MODERNIZING CHINA: POST-MAO REFORM AND DEVELOPMENT
A. Doak Barnett and Ralph N. Clough (Eds.)
Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1986
xii+136pp., $23.85 hardcover; $12.85 paperback
SWEET AND SOUR CAPITALISM
An Analysis of 'Socialism with Chinese Characteristics'
Donal J. Senese
Washington, D.C.: The Council for Social and Economic Studies, 1985
vii+153 pp.
TO GET RICH GLORIOUS: CHINA IN THE EIGHTIES
Orville Schell
New York: Pantheon Books, 1984
210 pp., $15.95 hard cover; $4.95 paperback
The Western fascination with China and the readiness to explain away, when not praising, all kinds of chinoiseries, has had some unfortunate consequences for our ability to dispassionately understand what was and is going on there. The situation was particularly deplorable from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s, a time when, except for two or three years in the early sixties, a gaggle of ideological crazies was running the country, experimenting with instant utopias and wreaking havoc with the culture, polity, economy, and personal lives of the Chinese people. Much of the literature on China produced in the West at that time, the part of it uncritically supportive of the Maoist derangement, is destined for the trash can, of history and otherwise, and its disappearance would represent a net addition to our knowledge of China. Those responsible for these scribblings have been, by and large, unaffected by the subsequent exposure of their intellectual maladroitness. Many keep churning out new works on China, this time explaining and extolling the current line which, to say the least, seems to be quite different from the former Maoist course. One gets the impression that for these people no Chinese regime can ever be wrong, so long as it claims to be Marxist, assumes a Leninist posture, and adheres to the socialist road.
Ah, but herein lies a problem. Is the road socialist, and if it is, was the old road socialist too? Does the present Chinese leadership know where it is going, or is it stumbling about in the mist looking for the tao in some rough conformity with what the frustrated Soviets call the principle of the zigzag?
China: Which Way?
It has been said that the Chinese made a long march to socialism, and when they got there, they found nothing there, so now they are marching back, leaving behind the Soviet bloc which has been standing there for decades pretending to be moving. Certainly, China's search for the Socialist promise has been full of swagger, with leaps forward and back, while the Soviets since Khrushchev's reformist flash in the pan have been mired in a condition of dynamic immobilism.
What China does or does not do with the socioeconomic and political systems it had borrowed earlier from the Stalinist Soviets and with which it had tinkered ever since is a
...
Read Full Article
|
