By successful I mean in maintaining relative party unity, work with the masses, and thus the masses trust in the party, and political and economic stability.
With the exception of the latter years of the Cultural Revolution, the CPC has been remarkably stable, ideologically consistent, and have maintained power and dominance over the Chinese state and economy. All of this is even more impressive given the fall of communist states in Europe and the rise of western/American unipolarity.
While similar tendencies have been found in the CPSU, the rise of figures like Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and especially Gorbachev, and of course their supporters within the party, makes the CPSU appear less stable and ideologically consistent compared to the CPC. Added onto this the fact that the CPC has a much larger and diverse membership, including the national bourgeoisie.
Rather than viewing this question through great man theory, I want to know how the structural formation and process of the CPC itself maintains stability, and how it’s party structure is different from the CPSU. While both parties are founded on democratic centralism, how does this manifest differently between the two? In an interview with Marxist Paul, Hakim said the ban on factions within the CPSU, while imperative during the civil war and early years of the revolution, ultimately hurt the party. He then praised the informal factionalism of the CPC: Dengists, Maoists, liberals, etc. From the outset it would appear that such a situation of factionalism should rip the party apart, but it doesn’t. Why,?
Looking at the relatively young history of communist movements and parties show that many, for material reasons, were/are unable to be stable and ideologically consistent. Again, outside factors and capitalist sabotage are of course a major contributing factor, but could there be structural elements within various parties which explain, to a certain extent, their successes or failures?
Seeing the immense progress the CPC has brought their own people and, increasingly, the people of the rest of the colonized world, means we must understand how they operate. Every party and movement will be different and adjusted to their particular circumstances and material conditions, and thus copy and pasting the CPC anywhere else will not yield positive results. However, could/should the structural basis of the CPC be applied and modified to other countries and contexts?
The biggest difference IMO, is the focus on integrating rather than de-linking with the world economy. The PRC and the USSR were both demonized cold war targets, so why did one thrive, and the other stagnate?
With the Deng Xiaoping era and the opening up to the world economy, we have the answer. The focus shifted away from a the ideological struggle that exemplified the Cultural Revolution. The lesson learnt there: you cannot better people’s material conditions, and end poverty with ideological struggle, or isolationism.
The USSR, through historical inertia, and an emphasis on siege socialism, demonstrated an unwillingness to pursue opening up. Deng Xiaoping by contrast stated: “we don’t need to be afraid to open the window just because a few flies might get in… The fresh air will do us good, and the flies are nothing to we can’t handle.”
Since then, the focus shifted to economic construction and technological advancements gained via an open market system with the west: the superiority of socialism over capitalism must come through it’s better development of the productive forces, and better ability to feed your people.
The USSR had to use spycraft to get tainted western microchips already a few years old. Yet since the 1980s the west is falling over themselves to build factories and export tech to China.
There’s a lot of nuance to this strategy, because integration with the west almost always means getting caught in the low-wage-trap, but SWCC organized this bargain in their favor. They traded limited wage exploitation, in exchange for long-term technological expertise… A strategy that’s clearly been paying off.
Some more resources here: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#is-china-state-capitalist
Isolationism is my exact problem with the DPRK and Cuba. Sure it helped ya survive 70 years but eventually it’s not gonna be viable long-term.
I find myself more and more politically aligned to Juche so isolationism will be the one thing I disagree with.
Just finished my meeting with PSL last week over this article, and I thought this could help with context of Deng (I am not a fan of him in regards to how his wing overthrew the other wing and enacted their own reforms at the cost of millions of poorer, rural workers forced to work for the capitalist enterprises without the safety net and protections offered by state jobs):
Note: Take this article with a grain of salt. This is an older article (2007-05-31) from the PSL that paints the Cultural Revolution in an overly positive light while omitting the corruption that occurred from Mao’s wing. I apologize for my ignorance on this topic. Thank you, @muad_dibber and @qwename, for enlightening me.
What do socialists defend in China today?
https://www.liberationschool.org/what-do-socialists-defend-in-china-today/
Immediately after its victory in 1949, the leadership of the Communist Party, by necessity, focused on the question of China’s economic development. Affecting the day-to-day lives of more than 500 million people, no task was more urgent than economic and social development. On this all wings of the Communist Party agreed.
How this development would take place in the context of the continued class struggle, however, became the pivot for what became known in China as the “two-line struggle” between elements of the party centered around Mao Zedong and those led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. The Mao grouping advocated socialist methods for development, including nationalized public property in the core industries and banking, centralized planning, collectivized agriculture, mobilization of the workers and peasants, and a monopoly of foreign trade. The wing led by Liu and Deng was essentially pragmatic rather than Marxist in their approach, utilizing material incentives, capitalist-style accounting methods and elements of the capitalist market—all while professing allegiance to the goal of building socialism.
In 1966, this struggle led to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a mass campaign initiated by Mao and his allies that aimed to rally the poor and the young to dislodge from positions of authority Liu, Deng and thousands of others castigated as favoring the “capitalist road” for China’s economic development.
Contrary to the presentation by bourgeois historians, the two-line struggle was not primarily over the pace of economic development in China, with Mao favoring a slower approach and Liu and Deng favoring a faster tempo. Both sides in the two-line struggle put the rapid economic development of China as a top priority.
…
Despite the historic achievements on the road to socialism during this period, a series of international events and their reflection within the Communist Party weakened the strength of the revolutionary wing of the party. The defeat of the Indonesian Revolution in 1965, the escalation of the Sino-Soviet split and the ultimate rapprochement between China and U.S. imperialism, the corresponding death of People’s Liberation Army leader Lin Biao, and the purge of other leftists—all these events laid the basis for the reemergence of the “capitalist road” grouping following Mao’s death in 1976.
At the time, some observers of the Chinese Revolution considered the accusation that certain party leaders were “capitalist roaders” to be one more rhetorical flourish or excess of the Cultural Revolution. But the accusation, as it turned out, was not overheated rhetoric at all. It was a precise and accurate description of Mao’s political opponents inside the leadership of the Communist Party.
Following Mao’s death in 1976, the left wing of the party was routed and its leaders were arrested. By 1978, the “capitalist roaders,” galvanized under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, introduced sweeping economic reforms under the newly concocted and theoretically unfounded label of “market socialism.”
These reforms led over the course of several steps to the “opening up” of China to imperialist banks and corporations. The development strategy was premised on a strategic assumption: The lure of super profits from the employment of low-wage labor in China would lead to massive capital investment by the industries and banks that possessed the most advanced technology. China would benefit in its “development” by accessing and acquiring the latest technologies.
The Chinese commune system of collectivized agriculture was also dismantled. The Chinese countryside, known throughout Asia in the decades prior to the 1970s for its egalitarian achievements and social gains for the poorest peasants, became severely stratified again.
While millions of more well-to-do peasants saw a sharp rise in their living standards, a huge mass of rural dwellers lost everything. Left to fend for themselves, they migrated by the tens of millions to urban areas seeking employment in newly created factories—many in special economic zones set aside for foreign capitalist investors. This migrant labor force, uprooted from the land, became the source of human material necessary for the establishment of a new market-based private capitalist sector.
Within 25 years, the People’s Republic of China was fully integrated into the capitalist world economy. Foreign direct investment skyrocketed as U.S., European and Japanese capital set up in China to take advantage of the huge labor pool. Transnational corporations helped create the largest industrial work force in the world.
At the same time I am disgusted by this event, I also wonder if it was unfortunately necessary to help China reach to its current state today. If events had played in a different way where Mao’s wing would have been dominant over Liu and Deng’s, could China have suffered the same fate as the USSR? In the end, the West is responsible for creating a divide between the USSR and China, hurting their relations so the West could use one enemy against the other to their advantage.
This is the second time I’m seeing the Cultural Revolution put in a good light in this post, get off your high horses you naive idealists!
The Cultural Revolution was hijacked by ultras, Lin Biao tried to assassinate Mao.
This is the Constitution of the CPC in 1969: https://fuwu.12371.cn/2014/12/24/ARTI1419387596442272.shtml, it includes this paragraph in the preamble:
林彪同志一贯高举毛泽东思想伟大红旗，最忠诚、最坚定地执行和捍卫毛泽东同志的无产阶级革命路线。林彪同志是毛泽东同志的亲密战友和接班人。
(DeepL translation) Comrade Lin Biao has consistently held high the great red flag of Mao Zedong Thought and has most faithfully and resolutely implemented and defended the proletarian revolutionary line of Comrade Mao Zedong. Comrade Lin Biao is Comrade Mao Zedong’s close comrade-in-arms and successor.
Utterly disgusting.
I’m sorry, but I believe I am in agreement with you. I am disgusted by the hijacking of the Cultural Revolution and the attempted assassination of Mao by his own close comrade. I am also open to different perspectives and want to improve my own to help humanity reach its best possible future. I intend to be a dialectical materialist and not an idealist. If my message came across as otherwise, I apologize. I am also still learning, and I only mean well. I appreciate your response as it helps me improve my understanding of China’s history. I am an American, so please forgive me if I make a bad take and/or miss important context regarding different countries’ histories. My goal is to avoid misinforming people.
Sorry I got heated up after reading the article you linked, the strong words are directed at that. I personally wish the Cultural Revolution had succeeded but alas here we are.
There will always be the risk of reactionaries sneaking into the party and climbing up to the higher ranks, or former comrades turning corrupt and endangering the the socialist cause. But that doesn’t mean we should destabilize the country just to deal with them, that only helps the reactionaries further their cause.
What everyone should learn from the Cultural Revolution is how NOT to handle internal contradictions.
Ultra-lefts love appointing kings for some reason, and think socialism is when one guy controls everything, and hand picks a sucessor. Look at the history of int’l trotskyist movement squabbles, or their historical attachment to the myth that “Lenin appointed trotsky king of the USSR”.
The lesson learnt there: you cannot better people’s material conditions, and end poverty with ideological struggle, or isolationism.
The cultural revolution lead to a drastic increase in material conditions to the vast majority of the Chinese population. This can be tracked from education to food availability.
In fact, the rural collectives, working more autonomously than they do now, were able to build industry to a scale never seen before in China. The schools they built in rural areas, which previously went ignored by the party, raised literacy rates to near 90%. That’s up from around 30% previously.
The industrialization undertaken in these areas was SO successful that Deng’s government privatized them and built upon them to “develop productive forces” that were already being developed at previously unseen speeds.
I’m not saying that the reform era is revisionist or whatever. Clearly, the strategy has worked out incredibly in many ways (and failed in others), but the idea that the cultural revolution was some kind of economic disaster that stunted industrial production is false. It’s a myth that’s carted out as justification for the reforms (which, frankly, isn’t needed because the arguments for reform can stand on their own merit).
All of this and more can be found in Dongping Han’s “The Unknown Cultural Revolution”
I’d be wary of anyone who tries to glorify the Cultural Revolution.
For example, the point about literacy rates:
From China’s second census in 1964, 233,267,947 out of 723,070,269 people over the age of 13 were illiterate, that’s 32.3%.
From China’s third census in 1982, 235,820,002 out of 1,031,882,511 people over the age of 12 were illiterate or semi illiterate, that’s 22.9%.
Note that these two statistics aren’t referring to the same thing, so the report for the third census in 1982 also mentions that the percentage of people that were illiterate and semi illiterate went down from 38.1％ in 1964 to 23.5% in 1982.
Side note: I found a site that’s supposedly “The voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA” https://revcom.us/a/174/dongping_han-en.html that mentions this book, and what do I find?
But after Mao died in 1976, top leaders in the Communist Party, headed by Deng Xiaoping, carried out a reactionary coup.
Thanks for that.
Dongping Han certainly has a negative view of Deng Xiaoping. Certainly more negative than I do. However, regardless of his line on Deng, his book is well sourced and provides a ton of on-the-ground experiences that I think are worthwhile for anyone interested in China’s revolution. Mobo Gao is also very anti-Deng, but most communists around here uphold his book for good reading on the cultural revolution, too. Michael Parenti has also called reform China revisionist, and I don’t think that invalidates his work.
I recommend checking out the book yourself, but if you’re really interested and you don’t have the time, I can go through and pull out where he’s sourcing his info and message them to you. I’m gonna check the info myself anyway because of the numbers you posted.
Just let me know.
Meritocracy seems an obvious explanation to reach for.
