20th Century China and Russia: A century of
revolution and reconciliation with the West
By Tom Wheat
What makes a revolution? This is inherently a
political contention that involves an amalgamation of processes without clearly
defined functional modes of analyzing revolutionary activity, its escalation
and ultimately articulation of revolutionary change. According to Goldstone
there are three historical theories for revolution, 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 different 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. Often states
respond to late to revolutions rather assisting blindly in them. Revolutions,
are typically elite centered 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 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,
demonstrates that china’s civil society was in decline or eclipsed by a more
conservative revolution of Chinese global market integration, by party leaders,
and an opposition force of proletarians and intellectuals and occasional
peasants bound to the system of progress by which the party has set the
standard for revolution and not the people. 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 developed
and organized urban civil society then china signaling its success and possibly
china’s long-term failure.
Pursuant
to the scope of this assignment this paper will analyze the Chinese communist
revolution of 1949, and the tianamien 1989 uprising and the East German soviet
revolutions of 1989-1991.
The 20th century marked an epochal shift in
china’s legacy as one of the enduring traditional dynastic cores of Asia and a
civilization endowed with historical continuity of imperial rule from
antiquity. That century saw the rise of revolution first beginning in 1911,
with the republican tongmeng hui republican movement, that managed to overthrow
the Qing dynasty with the help of the counter revolutionary, Yuan Shikai who
later installed himself as emperor. Yuan Shikai’s reign was brief ending with
his death in 1915. The imperial troops subsequently revolted and the
Nationalist party was installed in power with its top general Chiang Kai Shek
as Generalissimo. Mao Tse Tung a middle peasant from Hunan and former librarian
at Beijing University was a leading member of the Kuomintang Executive Bureau
and one of the key founders of the Chinese Communist party. China’s
tradition of nationalist protest centered on the method of remonstrance, centered
on the principle of the Confucian bureaucratic duty to state as involving the
right of reminding the sovereign of his sage duty to emulate heavenly order
according to the various Confucian analects. After the 19th century
legacy of rapprochement from the west via, the opium wars, ensuing
establishment of western treaty ports, cantons and enforcement of western
spheres of influence in china by gunboat diplomacy, and extra-territoriality,
dramatically changed the modality that sustained the intellectual process of
protest and nationalist remonstrance into outright revolution. The students of
china’s 1920’s may 4th movement, sought to radically define
nationalism as the process of loyalty to the state based upon its ability to
function more so than the divine mandate of the Chinese sovereign. Accordingly
they came to view themselves as a great civilization made backward by western
imperialism and china’s lack of knowledge in the sciences. Extraterritoriality
gave china’s emerging civil society the tactical freedom necessary to mobilize
and culminated in the overthrow of the imperial regime.
China during The 1920’s saw the rise of warlords, due
to the earlier methods of militarization of the countryside as a method to
quell rural unrest. Gradually Chiang completed his consolidation of provincial
chiefs under his authority. This period was also characterized by Nationalist
counter insurgencies against Mao’s emerging bands of communist peasant
guerrillas. The 1930’s marked the beginning of the Japanese imperialist phase
when in 1933 Japan seized Manchuria, and installed the deposed emperor Pu Yi as
the puppet ruler of a Japanese protectorate, state newly named, Manchukuo.
Further Japanese expansion occurred throughout the southern and coastal
portions of china throughout the 1930’s prior to the intervention of the US in
WWII. In 1937 the Japanese sacked and razed the capital city Nanjing provoking
international condemnation. The British and FDR respond by imposing a steel
embargo cross-cutting vital Japanese steel imports from Manchuria which
ultimately led them to decide to bomb Pearl Harbor, as a strategically
defensive sucker punch. During 1937 a brief nationalist communist alliance was
established, with Mao installed as the commander of the communist 8th route
army. American intervention in the war led to the expulsion of the Japanese
from China, and the development of a strategic alliance between the US and
Chiang’s KMT party. This alliance proved to be costly failure in terms of US
diplomatic and foreign assistance objectives being compromised by Nationalist
bureaucratic corruption and misappropriation of funds for their own personal
aggrandizement. Mao’s communists defeated The Nationalists, in 1949 and
established the PRC. The initial communist offensive was made possible by their
seizure of Japanese-Manchurian armaments after the war and the subsequent brief
Soviet occupation of Manchuria tipped the military edge in favor the
communists. Despite millions of dollars of US aid the nationalists were unable
to defeat the communists. The reasons stemmed from the communists abilities to
claim numerical superiority, via mobilization of the rural peasantry, into
brigades of cadre led communes, and militias, and in its ability to dispense
regionally the maintenance or the appearance of national government in the face
of a crisis, corruption and disorder in Chiang’s regime. This was marked by a
military elite exodus and disassociation from the KMT regime.
According to Charles Tilly revolutions require a
multiplication of polities and power status groups competing for authority, in
which a single polity or party assumes a majority and control over the
coalitional process. Secondly, revolutions require 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. “This analysis veers from Huntington’s especially in denying the
significance of a discrepancy between the overall rates of mobilization and
institutionalization, in attaching greater importance to conflicts over claims,
duties, privileges and conceptions of justice embedded in particular contenders
for power and in drawing attention to the important possibility that the
crucial contenders will be disaffected members of a polity rather than
newcomers to power.’(Goldstone,
Revolutions, 50)
Mark Seldon argues that the communists were successful
due to tactical and logistical superiority in dealing with the Japanese while
chiang’s command structure divided its authority between extermination of the
communists and gradual escalation of resistance to Japanese expansion. Secondly
by the communists’ defeat of the KMT saw the end of the foreign treaty ports, a
historically ascribed cause for the institutional decay of imperial
civilization. For the masses in China It seemed that the communists had history
on their side. Furthermore after the victory, in 1949, the PRC legitimized its
revolutionary and ideological claim to power by instituting a policy of rural
land reforms. Furthermore Seldon argues that china during 1949 was undergoing a
period of economic hyperinflation brought on ostensibly by the corruption of
the KMT regime. Furthermore it was faced with a population crisis, a process
that had first began to develop late in the 18th century and assumed
pre-imminent influence in the breakdown of the earlier Qing state, in that the
population had come to evolve beyond its current social institutional
structures of support. The end result was revolution, which finally culminated
after a long tortuous process of 100 years of petty revolts resulting in a
communist victory.
Theda Skocpol argues that in imperial china the landed
classes were able to resist the state bureaucrats and their efforts towards
modernization. The Qing state was a bureaucratic monarchy that existed outside
of colonialism and then later became incorporated and struggled under the
experience of colonialism. This struggle between nationalism and national unity
has made possible by china’s experience of western rapprochement, and according
to Skocpol, “China’s vulnerable international situation has always encouraged centralization
and bureaucracy.”(68) This radically redefined the traditional Chinese view of
legitimate sovereignty, as involving the authority of the state in
redistributing the wealth however it was not a matter of question of whether
authority should be centralized or decentralized the alternative was considered
to be irrational and evoked memories of china’s feudal warlord past.
The 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
lifestyle from the pressures of population growth, 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. So the peasant revolution in
china is a stark contrast with Marx’s view of an urban proletarian socialist
revolution.
Wolf further argues that 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. Essentially
mass population increases along with the ensuing commodification of wage labor
(stemming from the monetization of the Chinese economy beginning in the late
18th century British traders flooded the Chinese market with a steady influx of
silver, with the ensuing result culminating in inflation and rising food
prices. This trend would continue throughout the 19th and 1st
half the 20th century) essentially created an international agenda
to local market relations thereby disrupting the sanctity of the peasant
village universe. Hence the displacement of the rural peasantry and increased
population and urban growth renders peasant villages as subsidiaries of the
market. This loss of traditional autonomy involved the confiscation of
traditional peasant rates of surplus by raised rents or by coercive seizure and
or increased tax rates. “This is perhaps best seen in Russia, where successive
land reforms threatened peasant access to pastures, forests and
plowland…equally evident in cases where commercialization threatened peasant
access to communal lands (Mexico, Algeria, Vietnam), to unclaimed land, (Mexico,
Cuba), to public granaries, (Algeria, china)…commercialization disrupted rural
life it also created new and ecological niches in industry…Increased
instability in the rural areas was thus accompanied by a still unstable
commitment to industrial work”(57) Generally peasants are conservative andtheir
rebellions are generally an anachronistic response to industrialization.
The economic mode of production in china relied mostly
on traditional methods of agriculture and land tenancy, in which the modern industrial
sector only accounted for 7% of national income, whereas 19% of national income
was derived from rural property owners. Equally important was China’s
transportation infrastructure, which lay in shambles after the Japanese
attempts at occupation. Ultimately, with the victory of the PRC in 1949
culminated in a Naval blockade of china by the US, a boiling point only
resolved after China’s intervention into the Korean War. “The party’s
leadership of the peasant based anti Japanese resistance demonstrated the
capacity of the peasantry to organize, to mobilize, and to grow in the context
of a movement which respected its subsistence needs and which attempted to
locate the foundations for change on such common practices as rural mutual aid
and the cohesiveness of village structures.”(194) The land reform program of
the 1950’s centered on uniting of the party interest with the middle and poor
peasants against the wealthy landlords, which often involved the expropriation
of the latter’s assets and redistributing the assets locally on the basis of
need. The outcomes in themselves where not always ideal and many villagers used
the PRC’s land reform program to showcase their own internal feuds between
neighbors or local officials.
China’s leadership came to now increasingly rely on
soviet assistance for economic planning and development of industrial
infrastructure. Between the periods of 1953-1958 saw the creation of heavy
industrial production plants and consolidation of peasant communes into
centralized districts of state directed enterprise. The Great Leap Forward
however was a disastrous failure of the state’s attempt to turn mobilized labor
into industrial capital in that production was heavily geared towards
manufacturing when the primary focus had been agriculture, ostensibly resulting
in mass starvation and the deaths of 30 million people. “In short, the central
promise and central contradiction within societies engaged in the transition to
socialism center on the role of the state which can serve at once as a vehicle
for advancing and concentrating the interests of the direct producers in a
socialist society and as a roadblock for preventing the expression of those
interests.”(196) According to Seldon, China would not recover from the effects
of the land reform movement until 1978. Despite the modest gains in personal
income gained by the peasants during the early years of land reform resulted in
an overall decrease in peasant incomes. (198) However, China continued a steady
process of industrialization from 1952-1978 in which industrial output grew by
11.2% whereas agricultural output remained steady at 3.2% rate of growth. Also
China’s rates of investment into industrialization, from 24.2% (1953-57) to
39.6% at the height of the great leap forward, 1958, and from 1970-78 it
devoted 33% of material output into research and development. (199) Since
1980-2000, China’s economy has grown at a rate of 8-10% annually. After the
failure of the Great leap Forward, China disbanded its soviet economic
advisors, in 1960 and the growing Sino-Soviet divide later provided the
leveraged basis of America’s détente diplomatic tactics in the 1970’s.
In 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution as a bid
to reclaim party power for himself from Liao Saochi and Deng Xiaopeng, the so
called, ‘capitalist roaders,’ whom he purged later resuscitating Deng as his
heir apparent. Mao encouraged students and workers and peasants to organize as
Red Guard Brigades where they would expose intellectuals, bureaucrats, and
production managers with supposed rightist tendencies. Seldon argues that the
ideology of the Cultural Revolution did manage to radically redefine Chinese
expressions towards age and authority, bureacratisim and statisim. “Proponents
of uninterrupted revolution and continued class struggle did in fact develop a
cutting critique of the dangers of bureacratisim, of statist tendencies to
monopolize and abuse power.”(200) The Cultural Revolution ended in chaos and in
the deaths of some 60,000 people when the PLA finally stepped in restored local
order. Indeed after Mao’s death in 1976 many began to refer to the Cultural
Revolution as the age of the cult of Mao.
Deng Xiaopeng emerged as the new leader of China and
embarked on a radical departure from Maoist collectivism, to state directed
economic liberalization and development of a private sector. Essentially Deng
planned to merge capitalism, with Chinese socialism, a major departure from
previous polices of isolation from the west to one of direct economic
engagement. In 1980 Deng begun the partial privatization of enterprise,
resulting in the rise of the southern and eastern coastal cities as
commercially powerful sectors leading china to eventually dominate the global
export trade and freight business due to its cheap commodity labor supply. The
CCP still had a monopoly on political power that increasingly called into
question its own ideological affiliation to socialist cradle to grave policies
of maximum full employment, replaced by what the western liberal capitalists
designated as economic liberalization, resulting in the CCP’s bid to extend
privatization and export led development policies resulting in the laying off
of 10’s of millions of workers from formerly state owned factories. These
contradictions according to Seldon constituted the volatile ‘combustible
material’ that embodied china’s economic transition from state directed market
socialism to gradual integration into a global economic market structure. “The
Market then appears as a necessary but dangerously volatile instrument in the
socialist transition. Its dual nature constitutes one of the many
contradictions that socialist countries face in the transition process.”(201)
Many would argue that while china experienced vast economic growth in the 80’s
as a result of foreign and state directed private sector investment, the
widening disparities between wealth, income, status, rural and urban classes,
as well as corruption in the CCP undermined this whole transition process, and
culminated in the 1989 tianamien uprising. Revolution comes to china gradually
in waves of uprisings culminating from decades of struggle amongst the
competing entities of the Chinese cultural universe, the forces of
traditionalism, capitalism, and Socialism. Rather revolution represents a transfer
of power from one regime to the next, and arguably China searches to employ her
past legacy of dynastic continuity as an image of constancy to mold the process
of its social evolution and social change and also it is an attractive sell to
western multinational capital seeking to do business with a stable regime such
as China has proven itself in its successes in quelling the 1989 uprising, but
not necessarily the issues that movement sought to address.
Whereas China’s 1949 revolution involved a long complex
transfer of power from regime to regime the Russian revolution happened rather
rapidly and the socialist state soon consolidated its hold over all of Russia
quickly. Tsar Nicholas II the last Romanov ruler of Russia governed that nation
according to the dictates of royal precedents extending back to Ivan Grozny the
first autocratic Muscovite ruler. In the late 19th and early 20th
century Russia as a nation under tsarist autocratic rule underwent a process of
industrialization, reorganization of peasant land communes, and also the
formation of the Duma, the people’s assembly. In each case these measures where
direct responses to popular revolts and an attempt by the state to wield
greater authority, and eventually resulted in the overthrow of the regime
itself.
The Tsarist government consisted
of ministries with the two most powerful ministries, Finance and the Interior
vying for control amid the tsar’s own autocratic authority. These Bureaucratic
organizations were effectively undercut by the system of autocracy in that rule
by authority of personality superseded the authority of an institution. Russia
between 1890-1914 initially embarked upon a path of industrialization and
agrarian reform because it wanted to compete with the west. The modernizers led
by Sergei Witte, the minister of Finance, financed their industrialization
programs by increasing the rates of taxation on the peasantry. The Russian
Government also subsidized or exempted entrepreneurs from taxes and also
encouraged foreign capital investment.
Despite the efforts of Witte, Russia still trailed
Italy and Spain in terms of industrial development. However, there was a major
increase in the proletarian class, beginning in 1867 after the liberation of
the serfs, at 35,000 workers and increasing to 200,000 proletarians by 1913.
The Population's Literacy rate doubled in this period as well to 40% of
the total population. Despite the rises in industrial wage earners, Russia
remained predominately a peasant nation with a total of 1/2 of European
Russia organized under peasant communes. On these communes all taxes were
paid in kind and land redistributed according to family size and
productive capacity. Tim McDaniel argues that the system of collective
ownership created a low incentive on the part of the peasants to agriculturally
innovate. However, a system of demographic upheavals would result in 1916 with
fully one half of the Russian peasants being displaced from communes or
otherwise landless vagabonds.
Tsarist Russia's earlier attempt at
agrarian land reform, in 1906 began the process of privatization of peasant
communes. Led by the Prime minister Peter Stolypin these reforms did little to
quell the growing revolutionary sentiment in the minds of the Russian people.
During 1905-1906 Japan fought and won a war with Russia setting the precedent
of the first Asian power to defeat a European power in the modern age. Against
this backdrop was the growing exploitation of the Russian proletarian worker,
and on January 9th 1905, 60000 workers petitioned the tsar for better working
conditions. The Tsar refused to the see the workers and instead sent Cossack
troops to gun down the insurrectionists. As mentioned before the Stolypin
reforms were a failure and the end result was the government's withdrawal of a
land reform plan, which in turn led to an increasing development of village
solidarity on the communes. McDaniel describes the bureaucratic structure
of the Russian government and why the twin towers of the tsar's domestic
policy, privatization and modernization indicated that his royal authority and
the monocratic bureaucracy associated with it had become outdated. "..The
regime staked its success of its modernization program on private initiative,
but its authoritarian nature stifled it. In the case of some groups the regime
smothered their initiative quite consciously out of fear of overt opposition.
For example the tsar had no intention of permitting an independent trade union
movement even if its suppression entailed worker disaffection both in the
factory and in the society at large."(187) In fact this disaffection would
be felt in the urban centers and with the rise of Marxist ideology a unified
national class-consciousness began to be established, linking peasants with
proletarians. During WWI Russia suffered a number of disastrous defeats until
the Americans entered the war. This demonstrated that the modernization reforms
had been null, and that the security of apparatus of the state was more bent on
repressing the populace then actually protecting it from foreign invasion. In
October, 1917 a national revolt was launched in Moscow and St. Petersburg and
the tsar was forced to abdicate by members of the Russian Duma of whom the
Bolsheviks had sizable majority after defeating the moderate mescheniks.
Lenin's thesis proposed a rural
revolution of the countryside. The agriculture was predominately based on the
medieval three-field system. Only in the frontiers and in Siberia could
villagers claim mixed success as opposed to the whole of the Russian masses
mired in economic stagnation and rising currency devaluation. essentially
poverty stemmed from corruption and overpopulation and in Russia's case this
had created a declining class of rural elites and overall poverty in the
countryside. The new Provisional government composed of moderates, liberals and
socialists essentially had no social base of support in the countryside their
primary focus being increased industrialization. Bolshevik ideology was willing
to accommodate both the proletarian and the peasants endowing them with a
politicized view of class consciousness that had never before been articulated
as a mass whole by the Russian people and that ideology of
revolution defined class struggle and nation building as the
transhistorical mission of the Russian people. However, McDaniel argues that
the system of autocracy was passed to the soviets, in that the land reform was
revolutionary, however, essentially there was a recapitulation of the Tsarist
bureaucracy under Lenin and later Stalin's rule. "In Russia, autocratic
control of society meant that critical knowledge vital to rational decision
making on the part of individuals and social groups was masked. Workers had no
real sense of what support for the Bolshevik party implied."(190) Hence
socialist revolution created a Soviet privileged class of the
intelligentsia.
Revolutions against Soviet
communism would first occur in the soviet client states of East Germany,
Hungary and Poland. 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 quality
consumer goods, and this problem became especially acute in the (1970's-1980's)
when 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.
The opposition movements of Eastern Europe involved
five features. First it was a multi-class movement, and secondly this movement
featured 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.
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. 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.
Accordingly with the thesis of this paper Gold Stone
argues that revolutions involve a series of conjunctions involving an
amalgamation of trends. Revolutions involve a decline in state effectiveness
and fiscal solvency, 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. (262) In the
1970’s this problem was not as acute, 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 instruemental 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.
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 there
are connections between the revolutions of 1989 to the French revolution of
1789, and the Bolshevik, 1917 revolution along with the Chinese 1949
revolution. He argues 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. 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 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.