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The Power Game in Beijing
| Article
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16718 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1989 |
8,271 Words |
| Author
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Parris H. Chang
Parris H. Chang is professor of political science and director
of Asian studies at Penn State University; he is the author of
Power and Policy in China, Elite Conflict in the Post-Mao
China, and scores of articles on Asian affairs. |
Forty years ago, when the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was proclaimed in Beijing on October 1, 1949, China was a country that had been ravaged by decades of civil war, foreign invasion, and social upheavals--a country whose economy had been disrupted and many of its industrial centers damaged or destroyed. Within ten years after they took power, however, the Chinese communists had created a centralized and totalitarian apparatus that unified and exercised effective control over the Chinese mainland. They had also brought order out of economic chaos and launched a succession of ambitious development programs.
While the first decade of communist rule produced, on balance, a modest record of achievement in the development of the mainland economy, the second decade was beset with enormous economic difficulties from the very start. In 1958, Chairman Mao Zedong, dissatisfied with the progress of the economy during the first Five-year Plan (1953-57), launched the "Great Leap Forward" program, intending to "transform China from an agricultural into an industrial country" virtually overnight. The already ambitious output targets previously set were scrapped in favor of higher goals, which then were successively raised even higher, projecting rates of development that were unprecedented in China or anywhere else.
To speed industrialization, the regime initiated a reckless drive to mobilize millions of rural villagers throughout China to build small backyard factories using local resources for the production of pig iron, steel, and other commodities. Most startling of all, within a few months, in the fall of 1958, China's almost 750,000 collective farms were amalgamated into some 26,000 much larger communes in a move propagandized as a giant advance toward full communism but primarily designed to enhance the regime's ability to mobilize rural manpower and resources for state-directed projects.
Catastrophe soon followed. Agricultural failures and serious economic dislocations, caused by the excesses and irrationalities of the Great Leap and commune movements, were further aggravated by the sudden withdrawal of Soviet technical aid in 1960 and by natural calamities in 1959 and 1960. This produced a major economic crisis in China during 1960-62. Food rations sank to subsistence levels for the nation as a whole, and more than 20 million Chinese died due to outright starvation or poor health.
Challenge to Mao's Leadership
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