The Soviet Disease Spreads To China

By Arthur Waldron
 

The Chinese Communist Party's recent high-level meeting -- the Fourth Plenum of the 17th Central Committee -- concluded with a call to "strongly support the leadership of the democracy of the people by the internal democracy of the Party." Given the lack of actual democracy in China at any level, this resolution, highlighted in press reports, suggests that the Chinese party is seeking a solution to a fundamental problem in its own way. Just like the Soviet Union in its waning years, China is now grappling with increasing social complexity and differentiation, ethnic and political, which threatens the monolithic power of the Party.

Karl Marx believed that human history was a homogenizing process, in which the wheel of the dialectic gradually kneaded complexity into simplicity. Thus the myriad guilds of feudalism were replaced by the simpler structures of the industrial working class in the era of capitalism. Marx believed that ultimately the workers would become totally homogenous, a group sharing a single common interest. Once the handful of capitalists was pushed aside, a self-managing society would come into being because all its members would share the same interests.

In Eastern Europe, then the U.S.S.R., and finally in China, this prediction has proven wrong. Instead of disappearing, diverse interests have multiplied. Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reconstruct the Soviet Union in a way that would diffuse the conflicts arising under socialism and lead ultimately to what he called soglacie, or "harmony." Hu Jintao has exactly the same aim, seeking to create a "harmonious society" where a variety of disputes -- some social, some ethnic, some within the party itself -- have created a situation that is anything but harmonious.

This problem has long been recognized by socialist analysts. But the way that it is being discussed in China today is of interest above all because that country's fundamental dilemma, growing more acute by the day, is the mismatch between a complex society and a government that is unable really to manage it. It is also revealing in the stress it lays both on disharmony among ethnic groups and disharmony within the party -- such as that which, at the recent plenum, seems to have blocked any decision on the future of the putative next leader, Xi Jinping.

The Chinese discussion of the problem began during the period of liberalization under Premier Zhao Ziyang (in office 1980-87). In the Beijing Review for 1987 we find a series of articles by Luo Rongxing and others, one of which, "Different Interest Groups Under Socialism," points out how in communist China social diversity was developing, just as it had in the U.S.S.R.:

"An indisputable fact in China today is that there exist different interest groups whose understanding of the objective situation is different . . . The socialist system has the advantage of being best able to identify the interests of the people with those of society as a whole, but there are still differences of interests between different groups of people." [emphasis added]

Mr. Luo and his colleagues noted: "Since 1978 . . . the reform has diversified forms of public ownership, stimulated the growth of individual, private, and other economic sectors, developed commodity and money relations, upgraded the role of market regulation, and broken away from the absolute egalitarian distribution system. All this has meant that interest relations have changed in every respect -- making them more varied, complex, and above all more apparent than ever."

The authors then cited a host of examples. In the countryside, "Households engaged in traditional handicrafts, specialized households, collectives, companies integrating agriculture with industry and commerce, privately owned concerns and so on" -- not to mention traditional farmers -- "all have interests of their own." In the cities "people involved in industries and enterprises with different forms of ownership have different interests." The interests "of government employees and intellectuals have diverged with the reforms in the personnel system." Not to mention the "very complex relationships of interest between towns and countryside, cadres and masses, the various professions, different age groups, people with different educational levels, central and local governments, the coastal areas and the hinterland . . . and sellers and buyers. All these interest relations are shifting, creating new contradictions and conflicts which must be taken into account when considering China's economic and political reforms."

New mechanisms, they argued, must be found to represent and adjust these interests, or China's society risked disintegration, chaos, or conflict. The methods of the past could not be used. Before the reforms, "the masses and cadres were all easily led away from recognition of divergence of interests between different groups in the community: Contradictions and conflicts between people were crammed bag and baggage under the rubric of 'class struggle.'" The need for an enduring structural and institutional solution was emerging.

As China modernized after 1978, she grew wealthier and better educated. As Chinese turned their talents to a variety of tasks, quite naturally conflicts of interest developed. The problem is that the solution to the problem adopted in most countries -- namely, free expression, impartial law, and representation of interests in democratically constituted forums -- remains unacceptable to the Chinese Communist Party.

The most Mr. Luo could do was quote Li Jun of the Research Institute of China's Economic Reform to the effect that the changes in question are good for society: "It would be meaningful progress for us to recognize and understand that different interest groups do exist in our society. We would also have to make efforts to coordinate and sort out the contradictions which spring from this."

That was as far as the discussion went in the 1980s. After Li Peng became premier in April 1988, the prevailing attitude toward the topic quickly shifted. An article in Peking Review called "Controlling the Diversification of Interests" contained no discussion of how the flowering of diversification of interest in China might be accommodated, instead noting, "Future reforms and developments will largely be determined by whether effective ways to check the trend of diversification of interests and to overcome various related negative factors."

The only means proposed are "the establishment of a new series of market-oriented economic mechanisms" (although how markets would limit diversification is not made clear) and the old standbys, "to strengthen ideological education, establish the concept of putting the interests of the state and the people above all else, and subordinate local interests to overall interests. Professional ethics and social morals must be promoted. Overall, the development of socialist culture and ideology has to be accelerated." In other words, homogeneity was to be enforced and development restricted, even at the cost of social welfare. Since then the discussion has continued in China, varying with the political atmosphere, in a variety of books and articles.

Mr. Gorbachev believed that openness, or glasnost, combined with structural reform, or perestroika, would solve the problem. It did not, for although it permitted disagreements to be ventilated, it provided no mechanism for resolving them. In China today disagreements are not even officially supposed to be aired, a restriction that is leading to ever-increasing extralegal protest and disorder. If they were aired, moreover, nothing in the existing judicial and dispute resolution mechanisms is equal to the task of dealing with the proliferating new interests and their conflicts.

The question is whether the measures Mr. Hu proposes to solve this problem will have any more success than Mr. Gorbachev's -- the effect of which was to force the discarding of the single party dictatorship and its substitution by a far more complex system of government in which interests are represented and balanced, although not with complete fairness.

As in China, social order in the Soviet Union was undermined by its own development. During the Brezhnev years, the population was changing in ways that rendered it far less uniform than previously. In 1950, the year Mr. Gorbachev entered Moscow University, there were 1.25 million students enrolled in higher education, about 3% of the population, but by the late 1970s fully 10% of the Soviet population had completed college. Almost 70% had completed high school, compared with 40% in 1950. World-class skills were the order of the day in mathematics, science and engineering-and in other areas as well, though with some political camouflage required. The ability to think critically and creatively about assigned issues inevitably spilled over into thinking about unassigned, even forbidden, topics. This description applies equally to China today.

For the Soviet leadership this was an entirely unexpected and unwelcome discovery. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the regime, rather like the Chinese leadership after 1988, was increasingly intent on discouraging or suppressing sociological research that tested the limits of the Marxist predictions of "social simplification."

These issues could be resolved, some communist theorists thought. But Soviet sources representative of the Brezhnev leadership's outlook resolutely denied that stronger internal integration would arise solely from the spontaneous development of society. Rather like the second Chinese article quoted above, they insisted that if social development were not subjected to conscious, planned direction, the growth of complexity and differentiation would lead to anarchy and disintegration.

That was because even under socialism, new "contradictions" were arising. No longer were social disputes thought to be perezhitki, or "survivals," of the old society. They were recognized as nazhitki, "acquisitions" or products of socialism itself. The Chinese discussion of this problem draws on more than 20 years of debate in the Soviet Union.

Differentiation was particularly worrying with respect to ethnic questions. The words of Nikolai Leonov, the chief analyst at the KGB, are probably well known in China: "The Soviet Union resembled a chocolate bar: It was creased with the furrowed lines of future division, as if for the convenience of its consumers."

China is of course deeply worried about the ethnic tensions that began to bubble over last year. These worries are made all the more acute because the basic Soviet model of ostensibly self-governing ethnic states within a larger unit was adopted by the People's Republic as well. So terrifying was the disintegration of the Soviet Union along ethnic lines that some Chinese scholars have concluded that the idea of a union based on self-governing ethnic territories is defective. They argue that "a new meaning must be given to national self determination, in order to dilute national self-consciousness and assist the preservation of the unity of the multi-ethnic national state."

Such a view would seem to have been adopted already in China. Stress is now turning to the project of somehow making all those who dwell within the borders of the People's Republic into Chinese, part of the zhonghua minzu or "Chinese race," thus substituting ethnic homogeneity -- enforced by the flooding of minority areas with Chinese -- for the economic homogeneity that failed to appear. One need only look at the displays in Tiananmen Square for National Day of pillars representing the various ethnicities as part of a single whole to recognize the increasing emphasis on racial rather than class-based ideas of solidarity. All this is different to the experience of the Soviet Union, where the idea of a "Soviet people" or Sovetskii narod was long avoided, and invoked only very late in the day.

To which we may add an additional problem for China. In the U.S.S.R. the dissolution of the Party came as the result of the unfolding of events after Mr. Gorbachev's policies were put into place. No factionalism comparable to what we see in China today existed in the last years of the Soviet Union. Unlike the Soviet Party then, the Chinese Party today is "creased with the furrowed lines of future division."

In contrast to the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the record of the Chinese Party is one of chronic factionalism, even at times when a dominant figure such as a Mao or a Deng was present. Diversification of society only reinforces and underpins such factionalism. Weak leadership, with no individual clearly more qualified for supreme rule than another -- the situation today -- further exacerbates the situation.

Few people are more different than Mikhail Gorbachev, the humanitarian communist, and Hu Jintao, the chilly authoritarian. Yet here is Mr. Hu and the Fourth Plenum, clearly at a loss for other solutions, proposing intraparty democracy, a sort of glasnost for the few, among possible answer to challenges to harmony both in the state and within the party. This should come as no surprise. China faces the same fundamental structural problems that the Soviet Union did and will find herself walking the same road of Marxist improvisation.

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Arthur Waldron is Lauder professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania.