20th Century China and Russia: A century
of revolution and reconciliation with the West
By Tom Wheat
The Chinese and Russian revolutions involved a multiplication of polities and power status groups competing for authority, in which a single polity or party structure assumed a majority and control over the coalitional process. Secondly, these revolutions required the commitment of the subject population and when this is not possible due to coalitional breakdown at the elite level haphazarding the state’s institutional role as the resource allocator of public works projects, then the opposing force that fills the vacuum becomes the instrument of the revolution, and becomes viewed as the legitimate dominant contender as an alternative polity to the current regime, by the merging of elite and peasant consensus centered upon nationalist survival.
Revolutions are amalgamations of processes leading to the combustion of political critical masses engaged in a coalitional mobilization of principle values, ideology, and resource acquisition and at its core outcome, articulation of revolutionary sociological change. The criterion for Revolutions is as follows: The first involving resistance in response to too much state oppression, the second involves a crisis of state management involving either its ability to respond to civil emergencies, fiscal crisis’s or its collective impotence rendered such by the presence of abundant factionalism in its bureaucratic ranks. The third factor, which posits the structural conditions necessary for revolution to take root, is the growth of radical ideas fueled by technological advancement, and acculturation. Revolutions also require the politicization of multiple class groups as well. All revolutions stem from sort of societal modernization process that effects or creates either new modes of production effecting market consumption interest or pressures exerted by increased population.
Revolutions, typically ‘come from above’ as opposed to core grass roots movements and this requires an elite group of partisans, reformers, (moderates, radicals) and status quo hardliners (pro-regime) or some sort of fractious divide among the elite classes so compelling as to threaten the social order of stability will permit these individuals to mobilize other classes in opposition to the current regime. Essentially all revolutions have required elites, and those that have been attempted without them, i.e., solely peasant populist regimes, have rarely ever been successful. Revolutions begin when the state is no longer capable of dispensing effectiveness of justice, when in essence the political organs of the state cease to be able to conceal the system of patronage and corruption of government. This causes the alienation of elite support for the current regime, in that a crisis of authority undermines the macro economic rotational structure of the class regime when social mobility is unreasonably excluded. Alienation is typically caused by declines in wages, employment, food access, land, rent, etc., and propels the elite to mobilize the masses to overthrow the regime. The other key important factor is the effect of foreign hegemony in inciting local nationalistic revolutionary aspirations, either by rite of direct imperialist practices of occupation, or through regional economic manipulation which tends to involve the willing acquiescence of counter-revolutionaries and ruling hardliners, polarizing the populace to view the government as an internal graft of an external foe, further capitulating the demise of the pre-revolutionary state.
My thesis is that revolutions are made possible by the degree to which there exists a social ventricle that sustains the intellectual and philosophical elements of a civil society and to the degree to which the state has a legitimate hold on authority is ultimately defined by that polity, as that polity exists to act as the intermediaries of regional authority and the state as a central authority built on the principles of core civil values. The state itself relies on 4 types of structural modes of power to reasonably monopolize the process of social accumulation. These 4 methods are 1.) By its ability to regulate use of economic resources and modes of production, 2.) Its ideological affiliation and platform toward progress, 3.) Through the use of military force to quell opposition, and 4.) The fourth form of functioning state power is the necessary reliance on the elite view that the state legitimately exercises political power for the benefit of the collective state. This type of state structure existed in the USSR until 1970 when the Soviet state itself declined in economic power, due to US trade and détente policies and increasing reliance on foreign loans and grain imports to supplement an economy where industrialization was high and spare parts and quality goods were scarce. Russia’s civil society stepped in to fill the void left by the antiquarian revolutionaries of the early 20th century, the Bolsheviks and paved the way for economic integration with the west. Russia proved to be somewhat more accommodating to ‘liberal’ change then china and the reason stemmed again from the nature of power relations and the degree in which the same civil society had had the tactical freedom to mobilize along multi-class lines rather than peripherally motivated by individual class and status interests. This appears to be a demonstration that after 40 years after china’s revolution, china’s civil society was in decline or eclipsed by a more conservative village peasant revolution spearheaded by Chinese global market integration. The Monopoly of the Chinese one party rule system, and conservative peasants affectively contained an opposition force of proletarians and intellectuals bound to the system of progress by which the ‘party’ was able to set the standard for revolution and not the ‘civil’ Students. Deng’s consumerist socialism wins out over Gorbachevs accommodation, in terms of the maintenance of state power, and the smooth regime changes China has encountered after Mao posit that revolutions from China come usually from above due to the nature of the peasantry, and that Russian leaders had to contend with a much more organized urban civil society then China. The overall collapse of the 2nd world created the present system of arms blocs and oligarchical arms proliferation in Russia-- a chaotic sense of freedom versus the ordered rapid economic growth and degree of sustained repression in China today.
The historical reasons for the Chinese communist success at revolution involved their ability to mobilize the peasantry. Eric Wolf argues that peasant rebellions are defensive attempts to maintain traditional village lifestyle from the pressures of population growth, encroaching commercialization and growth of market activity and finally the breakdown in local government handling of farm and disaster granaries. In order for peasants to be able to revolt requires that they have ‘tactical freedom,’ enough autonomy on lands outside of the central authority of the state or local landlord. Generally it is the middle and rich peasants that have enough of a surplus to legitimately possess tactical freedom, i.e., freedom from compulsory labor and also it may include independent peasant communes. However, Wolf argues that in order for a peasant revolt to be successful it requires elite support. Peasants are difficult to organize and this stems from the competitive nature of each peasant’s relations to the factors and forces of production. Peasant economic and political outlooks become acutely aware and sensitive to tyranny of landlords and production schedules in eroding the power for a peasant to own a piece of land. The system is further complicated by a system of extensive kinship lineages in which the wealthy rich peasant landlord can be related to the poorest of poor peasants. Peasant interests then can cross cut class alignments.
Revolutions against Soviet communism would first occur in the soviet client states of East Germany, Hungary and Poland. These successful revolutions involved five features. First they featured multi-class agendas, unified by widespread discontent with government. Thirdly this phenomenon erupted into nationalism, with the growing opposition of soviet client states to Moscow’s attempt to exercise centralized control. Fourth these movements all featured radical forms of leadership, and finally they all featured quasi utopianist ideologies. These opposition movements were comprised of peasants, workers, intellectuals, professionals, and disaffected members of the state enterprise boards. Essentially since the state owned everything and was in charge of distribution, the communist party came to be called into question since there were shortages and lack of quality in production.
Revolutions in the 2nd and third world have required that the successful new Government structure must have some charitable link to village organization or be able to eclipse that sector by riding the sentiment of an urban polity. Revolutions result when there is a decline in state effectiveness and a rise in fiscal insolvency, increased alienation and conflict among elites due to impeded social mobility and an ensuing increase in mass mobilization of the populace by declining living standards and increased urbanization.
Goodwin argues that the reasons for these revolutions against socialism were due to the closed autonomous economic sphere maintained by the Soviet Union and her client states and republics, and that ensuing fiscal problems in the late 1970’s and 1980’s were due to commerce being dependent upon foreign capital investment. The polish steel workers strike sounded off the demise of communism, and soviet regional economic state directed planning. However, none of the more so dramatic events occurred when Gorbachev was elected President and he proved to be liberal moderate accommodating the forces of change and revolution again, by passing the torch of soviet collectivism to free market Russian capitalism. Gorbachev’s rejection of the Breznev doctrine—direct soviet intervention into rebellious client states to enforce the soviet line, was met by his later acknowledgement that through the years of government party statist control, Russia had an underdeveloped ‘civil society.’ Essentially an elite exodus had occurred because of Breznev’s hardline or what Goodwin calls an elite reaction to the decline of an ‘overextended imperialist power.’(257) Gorbachev’s reform years, 1985-1989 paved the way for the dissolution of the Soviet Union and spurred on a smoldering national movement to create independent states out of the former soviet republics. In 1991 while Gorbachev was vacationing in the Black Sea the communists attempted a coup, however, they were defeated by Gorbachev’s ally, Boris Yeltsin. Since Yeltsin had effectively control of the soviet army, he assumed the Presidency of a new Russia no longer communist.
The unique feature of the East German revolution of 1989 was that it was rather a peaceful revolution compared to other revolutions of the past. Goldstone compares the E. German revolutions (Poland Czechoslovakia, and east Germany) with the third world revolutions of (Mexico, Vietnam, Cuba, Iran and Nicaragua). Essentially he views these revolutions as a response to 2nd world totalitarianism, evolving into 3rd world authoritarianism. Goldstone argues that the regime similarities are pronounced in their connections to neopatrimonial, personalist dictatorships and former tactics of colonialist rule were all embodied in the soviet tributary regional state security structure. Also in the post Stalin years there were also a lack of access to quality consumer goods, and this problem became especially acute in the (1970’s-1980’s) when market innovation came to be increasingly undermined by the politicized nature of state socialist economies. During this period of economic stagnation the Soviet Union also began to borrow heavily from the west and had undergone limited attempts at political and economic liberalization. However, the reforms were undercut or otherwise impeded by state socialist bureaucracies. (259) Furthermore political and economic liberalization threatened the elite power of the enterprise manager, who had essentially made a cult of no work and opportune access to government graft as their carrot and the stake in maintaining the decaying soviet state.
A similar logic of opposition existed in the third world in response to neocolonialist regime reform measures, and in each case when elite regional power was threatened even if their office was the adoptive measure of reform proved ultimately incapable of reform. The potential loss of authority for the nomenklature like 3rd world neopatrimonial dictatorships made reform an insurmountable barrier to development, in that political and economic favoritism, corruption and cronyism were the natural politics of developing nations, beholden to foreign investment capital for growth. Revolutions only came to the third world when colonial empires found the costs of empire to great to bear after long years of counterinsurgency campaigns against opposition native guerilla forces. Goodwin argues that the Soviets themselves ultimately were bankrupted by the attempts to maintain a neocolonialist empire. A series of policies focusing on ‘progressive attrition’ and negotiated revolutions in (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, E. Germany) resulted in a series of mass popular protests that brought about the collapse of authoritarian socialism in E. Europe in 1989-1991.
In the 1970’s it was hard to imagine that the Warsaw pact would collapse in 1989. Communism was on the rise and indeed it was the West and the US that looked ineffectual after Vietnam. The communist party institutionalized its control over society replacing gulags with cronies of the party. In terms of the standard of living, the period between 1958-1971 saw soviet infant mortality rates halved from 40.6 to 22.9 deaths per 1000 infants. Indeed after WW!! The Soviet Union economy grew at an average rate of 6% a year. However, after 1970 economic development began to stagnate and while the Soviet Union was committed to heavy industry while it could not begin the transition to an emerging high tech economy that had begun to evolve in the west. While the USSR attempted to increase production yet it lacked spare parts and came to be increasingly dependant upon foreign trade in raw materials. USSR economic growth fell to 5.5% between 1971-1975, and then fell to 2.7% between 1976-1980, and then 1.9% from 1981-1985. Soviet manufacturing began to lose its foreign market demand and hence exports declined as well. “Perestrokia simply disrupted production and led to severe shortages of goods.”(264)
While Gorbachev was seen as a liberal reformer his policies almost bankrupted the USSR. The Budget deficit climbed from 15billion to 18 billion, 1980-1985 and rose to 80 billion dollars 1988-1989. The USSR also lost a number of its Middle East regional client states, in which in 1975, Egypt shook off its soviet alliance for an American foreign aid and development leaving only Syria as the USSR’s principle ally in the Middle East. Also in 1979 the Soviets undertook what would be a long disastrous decade long counterinsurgency campaign against Afghanistan mujahadin guerillas. This war further exacerbated soviet deficit fiascoes. Perhaps the single-handed most ideological blow to Leninist soviet communism came during 1986 during the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. The radiation fallout around the Ukraine was 80times the fallout at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviet leadership failed to warn the populace about the disaster. Kiev the nearest major city, 75 miles away saw mortality rates climb back to world war levels. Inherently these factors brought about the alienation of elites in opposition to the soviet state. During the 1960’s-1980’s there was an explosion of Soviet engineers and scientists however, they were more or less indentured to enterprise managers who disliked innovation when it conflicted with their graft ethic. These intellectuals came to reject the communist party and were later instrumental in securing Yeltsin’s ascent to power. (267)
The Soviet unions last gasp toward mass mobilization came with glasnost and this inevitably brought about the collapse of the communist regime.
“While Gorbachev apparently envisaged popular action by soviet citizens, he failed to realize that local organizations would follow preexisting lines of local organizations created by the USSR which emphasized the national identity of the constituent republics.”(269)
Inherently the Soviet Union believed class mobilization could overcome nationalism and ethnicity as primary measures of concern; rather they unified all three measures together unknowingly. In 1989 Russia had an urban population of 188 million double what it had been in 1959. This urbanization consolidated tensions and became the focus for popular mobilization. Between 1989-1991, 400,000 coal miners went on strike along with steel workers. The revolution represented the conflicting lines of control, authority and legitimacy in the modalities of Soviet elite authority in a period of increased economic stagnation prompting the state to attempt reforms, perestroika, glasnost, that essentially while intended as reform measures opened up the view that the communist party was no longer fallible. So the question that remains is, why did communism fall in Russia and remain in force in China despite its further economic integration into the western global capital system?
Martin King Whyte argues in his essay, “The Social Sources of the Student Demonstrations in China, 1989,” that Deng’s economic reforms, the push for private limited property ownership made inequality in escapable part of life for modern Chinese socialism. Initially a group of Chinese students from prestigious universities and some workers from the major cities met in Beijing at Tiananamien Square to push for greater reform in the CCP, and party accountability to the principles of socialist democracy. However, in 1989 China was in a better economic position then Eastern Europe. Deng’s ‘open’ policy allowed western style goods to flood Chinese markets, and some temples destroyed during the Cultural Revolution were restored. Also there was a revival of Confucianism and an effort to retrieve cultural practices repressed under the Mao years. The roots of popular discontent can be traced to three groups, the ‘not far enoughs,’ ‘the too fars,’ and ‘the satisfied.’ In reality Deng’s reforms had stalled since the mid 80’s and there was a growing surplus of entrepreneurial, and intellectual talent along with skilled labor rendered irrelevant by the newfound prosperity. The demonstrations of 1989 were a repeat of demonstrations held in 1987, 1981, and 1979. Essentially the demonstrations in the spring of 1989 involved these aforementioned groups reminding the party leadership of its promise that this form of elite would have a voice in shaping china. In reality the state was investing little in into its educational institutions and so students had little market demand for their skills, since their individual expertise and talent had to contend with the social norms of career limited opportunities due to cronyism and corruption.
“All though the specific ways in which the ‘not far enough’ sentiment was felt by these groups varied, they were united in their anger at the hypocrisy involved in the meritocratic vision of the reforms. A few individuals were benefiting disproportionately even though they had done relatively little to merit such benefits.”(275)
The argument for true reform centered upon the debate between equity versus equality. The ‘not far enoughs’ looked to china’s may 4th revolution for a time when they saw that intellectual opinion was valued. These marginalized elites attempted to provide a critique of china’s traditional legacy (imperial feudalism) and the modern evolving nature of Chinese bureaucratic socialism. Generally, it was only the progeny of high-ranking communist officials who received first access to new markets and positions of newfound economic autonomous power. The group who comprised the ‘too fars,’ of the majority were predominately industrial workers, low-level bureaucrats, party officials, PLA and the police. For the workers, the loss of job income security was a return to capitalistic exploitation and a sellout of socialism. Equally important was that during 1988-1989, failing state firms began to be turned over to private contractors, not only did layoffs increase dramatically afterward, enterprise managers began laying off women as well. Among the low level bureaucrats, party officials, soldiers and police the argument centered on their small fixed salaries and the threat of increased economic engagement with the west as construing a threat to their power.
“The ‘too far,’ groups vision of the good society was decidedly not one which party bureaucrats would be replaced at the top of the social pyramid by meritocratic experts…They saw precious little of such benevolence in the policies and pronouncements of the reform era leadership and many feared the elitism and arrogance of China’s intellectuals.” (277)
The ‘too fars’ thought that the ‘not far enoughs’ program of westernization was a fatally flawed solution in that greater economic contact with the west inevitably grafted western economic ideas into the traditional Chinese economic landscape once sanctified by socialism. On the flipside the peasants, or ‘the satisfied were content with the reforms. There were increases in rural income despite the imposition of the ‘one child policy’ in 1979, and the peasantry traditionally sanctified bribery. Hence though there was some spillover unrest in the peasant population during the uprising, the lack of a coalitional consensus provided a situation unlike what befell East Berlin roughly at the same time.
There was also a generational transition in China with the Red Guard coming of age with many beginning to advocate multiparty rule. (280) Zhao Ziyang was a high-ranking bureaucrat who favored increased reforms, and sought to compromise with the protestors on how to deal with corruption and inflation. Hunger Strikes were launched in Mid May as means to step up the moral pressure on the party leadership to accept a legitimate form of intellectual remonstrance cognizant with china’s historical past. To some extent this tactic was successful and slowly it seemed the protesters had begun to galvanize popular support, and with Party Secretary Zhao’s position a party leadership split was created in the upper echelon of the CCP. Many provincial towns and cities would unknowingly host similar demonstrations. The imminent consequence was the ouster of Zhao Ziyang and the installation of Jiang Zemin, the former mayor of Shanghai, as Party Secretary. He quickly began a program to reduce enrollment in china’s national universities, and saw to it that all expressions of dissent were totally suppressed. In June 1989, with the order of Première Li peng PLA military troops were called into the square resulting in the approximate deaths of 1500 Chinese. The 1989 Chinese student democracy movement was effectively repressed.
Daniel Chirot argues in his essay, “the Crisis of Leninism and the decline of the Left,” that social revolutions constitute large-scale social experiments conducted during the collapse of formerly stable state structure. The collapse stemmed from economic decision-making being subject to political ideology along with artificially fixed prices for goods producing inefficient production.
“The aim of curtailing the power of market forces was achieved but an inevitable side effect was that under these conditions it became impossible to measure what firms were profitable and what production processes were more or less efficent..there were no real prices.”(4)
Chirot argues that there have been five industrial ages to capitalism. The first involved the cotton-textile age dominated by England from 1780-1830. The second age was the rail and Iron Age also dominated by England during the 1840’s-1870’s. The third age was the steel and organic chemistry, electrical mechanization age dominated by Germany and the US during the 1870’s to 1914. The Fourth Age, the automobile and petrochemical age began in 1910- and continued to 1970. The final age of capitalism was the electronic age, 1970-present, dominated by the US, Japan, Korea, and China. Essentially Chirot argues that during the 1970’s the Soviet Union was stuck in the 3rd age of capitalism.
“By the 1970’s the USSR had the worlds most advanced late 19th century economy, the worlds largest and best, most inflexible rust belt. It is as if Andrew Carnegie had taken over the entire United States, forced it to become a giant copy of US Steel, and the executives of the same US Steel had continued to run the country into the 1970’s and 1980’s.”(6)
Each transition phase between one capitalist age to the next one is marked by economic depressions and political turmoil. After WWI colonial acquisitions precipitated a massive European arms race between Germany and England. Russia’s failure to keep up with German industrialization forced it modernize under the rubric of defensive military socialism. WWII was the result of an inconclusive peace reached at Versailles in WWI and the second war was also triggered by global economic depression. The Leninist Stalinist model did work somewhat in Manchuria for the Chinese and in backward areas of Eastern Europe. However, the growing policy of détente, trade with the west and foreign loans led to the raising of prices in Poland and Hungary. The reasons for the CCP’s success in quelling this global revolutionary wave stemmed from the Chinese initially decollectivizing agriculture in 1976, and then promising not to resocialize existing land relations.
“This remains of course the advantage of the Chinese communists. They can still entirely rely on a vast reservoir of peasant indifference and respect for authority along as agriculture is not resocialized.”(11)
For the USSR the revolutionary precedent came in 1968 with the Breznev policy of reform through blackmail. “In any case arbitrary, ‘petty tyranny’ becomes the only model of proper authoritative behavior.”(11) Chirot’s essay argues that this may explain Stalin’s purges of the 1930’s and the Chinese sentiment during the Cultural Revolution. These changes and crisis’s in government authority had more of an effect on the urban population because of the politicized nature of their social relations. Timothy Garton Ash argues that Poland’s response was to create alternative social structures during the 1970’ s-1980 due to the growing perception of the erosion of Soviet legitimacy. The Soviets had appeared strong in the mid 1980’s during their Afghan war and subsequent crushing of the Polish solidarity movement. However, the common theory for the Soviet’s fall was that NATO had developed a tactical edge in the automated delivery of conventional missiles and the promise of A Star Wars like missile defense program that if proved real would render soviet first strike capabilities dead in the water. Furthermore the industrial ineptitude of the Chernobyl disaster further added to the growing malaise of popular discontent. For Poland things changed with the election by the Vatican of a Polish pope that essentially created the solidarity movement. Initial Soviet difficulties at repressing these movements stemmed from the unreliability of local client state armies and an increasing reliance on secret police and soviet military to enforce order in the republics. Gorbachev fearing the worst arranged for talks with polish workers in November 1988, he also pulled Russian troops out of Afghanistan the following year. Soon Afterwards Hungarian officials opened up their border with Austria creating a massive exodus of eastern Europeans into Western Europe.
“East Germany was no China, despite Honecker’s claim that it would be. It had no reserve of ignorant, barely literate peasant boys to bring into the breach; and its economy was far to dependant on the West German connection to risk a break.”(15)
November 9th the Berlin wall came down.
There was a growing feeling in Eastern Europe that hegemony under the USSR had created deprivation of the masses in relationship to the west. It was as if the moral basis of communism had vanished and elites began to lose confidence in government. Essentially the urban public was educated enough to read between the lines of elite-intellectual dissent and ineffective government structure. Overall, the swift transition was only made possible by Gorbachev’s willing acquiescence to compromise. Chirot concludes his essay by noting that the Soviet Union was to formalistically dependant on Marxist inspired social science models and its imitation of an outdated mode of industrialization was the essential reasons for the Soviet collapse. However, the most important factor was that eastern Europe had a better mobilized, professional urban class then China and it is essentially this group, the ‘civil society,’ that Chirot argues sets the tone for all revolutions that have come and gone.
In conclusion this essay has sought to explore the contrasts and parallels between the Chinese and Russian revolutions. Dominant features of both revolutions have involved breakdown in legitimate state authority, in response to foreign encroachments, resulting in alienation of the elite from the regime, and their mobilization of the populace through existing village structures to bring about a structural regime change. Successful revolutions have required a developed civil society and a connection between rural and urban elites and commoners to achieve legitimacy, and this explains the Russian success in 1989 and the Chinese student demonstration’s failure, lack of cohesive connection to the peasantry. The Chinese succeeded in their 1949 revolution because the Japanese invasion forced the gradual centralization of power into the CCP’s hands due to the corruption and lack of connection to rural sentiment evinced by the corrupt KMT regime. The question that remains is whether modern western modes of communication and warfare can prevent the outbreak of further revolution in the second and third world since it has effectively prevented the outbreak of major social transformative revolution in the west since the 1960’s? To the extent that the west has monopolized the revolutionary ideal will be the practice of the western observer to view success through the failures of eastern regimes, or their transformations as token esteem of the surplus we deem as mundane and passé, a lifeline for change, for others.