Countryside triumphant
Having forgotten the Tiananmen spring — and the massacre —it's business as usual in a China open to the world of capitalism. Roland Lew examines the transformation taking place in Chinese society, a society characterised by both rapid change and deep-rooted traditions.
International Viewpoint #246 June 1993
ROLAND LEW*
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surprised by urban China. One expects to find an urban scene paralysed after the tragic events of 1989, in the expectation of long-awaited political changes. One expects to find a frightened society; after all, the victors of 1989 — those responsible for the massacre - are still in power, including Prime Minister Li Peng whose term has just been renewed for another five years.
Instead, one discovers a freedom of activity and even often of expression of a population swept away by the economic boom (almost 20% industrial growth in 1992), engrossed in a passion for business matters, thirsting after consumer goods and determined to carry out its plans with, without or against the regime.
One expects to visit one of the last bastions of the 'socialist' state (a contradiction in terms which long ago ceased to surprise anyone). Instead, capitalism is visible at every turn and eagerly sought after in the most dynamic sectors of urban
This desire to build a Chinese capitalism barely hidden behind various turns of phrase (such as the 'socialist market economy', which has recently been written into the Constitution) has been on the order of the day since Deng Xiaoping launched an offensive at the beginning of 1992, given official blessing at the fourteenth Party congress in October 1992 and hammered home at the spring session of the National Assembly of the People.
And even those who were not naive about the real evolution of the country — those who know the difference between official pronouncements and reality -expect to find signs of an authoritarian state, of the state that sent in the tanks to crush the Tianenmen spring.
Instead, one finds many signs of a weak state. While there is a repressive system in place and the smothering of any open opposition, the state also suffers from a highly fragile authority in the social and economic fields. This is the 24
• CHINA China of the 1990s: a country which still has to make decisive choices or at least openly consolidate those that have already
Over the last year, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has on several occasions declared that the new orientation -towards the market — will be a policy valid for 100 years. However, nothing is certain given the fact that everything relies on the steps taken by an old man of nearly 90 years with no apparent successor.
The designated successor, Jiang Zemin, has amassed a host of positions which in principle should make him as powerful as Mao was in his moment of glory: secretary general of the CCP (Mao was president), president of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and president of the powerful military committee of the CCP. Nevertheless, the Chinese people are not impressed, aware as they are of the fact that he has much less power than Deng Xiaoping, a man who no longer occupies any official posts.
In 1993, urban Chinese are voracious consumers, dressing up in leather (often Chinese-made), on the look out for 'new look' entertainment from Japan and Hong Kong. More than this, they want to set up a small business to quickly improve their standard of living and, for the most successful, attain a purchasing power equivalent to the West or to Hong Kong - up to and including the ability to buy that rare and particularly expensive item, the auto-
And they take this path with that much more energy given the fact that they are emerging from a long history of misery and face an uncertain future. The government is definitely weak, and seen as such, but experience has taught the Chinese to be wary of a possible return to the rule of the truncheon, big shifts in policy and arbitrary measures taken by the Party-state. The uncertainty has less to do with upcoming struggle over the succession of Deng Xiaoping than with the viability of the development currently underway and the continuation of current successes.
The vitality, dynamism and optimism of the Chinese prevent them from openly expressing these doubts to foreigners. China is changing but remains true to itself: aware that it is emerging from a level of underdevelopment which can be seen everywhere, in the city as in the countryside. Aware that it is a country where, as throughout its history, a few bad harvests can throw everything into doubt.
In China one now inhabits a universe which is torn between the desire to benefit from a boom which may prove to be short-lived and the need to guarantee solid foundations for family interests. No one in China knows, neither in the population nor in the highest reaches of the regimes, who will really take Deng Xiaoping's place -in what context and to do what, to carry out which change or impose (if this is possible!) which retreat.
People are not joking when they say they want a new 'emperor', authoritarian but not despotic. They want a leader who will go further in the direction of the current changes and who will satisfy the aspirations of the people. No one imagines that the people have something to say about a process which represents nothing less than leading the nation into a major turn in Chi-
This of course reflects the authoritarian turn in the political field unleashed by the brief yet severe repression in 1989. But it goes further still: city dwellers do not express the belief that China was, or is ready to go beyond anything more than a dictatorial regime. There is great scepticism regarding the possible success of democracy in this vast and complex coun try-continent (whereas people are conscious of the progress made in this direction on the island of Taiwan).
And there is a similar amount of scepticism regarding the democratic convictions of many of the dissidents from 1989. In a way, they are seen as being 'too Chinese and too much products of the authoritarian experience of the PRC for them to be credited with genuine democratic aspi-
Many people one comes across say that democracy is for later, when the people are more educated - unconsciously but sincerely repeating an old line of
* Roland Lew has recently returned from a trip to China. His article originally appeared in two parts in the April 29 and May 6 issues of Rouge, weekly paper of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, French section of the Fourth International.
International Viewpoint #246 June 1993 argument used on numerous occasions throughout the 20th century in China, whether by Guomindang nationalists or by Communists. Once again, one comes across a traditional China, whose old reflex to defend elites is very much present in the current upheavals.
The current period is a dramatic indicator of post-Maoist China. While it is exaggerated and highly illusory to think that today everything has been revealed, it is nonetheless the case that many things can be clearly distinguished. The passions of the day reveal some of the fundamental forces and traits of Chinese society as it has emerged from several decades under the Maoist regime.
The dynamism of urban society merely reveals the degree of the rural presence in the cities. There is first and foremost the large number of rural migrants in the cities: those urban layers who came from the countryside after 1949, classic products of the industrialization process.
In China this goes further: the Chinese city - including the most city-like of Chinese cities, Beijing and Shanghai - has always been the countryside in the city. This striking reality, visible to all now that there is no longer a regime which closes the country to the world, has its negative and positive sides.
It is precisely because the rural world represents not only the huge majority of the country but also the greater part of the cities that the country has survived the bad medicine administered during the Maoist period and that its vitality can shine through today.
It is peasant characteristics and values which are behind the current successes. This carefree China which is moving at a lightning speed, ready to trade one economic system for another whatever the name, is a China rooted in a peasant world which has proved to everyone its incredible capacity for resistance.
This peasant world has shown itself ready to retreat when necessary, yet quick to rebound, to seize the opportunity and improve its lot - that of the family, the clan, and so forth — in at least a provisional manner, but really no more than that.
The peasantry's horizons remain narrow, both in the city and in the countryside. But they have displayed tremendous confidence, tremendous energy in their search for concrete and immediate solutions and great determination to seize the initiative and proceed without great sentimentality with an acute sense of what is possible at any given moment. This is how the peasant survived in the past — and the history of the 19th and 20th century has been particularly dramatic for the peasan-
The peasantry used the same values, the same qualities and the same schemes under the Maoist regime. The peasantry was favourable to the agrarian reform of 1950 which redistributed lands in the way they had wanted for a long time; and it was cautious but not entirely hostile to Mao's forced collectivization of 1955-56.
The disaster of the Great Leap Forward - the terrible economic reversals and the three years of famine which it provoked - and the poor results of two decades of collectivization led the peasants to place greater and greater pressures for a new orientation after Mao's death in 1976.
These pressures led to - against the advice of the regime but with its agreement — a rapid decollectivisation at the beginning of the 1980s and the de facto return of private family farms. The time for individual and clan rural initiative had arrived, with caution and attention given to mollifying local leaders - but nonetheless with great determination and unceasing
The flux towards the cities is all the more irresistible given that urban social life is not different in the main from that of the countryside.
The experience of the city since 1949 is clearly different from that of the coun tryside. On the one hand, the peasantry can only obtain that which is acquired through their work and that of their family - and by using all possible avenues, including the super-exploitation of other peasants.
On the other, at least until recently, the state system offered very little room for individual initiative — but it allowed for a peaceful life and provided for various advantages which city dwellers received (rather than won) during the Maoist per-
But for the past several years the urban scene has been subject to productivist pressures which do not guarantee the continuation of these advantages. As a result, the incidence of private initiative increased. Thus, city dwellers — like good urbanized peasants - were swept up by the passions of the day and have plunged into the joys of business, to get an immediate and tangible gain (today, not tomorrow) in its position.
It is striking to see the the enthusiasm of city dwellers who have decided to 'swallow' all that is on offer in the shops and the prosperous markets — taking advantage of all that can be eaten, put on one's body and placed in one's apartment to impress oneself and one's friends. There is a clear turning of backs to the misery of rural life and the suffering of the past in this eagerness and readiness to consume as if everyone - however one may want to describe this people which is optimistic in its discourse, not inclined to be depressed and very suspicious about others, and not only foreigners — is living in uncertainty about the present, and even more so about the future.
These characteristics of the peasantry — of a rural world still present in the cities
- can be easily found among those who would be insulted were they to be pointed
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International Viewpoint #246 June 1993 out to them. And this is especially true among a number of urban intellectuals.
However, one need only see their refusal to participate in even a slightly abstract discussion which does not involve some concrete concern or immediate advantage. And one need only observe the great exaltation that possesses them in questions of setting up a business or some concrete pro-
I saw high-level academics very excitedly discussing a banal, routine project of setting up an automobile service station through their institute with the hopes of increasing their meagre salaries.
This is far from the traditional image of the intellectual, of the mandarins and their ancestral disdain for commerce and business — a disdain shared by a tradition of Communist activism but now beaten back by the drive towards business (or the exploitation of others' business) now common among CCP cadres, less so among women cadres but their turn will soon come. And these cadres are often themselves the children or grandchildren of
This fact of rural life in the city reminds us of the Soviet case. The historian Moshe Lewin has shown in a convincing way that one can't understand Soviet society of the 1930s without taking into consideration the ruralisation of the cities 26 caused by the influx of peasants. This ruralisation of the cities outweighed the urbanization of these peasants forcefully brought into the urban centres - a fact which had major importance on the Soviet system, on the realities of Stalinism (which, for example, manipulated popular demonology to full effect) and for the very difficult task of creating a specific urban space in Soviet society.
The same thing goes for Communist China. The Chinese peasantry has had to bear the weight of economic development, paid the price for the arbitrary measures of various leaders, and suffered through Mao's whimsical twists and turns. It has managed to maintain a continuity of its values (which is not at all self-evident in Russia), and in its way to contribute to saving the country as much in wartime (civil war or war against an invader) as in peacetime.
Nevertheless, there should be no glossing over the price China has had to pay for this: the fragility of any kind of urban "civility" (not to say civilization) and the absence of an autonomous urban world. In other words, a long-standing characteristic of Chinese society continues to be felt: the low autonomy of the urban social space and the lack of a specifically urban area separate from both the countryside and the attractive and remunerative powers of the regime.
What the Chinese city still reflects today are the continuing problems associated with tearing a city away from its peasant origins and the building of a specifically urban universe with its own values and patterns of social behaviour.
The cities have taken the lead in the economic changes, taking on the 1980s dynamism of the countryside. But they do not play a leadership role in the forging of a new political and social orientation. This is quite striking in cities like Beijing and Shanghai —especially in Shanghai, a city proud of the prestige it has historically for being the bearer of innovation in China.
The rural weight in the cities, which is hardly restricted to China, explains the political retardation of Chinese society or, rather, the relative ease with which the Communist power has controlled an urban society which, however, grows more and more restless faced with an authoritarianism imposed by the Party-state of another
And this retardation has not been effaced since the explosion of spring 1989, which revealed the discontent of the students and of urban society - but also the unpreparedness of this same urban world to take up the challenge, to propose credible alternatives.
Indeed, the opposition was too weak due to its superficial roots in the changes which themselves are insufficiently embedded in the social landscape. And now this opposition has been swept away by the business madness.
The People's Republic of China has lived through a kind of paradox of the separation and non-separation of the city and the countryside. The social world is no longer clearly separated — above all, the city no longer has a role of its own and cannot play the part of stimulating social
But the city is economically separated from the countryside; it can even be said that it was protected by a kind of cordon sanitaire from peasant intrusion, and has preserved up to this day privileges denied to the peasant majority — with the argument that the coun try was too poor to generalize social security, education and other public programmes.
This separation, codified with the famous Hukou (the city residence permit, currently less enforced), was vigorously defended by the Maoist regime.
It obscured family ties, the social continuity between the city and the countryside - and the undeclared victory of rural China.*