The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism

Monthly Review, Dec, 1997 by Bruce Cummings

Maurice Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996) $30.00 cloth. 544pp.

This is the best book yet to appear on the recent period of reform and de-Maoization in China, and it is likely to remain the definitive account because the "Deng Xiaoping era" has now ended with the death in 1997 of the last titan of Chinese Communism. Maurice Meisner has long been, in my view, the leading American student of China, beginning with his seminal study of the founder of Chinese Marxism, Li Dazhao. But he is also one of this country's most thoughtful intellectuals. It is his historical sensibility that distinguishes this account from so much contemporary analysis. Better than anyone else, Professor Meisner links past to present in a continuous and much-pondered narrative, about a country with a particularly tortuous twentieth-century path; where other experts seem blown this way and that by the contradictory winds emanating from Beijing in the past five decades, Meisner scrupulously weighs past interpretations against present realities and the best evidence, maintaining a steady, satisfying, and finally commanding interpretation. More than most others, also, he uses theory to guide his inquiry and to pick and choose wisely among the welter of information coming out of this fascinating country.

That theory is Marxism, wielded as a critical tool throughout the book but worn lightly, precisely because Meisner knows his Marxism so well. In the late 1990s this also comes as a breath of fresh air, because we have become so inured over the past decade to people claiming that Marx is dead. Professor Meisner effectively discriminates between the democratic and communal socialism that Marx envisioned, the state socialism of the first thirty years after the People's Republic was founded, and the bureaucratic capitalism that has held sway in the past two decades. In between we find a consistent Chinese lineage, of age-old bureaucratic practice and a power elite that endures through every change since 1949, including the revolution itself. Except for one period, that is: the Cultural Revolution. We are now expected to condemn every aspect of the Cultural Revolution and throw out its lessons, root and branch, except the lesson of the dangers of personal despotism. Meisner, to the contrary, subjects that important episode to his careful critical scrutiny--exploring Mao's personal dictatorship, the widespread chaos, death and destruction of which we are now well aware, and the truth that has been lost: that the Cultural Revolution took as its primary target the bureaucrats, and especially the high Communist Party cadres:

The Cultural Revolution raised profoundly important questions about the means and ends of socialism in the twentieth-century.... At no time in world history have the consequences of the transformation of revolutionaries into rulers been exposed so clearly.... Rarely has there been so searching an inquiry into the sources of inequality, elitism, hierarchy, and bureaucracy (p. 53).

This is but one example of Meisner's historical method, which is to weigh and assess the Chinese record honestly, avoiding none of the tough questions, exercising the moral and political judgement that falls to the historian, and doing so with the integrity of the narrative uppermost in his mind. This method is also a high tribute to the Chinese people: Meisner believes they--through sacrifices most Americans can only imagine--produced the greatest social revolution of our turbulent century; that their leaders created a proud and independent country out of the "sick man of Asia," and that the leaders and the people proceeded to develop its industrial economy at a rate comparable only to the greatest surges of growth in history (England's in the "industrial revolution" of the nineteenth-century, for example--p. 256). Unlike most other accounts, this one posits that the rapid growth of the Deng era rested on the successful creation of a modern industrial base under Mao's leadership.

Meisner does not think, however, that the PRC has ever been socialist, and the revolution still has not brought what the Chinese people demanded ever since the watershed May Fourth Movement in 1919: democracy. Furthermore the Deng era has not only reversed the progress toward socialism in the previous period, but built the foundations of a rapacious capitalism while sapping the spirits of an increasingly cynical population, and depriving millions of Chinese of the one indelible achievement of the social revolution: the right to eat, to a job, to housing, and to a rough social security. So the verdict he levies is really quite devastating: if Mao failed at democracy and building socialism, Deng began by dismissing the promise of both, only to achieve a highly inegalitarian if rapid form of capitalist growth, under the legitimation of an increasingly strident and xenophobic nationalism. It is now an entirely fair question to ask if, assuming these trends continue, the Chinese Communists have created anything enduring that would not also have been accomplished under the Nationalists (the defeated party in China's civil war, residing on Taiwan ever since). China has finally joined the world economy, after decades of trying to do something else (form a socialist world market with Moscow, pursue self-reliance), but only as a hell-bent-for-leather "Asian tiger," taking as its model Singapore under Lee Kwan Yew or South Korea under Park Chung Hee. Throughout the volume Meisner asks if there should not be something more to show for China's century of revolution and turmoil, than this restless search for wealth and power.