to the microfiched documents. A
very valuable research tool for BCAS readers.
All the best,
Tom Grunfeld
Empire State College
Errata
A general note about typographical and other mistakes in
the Bulletin: We are always glad to acknowledge any errors that
are likely to confuse or mislead. In all such cases, we request
your indulgence and wish to explain that we have neither proof
reading staff nor time or funds to mail galleys to authors who
reside in many parts of the world.
The following review copies have a"ived at the office of the
B ulletin./fyou are interested in reviewing one or more ofthem,
write to Joe Moore, BCAS, P.O. Box R, Berthoud, Colorado
80513. Reviews of important works not listed here will be
equally welcome.
Hamza Alavi & Teodor Shanin: Introduction to the Sociology of' 'Develop
ing Societies" (Monthly Review, 1982).
Noam Chomsky: Myth and Ideology in U.S. Foreign Policy (East Timor
Human Rights Comm., 1982).
Herbert J. Ellison (ed.): The Sino-Soviet Conflict: A Global Perspective
(Univ. of Washington, 1982).
Cheryl Payer: The World Bank: A CriticalAnolysis (Monthly Review, 1982).
William G. Rosenberg & Marilyn B. Young: Transforming Russia and
China: Revolutionary Struggle in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1982).
Eric R. Wolf: Europe and the People without History (U. California Press,
1982).
East Asia
Otto Braun: A Comintern Agent in China, 1932-39 (Stanford Univ. Press,
1982).
Anthony B. Chan: Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World (New Star
Books, 1983).
K.K. Fung (ed.): Social Needs versus Economic Efficiency in China: Sun
Yefang's Critique ofSocialist Economics (M.E. Sharpe, 1982).
Stevan Harrell: Ploughshare Village: Culture and Context in Taiwan (Univ.
of Washington Press, 1982).
Michael Kahn-Ackermann: China: Within the Outer Gate (Marco Polo
Press, 1982).
Harish Kapur: The Awakening Giant: China's Ascension in World Politics
(Martinus Nijhoff, 1981).
Nicholas R. Lardy & Kenneth Lieberthal (eds.): Chen Yun's Strategy for
China's Development: A Non-Maoist Alternative (M.E. Sharpe, 1983).
Helmut Martin: Cult & Canon: The Origins andDevelopmentofStateMaoism
(M.E. Sharpe, 1982).
Peter Richardson: Chinese Mine Labour in the Transvaal (Humanities Press,
1982).
Mark Selden & Victor Lippit (eds.): The Transition to Socialism in China
(M.E. Sharpe, 1982).
Lynda Shaffer: Mao and the Workers: The Hunan Labor Movement, 1920
1923 (M.E. Sharpe, 1982).
Claude Widor (ed.): Documents on the Chinese Democratic Movement,
1978-1980: Unofficial Magazines and_Wall Posters (Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences SociaIes, Paris, 1981).
Brantly Womack: The Foundations ofMao Zedong's Political Thought 1917
1935 (Univ. Press ofHawaii, 1982).
Jonathan Unger: Education Under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton
Schools, 1960-1980 (Columbia Univ. Press, 1982).
South Asia
M.L. Dewan: Agriculture and Rural Development in India: A Case Study on
the Dignity ofLabour (Humanities Press, 1983).
Mark Juergensmeyer: Religion as Social Vision: The Movement against
Untouchability in 20th Century Punjab (Univ. ofCalifornia Press, 1982).
Ram Chandra Prasad: Early English Travellers in India (Motilal Banar
sidass, Delhi, 1980).
S.A. Shah (ed.): India: Degradation and Development, Pt. I (M. Ven
katarangaiya Foundation, 1982).
M.S. Venkataremani: The American Role inPalcistan, 1947-1958 (Human
ities Press, 1982).
Denis von der Weid & Guy Poitevin: Roots ofa Peasant Apprai
sal ofthe Movement Initiated byRural Community Development Association
(Shubhada-Sarswat Pubs., Pune, 1981).
A. Jeyaratnam Wilson & Dennis Dalton (eds.): The States ofSouth Asia:
Problems ofnational Integration (Univ. Press ofHawaii, 1982).
Northeast Asia
In Asoka Bandrage's article in Vol. 14 No. 3 (July
Thomas W. Burkman: The Education of Japan: Educational and Social
Sept. 1982), the explanation of ** in Figure 1 on page 17
Reform (MacArthur Memorial, 1982).
should read: ** Dominant social relations during pre-colo
E.N. Castle & K. Hemmi (eds.): U.S.-Japanese Agricultural Trade Rela
nial period.
tions (Resources for the Future, 1982).
C. Harvey Gardiner: Pawns in a Triangle ofHate: The and
the United States (Univ. ofWashington, 1981).
71
Yoshiko Uchida: Desert Exile: The Uprooting ofa Japanese American Family
(Univ. of Washington Press, 1982).
Peter H. Lee (ed.): Anthology ofKorean Literature from Early Times to the
Nineteenth Century (Univ. Press of Hawaii, 1981).
Dae-Sook Sub: Korean Communism 1945-1980: A Reference Guide to the
Political System (Univ. Press of Hawaii, 1981).
Southeast Asia
Jill Jolliffe: East Timor: Nationalism & Colonialism (Univ. of Queensland,
1978).
Heri Akhmadi: Breaking the Chains ofOppression ofthe Indonesian People
(Cornell Univ., 1981).
Indonesian Documentation and Information Centre (ed.): Indonesian
Workers and their Right to Organise (INDOC, 1981).
Alfons van der Kraan: Lombok: Conquest, Colonization and Underdevelop
ment, 1870-1940 (Heinemann Educational Books, 1980).
Hamish McDonald: Suharto's Indonesia (Univ. Press of Hawaii, 1980).
Robert J. McMahon: Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the
Struggle forlndonesian Independence, 1945-49 (Cornell, 1981).
Chr. L.M. Penden. (ed.): Indonesia: Selected Documents on Colonialism and
Nationalism, 1830-1942 (Univ. of Queensland, 1977).
John P. Craven: The Management of Pacific Marine Resources: Present
Problems and Future Trends (Westview Press, 1982).
Micronesia Support Committee & Pacific Concerns Resource Center:
From Trusteeship to ... ?, 2nd ed., (Honolulu, 1982).
S. Husin Ali: The Malays: Their Problems and Future (Heinemann Asia,
1981).
W. Bello, D. Kinley & E. Elinson: Development Debacle: The World
Bank in the Philippines (IFDP & Philippine Solidarity Network,
1982).
Benedict J. Kerkvliet: The Huk Rebellion: A Study ofPeasant Revolt in the
Philippines (U. California Press, 1982).
Jim Zwick: Militarism and Repression in the Philippines (Centre for Devel
oping-Area Studies, McGill Univ., 1983).
Peter Braestrup: Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported
and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington,
abridged ed., (Yale Univ. Press, 1983). .
Chantal Descours-Gatin & Hugues Villiers: Guide de Recherches sur Ie
Vietnam: Bibliographies, archives et Bibliotheques de France (Editions
L'Harmattan, 1983).
Gerald Cannon Hickey: Sons of the Mountains: Ethnohistory of the Viet
namese Central Highlands, 1954-1976 (Yale Univ. Press, 1982).
Gerald Cannon Hickey: Free in the Forest: Ethnohistory ofthe Vietnamese
Central Highlands, 1954-1976 (Yale Univ. Press, 1982).
Martin J. Murray: The Development of Capitalism in Colonial Indochina
(1870-1940) (Univ. of California Press, 1980).
Archimedes L.A. Patti: Why Vietnam? Prelude to America's Albatross
(Univ. of California Press, 1982).
Wallace J. Thies: When Governments Collide: Coercion and Diplomacy in the
Vietnam Conflict, 1964-1968 (Univ. of California Press, 1982).
CounterSpy
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P.O. Box 847,
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