China’s Red Campaign: Back to Mao?

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.   

Although Nothing Happened at Cuba’s Party Congress, Something Actually Did (The Dog That Did Not Bark)

Despite speculation of major changes, none were visible at Cuba’s first party congress in sixteen years. The delegates formalized Raul’s replacement of the ailing Fidel Castro (this actually happened three years ago), it re-elected the old revolutionary guard to the key positions, and it approved some trivial reforms. Their heralded reforms reduced the size of the public work force (which accounts for some nine out of ten jobs), allowed private ownership of homes, and approved several hundred other changes that were kept from public view but are surely trivial.

All the talk of making way for a new generation of leaders proved empty. The newly-elected leadership consists of Raul Castro at 76, his first deputy at 77, and a Politburo whose average age is in the 70s. The Congress’s “dog that did not bark” was it failure to elevate younger party members to the party elite. This omission will have a profound effect on Cuba’s future.

The failure of the April 2011 Cuban party congress to address fundamental reform was entirely predictable. We have no historical case of fundamental reform during the lifetime of the “great” revolutionary leader. The Chinese reforms began shortly after Mao’s death in 1976. Gorbachev’s reforms, three decades after Stalin’s death, had to wait the passing of the Stalin clones who served after him. Any fundamental restructuring of the “Great Leader’s” political and economic system questions his lifetime achievements and is not feasible.

Instead of reform, the Ancien Regime “talks” about reform, as they did at the Cuban congress. They realize that the system is failing. Yet they must hold out hope that it can be salvaged by minor tinkering (such as allowing private home ownership or loosening restrictions on private economic activity). As “old revolutionaries” they understand that real reform will destroy all that they have worked for and believe in. Real reform remains off limits.

Within less than ten years, human mortality and infirmity will install leaders too young to have led the glorious revolution. Cuba will be where the Soviet Union was in March of 1985 as the last of the old guard died off, and the party had to turn to a new generation not appointed by Stalin himself.

Who will be Cuba’s Gorbachev? We do not know, but he is inevitable and within a relatively short period of time. Will he, like Gorbachev, unwittingly (or in this case deliberately), destroy the party, or will he be a Deng, who figures out how to preserve the party in the face of meaningful reform?

In my view, the most likely scenario for Cuba’s new “young” leaders is the Gorbachev “system-destruction” model. Why?

The younger members of the Cuban party elite of 2020 must make a practical choice: Are our interests better served by retaining the old system or by destroying it? By that time, the Cuban economy will be tottering. The privileges of high party office will seem trivial compared to other possibilities that they can arrange through their party networks in a “capitalist” Cuba. They need only emulate their former comrades in Russia and Central Asia, as the brave “capitalist” reformers of Cuba. All they need to do is to make sure that they head the property committees, the banks, and the economic ministries as the privatization begins. The United States will delight in their new capitalist allies, only later to express disappointment when they end up owning most of Cuba’s national resources.

For the Castros, the April 2011 party congress was their last chance to prevent this outcome. If they had institutionalized retirements (as did the Chinese) and made way for a new party elite, the party’s emerging leaders would have gained a stake in the system. It would have given the new elite serious pause to explore the Chinese option of an open, foreign-investment-led path that rewarded them sufficiently to retain the party monopoly. Even if they would not be the new billionaires of Cuba, their children could be the “Princelings” of a prosperous and growing Cuba.

Whatever! This option was the road not taken at the April Cuban party congress.