to increase state regulation of societal relationships, with the exception of the Cultural Revolution years, we cannot really describe Maoism as essentially antibureaucratic. At the same time, the Maoist concept of antibureaucratism was also the expression of an interelite conflict. The notion of a “class war” against, inter alia, “bureaucratic excesses” that formed the backbone of political campaigns was mainly devoted to attempting to oppose the old political and economic intellectual elites who still possessed cultural capital after 1949 (Andreas 2009; see also Selden 1993, 7–13). Consequently, collectivist ethics and efforts to level class differences targeted technocratic and/or bureaucratic groups.10 However, this “Red-over-expert power structure … in which incumbent managers and specialists were relegated to subordinate technical positions” (Andreas 2009, 269) became less important over time. Following the peak of this interelite conflict, the Cultural Revolution, the Maoist and technocratic elites converged under Deng Xiaoping and became the new ruling elite (Andreas 2009, 269–76; also see Walder 2015).11
A final feature of Maoism I would like to outline here is the link between nationalism and a rural populism that led to Mao’s voluntarism, that is, the attempt to “leap over” the country’s material backwardness by appealing to the morality of the people (Lieberthal 1995, 62–70). In contrast to the USSR, the party-state had neither a proletarian nor a liberal legacy to deal with.
Consistent with the absence of the class structure postulated in Marx’s writings, and with the role of the intelligentsia, free from loyalty to a particular class … Maoism is essentially “voluntarist”: that is, the aims of the leadership are seen as feasible provided they work hard, rather than provided the objective situation permits. The role of theory is thus changed from that suggested in Marx; for Mao theory is a somewhat eclectically selected element in public relations work, in the propaganda necessary to change consciousness, rather than itself a more or less accurate analysis of reality to guide practice. (Harris 1971, 174; see also Harris 1986, 170–86)
Voluntarism and its counterpart, the Mao cult, advocated hierarchical decision-making methods as well as the valorization of intuitive actions of the country’s leaders. The prevailing institutionalized voluntarism found expression in the plethora of production campaigns that were conducted like military offensives, a fact reflected in the language used by the CCP (“production brigade,” “grain front,” etc.). Linked to this was a tradition of “socialist education” where the “educator” guided the masses who, conversely, were infantilized. This, in turn, eliminated the party cadres’ individual sense of responsibility to a great extent. Under the overriding premise of acting “in the interests of the masses,” these cadres were able to discard their moral scruples (Saich 2004, 219–20).12
Between Command Economy and “Plan Anarchy”: Key Features of the Chinese Economy from the 1930s to the 1970s
To counter the myths that misrepresented the Maoist model of development as the brainchild of an insane dictator, an antibureaucratic idyll of farmers’ communes, and similar, Naughton refers to China’s GDP growth rates, which, compared to India, for instance, were relatively high (Naughton 2007, 140; see also Karl 2010). The average annual growth in GDP between 1952 and 1978 was around 6 percent. Industrial output increased by an average of 11.5 percent per annum between 1952 and 1978 (Naughton 2007, 56). Even as early as 1954, China had an investment rate of 26 percent of GDP, which is rather high compared to other developing countries. Particularly in the years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, however, there were substantial economic downturns.13
During the course of its national modernization efforts, the CCP was able to build on the remnants of the prewar era (Bian 2005), including the industry that burgeoned in the early twentieth century in colonial treaty ports such as Shanghai, Tianjin, or Qingdao. Although this “enclave industrialization” was, for the most part, externally initiated and under foreign control to begin with, indigenous enterprises rapidly caught up (Hamilton 2006a). By the 1930s, Chinese-owned companies were producing two-thirds of the country’s industrial output (Naughton 2007, 44). In addition, we saw the emergence of large-scale Japanese government-sponsored industrial projects in Manchuria. Thanks to their qualitative importance (heavy industry), these projects played a far more significant role than their 14 percent share of total industrial output in 1933 might suggest.14
From an industrial policy perspective, the precursor of the practice of substantial state intervention and the political power of disposition over companies can be found in the Guomindang government. The relocation of industrial production inland from Shanghai during the Japanese invasion and World War II, for instance, was organized by the Guomindang Planning Commission (Bian 2005, chapters 2 and 3). In the early 1940s, state-owned enterprises in the territories that were not under Japanese occupation accounted for 70 percent of China’s capital. The CCP described the ruling powers at the time—almost in subconscious anticipation of their later impact—as “bureaucratic capitalists” (Au 2009).15
There was also evidence of path dependencies in terms of the organization of labor:
The emergence of the Maoist system in the 1950s was itself the result of path-dependent development based on industrial arrangements that arose during the Republican era under the Nationalist government. In the 1920s and 1930s, a newly established legal framework for industrial relations, along with state-corporatist tendencies, heavy-handed state intervention, and paternalistic practices to curb a high labor turnover rate among skilled workers helped lay down the preconditions for the socialist workplace (danwei) system. (A. Chan and Unger 2009, 6–7; see also Bian 2005, 167–79)
Certain conditions for industrial development were therefore already in place in the form of state ownership and authoritarian collectivism. Following the Japanese occupation, the ruling CCP gradually developed these conditions further—“institutional and ideological evolution, not revolution, explains the basic structure of state-owned enterprise and its ideology in post-1949 China” (Bian 2005, 213). After 1949, the state-controlled economic sectors were largely taken over by the CCP.16 Because large parts of (heavy) industry had already been nationalized by the Guomindang government, the subsequent expropriation policy implemented in the country’s urban centers could be concentrated on light industry. Now the CCP, which at this juncture had already split internally into separate factions, assumed the role of the national power elite as a form of substitute bourgeoisie (Ersatzbourgeoisie). In addition, many senior members of staff from the pre-Maoist Planning Commission continued to be employed under the rule of the Communist Party.
Overall, however, after 1949, China’s new elite was primarily faced with a myriad of unfavorable legacies. The years from 1937 to 1945 left the country with a desolate economic infrastructure, a financial crisis that manifested itself as hyperinflation, and an exhausted population subjected not only to fierce Japanese aggression but also repression under the Guomindang. The economy was also heavily balkanized.17 The decades of Chinese Nationalist rule, of the Japanese occupation of parts of the country, of war, and ultimately civil war meant that the victorious CCP was confronted with an economy that was on the verge of collapse (Herrmann-Pillath 1995, 54–59).
In the first few years following the anticolonial revolution and the victory over the Guomindang, China attempted to imitate Soviet development models (Gey 1985, 15–22). Global economic crises and world war had discredited Western capitalist development policies whereas, at the time, the USSR had the highest growth rates of all major economies. This was commented on retrospectively by Justin Yifu Lin, a former Chinese chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank: “The collapse of the New York Stock Exchange [in 1929] … triggered a ten-year depression accompanied by enormous mass unemployment throughout the entire Western world. Apparently completely unfazed by this, the Soviet Union under Stalin picked this of all times to fully commit itself to transitioning from a poor agricultural country into a serious industrial and military power. There was therefore great fascination about Communism’s ability to do exactly as it promised” (J. Lin 2009, 56, my translation; see also Osterhammel 1989, 364–69).
China’s pragmatic alignment with the Soviet Union was nevertheless adapted to the country’s somewhat different conditions. It would therefore appear to be more accurate to refer to a distinctive