G. F. Hudson on China
Education and Communism in China: An Anthology of Commentary and Documents edited by Stewart E. Fraser (Pall Mall Press £2.75)
The Chinese Road to Socialism: Economics of ,the Cultural Revolution E. L. Wheel- wright and Bruce McFarlane, with a fore- word by Joan Robinson (Monthly Review Press £3.25) These two books respectively deal with Chinese education and Chinese economics, but they are closely linked together by the fact that'in Communist China not only is the educational system geared•to planned econ- omic objectives, but the economy itself is conditioned by the ideological aim, asserted with extreme emphasis in the so-called 'Cul- tural Revolution', of turning out a particular kind of human being from schools and uni- versities. The contributors to the symposium edited by Stewart Fraser (who is Professor of International and Comparative Education at the George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, Tennessee) are mostly specialists on education, some of whom have been either teachers or students in China, while the authors of. The Chinese Road to Social- ism are two Australian economists who paid brief visits to China in 1966 and 1968 to 'sniff the economic atmosphere'.
Politically there is a wide divergence between the impressions of contemporary China conveyed by the two books. The six- teen writers in Education and Communism in China are far from being a team—they manifest a considerable variety of attitudes and opinions—but their treatment of their subjects is critical and none of them can be regarded as a committed Maoist. Wheel- wright and McFarlane, on the other hand, are enthusiasts for the ideal at which they . believe Mao to be aiming, and their book is suitably introduced with a foreword writ- ten by Britain's most eminent Maoist, who
warns the reader that the authors 'cannot give a systematic .account of GNP, growth
rates and all that', but claims that they nevertheless 'know the right questions to ask'.
The studies of the Chinese educational system in Education and C01711)11111iS171 in
China were written at various dates and it is a defect of an otherwise well produced book that it is not clearly indicated when
each contribution was completed. Some of them date from before the Cultural Revolu- tion, as is shown by their references, and these have a special value in that they describe without benefit of hindsight the situation which preceded the convulsions of the period since the summer of 1966. The Chinese Communists after their capture of power sought to achieve three basic aims in education : first, to spread some measure of education to the masses of the people, most of whom were still illiterate; second, to provide a sufficiency of scientists and technical experts for the rapid building of a modern industrial economy; and thirdly, to indoctrinate both teachers and taught at all levels with the ideology of Marxism- Leninism as interpreted by Mac; Tse-tung. In the first aim the People's Republic can claim substantial success; in spite of chronic shortages of trained teachers, textbooks and school buildings, there has been a vast expansion of primary education. The second and third aims, on the other hand, have been in conflict with each other, and the former has been subordinated to the latter to a degree highly detrimental to China's economic future. In a rigorous analysis of China's scientific manpower Cheng Chu- yuan shows that in 1965, of 188 members of the Chinese Academy, of Sciences on four departmental boards concerned with the natural sciences and technology, '143, or 76 per cent, were trained in the United States, Japan or Western Europe'; as a result of the Communist revolution the academic links with the West were disrupted -and replaced by similar contracts with the Soviet Union, but these were likewise brought to an end by the development of the Sino-Soviet dis- pute from 1960 onward. Cheng argues that the older generation of scientists, whose number is dwindling through death and retirement and who have been under fre- quent political suspicion and harassment because of their foreign connections, are not. being adequately replaced, and that 'the question is less whether China can build missiles and bombs, the technology of which was known ten to twenty years ago, than whether she can catch up with the present- day rate of technological growth in the world'.
The evidence certainly indicates what by any Western academic standards must be regarded as a serious impoverishment in Chinese higher education in recent years, not only by the virtual cessation of training abroad and foreign academic contacts, but
also by the drastic shortening of university courses, the supervision of teaching staffs by basically uneducated political cadres, the tying of all research to immediate econo- mic needs, the diversion of students into productive labour often unrelated to their specialities, the time-consuming and nerve- racking group indoctrination meetings (hsueh-hsi) and last, but, not least, the violence, disorder and vandalism of the Cultural Revolution. For Wheelwright and McFarlane, on the other hand, these are phenomena, not of sickness, but of health; they see the Cultural Revolution as essen- tially 'the promotion of the human factor in economic development', 'an attempt to avoid the elite spirit that has characterised other communist regimes', 'a conflict between revolutionaries and technocrats over the kind of society desirable for China'. They believe that 'social organisation, moral out- look and relations between people are more important than a one-sided emphasis on raising the level of production', and they are convinced that Maoism, which is 'a sort of religion', really has produced a' society in which economic effort is inspired by a selfless collectivism, without the need to rely on material incentives, and there is no desire for the 'washing machine economy'. They complain that 'the use of non-financial stimulants in Chinese economic life has been met with a wall of scepticism in the West'. It is certainly true that very few 'China- watchers' have been as willing as Wheel- wright and McFarlane to accept the claims of Maoism at their face value, but if there is indeed a 'wall of scepticism', it is at least partly because everything these authors say today about China was said about Russia a generation ago by Ella Winter, Pat Sloan and the Webbs. In our time those who can- not bear the abundance of washing machines in Canberra or Sydney no longer make the pilgrimage to Moscow; they find their utopia in Peking. But Mao is mortal and it is unlikely that his fanatic zeal will retain its potency when the People's Republic is fifty years old.
G. F. Hudson is in charge of Far Eastern Studies at St Antony's College, Oxford
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