Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

MAO: THE KNOWN STORY
China had a well-developed industry, which was not concentrated in
urban cities but dispersed in rural areas. It was this rural industry
combined with agriculture that structured Chinese society in which the
landlord class and urban commercialization were supported. It was this
structure that enabled a rental class to collect a high rate of land tax from
the peasantry because incomes from rural industry helped sustain their
livelihoods. However, when Western industrial goods penetrated the
Chinese market, the consequences were disastrous because the collapse
of rural industry meant it became impossible for the peasantry to make
a living. Fei here only talks about normal capitalist trade penetration into
China’s interior. He was not even talking about colonial plunder and the
opium trade, for the defence of which the British launched a war. Therefore,
Fei argues, conditions were ripe for a peasant revolution. The solution
was not only land reform but also income from sources other than
land, for land was not enough to support the Chinese population. Both
solutions required the re-structuring of the Chinese society.
Today, with hindsight when the job of re-structuring Chinese society
has been accomplished, amid the triumph of liberal democracy and
market capitalism, revolutionary solutions are seen not only as excessive
but as senseless destruction. Regarding the issue of land reform in China,
He Zhiguang (2007), in a publication that appeared in the Chinese
Communist Party official historical journal Yanhuang chunqiu, asserts
that during the 1950 land reform Mao overturned Liu Shaoqi’s peaceful
reform and declares that Mao’s intervention was the first step to push
back the wheel of history in new China, because the land reform carried
out the barbaric violence of class struggle. Mao’s policy of land reform
was the first step in developing an anti-democracy, anti-humanity and
anti-science ultra-leftism, He asserts.
An alternative model of development
Ultimately the issue of evaluating contemporary China comes to the
model for modernity. According to mainstream economic history and
the history of ideas, large-scale industrialization and urbanization not
only embody the best model but an inevitable and a progressive one.
Underlying this teleological view there is an assumption of a binary
dichotomy: tradition versus modernity, rural versus urban, agriculture
versus industry, handicraft versus large-scale industry, organic versus
mechanical, status versus contracts, rule versus bureaucracy, watermill
versus steam, advanced versus backward and so on. Taking this
assumption for granted and given the empirical and daily-life
evidence of the superiority of the Western model of liberal democracy
and market capitalism the preferred development model seems
obvious.
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