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The Origins of China's Post-Mao Reforms
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14277 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1988 |
7,237 Words |
| Author
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Lowell Dittmer
Lowell Dittmer is professor of Political Science at the
University of California, Berkeley. |
There has been a slowly accumulating body of literature describing and analyzing China's post-Mao reforms. This is as it should be, for those reforms have been so comprehensive in their impact and so aleatory in their direction of movement that they must be expected to require close monitoring and commentary. There have also been attempts to infer from this experience the direction that the Chinese reform movement is likely to take in the foreseeable future. But there have been few efforts to trace the ancestry of the reforms through the thicket of pre-1976 political cleavages.
Inasmuch as such an attempt will here be undertaken, the presumption is of course that it will be a useful contribution to our understanding of the reforms. And useful not merely to an understanding of the recent past, but to provide at least a premonition of the future. Of course the past does not repeat itself, but nowhere else is George Santayana's dictum that those who do not understand the past are condemned to repeat it more applicable. For unlike the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese reform movement did not spring out of the mind of one great leader. It is rather the product of a confluence of thinkers and contradictory social forces that moves here in one direction and there in another without any master plan or predefined destination. In fact, China's reform movement is more clearly defined by the recent historical errors that it is trying to escape from than by any self-conscious vision of the future. It is among those historical phenomena without blueprint whose future must be found in a "tradition" constructed from its origins and historical development.
The thesis of this essay is that the Chinese reform movement is of dubious origin in the sense that it can be traced back to at least three different births: the period of the First Five-Year Plan, the period of recovery from the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. For those who claim ancestry from the 1950s, the reform represents a restoration of the noble traditions of the founding fathers of party and state; for those who trace it to the Cultural Revolution, the reform movement represents the death of a bankrupt, moribund set of institutions and the dawning of new possibilities for political and economic development. Those features of the current reform movement that are derived from the early 1960s remain fatherless. Although Deng Xiaoping, Liu Shaoqi, and most other principals of that period have since been rehabilitated, their rehabilitation seems to have been controversial, and the "revisionist" episode in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history remains in some ideological disrepute. A certain embarrassment is indicated
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