The Red Campaign’s Allure: China Chooses Its Course

In 2012, the Chinese Communist Party chooses a new Politburo. This once-in-a-decade event will set China’s course through 2025. The new Politburo must decide whether the Communist Party will continue as the dominant force in politics and society, or will China evolve towards some kind of pluralism.

China’s successes over the past three decades should give “liberals” a strong claim to a solid Politburo majority. Under a continuing “liberal” majority, private enterprise will outgrow state enterprise, China will deepen its integration into the world economy, the party will explore pluralism, at least at the local level, and Maoist philosophy will become a remnant of the past.

The “Red Campaign” offers a quite different path: The party reasserts its central role, rejects Western or universal values in favor of “red culture, enacts statist policies to replace free-wheeling capitalism, and crushes challenges with a powerful security apparatus. 

The pilgrimages of top party leaders to Chingqoing party boss Bo Xilai are much in the news. New Leftist Bo, a favorite to take one of the Politburo seats, proposes to apply his brand of patriotic TV programming, red singing shows, extra-judicial crackdowns on crime and dissent, and government spending on worker housing to all of China. Bo’s “Red Campaign” has clearly struck a responsive chord.

Why this nostalgia for the Mao era despite its horrors and China’s enormous economic successes? President Obama would have few 2012 election jitters with such an economic record. The New Leftists are, in effect, proposing dramatic changes to what the rest of the world views as a most successful policy.

Let me suggest possible explanations:

1). China’s communist party faces irrelevance under the current course. As the state enterprise share shrinks below one fifth, all pretense of China as a socialist market economy disappears. The private sector will be clearly exposed as the engine of growth, not the “wise leadership” of the Communist Party, as is currently claimed.

A market economy integrated into a global economy does not leave room for party domination. Markets replace plans and administrative allocation, and state influence is exercised through macro policy and regulation, as it is elsewhere.

To avoid redundancy in the economic sphere, the party must reestablish a statist economy based on party direction of a dominant state sector, as proposed by the Red Campaign.

2) China’s “New Left” believes that the Chinese people associate the market economy with the corruption of party officials and their Princeling offspring. They offer a  “pure” party and a statist economy as a cure.

China’s communist party finds itself in much the same position as Boris Yeltsin’s “democrats” in the 1990s.  The Soviet Communist Party was no longer around to take the fall for corruption and unpaid pensions, so democracy and capitalism got the blame.

In China, the party is still very much around to be blamed for theft, corruption, illegal land grabs, unemployment, and the Princeling Mercedes Benzes that run over workers on the streets

The Red Campaign offers a simple solution:  A return to the days of a pure party motivated not by money but by ideology. The party of Mao made disastrous mistakes, but al least it did not steal.  Although the mass starvation of 1958-1960 and the Cultural Revolution of 1965-1968 left dark shadows on millions of Chinese families, the New Left counts on such memories dimming.

Many Russians feel nostalgia for the “old days” when the party kept order, they had their jobs, and party theft was limited.  For Russians, the Stalin terror and famine lay almost a half century back. The Chinese New Left hopes to play on similar nostalgia, especially now that Mao’s excesses lie more than thirty years in the past.

China in 2012 confronts the same choice as Gorbachev in 1989, but under quite different circumstances. Gorbachev in 1989 was firefighting the crisis of the collapsing command economy. The Chinese Politburo in 2012 will face a non-crisis. Even with slowing growth, China will still be among the world’s fastest growing economies and an envy of the world.

Confronted with his crisis, Gorbachev chose to end party dominance of the economy and weaken the party’s central apparatus.  His Politburo hardliners timidly acceded at first.  Their amateurish coup, launched to save the party, came too late.

If China’s 2012 Politburo attempts to implement the Red Campaign, it will discover the genie of private enterprise cannot be put back in the bottle. They can restore the dominance of state companies only through extreme favoritism and even repression of the private sector. The New Left will find themselves like a King Canute trying to hold back the sea. They cannot mount enough political power to revert back to the economic statism of earlier years.

Gorbachev did not understand that the reforms he launched would inevitably end the Soviet economic and political system. Had he understood, he would have followed the course of his predecessors. The Chinese New Left apparently sees the handwriting on the wall. They see 2012 as their last chance to save the party as they want it to be.   

Why the Chinese Communists Are So Scared (Is It Time to Wither Away?)

Marx and Engels wrote that the state would wither away after the Communists Party accomplished its tasks. The Chinese Communist Party fears that someone may ask: “Is it time for us to wither away?”

The threat of a Jasmine Revolution scared the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese Communists reacted to fear of contagion from the Arab Spring by stepping up repression, but their concerns have deeper and more permanent roots.

China is much different from the Arab Spring countries. Its economy is booming. Real incomes are rising. China is less corrupt, and people believe central authorities are relatively honest. China is said to be run by a competent government that deftly avoided the world financial crisis and created growth.

So why are the Chinese Communists so fearful? Why are informal church services, poets, film makers, artists, and nationalists of any stripe suppressed with extreme brutality? Why does every demonstration, no matter how small, strike fear into the hearts of authorities?

Why do not the Chinese Communists, with their record of achievements, feel secure?
Answer: The Chinese Communist Party no longer has a claim to legitimacy. It has no real purpose other than to keep itself in power. It is that simple.

The preamble to the Chinese Constitution illustrates the quandary: It tells of the glorious victory of the heroic Chinese Communist Party in 1949, fighting with long odds against the imperialists, the revanchists, and the nationalists to set the Chinese people on the “socialist road guided by Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought.”

After the glorious victory, the Communist Party’s role was to lead the “continuous revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat … to achieve great victories both in socialist revolution and socialist construction.” Without the Communist Party’s leadership, the battle “between the socialist road and the capitalist road” could still be lost. The Party’s role was not limited to politics. It was needed to secure economic victory by “practicing economic planning on the basis of socialist public ownership.”

Without the Communist Party firm hand, hard-fought political and economic achievements were at risk, or so it was said.

The 1975 Constitution makes the case: The Communist Party is legitimate because the people and the party are one, and daunting task lie ahead. As Article 2 states: “The working class exercises leadership over the state through its vanguard, the Communist Party of China.”

This heroic narrative loses its glow in the haze of the constitutional amendments from 1982 to 2004, which were required by the reality of Chinese reforms.

China now aims for “socialist modernization.” Instead of “continuous revolution,” the Party advances society “along the road of Chinese-style socialism… persists in reform, improves socialist institutions, develops a socialist market economy, advances socialist democracy, improves the socialist legal system and turns China into a powerful and prosperous socialist country.” The state no longer plans the economy because "the state has put into practice a socialist market economy.” The State is reduced to “formulating economic laws, improving macro adjustment and control” like any other conventional state.

In effect, the “New deal” is that the Chinese Communist Party offers the people growth and prosperity if they refrain from asking the “withering away” question.

As the Communist Party loses its raison de etre, it is increasingly threatened by the constitutional guarantees of “freedom of speech, correspondence, the press, assembly, association, procession, demonstration and the freedom to strike, and enjoy freedom to believe in religion and freedom not to believe in religion and to propagate atheism.”

If people are free to gather, criticize, and express opinions, they may ask: “Why do we even need the Communist Party? If we are allowed to vote, why is there only one slate of candidates?

The asking of such questions has dire consequences. “The exercise by citizens of their freedoms and rights may not infringe upon the interests of the state, of society and of the collective, or upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens.” Private correspondence can be censored according to the “needs of state security.” Citizens can complain about officials “but fabrication or distortion of facts with the intention of libel or frame-up is prohibited.”

Notice that virtually any exercise of constitutional rights can be deemed “contrary to the interests of the state or the needs of state security.” Dissidents cannot judge the consequences of their acts, although they know the reaction will be negative.

In 2012, a new majority of the Communist Party Politburo will be chosen from among leaders who were not alive in 1949. The contenders must understand that the Communist Party dictatorship has lost its reason for being. The “Maoists” will argue that China must regain its revolutionary fervor. It must return to a “pure” socialist road. The “Reformers” may decide that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” is not longer appropriate for a society of private ownership, foreign investment, and an integrated world economy.

How they decide will have a stunning impact on the world in which we live.