Peking's new revisionists
Bohdan Nahaylo
During the long-standing rift in Sino- Soviet relations, Peking has taunted the infuriated Moscow in more ways than one. The Chinese have not only assailed the Soviet Union's pre-eminence as leader of the communist world and demanded the return of territories wrung from an en- feebled China by the Tsars, but have also sided with the West in condemning Soviet aggression and expansionism from Czechoslovakia to Afghanistan. And now, even as talks continue between the two sides about normalising relations, Peking has added the final touches to its supreme snub. With the extension of its bold pro- gramme of economic reform, the Chinese leadership has implicitly broken with the Soviet-style system of central planning and collectivised agriculture and thereby called into doubt the Kremlin's entire orthodox communist economic strategy.
Ever since the wily survivor of successive purges Deng Xiaoping came to the helm six years ago, he has turned the Chinese leviathan in an altogether different direc- tion to that plotted by Mao Tse-tung. Placing the emphasis on pragmatism, mod- ernisation and the raising of living stan- dards, he has opened up China to the outside world, purged the Chinese Com- munist Party of radical Leftists and intro- duced far-reaching reforms, first in the agricultural system and now in the urban economy. In the international sphere the country has also come into its own and the 'China card' is no longer anybody's to play.
China's adoption of 'market socialism' has brought impressive successes in the countryside. By the virtual dismantling of collectivised agriculture and the release of market forces, rural incomes have been boosted and record harvests achieved. Encouraged by these results, on 20 Octo- ber the Chinese party leadership issued its blueprint for injecting a healthy dose of capitalism into industry and commerce. Before this aspect of the ambitious reform programme has even had time to get under way, Peking has already announced that the country's national airline will be broken up into separate competing com- panies and that a measure of private medicine will be permitted.
While China's new economic course will hardly raise eyebrows in Yugoslavia or Hungary, Moscow has wasted no time in voicing its distaste. Towards the end of last month Pravda fired two broadsides against the Chinese economic initiatives. Peking was warned that the changes would result in a 'pluralistic economy' displaying such 'capitalist' ills as unemployment, inflation and disproportionate development. Pravda also pointed out that the West welcomed the reforms as 'a retreat from the models of the orthodox planned enconomy'.
The Chinese response has been to re- mind Moscow that economic reforms are long overdue in the Soviet Union. Last week the magazine Liaowang emphasised that if the Soviet leadership wishes to avoid a continuation of its chronic agricultural difficulties, it should follow China's exam- ple and 'take practical steps in manage- ment and in providing incentives for peo- ple'. The rejoinder was delivered at a particularly embarrassing moment for the Kremlin's conservative oligarchs. At the end of October a special meeting of the Central Committee was convened in Mos- cow to discuss the dismal state of Soviet agriculture. True to form, it failed to consider any substantial policy changes.
Ironically, today's Chinese 'capitalist roaders' are yesterday's stalwart defenders of Stalin's legacy who were once conde- mned by the Kremlin as 'dogmatists'. After all, in November 1960, at a closed confer- ence in Moscow attended by representa- tives of 81 Communist parties, it was none other than Deng Xiaoping, the official Chinese delegate, who accused Khruschev of 'revisionism' and 'opportunism'. The following year, during the 22nd Soviet Party Congress that marked the high point of Khrushchev's deStalinisation 'policy, Chou En-lai demonstratively laid a wreath on Stalin's tomb bearing the legend 'the great Marxist-Leninist'. How different it all seems now that the roles have been reversed. It is the Soviet Union that is currently experiencing a revival of neo-Stalinism. The deterioration in the human rights situation complete
with a series of new repressive laws, the tighten- ing of controls over cultural life, the intensification of policies aimed at the russification of the non-Russians, and the officially promoted xenophobia and siege mentality are its symptoms. The recent rehabilitation of Stalin's role in the Bolshe- vik seizure of power and the return to the USSR of the dictator's daughter Svetlana Allilueva simply confirm the diagnosis. In China, however, the shift from ideo- logy to pragmatism has brought the dis- placement of Stalin and the downgrading of Mao. What is taking place there is not simply China's equivalent of deStalinisa- tion, that is, controlled relaxation after such disastrous convulsions as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolu- tion. Rather, it resembles Lenin's New Economic Policy of the 1920s when the Soviet regime was forced as a temporary expedient to abandon its unpopular doctri- naire policies and to permit limited free enterprise and an overwhelmingly private agricultural system. Then, as in China today, the communists retained control of the 'commanding heights of the economy and utilised 'bourgeois' credits, technologY and expertise `to build socialism'. But just as the New Economic Policy did not bring any real loosening of political controls, so China's lurch toward capital- ism has not spelt political liberalisation: Flexibility there may be in the economic sphere, but that is still a long way off from political toleration and pluralism. In 1979 Deng allowed dissent to surface and then cracked down hard. The best known of the Chinese dissidents, Wei Jingsheng, was given a 15-year sentence for advocating the democratisation of Chinese society. A few weeks ago Amnesty International pub' lished a major report on human rights abuses in China, citing evidence of mass executions of so-called criminal elementS, of thousands of political prisoners held in prisons, labour and 're-education' camPs, and of the ill-treatment of prisoners. The prospects for the new Chinese re- forms are problematical, to say the least.' Difficulties range from the likely °PP.°. tion of conservative bureaucrats defenchng their vested interests, to avoiding inflation and undue unemployment. The crucial question is whether the octogenarian Deng can generate enough momentum for his reforms to ensure that they survive his death. By then it will have become clear how much revisionism in economic strategy can be accommodated within an orthodox communist political framework. In the meantime, for all its disdain, the Kremlin is certain to follow developments in China very closely indeed.
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