Whither the State of Communism

June 1989

 

Earlier this year, at the conclusion of a five week trip to China, I sat in the soft cushioned seats of the sumptuous coffee bar of the Jinjiang hotel in Chengdu. Across marble floors I watched uniformed doormen and bellboys act out their roles under glittering chandeliers to the strains of Tim Rice canned music, while behind the hotel desk the receptionist smoothly operated a computer reservations system. Anyone cocooned in here, having run the gauntlet of money changers operating illegally but perfectly openly outside the gate, could be forgiven for thinking that China’s much heralded modernization had truly arrived.

But the Jinjiang hotel, and a handful like it in the major tourist cities are extraordinary places. Modern day equivalents of the colonial mansions on the eastern seaboard before the Communist revolution, they invite comparison with the reality that surrounds them. Exceptions to the Chinese way of life that prove the rule.

It was that eastern coastal region that the now deposed Communist Party general-secretary Zhao Ziyang attempted to open up to foreign trade and investment, and it was there that I started my journey, staying with an old Chinese friend of my missionary grandfather. His two bedroomed government apartment in a suburban highrise block was a far cry from the luxury of the Jinjiang. In the kitchen a single slab of stone drained towards a hole in one corner forming the apartment’s only sink. All hot water for cooking and washing had to be heated on the single electric ring, and we wore numerous layers of clothes as we talked, frequently by candlelight for the power cuts are without warning and of indeterminate length.

His tale can be told in one form or another by almost all the educated elderly people in China, but it is no less harrowing for that. A tale of sudden disappearance in the early seventies, followed by years of solitary confinement without charge. His wife had been paralysed by a stroke after his arrest, lying immobile for nine months moving only her eyes. In the opinion of his children, fighting death in her determination to see him once more. She never did. After his eventual release his position only slowly improved, but now he had a pension recognizing his former headmastership and this flat to rent. It was in essence the story of the Cultural Revolution, of the kind of madness that the Chinese wreaked on themselves in the recent past. So when it came to asking a survivor of those times about the present I was pleased to hear that he was cautiously optimistic. “Things are moving in the right direction”, he said. His hope was for slow improvement, his experience ruled out any desire for quick change, his greatest fear was disruption, knowing how quickly that could lead to insanity.

I went next to Shantou, a thriving port between Canton and Shanghai. My guides this time were young graduates in their mid-twenties. We toured the city by bicycle, visiting the parks and the markets, then cycling down towards the port and general area nominated as the New Economic Zone. Although the casual observer would not recognize a difference in the buildings, it is in these areas that China has concentrated its modernization experiments. For the traders here it is the economic freedom from the usual bureaucratic controls that differentiate it from the rest of the planned economy. My guides who worked as civil servants gesticulated with a mixture of envy and antagonism, “They earn much more than us”.

Over the next few days, a consistent pattern of opinion emerged, consolidating these first two encounters. Amongst the elderly there was a tempered enthusiasm. Survivors of a turbulent past, with their feet rooted in a different starting place, they believed that things were slowly improving on the political front. For these old people that I met, largely concerned with religious freedom, the progress was very real. The freedom of association and even the return of confiscated property had been allowed, they looked forward optimistically to a period of gradual improvement. Lives of economic hardship had accustomed them to a life on the poverty line, their fears were of political not economic regression. Amongst the young civil servants however, those working in schools, libraries, research institutions, a different view emerged. They were economically discontented, frustrated by the bureaucratic controls that dictated their lives. Jobs, salaries, housing, their ability to travel were all directed, whilst others around them earned comparative fortunes freed from such controls.

It was this perception of being forcibly excluded from the economic rewards of their modernization programme that I was reminded of in following the tragic events which culminated in the tragedy of Tiananmen Square. In the West, critics of our move towards ‘freer’ markets talk of winners and losers. Supporters maintain that whilst rewards are unequal, all are winners overall by participation in successful economies. In China, because of the partial way the government has attempted to open up their economy, many people perceive it differently. There they see winners and those left out, those who are forbidden to compete, regardless of ability, (and they include the most able).

The students are almost exclusively destined to work in the planned economy, the shortfall of educated people means they must go where they are most needed. They will be directed into types of employment, at fixed wages, wherever the bureaucracy sees fit. The only escape routes are through corruption, or possibly by achieving excellent grades, the latter increasing the pressure to succeed amidst deteriorating conditions. Increasingly crowded accommodation, lack of study space and facilities, are aggravated by sudden rapid inflation after thirty years of fixed prices. Looking around them, the students see others improving their position. In particular the multiplying incomes of both the peasants in the new service industries on the city fringes and those urban workers freed at least partially from wage restraint.

Furthermore, they, as well as the workers, have responded to the self-conscious systematic attempts of the leadership to stimulate the economy by exposure to Western standards of living. Foreign videos depicting affluent lifestyles complement the immediate visibility of the consumption patterns of both tourists and contractors. With aspirations running impossibly high, the policy of partial freedom is ideal for breeding corruption. It is hardly surprising that those who feel left out are now envious and antagonistic. It was these personal grievances that led the students onto the streets, but in identifying the economic corruption of the Party as their chief target, they triggered support from the mass of the people, including eventually even the fearful elderly who supported their call for political reforms.

But when the current wave of rebellion and repression subsides, when the blood is washed clean from the Beijing streets, and the pictures fade from our television screens, China will still be left with the question as to how it is to modernize its economy without betraying the principles on which it rests. A decade of experimenting with a partial free market approach has ended in tragedy. The current almost worldwide assumption that ‘individuals freed from collective restraints act with greater incentive’ has not been disproved by the Chinese experiment, but the more spurious claim that ‘what is good for the individual is good for all’ is not their experience. And if partiality has failed, which route should they take, should they batten the hatches to ‘free’ economics, or open it further?

When we in the West consider this question, it’s important to realize just how low a standard of living the Chinese have. How underdeveloped most of the economy is outside of the major centres. The China I saw was still largely a peasant economy. In many shops and hotels an abacus was the usual method of accounting. Bicycles or desperately overcrowded trains and buses were the sole means of transport. Those visitors who make the short trip from Hong Kong to Canton see many taxis and private cars, but outside the cities they hardly exist. Time and again in China one sees work that is either overmanned or which better equipped could be done more efficiently by fewer people. On each floor in my Shantou hotel was a receptionist to issue keys and fill thermoses. At night they slept on a bed behind the counter. Five cleaners worked the twenty or so rooms on my floor each day. At the gate to almost every park a ticket collector is flanked a few feet away by another turnstile inspector. In the area around Shantou, one of the most productive agricultural areas in China, I never once saw a machine in a field. Buffaloes ploughed the fields and pigs were taken to market in wicker baskets on bicycles. Frequently from buses one would see roadworkers breaking up enormous stones almost by hand, bashing stone against stone. Dull, unpleasant, repetitive, and sometimes dangerous work which could be done more simply and safely by greater mechanization.

But whilst that is true of labour methods there is equally evidence of the benefit of the revolution. Electricity, however haphazardly conveyed, reaches almost everywhere. Infant mortality has been significantly reduced, and health in general is enormously improved. Everywhere I went people were adequately clothed, and the beggars seen on the streets of other undeveloped countries were non-existent. When I compare the evidence of my eyes I cannot forget that I saw more deformed limbs and outstretched hands in two days wandering the back streets of Hong Kong than I ever saw in China.

One of the reasons for this success is that labour intensive, ‘inefficient’ production and service industries, are not just allied to the communist ethic, but are part of the way the wealth is spread. They reinforce the distributive process whilst holding back the productive. When the Chinese reflect therefore on how to tackle their modernization programme, they are faced with an enormous problem. How to stimulate and develop their economy without plunging vast numbers back into the abject poverty that they so recently rose from. Rapid modernization without politically agreed safeguards threatens the whole system. The urgent need is for open debate to agree those safeguards, for neither repression tactics nor the free market can provide them.

As we in the West debate the appropriate economic, social, and political policies of moving from an industrial to a technological economy, we shouldn’t make the mistake of supposing those same policies apply to a country moving from a primarily peasant economy into an industrialized one. And we should remember that the extraordinary hardships of that progress towards advanced industrialism in Europe and North America were eventually alleviated by a move towards socialism, not away from it.

Aware of how low their base standard of living is, many Chinese are suspicious of the role models that the West can offer them. Looking at the West from the perspective of Chinese communism, it is not surprising that they conclude that rapid modernization on our model will cause unbalanced social and economic suffering.

For ten years before Tiananmen Square, Deng and his hand-picked supporters of economic reform, Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang, Li Peng, enjoyed enthusiastic support from the West for their apparent sympathy with our view of economic motivation and progress. As an affluent Westerner I sympathized with the desires of the young in China. How could I without hypocrisy deny them the benefits I so easily enjoy. But as I sat writing my diary amidst the conspicuous luxury of the Jinjiang hotel, unaware of the horrors to come, I remember reading some notes from my conversations in that first dismal Canton flat. The words of an educated and compassionate old man, concerned with his country’s development and aware of the problems facing it, describing himself then as cautiously optimistic. “We have to put back the lid on our individual economic desires, and channel our energies into political freedom”, he told me. He believed it was those personal economic desires which had led to the corruption of the Party and the bureaucracies, those same desires which had caused the inflation. He simply did not believe that his country could afford these newly generated economic aspirations, whatever the complexion of its government. So the political freedoms that he hoped were developing would not be an addition, but a trade-off. Political freedom in return for austerity. At the end of our conversation he smiled, waving his hands, “We are old men, I don’t suppose the young will listen to our advice”.

The voices of the old men in the Party lost their authority that night when they chose to exercise power not politics. For the next few months they will merely hang on in a vacuum, exercising that power without authority. And when new leaders face up to the legacy of the last decade they will have a difficult task, austerity has rarely been a popular political platform. Now that so much has been promised, it will be even more difficult. But if they wish to gain back genuine authority, and if fulfilling those economic desires is impossible without plunging millions into destitution, without self-destructing the ethic of their society, they will have no choice. As Mrs Thatcher famously put it choosing a different route, ‘there is no alternative’. They must offer to the people the rewards of political freedom, and guarantee the equity of whatever austerity is required.

And when we consider the future of this quarter of the world’s population, we should remember that it is only responsible to suggest what is possible. Given time, they will undoubtedly modernise their economy and attain the higher standards of living desired worldwide. But there is a pace that is acceptable and a faster one which is not. We in the West see economic and political freedoms as going hand in hand, some might say the former leading the latter in importance. But I believe that in the interests of equity, their economic freedoms may have to be restrained. And if we in the West wish to offer any role models they should be restricted to stressing the benefits of political freedoms. Benefits which can be compatible with communism, even enrich it, the freedoms of the press, of criticism, of association and belief. Only when they are in place will they be able to consider the economic freedoms that we enjoy which are currently inappropriate and disruptive to them.

And who knows, maybe in the end it will be by that route, rather than by the ‘free-market’, that we will see, not the failure of communism, but its professed goal, the eventual withering of the State.