Chinese Economic Development

152 Chinese Economic DevelopmentThe late Maoist development strategyLate Maoism broke with Stalinism in assuming that the superstructure – the systemof law, government, cultural production and ideology – was a key determinant ofthe pace of modernization. It was not enough, Mao argued, to attempt to changethe economic basis directly; that was mere economic determinism. Rather, it wasnecessary to change the superstructure as well.But what then? When the old superstructure had been torn down, what wasto be erected in its place? What type of development strategy was China topursue? The answer to that question was an alternative path to modernity thatwas neither capitalist nor Stalinist. On the one hand, Mao had long recognizedthat capitalism was no more than a cul-de-sac. Free trade offered no basis foreconomic development in a China faced by an overwhelming military threat. USinvolvement in Vietnam and deteriorating relations with the USSR made state-leddefence industrialization a priority if other developmental goals were not to becompromised. And the mass internal migration and uneven development thatwould inevitably result from the adoption of a market-orientated developmentstrategy would undercut the very promise of the Revolution that had attracted theChinese peasantry to the cause of the CCP in the first place. At the same time,and as is evident from Mao’s own critique of Stalin’s writings on economics, theSoviet road was not the answer. Not only had the Soviet bureaucracy ossified butalso the Soviet development strategy was flawed because it overemphasized urbanindustrial growth at the expense of the development of the countryside, and hadalso neglected the possibilities inherent in small-scale industrial developmentThe alternative pioneered in China during the 1960s and 1970s was a strategy of‘walking on two legs’: the balanced development of the urban and rural sectors. Interms of Marxist theory, China would combine a programme of superstructuralchange with a transformation of the economic base. In terms of practical policy,the late Maoist development strategy aimed first and foremost at the modernizationof the Chinese countryside by means of the expansion of education, ruralindustrialization and collective farming. The aim was to put the countrysideon a par with the level of development already achieved in the urban sector.The transformation of the superstructure would underpin all three of these ruralmodernization strategies.Late Maoism was thus an ambitious attempt to change Chinese society bybringing about a simultaneous transformation of the forces of production, the relationsof production and the superstructure. Superstructural transformation was tobe brought about by educational reform in the urban sector, and by using urbanyouth as teachers to bring about a vast expansion of schooling in the Chinesecountryside. Relations of production were to be based on public ownership of agriculturaland industrial assets. There was to be no going back on the transformationof property rights which had been accomplished during the 1950s. Productionin the countryside would be carried out by collectives and in border regions byquasi-military state farms. By enabling the mobilization of surplus labour, theseinstitutions would prepare farmland for mechanization and would greatly expand