The War Against the Working Class

by Will Podmore

  To cope with the famine, the government maintained a strict rationing system.56 Robert North judged, “Undoubtedly the Communist regime was unique among Chinese governments of the 19th and 20th centuries with respect to the efforts it made toward alleviating the inevitable mass suffering that accompanied these catastrophes.”57

  But even so, the death rate in these years was tragically far higher than normal. The worst year’s death rate was 25.4/1,000 in 1960, as against 1957’s 12/1,000. This 1960 figure was close to India’s ‘normal’ death rate, 24.6/1,000, Indonesia’s 23/1,000 and Pakistan’s 23/1,000. It was much lower than China’s 1949 figure (38/1,000) and much lower than in any year before the revolution. It was also lower than India’s in any year of British rule, which was always 30/1,000 or more. China, by cutting death rates from 38/1,000 in 1949 to 12/1,000 in 1957, had saved tens of millions of lives, the largest mortality reduction in history. In the same period, India reduced mortality only from 28 to 23/1,000 and Indonesia only from 26 to 23/1,000.

  The Chinese people worked hard to improve agriculture. They irrigated 20 per cent of the land in 1952, 50 per cent in 1978.58 This expansion, combined with the increased productivity achieved by large collective farms, allowed for big increases in double cropping.59 The communes also spread the use of improved technology, made greater use of fertilisers, and planted high-yield semi-dwarf rice on 80 per cent of China’s rice land. Michael Dillon commented, “The People’s Communes did have positive aspects, notably economies of scale when compared with small family farms and the ability to engage in the long-term planning of agricultural production.”60

  Between 1949 and 1978, food production rose by 169.6 per cent, while the population grew by 77.7 per cent. So food production per person grew from 204 kilograms to 328 kilograms. Grain output increased by 2.4 per cent a year from 1952 to 1978. By 1977, China was growing 40 per cent more food per person than India, on 14 per cent less arable land, and distributing it more equitably to a population which was 50 per cent larger.61 China had become self-sufficient in food.62 As Y. Y. Kueh pointed out, “by the close of Mao’s period China’s historic food problem was basically solved.”63

  In 1986, India’s death rate was 12 per 1,000; China’s was 7 per 1,000. India’s population was 781 million in 1986, so its excess mortality was 3.9 million in that year.64 As economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen observed of India and China, “the similarities were quite striking” in 1949, but by 1989 “there is little doubt that as far as morbidity, mortality and longevity are concerned, China has a large and decisive lead over India.”65

  More threats of war

  On 5 August 1963, US Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and British Foreign Secretary Lord Home signed a partial test ban treaty, which was aimed at isolating China. As Gordon Chang later observed, the treaty “could have been the avenue for a surprise attack on China. … [President John F.] Kennedy and his associates sought to aggravate tensions between the Soviet Union and China to the point that the Soviets would join with the US, possibly even in a military action against the PRC.”66 In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson proposed ‘joint action’ with the Soviet Union, including ‘possible agreement to cooperation in preventive military action’ against China. US officials debated a joint US-Soviet nuclear attack on China’s nuclear weapons facilities.67 So China had to prepare itself against this threat.68 In August 1964, the US government fabricated the Tonkin incident, to justify its illegal assault on Vietnam. In September, it threatened to pursue North Vietnamese planes into China’s territory.69

  The Brezhnev government, like the Indian government, refused to negotiate its borders with China, claiming that they were already defined and therefore non-negotiable. In 1968, Brezhnev stationed 16 divisions armed with heavy weaponry and missiles on the Sino-Soviet border. In the 1969 border conflict, the first casualties were Chinese. In March, Brezhnev threatened a nuclear attack on China.70 In August, a Soviet official asked the US State Department “what the US would do if the Soviet Union attacked and destroyed China’s nuclear installations.”71 Again, China had to prepare itself against this threat.72

  Rapid growth

  The World Bank’s first report on China concluded that Chinese development had been impressive. Workers’ real wages were 35 per cent higher in 1970 than in 1952. China’s state-owned enterprises provided secure jobs, cheap and decent housing, health care that was usually free of charge, social care, pensions for retired workers, and education for workers’ children.73 Workers had better food, housing, medical care, education and training opportunities than ever before. GNP per head had grown at between 2 and 2.5 per cent a year between 1957 and 1977, in spite of a 2 per cent yearly population growth. Other low-income countries had grown on average by only 1.6 per cent.

  Industry’s net output grew by 10.2 per cent a year between 1957 and 1979, well above other low-income countries’ average of 5.4 per cent.74 In the mid-1950s, China produced only 20,000 barrels of petroleum a day; by 1965, it produced 200,000 and was basically self-sufficient. Between 1952 and 1976, steel output increased from 1.4 to 31.8 million tons, coal from 66 to 617 million tons, cement from 3 to 65 million tons, timber from 11 to 51 million tons, electric power from 7 to 256 billion kilowatt hours, crude oil from virtually nothing to 104 million tons and chemical fertiliser from 39,000 to 8,693,000 tons. By the mid-1970s, China was producing large numbers of jet airplanes, heavy tractors, trains and oceangoing vessels. It became a nuclear power, with intercontinental ballistic missiles. It produced its first atomic bomb in 1964 and its first hydrogen bomb in 1967. It launched a satellite into orbit in 1970.

  By 1976, China was one of the world’s six largest industrial producers. Between 1952 and 1978, energy production grew by 10.3 per cent a year. The industrial working class grew from 3 million to 50 million. The number of scientists and technicians grew from 50,000 in 1949 to 5 million in 1979. From 1965 to 1985, China’s GDP grew by 7.49 per cent a year, more than India’s 1.7 per cent, the USA’s 1.34 per cent, Britain’s 1.6 per cent, Japan’s 4.7 per cent, South Korea’s 6.6 per cent and West Germany’s 2.7 per cent.

  From 1952 to 1972, China grew 64 per cent (34 per cent per head) per decade, compared to the Soviet Union’s 54 per cent (44 per cent per head) from 1928 to 1958, Germany’s 33 per cent (17 per cent per head) between 1880 and 1914 and Japan’s 43 per cent (28 per cent per head) between 1874 and 1929.75 The Chinese people achieved all this by their own efforts, using their country’s resources. Apart from the Soviet aid of the 1950s, which was repaid in full (and with interest) by the mid-1960s, China industrialised without foreign loans or investments.76

  The government consistently invested heavily in the health of China’s people. By the late 1970s, the health service covered, according to the World Bank, ‘nearly the entire urban and 85% of the rural population, an unrivalled achievement among low-income countries’.77 Its health care system prioritised mass sanitation, universal immunisation and preventive medicine. Opium smoking was banned. Chris Bramall, the British historian of China’s economic development, pointed out, “Large-scale vaccination programmes and improvements in sanitation (such as the anti-schistosomiasis campaigns) had a major effect in reducing death from infectious disease, especially in rural areas. In this regard China’s strategy was far more effective than India’s; in fact barely a country in the world has matched the pace of mortality reduction achieved by the People’s Republic in the postwar era. It is a classic demonstration of how a poor country can reduce mortality even in the absence of large increases in GDP per head.”78

  Between 1949 and 1957, 800 hospitals were built, the number of beds rising from 90,000 to 390,000. From 1949 to 1965, the number of doctors rose from 40,000 to 150,000. Smallpox, cholera, typhus, typhoid fever, plague and leprosy were ended. The government increased the number of midwives from 15,700 in 1950 to 35,290 in 1960. Infant mortality fell from 250/1,000 before the revolution to 20/1,000 i
n 1980. Between 1949 and 1980, life expectancy at birth nearly doubled, from 36 to 67, the biggest improvement in the world.

  The World Bank’s 1981 development report said, “China’s most remarkable achievement during the past three decades has been to make the low-income groups far better off in terms of basic needs than their counterparts in most other poor countries. They all have work; their food supply is guaranteed through a mixture of state rationing and collective self-insurance; most of their children are not only at school but are also comparatively well taught; and the great majority have access to basic health care and family planning services. Life expectancy – whose dependence on many other economic and social variables makes it probably the best single indicator of the extent of real poverty in a country – is outstandingly high for a country at China’s per capita income level.” The Bank pointed out in 1983, “the poorest people in China are far better off than their counterparts in most other developing countries.”79

  The government also consistently invested heavily in the education of China’s people. In 1949, most children did not attend school at all, fewer than 7 per cent completed primary school, about 2 per cent completed junior middle school, fewer than 1 per cent completed senior middle school and even fewer attended college. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, hundreds of thousands of primary schools and tens of thousands of secondary schools were built in rural areas to ensure that China had the skilled workers it needed for industrial growth across the country.80

  By 1976, almost all children finished primary school, more than two-thirds completed junior middle school and more than a third completed senior middle school. By 1979, primary school enrolment was 93 per cent, 30 per cent higher than developing countries’ average. Secondary school enrolment was 46 per cent, 20 per cent higher than developing countries’ average. But tertiary enrolment was below average – only 10 per 10,000, as against India’s 60.

  Bramall concluded, “China was very unusual amongst developing countries in bringing about a rapid and sustained reduction in the illiteracy rate. … late Maoist educational policy … in so far as it allowed students to gain work experience in industry … may well have accelerated the rate of growth. Late Maoist China did even better in terms of reducing educational inequality. The gap between average levels of attainment in urban and rural areas narrowed. The educational opportunities enjoyed by girls vastly increased. And the traditional link between the level of parental education and the educational opportunities enjoyed by their children was broken. … late Maoist policy expanded urban middle-school opportunities as well as opportunities in the countryside. It is therefore hard to escape the conclusion that the mass of the Chinese population gained far more than the populations of other developing countries from their government’s educational programme during the late Maoist era.”81

  As historian Jack Gray concluded, “integrated village development on the basis of the employment of surplus rural labour is probably the best way forward for most poor countries …”82 Bramall observed, “it was the diffusion of skills from urban core to rural periphery, and the learning-by-doing in the primitive rural industries of the Maoist era, which ensured that China entered the 1980s with the workforce needed for rapid industrial expansion. By 1978, an extensive manufacturing capability had been created in rural areas. … One of the attractions of this learning-by-doing hypothesis is that it explains the gradual acceleration in the growth of rural industrial output during the late 1970s. If policy change had been critical to the process, a much more abrupt discontinuity in the pace of the growth in the early 1970s (following fiscal decentralization) or in the early 1980s (as a result of liberalization of controls on ownership) would be observed. In fact, however, the change was much more gradual. … this process of urban to rural diffusion was without parallel in the developing world. It is hard to believe that the rural industrial explosion of the 1980s would have occurred in its absence.”83 Bramall summed up, “Mao in his twilight years presided over a remarkable expansion of rural industrial capability – especially skills – which laid the foundation for the extraordinary growth of the 1980s and 1990s and hence provided the basis for rural China’s ascent out of poverty.”84

  Female literacy and employment were vital to development and freedom and had the only proven effect on lowering fertility. So China’s fertility fell from 6.4 children per woman to 2.7 in the 1970s, before the one-child policy was introduced in 1979.

  Students of China agreed that Chinese women made great gains at this time. Sen praised ‘China’s excellent achievements’ in raising the quality of life for women in education, health care, employment and other aspects of gender equality.85 Delia Davin agreed, “Life expectancy, health, education, work roles, and opportunities for women all improved. Ideas about the transformation of gender roles reached far beyond the urban educated classes to which they had once been largely confined. Maoism was by no means successful in establishing gender equality, but it did preside over an impressive transformation of existing gender divisions. Perhaps most important, by successfully challenging and moving traditional gender boundaries, Maoism showed that these boundaries are not static and can be contested.”86 As Chun Lin noted, “new China’s record of pursuing gender equality was outstanding, despite many problems such as in political representation.”87 Nicholas Kristof judged, “The emancipation of women … moved China from one of the worst places in the world to be a girl to one where women have more equality than in, say, Japan or Korea.”88

  Modern scholars pointed to the Chinese people’s great achievements during the Mao era. Sen asserted, “the Maoist policies of land reform, expansion of literacy, enlargement of public health care and so on had a very favourable effect on economic growth in post-reform China. The extent to which post-reform China draws on the results achieved in pre-reform China needs greater recognition.”89 Kueh judged, “what Mao did as an economic strategist was absolutely necessary … the economic heritage of Mao has to be assessed in its entirety to include the massive material foundation in both agriculture and industry, that he helped to create with the particular economic strategy practised.”90 Maurice Meisner concluded that China’s progress resulting from the revolution ‘must be seen as one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century’. He summed up, “few events in world history have done more to better the lives of more people.”91

  Counter-revolution

  China’s capitalist class launched its coup d’état in October 1976, after Mao died in September. Mao had warned of the danger of capitalist restoration. Deng Xiao-Ping like Gorbachev promised that his reforms would democratise and revitalise the revolution. But instead they too led to counter-revolution. In 1979, a new Criminal Law listed 14 new ‘counter-revolutionary offences’ punishable by death.

  In 1975, the Fourth National People’s Congress, on Mao’s recommendation, had added to China’s constitution the rights of the people to ‘speak out freely, air views freely, hold great debates and write big character posters’. In 1980, the Fifth National People’s Congress removed from the constitution these freedoms and the right to strike. In 1982, 5,000,000 people were purged from the party and the state; in Beijing alone, 200,000 government employees were sacked. In 1983, 5,000 people were executed.92

  When Deng introduced the Household Responsibility System in 1978, rural China returned to the class system of landowners and peasants that had existed before the revolution.93 Under this system, households owned most of the means of production – capital and farm machinery. Commercial cash crops were developed, agricultural markets liberalised and US agro-business entered the Chinese economy.94 In northern China, after the collectives were dissolved, herds were distributed to individual households, which bred bigger herds leading to overgrazing.

  Some credited decollectivisation with producing faster growth, but actually the faster growth came first. Farm output increased by 8.9 per cent in 1978 and 8.6 per cent in 1979, when by early 1980 only
about 1 per cent of farm households had adopted the household responsibility system.95 Similarly, very fine weather, not decollectivisation, was responsible for the very good grain harvests of 1982 and 1983.96

  With the ending of the commune system and the commercialisation of agriculture, nearly 200 million rural workers, about half the total, were made redundant. Inequality grew hugely. All forms of social insurance worsened – pensions, social security and health cover.97 After 1980, 120 million peasants moved into cities, the world’s largest migration. Peasant smallholders became wage labourers in ‘probably the most massive class transfer in world history’.98 The working class grew from 118 million in 1978 to 369 million in 2002. It comprised 25 per cent of the world’s workers.

  China reduced poverty most in the early 1980s when the volumes of trade and foreign direct investment were still tiny.99 Domestic investment drove this economic growth, not foreign trade and capital flows. Investment accounted for more than 40 per cent of GDP.

  When the government opened the door to foreign capital, this brought major financial and industrial joint ventures, special economic zones, coastal free ports and cheap labour export-processing industries.100 The government designed the tax system, subsidies, trade rules and access to finance, all to favour foreign over domestic firms. It even failed to negotiate technology transfers. So foreign multinationals soon controlled China’s high-tech exports and China came to depend on foreign technologies. The opening-up meant a loss of the power to protect infant industries, so with these policies China could never become more than a middle-income country.101