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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the March 6, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Deng, Mao and China's struggle to move forward

By Deirdre Griswold

The death of Deng Xiaoping marks the end of an era in the Peoples Republic of China. The leaders of the most populous country on Earth will no longer come from the generation that fought and won the Chinese Revolution.

That development profoundly affected the course of world history. After a sweeping struggle of two decades, the political and military organizations representing the most oppressed classes in China overcame the armed might of the landlords and capitalists.

A vast social upheaval

In that revolution, tens of millions of peasants rose up and defied the landlords who kept them in brutal servitude.

Women rebelled against their oppression, unbinding their feet and cutting their hair. Some ran away from cruel husbands and masters. Others banded together and asserted their rights in the village and the home.

Students set aside their ambitions, defied their parents and went to the countryside to join the impoverished rebel army. Workers organized clandestine cells in the factories under the noses of Chiang Kai-shek's police.

For years after the victory of 1949, China inspired the world as an example of how the humble, the starved, the despised who had lived at the whim of the rich and powerful could rise up under communist leadership and seize control of their destiny.

The revolution also removed nearly a quarter of humanity from the grip of foreign imperialists. Mao Zedong's Red Army had borne the brunt of the liberation war against Japan's army of occupation.

But the loss of China was felt most keenly by the ruling class in the United States. During World War II their greatest military effort was concentrated on defeating Japan in the Pacific.

The prize was China. But within a few years, China slipped from their grasp along with parts of Korea and Indochina. This set off a vicious argument and witch hunt in Washington over "who lost China."

How the bourgeoisie sees Deng's death

The ruling class here is analyzing Deng's death using the same criteria they have applied to all other political events in China since 1949. They speculate on what it means not for the masses but for U.S. imperialism's interests- especially for the restoration of a capitalism "fully integrated into the world economy." They mean subservient to and dependent on the financial institutions they control.

And while pretending to desire China's stability, they continue their open discussion of the PRC's susceptibility to being dismantled into warring regions and statelets. Will Hong Kong, which reverts to China this summer, be a Fifth Column of the imperialist bankers? Can an uprising be provoked in Tibet? Will China react militarily to continued U.S. moves to treat Taiwan as an independent country?

One think-tank journal even asked a few years ago if southern China's "special economic zones" where foreign investment is concentrated might not some day break away from the poorer parts of the country. Not an innocent question.

The counter-revolution in the USSR and the disintegration of that union of socialist republics has made it possible for Big Oil to begin to exploit the resources of Central Asia. Giddy with that success, they are now turning their hungry eyes further east. The Gobi Desert, with its subterranean riches, is just one part of China they covet.

At one time honest bourgeois journalists like Edgar Snow recorded the amazing progressive feats of the Chinese Revolution. But only the most hostile articles now appear in the U.S. corporate media.

The heroic period under the leadership of Mao accomplished nothing, they say. Deng Xiaoping inherited only poverty and chaos.

The Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks go even further. They accuse Mao of unleashing famine and merciless repression on the Chinese people. They have totally rewritten the history of China to validate their virulent anti-communism.

But the socialist revolution, of which Deng was a part, accomplished what the native bourgeoisie was unable to do in China. It broke the shackles of foreign imperialism. All the earlier attempts-the Boxer Rebellion, the Opium Wars-had ended in defeat for China and humiliating compromises with the West.

The triumph of the Red Army-first over Japan and then over Washington's chosen leader, Chiang Kai-shek-also liberated Chinese society from landlordism and stagnation.

Why he became a communist

Deng was one of many young Chinese who were won to the Communist Party in the 1920s and 1930s. World War I, that bloody recarving of the colonies by the European imperialists, was fresh in their minds when they turned to the example given by the Russian Revolution.

Here was an overwhelmingly peasant country, like China. But under Lenin's leadership it broke free of foreign domination.

The anti-colonial, anti-feudal struggle could not be completed by the national bourgeoisie. It had to come from the masses. They would give their all-but only if it meant their liberation from the exploiters at home, too.

All the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, from Mao to Deng, were united in this view.

The divergence of outlook between Deng and Mao came later.

Best known is their struggle during the Cultural Revolution. Deng was opposed to it, and was removed from the party leadership from 1967 until 1973.

China at a crossroads

China had come to a crossroads. The great efforts that had been made to quickly develop this vast country had only partially succeeded. Great public works had been built through mass mobilizations. Health care and education were extended to the millions in the countryside for the first time.

But China was attempting to accomplish in a few years what it had taken decades and centuries to do in the West and in Japan: build a modern industrial society.

A debate raged: Would China's limited resources be allowed to flow in greater abundance to the already privileged, thereby raising up one section of the population at the expense of the majority? Or would the masses be called forth to take the reins of the state more directly in their hands?

The Shanghai Commune, which marked the peak of the Cultural Revolution, was an attempt to circumvent the bureaucracy and much of the Communist Party itself and draw the masses directly into running society. It was modeled after the Paris Commune of 1871, when the workers seized power and set up their own state for the first time.

Mao Zedong, undisputed leader of the Chinese Communist Party and the Revolution, had invoked the Cultural Revolution. His enormous stature, however, was not enough to guarantee its success.

The bloody fascist military takeover in Indonesia in 1965 and the U.S. war in Vietnam affected China and the USSR, driving a wedge deeper between them. The daunting challenge of transforming China without substantial solidarity from socialist allies or workers' movements in the developed countries sapped the energies of the leftists. Reaction from within the state apparatus and the party bureaucracy grew.

Eventually Deng Xiaoping, who had been suppressed as a "capitalist roader" during the Cultural Revolution, made a comeback. He became the leading voice for those in the party who wanted to end the Cultural Revolution, open relations with the capitalist world and allow some private ownership and market forces to develop in China. His term for this was "market socialism."

What about the social consequences of the market? What about the dislocation of peasants once the communes were abandoned? The unemployment that has spread alongside the rise of new industries? The sharply rising prices for food and shelter?

The reappearance of economic crimes, drug abuse, prostitution and all the other vices that are inseparable from the capitalist market?

Triumph of pragmatism

Deng took a pragmatic approach, which won him kudos from the anti-communists of the West. "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice," he said. If China develops a modern industrial economy, the rest is secondary.

China's rapid modernization in recent years bolstered Deng's approach. Despite rising inequality and the cruel dislocation that market forces have inflicted on many workers and peasants, economic growth has been strong. At the same time, the potential social weight of the proletariat has grown as millions of peasants have flooded into the cities looking for work.

His pragmatic stance has also been reinforced by imperialism's triumphal expansion at the expense of the workers and oppressed worldwide. This has been a time of sneering at the hopes and aspirations of the poor for a better life. Inequality between classes and between rich and poor nations has grown by leaps and bounds. Those who fight this trend are branded as hopeless utopians.

Until the next capitalist contraction, the profit motive will be seen as the most basic force in nature. Until the next great uprising of the oppressed, the vision of a society that runs on socialist solidarity and cooperation will be derided.

Counter-revolution rebuffed

While Deng's economic reforms were welcome to the imperialists, he was nevertheless their adversary, rooted in an opposing class rule. This has been their great dilemma in dealing with China.

Despite the economic reforms, the state institutions born in the crucible of revolutionary struggle have survived to this day. There has been no crack-up of the system, even though it has undergone profound modifications.

The most bitter disappointment of the imperialists and their bourgeois co-thinkers within China came with Tiananmen Square in 1989. By then the process of counter-revolution had already gone very far in the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev himself visited Tiananmen Square in a gesture to a "democracy movement" that was enamored of capitalist freedoms and oblivious to the underlying dictatorship of money in the West, especially the United States.

Speculation in the imperialist media on the outcome of the demonstrations went from anticipating leadership changes in China to breathless hints that its armed forces might divide-leading to civil war.

Under Deng's leadership, the army eventually crushed the incipient counter-revolution.

The Tiananmen affair was not just a sit-in of idealistic students, as the big-business media made out. Its aim was about as "innocent" as the struggle over the Berlin Wall that left the workers of formerly prosperous and socialist East Germany in the clutches of the German big bourgeoisie.

Yes, Deng's pragmatism had blinded many to the dangers of the bourgeois siren song. His own policies encouraged the students to look to the capitalist West. But that doesn't change the fact that Deng acted to defend China's sovereignty and keep its system and state intact.

Within the context of China's communist revolutionaries, Deng was part of a conservative reaction to the leftist, Jacobin period of the Cultural Revolution. But he never became an outright counter-revolutionary like Gorbachev, Shevardnadze and Yeltsin, whose policies led to the destruction of the USSR.

The last word has not been said on the fate of China's great socialist revolution. Progressives around the world must hope for its regeneration as the growth of the working class and of the means of production create new political conditions.

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