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The Maoist Legacy and Chinese Socialism

Author(s): Maurice Meisner

Source: Asian Survey , Nov., 1977, Vol. 17, No. 11 (Nov., 1977), pp. 1016-1027

Published by: University of California Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2643350

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THE MAOIST LEGACY AND CHINESE SOCIALISM

Maurice Meisner

THE DEATH OF Mao Tse-tung in September 1976

marked not only the passing of the dominant figure of modern Chinese history but also symbolized the passing of a whole generation of Chi- nese revolutionary leaders who had grown to intellectual and political maturity during the May Fourth era fifty years ago. Many members of that first generation of Chinese Marxists had fallen in the revolu-

tionary struggles of the decades prior to the Communist victory of 1949. Others fell victim to a revolutionary process of their own mak- ing, particularly during the Cultural Revolution and its traumatic aftermath; in China, as elsewhere, the revolution consumed a good many of its own children. Old-age and illness eventually removed the remaining leaders of the first generation. The year or so preceding Mao's death also saw the passing of such luminaries as Chou En-lai, Chu Teh, Tung Pi-wu, and K'ang Sheng.

Thus the year 1976 marks the final departure from the political scene of a generation of leaders who became "the old Marxist revolu- tionaries." Surely historians will record this group as among the most remarkable and important of revolutionary intelligentsias in modern

world history. For more than a half century, these leaders were the carriers of the most modern of revolutionary doctrines in the oldest of nations. They led the greatest of the 20th century revolutions, and then, as revolutionaries turned rulers, presided over the beginning of the modern transformation of the world's most populous land. They were more than simply "modernizers" or members of a "modern na- tionalist elite," for the aim of the old revolutionaries was not merely to make China modern but to make it both modern and socialist. How- ever much the members of the first generation became bitterly divided in their later years over means and methods, they remained fundamen- tally committed to achieving the Marxian-inspired socialist goals and communist visions they had adopted in their youthful days.

In the year since Mao's death, there has been a good deal of dis-

1016

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CHINESE SOCIALISM 1017

cussion about the legacy he left to a new generation of Chinese Com- munist leaders. It is often assumed that Mao left China a socialist so- ciety, or at least one moving in that direction. Many further assume that the legacy of Mao is a pristinely socialist one, and that Mao's successors need only inherit it and act in accordance with it "to con- tinue the revolution" in order to guarantee a socialist future for China. Implicit in both these assumptions is the additional assumption that the social alernatives facing China are either to move forward to socialism and communism or to retreat back to capitalism. All three assumptions seem questionable. It is the purpose of this essay to raise some questions about them by discussing certain aspects of "the Maoist legacy," which is not without its ambiguities, especially in so far as the question of the theory and practice of socialism is concerned.

The notion that all societies in the modern world are either basi- cally socialist or basically capitalist is deeply ingrained in Chinese Communist thought. From the beginning of the history of Marxism in China there was a particularly strong Chinese Marxist proclivity to adopt a universal and unilinear conception of historical development and periodization, a proclivity present well before Stalin universalized Marx's scheme of "the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe" and made it into a Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy.' Mao Tse-tung, however unorthodox he was in other areas of Marxist-Leninist theory and prac- tice, adopted the orthodox view that Chinese history followed a uni- versal pattern of historical development, with (as far as modern history was concerned) a capitalist phase of socioeconomic development pre- ceding a socialist one and with a corresponding bourgeois political stage preceding a proletarian one. In his later years, Mao also came to the less orthodox belief that the modern historical process could be reversed, that presumably socialist societies could degenerate and re- gress to capitalism. Indeed, in his last years, Mao was obsessed by the fear that China was in danger of following the same "revisionist" path as the Soviet Union, which, he was convinced, had suffered a "bourgeois restoration."

But before he came to be haunted by fears of historical regression,

1 Marx, of course, insisted that his scheme of periodization was no more than an "historical sketch" of the Western European pattern of development and was caustically critical of those who attempted to transform it into a "historico-

philosophic theory of the general path every people is fated to tread." "Letter to the Editorial Board of the Otechestvenniye Zapiski," Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow, 1953), p. 379. The universalization of the scheme was not fully laid down as a Stalinist orthodoxy until after the "Leningrad debates" of 1931. For an account of the latter, see Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 402-411. Yet as early as the 1920s, most Chinese converts to Marxism-including non-Communist and politically conservative advocates of the materialist conception of history such as Hu Han-min-were disposed to take the "sketch" as universally valid, perhaps because, as Joseph Levenson has suggested, of an intellectual and emotional need to equate Chinese history with Western his- tory. See Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (University of California Press, 1965), Vol. III, esp. pp. 48-60.

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1018 MAURICE MEISNER

Mao believed that a capitalist phase of development necessarily and logically preceded-and was the necessary prerequisite for-a socialist phase of historical development. Indeed, one of the striking features of Maoist theory prior to the mid-1950s was Mao's insistence on the "bourgeois" nature of the Chinese revolutionary process. "What, after all, is the character of the Chinese revolution at the present stage?," Mao asked in 1939. "Is it a bourgeois-democratic oy a proletarian- socialist revolution? Obviously, not the latter but the former."' That the revolutionary process would be limited to bourgeois measures for the foreseeable future was dictated by the fact that China was a "semi- colonial and semi-feudal society." Thus the main revolutionary thrust was to overthrow the forces of external imperialism and internal feudalism, not to eliminate capitalism and abolish private property. To be sure, China's bourgeois-democratic revolution would not follow the Western model, which Mao declared "obsolete," but rather would be of a "special new type" appropriate to the particular conditions of colonial and semicolonial lands. What Mao termed "the new demo- cratic revolution" would not only establish the conditions for the de- velopment of modern capitalism (whiile simultaneously establishing the preconditions for socialism), but it also was to be "led by the pro- letariat," which is to say, the Chinese Communist Party. Moreover, given favorable conditions, China's bourgeois-democratic revolution would not necessarily produce a full-blown capitalist society but rather might "enjoy a socialist future." Nonetheless, Mao insisted on a clear distinction between the two historical stages, albeit without specifying the duration between them. While the eventual aim was socialism, it was first necessary "to complete China's bourgeois-democratic revolu- tion" and only later "to transform it into a socialist revolution when all the necessary conditions are ripe."3

Conditions for socialism were not deemed to have ripened a decade later, for when the Chinese Communists assumed nationwide state power in 1949 they proclaimed the new People's Republic not a "dicta- torship of the proletariat" (the Marxist-defined political form to carry out a socialist and eventually communist reorganization of society), but rather a "people's democratic dictatorship." The term was semantically obscurantist and an ideological distortion of the political realities of the new state, but it did convey the Maoist view that the Chinese revo- lutionary process remained in its "bourgeois-democratic" stage.

There were, of course, good historical reasons for Mao's continued insistence on the "bourgeois" character of the Chinese revolution. In 1949 China was one of the most economically backward countries in the world and its people among the most impoverished. The modern sector of the economy was tiny and structurally unbalanced, largely

2 "The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party" (1939), Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking, 1967), Vol. II, p. 326.

3 Ibid., pp. 326-330.

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CHINESE SOCIALISM 1019

confined to the coastal treaty ports and Manchuria and built under foreign imperialist auspices; the modern industrial capacity of the world's most populous land was smaller than that of Belgium at the time. The vast majority of the Chinese people lived and worked in rural areas still dominated by "precapitalist" forms of socioeconomic relationships. Moreover, China was a land that lacked genuine national

unity and had yet to achieve full national independence. In short, the country which the Communists came to rule was one where bourgeois revolutionary movements had failed for over a half century, and

where previous governments had failed to create a modern nation-

state, much less promote any sustained process of modern economic development.

Thus when the Communists established the People's Republic

(PRC) in 1949, they promise not one revolution but two-a bourgeois revolution and a socialist one. The former, left unfinished by the old Kuomintang regime, was swiftly accomplished by the new Communist regime. In the early 1950s, the Communists rapidly cemented the land that Sun Yat-sen once called "a loose sheet of sand" into a modern nation-state, establishing a powerful centralized government, unifying most of the vast territories of the old empire, and instilling the Chinese people with a strong and modern sense of national identity. The long-

deferred antifeudal revolution in the countryside was carried out and completed by the end of 1952 with the conclusion of the land reform

campaign, liberating the great majority of the Chinese people fromn the more horrendous traditional forms of socioeconomic oppression.

There was little that was specifically socialist in the policies pur- sued by the Communists in the early years of the PRC. National uni- fication, national independence, and the creation of a strong central

government were, after all, the aims of the "national" or "bourgeois- democratic" revolution of the mid-1920s which the ill-fated Kuomin- tang-Communist alliance had been designed to carry out, and Which Chiang K'ai-shek strove to achieve (if futilely) in the decades after 1927. In the cities, the Communists permitted-and, indeed, encouraged- the privately owned industrial and commercial enterprises and activi-

ties of those designated as "national capitalists," at least until 1953, in accordance with Mao's dictum to control but not eliminate all ele- ments of urban and rural capitalism beneficial to the national econ- omy.4 The land reform campaign produced not a socialist agrarian economy but rather a massive class of "petty bourgeois" individual peasant owner-cultivators. The establishment of a modern centralized state and the abolition of precapitalist relations in the countryside created, in turn, the necessary preconditions for the development of modern productive forces; with. the launching of the First Five Year

4 "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship," Selected Works of Mao Tse-tttng (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1961), p. 421.

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1020 MAURICE MEISNER

Plan in 1953, the Communists began to mobilize the enormous human and material resources latent in the vast land for that eminently na- tionalist goal of modern industrial development.

The policies pursued during the first half-decade of the PRC es- sentially followed the program that Sun Yat-sen had put forward at the beginning of the century-national unification and integration,

"land to the tiller," and a plan for modern industrialization. And the Chinese Communists, to whom the task of implementing that program

fell, can claim with more justice than their vanquished Kuomintang adversaries to be the true heirs of that most eminent of modern China's bourgeois revolutionaries. The results of that now-completed bourgeois revolution are apparent. China, long one of the most wretched and impoverished of lands, today stands in the world as a powerful, inde-

pendent, and rapidly modernizing nation, albeit still a relatively poor and backward one by the standards of the advanced industrialized nations of the West.

The bourgeois phase of the Chinese revolution did not of course resemble any classic historical model, at least not any model that can be derived from Western historical experience. China's bourgeois rev- olution was carried out under the auspices of a Marxist political party proclaiming socialist and Communist goals. What remained of the

Chinese bourgeoisie, i.e., the "national capitalists," were neither the leaders of the process nor its beneficiaries. Moreover, the defining characteristic of Western bourgeois revolutions-the creation of con- ditions favorable to the flourishing of private property and capitalist economic development-by no means characterized the Chinese ver- sion. The era of "national capitalism" in the cities and the period of individual peasant proprietorship in the countryside proved to be brief. Between the years 1953 and 1957, the private sector of the urban econ- omy was effectively nationalized. And with the collectivization cam- paign of 1955-1956 private land ownership in the rural areas was all but eliminated. The brevity of the bourgeois phase was of course determined by the fact that political power was in the hands of Marxists whose objective was the abolition of private property and capitalism.

Having concluded that the essential "bourgeois" tasks had been ac- complished, they sought to bring about the second of the two revolu- tions they had promised. The era of "the transition to socialism" officially was announced in 1953 and by the late 1950s the term "dic- tatorship of the proletariat" had replaced "people's democratic dicta- torship" as the formal ideological description of the nature of state power in the PRC.

Nearly a quarter century has passed since the Chinese Communists announced the beginning of the socialist stage of the revolution. Have they succeeded in building a socialist society, as they claim? Is the People's Republic, as its leaders declare, a state under "the dictatorship of the proletariat," that is, a country in the "transitional" phase be-

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CHINESE SOCIALISM 1021

tween socialism and communism? At the close of the Maoist era, it is natural that these questions should be asked, although perhaps one is still too close to that era to have the proper historical perspective to attempt to answer them. Nonetheless, it is by no means too early to offer some tentative observations.

The socioeconomic transformation of China in the years since 1949 cannot easily be treated as simply a case study in "the moderniza- tion process," however broadly one may choose to define that rather vague concept. "Modernization," after all, does not typically involve the abolition of private property. Yet it is precisely the absence of private ownership of the means of production that is the central fea- ture of contemporary Chinese society and the starting point from which any analysis of the social nature of the PRC must begin. The nationalization of the modern sector of the urban economy and the collectivization of agriculture in the 1950s have proved to be irreversi- ble measures. And they are necessary, even if not necessarily sufficient, conditions for socialism.

The abolition of private property was accompanied by an intensive drive for industrialization, and modern industrial development is of course central to all notions of "modernization." Yet it should be kept in mind that industrialization in the PRC has been carried out under state direction and ownership, and, more importantly, was conceived not as an end in itself but rather as the means to achieve socialist ends, as essential to the erection of the material base upon which the future

socialist society necessarily would have to rest. Indeed, perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the Chinese process has been the Maoist attempt to reconcile the means of modern industrialism with the ends of socialism. In China, as in the Soviet Union, rapid industrialization inevitably produced social and ideological tendencies incongruous with the socialist future envisioned-the growth of new and privileged bureaucratic and technological elites; an increasing socioeconomic gulf between the modernizing cities and the backward countryside, an in- evitable result of a strategy of urban industrialization based upon the exploitation of the peasantry; and a tendency for the industrial values of economic rationality and bureaucratic professionalism to become the dominant social values, overwhelming and undermining the social- ist values and goals modern economic development originally was in- tended to serve.

Much of what has been distinctively "Maoist" about the Maoist era has involved efforts to avoid, or at least to mitigate, these (and other) familiar consequences of industrialization. As Maoism emerged as a distinctive strategy of socioeconomic development in the years after 1955, Maoists came to reject the hitherto accepted Soviet ortho- doxy that the combination of the nationalization of the key means of production and industrialization automatically would guarantee the

arrival of a socialist society through a more or less evolutionary process

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1022 MAURICE MEISNER

of historical development. By contrast, Maoists have demanded that modern economic development must be accompanied by (and, indeed, preceded by) "continuous" processes of struggle which radically trans-

form social relationships and popular political consciousness, a demand that socialist organizational forms and Communist values must be created in the here and now in the very process of building the material foundations of the new society-in short, the demand that "prole- tarianization" must precede "mechanization." Indeed, Mao eventually arrived at the conclusion that the socialist transformation of social relationships and consciousness were the prerequisites for, not the pro- ducts of, the development of the material forces of production. And he further concluded that prevailing conditions of economic backward- ness offered advantages for, and were not barriers to, the building of a socialist society.5

These Maoist demands and assumptions received their fullest and most pristine practical expression in the ill-fated Great Leap Forward campaign of 1958-1960. But despite the economic catastrophe into which the utopianism of the Great Leap degenerated, many of the policies and programs hastily introduced during that era survived the debacle (or were later revived) to become central features of the Maoist strategy of development. Among these one might mention the Maoist emphasis on combining industrial with agricultural production, the various programs for rural industrialization, educational policies which stress the combination of learning with productive labor, and the obligation of officials and intellectuals to periodically engage in manual labor on farms or in factories. While such policies are usually regarded as Maoist innovations, they are in fact eminently Marxist in inspiration. Karl Marx, for example, in one of his rare discussions of the measures to be undertaken in a postrevolutionary society, specifi- cally advocated the "combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries," the "gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country" through a "a more equable distribution of the popula- tion over the country," and the "combination of education with indus- trial production" as the cornerstone of educational policy.6 The Maoist socioeconomic policies which have followed from Marx's prescriptions were conceived and sanctioned not only (or even primarily) for their economic utility but also as the means to achieve classic socialist aims -the elimination of the age-old distinctions between mental and manual labor, between workers and peasants, and between town and

5 Mao's belief in the advantages of backwardness was expressed in one of its more extreme forms in his famous 1958 thesis on the virtues of being "poor and blank," and was followed two years later by the remarkable proposition that "the more backward the economy, the easier, not the more difficult, the transition from capitalism to socialism." "Reading Notes on the Soviet Union's Political Econoomy," Mao Tse-tung ssu-hsiang, wan-sui (Taipei, 1969), p. 333.

6 "Manifesto," Marx and Engels, Selected Works (Moscow, 1950), Vol. 1, pp. 50-51.

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CHINESE SOCIALISM 1023

countryside. At the close of the Maoist era, the PRC is far from realizing such ultimate Marxist goals, but the striving for them has

served to narrow the range of socioeconomic inequalities, to mitigate bureaucratic elitism, and to forestall the full differentiation of a pro- fessional vocational ethic from the Maoist political ethic. In general, the thrust of Maoism over the first quarter century of the history of the PRC has been specifically socialist and not generally "modernistic."

Yet while it might be argued that many of the socioeconomic pre- conditions for socialism were laid during the Maoist era, it hardly can be argued that it was an era which saw the creation of the essential political preconditions for socialism. Socialism, after all, demands more

than the abolition of private property and a general social leveling. It also demands that political power be exercised directly by the masses of the producers themselves to enable them to control the conditions and the products of their labor. The period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as socialism (or, more precisely, "the lower phase of communism") is politically defined in Marxist theory, is a period when the social powers usurped by the state are returned to society as a whole. It is a time when, as Marx put it,"socialism throws the political hull away."7 More specifically, under the original Marxist conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the state (both in its repressive and constructive functions) takes the form of what Marx termed "the self-government of the producers.'8

In what passed for the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in Maoist China, these Marxian socialist political conceptions and forms were nowhere to be found, either in Maoist theory or Maoist practice. If Maoism is a doctrine that is noteworthy for having confronted (even if it did not resolve) the dilemma of reconciling the means of modern economic development with socialist ends, it is most notably not a doctrine that recognizes popular democracy as both the means and ends of socialism.

Over the history of the PRC there were two conspicuous Maoist failures to deal with the critical problem of the relationship between state and society. During the Hundred Flowers campaign of 1957, Mao himself raised the question of the contradiction between "the leader- ship and the led."9 The question Mao posed was a crucial one, for in a society in which private property has been abolished, the main social division clearly is no longer economic in nature but rather political- i.e., between those who hold political power and those who do not;

7 Karl Marx, "Critical Notes on 'The King of Prussia and Social Reform,'" Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (translated by L. Easton and K. Guddat) (New York, 1967), p. 241.

8 The concept is elaborated on in Marx's analysis of the Paris Commune, gen-

erally regarded as the original Marxist model of the dictatorship of the proletariat. See "The Civil War in France," Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, pp. 429-494.

9 On The Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People (Peking, 1957), p. 9 and passim.

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1024 MAURICE MEISNER

it is the elemental distinction between the rulers and the ruled. And from the movement itself there came eminently Maoist-type attacks against bureaucratic privilege as well as widespread demands for poli- tical democracy and intellectual freedom. But the demands soon were condemned as "rightist" heresies or worse and the question Mao posed was conveniently forgotten. Indeed, Mao placed himself at the head of the witch-hunt that tragically silenced the critics he had invited to "bloom and contend." At the end, the "contradiction" between rulers and ruled remained unresolved.

Secondly, when the Cultural Revolution unfolded in 1966, Mao and Maoists launched a wholesale attack against Party and State bureaucracies. At first the movement seemed to promise a more or less democratic reorganization of the political structure in accordance with the Marxist principles derived from the model of the Paris Commune. But early in 1967 Mao began what was to prove a long and agonizing retreat from the more radical and democratic aims pro- claimed in the summer of 1966, and by 1969 the Cultural Revolution concluded with the total restoration of the supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party in its old Leninist form. If Mao can be credited with initiating the Hundred Flowers campaign and the Cultural Revolution, he must also bear a large share of the historical responsibility for their nondemocratic results-i.e., for their failure to initiate processes to make the state the servant of society rather than its master.

For almost two decades Maoists have pointed to the Soviet Union as a "negative example" for the building of a socialist society. Yet Maoists have been remarkably selective in what they have regarded as "negative" in Soviet history. They have not, for example, derived from the Soviet experience the obvious lesson that socialism is an historical impossibility without freedom and popular democracy, nor the lesson that conditions of economic backwardness and a hostile international environment cannot indefinitely be used to justify the absence of a system of internal democracy. The old Marxist dream of "the withering away of the state" may be a utopian dream, but there is hardly any- thing utopian about the hope that the Chinese people might enjoy such elemental democratic liberties as freedom of expression and asso- ciation, and the other conventional "bourgeois" liberties theoretically guaranteed in the constitution of the PRC itself. Without that modest beginning-and it was not a beginning made during the Maoist era- "the dictatorship of the proletariat," however ardently proclaimed, will remain a hollow ideological rationalization for the continued dom- inance of state over society.

The legacy of Mao Tse-tung is thus a most ambiguous one, for it is marked by a deep incongruity between its progressive socioeco- nomic achievements and its retrogressive political features, an incon- gruity that can be traced back to the Maoism of the hallowed Yenan

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CHINESE SOCIALISM 1025

era.10 On the one hand, Maoism (at least since 1955) has thrown off Stalinist orthodoxies and methods in forging a new strategy for the economic development of a backward land, a strategy that has, on balance, moved Chinese in a socialist direction. On the other hand, Maoism retained essentially Stalinist methods of bureaucratic political rule while generating its own cults, orthodoxies, and dogmas, and it has consistently suppressed intellectual and political dissent, employ- ing both its own distinctive techniques and the conventional bureau- cratic agencies of the state apparaus. Mao, to be sure, regarded bureauc- racy as the greatest of evils, but his weapon to combat the phenomenon (insofar as he was able to dispense with it) was to rely on his personal prestige and such forces as he could rally under his own banner. Neither in theory or practice does the Maoist legacy include institutional safe- guards against bureaucratic dominance, much less democratic institu- tions of popular political control.

The new rulers of the PRC, whoever they ultimately may be, undoubtedly will wrap themselves in the mantle of Maoism. They may well continue to pursue the Maoist strategy of economic development, or at least those aspects of it that are perceived to be economically efficacious, although the extent to which Maoist methods will be re- tained in practice remains highly problematic. But the question that will determine the future course of China's social development, is not simply whether Mao's successors will inherit "the Maoist legacy," for as a socialist legacy it is politically deficient. The real question, at least as far as the prospects for socialism are concerned, is whether new and future generations of Chinese will develop and expand that legacy in a fashion that will make China politically democratic and intellec- tually free. The absence of political and intellectual freedom precludes the possibility that political power in China will take the form of "the self-government of the producers," the form that is both the essential condition of socialism and the necessary precondition for its genuine emergence and development.

The prospects that the PRC might undergo some process of demo- cratic evolution in the foreseeable future are less than promising, how- ever, for both objective and subjective reasons. Not only are the neces- sary political prerequisites absent in Chinese reality but the need for them is unrecognized in "Mao Tse-tung Thought" in particular and Chinese Communist theory in general. Indeed, Chinese socio-historical conditions at the close of the Maoist era powerfully favor the rapid and continued growth of an autonomous bureaucratic state structure standing ever higher above society. First and foremost among these

10The celebrated socially liberating practices and values of the Yenan period were accompanied by the rigid crystallization of a variety of Maoist ideological orthodoxies and the systematic political and intellectual repression of those who dissented from them.

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1026 MAURICE MEISNER

conditions-one that has its roots in the Maoist era-is the absence of a dominant social class capable of restraining the independent power of the state. In original Marxist theory it was of course assumed that political power in the aftermath of a socialist revolution would be in the hands of the proletariat and would be employed for universalistic ends-the creation of a classless and stateless society. It hardly needs to be noted that this has not been the case with the Chinese Revolu- tion. During the revolutionary decades (1928-1949), Maoists turned away from the cities and were remarkably disinterested in restoring the tie between the Chinese Communist Party and the proletariat that had been severed in 1927. And in the years since 1949, the relationship between the ruling Communist Party and China's growing urban working class has been ambiguous and tenuous at best. In lieu of a politically dominant proletariat (or its functional equivalent), the socially egalitarian results of the revolution, far from initiating a process leading to the "withering away" of the state, ironically has created conditions for the state to become all the more powerful vis a vis society. The postrevolutionary history of China over the past twenty-five years offers abundant evidence in support of Max Weber's thesis that "every process of social leveling creates a favorable situation for the development of bureaucracy."'

Beyond this general condition emphasized by Weber, one might note several specific factors conducive to bureaucratic autonomy and supremacy: the persisting influence of traditional bureaucratic habits and patterns; the new bureaucratic elites and mentalities fostered by modern industrial development; the elitist implications of Leninist principles of party organization, which (as the Cultural Revolution revealed) Mao in the end was unable and unwilling to dispense with; and, closely related to the restoration of the total supremacy of the party, the political apathy of the masses in the years since the Cultural Revolution-a condition upon which bureaucracy always thrives. And perhaps the passing of Mao Tse-tung (who possessed the exceptional ability to stand above party and state institutions) has removed the last and greatest barrier to the bureaucratic institutionalization of the Chinese revolution.

Thus China today finds itself in that misty historical realm of socio-economic orders which are neither capitalist nor socialist, and which, for the lack of any more precise term, are sometimes simply labelled "postcapitalist." The PRC is not essentially capitalist because it is a society where the essential condition of capitalism has been abolished-namely, private property and private ownership of the means of production. And it is not genuinely socialist because the masses of producers do not have the means to control either the condi-

11 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Newv York: The Free Press, 1964), p. 340.

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CHINESE SOCIALISM 1027

tions and products of their labor, or the state which has become the economic manager of society and which stands above them.

Those who are committed to the view that capitalism or socialism

are the sole social alternatives in the modern world, but who remain skeptical of official claims that China today is a truly socialist society, often find it convenient to characterize the PRC as a country under- going the process of "the transition to socialism." But the eventual

consummation of that putative transition cannot be taken for granted. If China is unlikely to go back to the old pre-1949 world, it is not

necessarily the case that it will move forward to a new socialist world. "Transitional" states can become more or less permanent states and

"postcapitalist" societies can crystalize into new forms of bureaucrati- cally-dominated social orders, as the history of the Soviet Union dem- onstrates.

During the Maoist era of the history of the PRC, the impetus for

socialism and the struggle against the solidification of an autonomous bureaucracy came from the top, and principally from Mao himself. That impetus struck responsive chords in Chinese society and the Maoist version of Marxist goals were pursued through the mobilization of the masses for radical social change. It seems most improbable that any similar impetus will be forthcoming from Mao Tse-tung's succes- sors, for they are cautious men who are essentially the managers of a powerful Party-State bureaucratic apparatus which has a strong interest in its own self-preservation, and thus a vested interest in the political apathy of the masses. If much of the Maoist era was guided by the principle of "permanent revolution," it seems likely that the post-

Maoist era will be marked by the permanence of bureaucracy and its dominance over society. The first 25 years of the PRC were turbulent ones; the next quarter-century may well offer historical confirmation for the observation that "the truth of all revolutions is not that they turn into counterrevolutions but that they become boring."'12

12 Kenneth Allsop as quoted in James H. Meisel, Counter-Revolution (New York: Atherton, 1966), p. xii.

MAURICE MEISNER is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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