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The Historical Position of Communist China: Doctrine and Reality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Extract

On the first of October, 1949, the Chinese Communists* climaxed their military success by establishing on the mainland a new revolutionary government, the “Chinese People's Republic.” While this government included a number of splinter parties, it was—and is—undisguisedly dominated by the Chinese Communist Party. The new rulers, who quickly destroyed the old system of political control, are today drastically reorganizing the country's social and economic relations. And they are planning to go far beyond the changes accomplished to date.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1954

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References

* The main ideas of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Far Eastern Association in New York City, April 15, 1954.

1 The Common Program and Other Documents of the First Plenary Session of The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, p. 1. (Peking, 1950).Google Scholar

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8 See Smith, Adam: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, pp. 646 and 688 ff. (New York, 1937)Google Scholar. Marx may also have found references to the hydraulic aspect of Chinese agriculture and government in Hegel's Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte II:286 and 298. (Leipzig, 1920).Google Scholar

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17 And it suffered the very fate which Marx and Engels ascribed to early Utopian socialism. Marx's socialist ideas were progressive in their criticism of the early industrial system; but, to use the language of the Communist Manifesto, they lost “all practical value and all theoretical justification,” when a new historical situation required, not the blind promotion of total statism, but its critical rejection. Marxism then became what the Manifesto, with respect to earlier socialist groups, designates as “reactionary” Utopianism. (For a discussion of the Utopian core in Marxism, see Wittfogel, OSOD, chap. IX.)

18 Engels 1935: 183.

19 Lenin first formulated this turn in Two Tactics, a book whose political implications for “backward” countries, such as China and India, are crucial. See Wittfogel, Karl A.: “The Influence of Leninism-Stalinism on China,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 277, p. 25. (1951).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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29 “State farms and the movement to organize mutual-aid teams and cooperatives continued to develop in 1952. There were 2,219 state farms in the country, of which 52 were mechanized; 3,663 agricultural producers' cooperatives; and over 8,300,000 mutual-aid teams of various types. In 1952, in the old liberated areas, more than 65 per cent of the total number of peasant households and in the newly liberated areas, about 25 per cent were organized into mutual-aid teams and co-operatives” (Communique on … Development, p. 4 ).

30 Marx, 1939: 395.Google Scholar