The Communist Road to Capitalism: How Social Unrest and Containment Have Pushed China’s (R)evolution since 1949

By Ralf Ruckus

The Communist Road to Capitalism explores how a dynamic of social struggles from below followed by countermeasures of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime has pushed the historical evolution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949.

Under socialism until the mid-1970s, during the ensuing transition until the mid-1990s, and in the capitalist period since, the CCP regime responded to the struggles of workers, peasants, migrants, and women* with a mix of repression, concession, cooptation, and reform. Ralf Ruckus shows that this dynamic took the country into a new phase each time—and eventually all the way from socialism to capitalism: in the 1950s, labor struggles and the Hundred Flowers Movement were followed by the regime’s Great Leap Forward; in the 1960s, the Cultural Revolution led to the CCP’s failed attempt to revitalize socialism; in the 1970s, social unrest and movements for a democratic socialism made room for the regime’s Reform and Opening policies; in the late 1980s, the Tian’anmen Square uprising triggered more radical reforms; in the 1990s, peasant and state worker unrest could not stop the capitalist restructuring; and in the 2000s, migrant worker struggles led to concessions, tightened repression, and the regime’s global capitalist expansion strategy in the 2010s.

The Communist Road to Capitalism breaks with established orthodoxies about the PRC’s socialist “successes” and myths on its later rise as an economic power. It combines a historiography of workers’, peasants’, migrants’, and women*’s struggles with a searing critique of exploitation, authoritarian state power and gender discrimination under socialism and capitalism. Drawing lessons from PRC history, Ralf Ruckus finally outlines political aims and methods for the left that avoid past mistakes and allow to fight on for a society free of all forms of exploitation and oppression.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PM Press
• Release date: Jul 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781629638539

Ralf Ruckus

Ralf Ruckus has been active in social movements in Europe and Asia for decades and publishes texts on social struggles in China and elsewhere. He edits gongchao.org and blogs on naoqingchu.org.

Book preview

The global left is terribly confused about China. Thankfully, Ralf Ruckus has responded powerfully to this problem, one that has been made all the more urgent by China’s increasingly global ambitions and the attendant intensified imperial rivalry with the US and its allies. Undertaking a thorough and systematic analysis of evolving political, social, and economic dynamics, he reveals how China’s failed experiment with socialism laid the groundwork for its more recent explosive capitalist growth. But he also shows that the transition to capitalism was neither inevitable nor its victory final. Highly recommended!

—Eli Friedman, professor of international and comparative labor at Cornell University and author of Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China (ILR Press, 2014)

What we in the Western world take for granted and consume—clothes, computers, watches, mobile phones, etc.—depends largely on work and workers in today’s China. Yet work and workers in China have been almost invisible on both sides of the Atlantic over the years. This book opens a window on the times and circumstances that ordinary women and men in China have gone through since the late 1940s. Ralf Ruckus unfolds a story of advances, defeats, repressions, and revolts for better standards of living, individual and collective rights, freedom of expression and residence, and dignity. This book will be indispensable to those who are not satisfied with grand geopolitical overviews about China, and who want to look closely at the People’s Republic of China’s past and current trends.

—Ferruccio Gambino, veteran Italian activist, coeditor of the journal altre ragioni, and lecturer on international migration at the University of Padua

It is striking, with everything that has been written about contemporary China, how few works put the Chinese working class, in reality the key to China’s situation, front and center. Ralf Ruckus’s book is an excellent corrective to this lack. The Chinese working class, by its location in the world’s workshop, will shake the world, as the Russian working class did in 1917, hopefully with a happier outcome.

—Loren Goldner, coeditor of Insurgent Notes

This highly original book traverses a range of contexts and will appeal to readers interested in the nature and meaning of the transition from socialism to capitalism in China. Of interest to both China experts and leftist activists, this timely book will help readers better understand both the complex history of the Communist Party of China and the contemporary nature of class struggle. Innovative in method and surprising in its findings, this superb book will prove to be a landmark work in advancing the field of Chinese labor history.

—Andrej Grubačic, professor of anthropology at CIIS-San Francisco and coauthor, with Denis O’Hearn, of Living at the Edges of Capitalism (University of California Press, 2016) and, with Staughton Lynd, of Wobblies and Zapatistas (PM Press, 2008)

"While there is renewed interest in socialism the world over, there seems to be a consensus that socialism has not yet been realized. Even if this is true, it is curious how little time the socialist left spends studying movements that claim to clear the path toward it. This is why The Communist Road to Capitalism is essential reading. Authored by a seasoned labor activist and scholar whose knowledge about working-class struggles in China is second to none, this book helps us answer some of the crucial questions of our time: Is there a way to socialism? Have we advanced on it? How do we reach its end?"

—Gabriel Kuhn, author of Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety: Forging a Militant Working-Class Culture (PM Press, 2017)

THE COMMUNIST ROAD TO CAPITALISM

How Social Unrest and Containment Have Pushed China’s (R)evolution since 1949

Ralf Ruckus

The Communist Road to Capitalism: How Social Unrest and Containment Have Pushed China’s (R)evolution since 1949

© Ralf Ruckus

This edition © 2021 PM Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN: 978–1–62963–837–9 (print)

ISBN: 978–1–62963–853–9 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934749

Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com

Interior design by briandesign

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PM Press

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Printed in the USA.

This book is dedicated to Ruda.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION One Party, Two Systems

1    Rupture, Continuity, and the Left

2    Focus of the Analysis

3    Grasping PRC History

I     Buildup of Socialism until the Mid-1950s

1    Before and After Liberation

2    New Class Divisions

3    Maoist Patriarchy

4    The Garrison State

5    Synopsis: Socialist Recomposition of Class Struggle

II    Socialism from the Mid-1950s to the Mid-1970s

1    Disruption: Strikes and Open Criticism, 1956–1957

2    Speedup: Great Leap and Purges, 1957–1965

3    Rebellion: Cultural Revolution and Radical Critique, 1966–1967

4    Restoration: Military Rule and Factionalism, 1967–1976

5    Synopsis: Still Waiting for the Revolution

III  Transition to Capitalism from the Mid-1970s to the Mid-1990s

1    Discontent: Social Struggles and the Democracy Movement, 1974–1980

2    Reform: Conversion and Crisis, 1976–1989

3    Uprising: The Tian’anmen Square Movement, 1989

4    Resumption: Crackdown, Restructuring, and Economic Rise, 1989–1999

5    Synopsis: Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones

IV  Capitalism Since the Mid-1990s

1    Resistance: Peasant Revolts and SOE Workers’ Unrest, 1992–2005

2    Consolidation: Harmonious Society, Boom, and Crisis, 2000–2012

3    Strikes: Migrant Struggles and the End of Cheap Labor, 2003–2012

4    Expansion: The New Normal and the Leap Outward, 2012–2020

5    Synopsis: The Consolidation of PRC Capitalism

CONCLUSION Getting Over Actually Existing Socialism

1    Recapitulation: Concepts Revisited

2    Assessment: Historical Opportunity

3    Implications: Lessons for the Left

EPILOGUE

FURTHER READING

BIBLIOGRAPHY

TIMELINE OF PRC HISTORY 1949–2020

ACRONYM KEY

MAP

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

Once upon a time a young man set out to write the definitive book on China. He prepared himself by studying all that had been written on the subject. He learned the language…. His head almost burst with ideas. Finally … the book was done except for the transcription of his mental shorthand. He only needed a few minor statistics on some unimportant point. Well, said the young man to himself as he read over his outline, one day’s delay won’t make much difference; I might as well get those figures tomorrow so that I won’t have to interrupt my writing later on. That was forty-six years ago; last heard of the young man—now a very old man—was still looking up a few minor details and figures.

—Peter F. Drucker

In 2013, Ramsey Kanaan of PM Press suggested I publish a book on China’s political economy. At the time, I had already spent roughly a decade closely examining the trajectory of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Much of the political exchange, writing, translation, and intervention I had been involved in dealt with contemporary class politics—migration, gender relations, and workplace conflicts. I focused mainly on the experiences from below of discontented workers, rebellious women*,¹ and left-wing activists.² Writing a comprehensive historical account of the PRC’s political economy since 1949 from such a grassroots perspective sounded challenging and interesting—and like a lot of work. In the following months and years, I collected material on different phases of PRC history, wrote a couple of book reviews related to topics I intended to address in the book, and drafted concepts and chapters. Yet along the way, I repeatedly got distracted by other PRC-related publishing projects and my involvement in political debates and social struggles in the PRC, Poland, and Germany. Sometimes I felt like the young man who was getting old while still looking for a few minor details, as well as the time and opportunity to finish the book. Now it is finally done—a critical historiography of PRC class politics spanning the last seventy years.

I wrote the book as an independent left-wing activist and researcher. I don’t work for an academic institution or a private enterprise, so I do not have to hold back opinions that might be unacceptable for state or private employers, nor am I restricted by academic fashions, competition, or credit counting, which often lead to twisted, repetitive, and politically dubious academic literature. Without these restrictions, I could employ the analytical methods and tools I have learned in social struggles and political debates in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North America, and East Asia during the past decades. For the historical research, I primarily used literature in English, complemented by some in German, Chinese, and other languages. Interviews and exchanges with workers, students, academics, and left-wing activists, many of them from the PRC, helped me cover more recent events. Even if their insights and analyses feed into a many of the arguments presented here, the book still represents my outsider view of this history, as I did not grow up in the PRC, nor have I settled there.

The research and writing process was intense, interesting, and eye-opening, revealing surprises and new insights. I went through several loops of reading, distilling, drafting, shortening, getting reviews, and reediting. Parts of the book or the whole manuscript were discussed with two dozen friends and comrades, some who had and others who did not have experience in discourses on PRC politics. Due to the political sensitivity of the topic(s) in the PRC, it would be too risky to mention most of them here—so I decided not to mention anyone. In any case, without their helpful critique and support, writing this book would not have been possible. Yet I am fully responsible for the book’s contents and shortcomings.

My motivation for writing the book—and for the bigger part of what I do most days—is a desire and determination to overcome capitalist exploitation and all forms of oppression, as well as to learn from previous attempts to accomplish this goal (even if they failed). Certain left-wing aerial perspectives and simplistic descriptions of PRC history and present provoked me, for instance, those that defend the class society of the socialist period on mere ideological grounds or those that promote social democracy as an alternative for the PRC in the current capitalist period.

Starting with a critical review of, in part, mystifying and twisted left-wing interpretations of PRC history, I set out to unearth the social and political origins of change in different historical phases and to reclaim the history from below of worker struggles, women*’s rebellions, peasant uprisings, migrant movements, and left-wing currents. For this, I relied on a materialist conception of history and focused on the social relations that (re)create societies rather than on ideational or discursive concepts. I put the history from the PRC’s founding to the present into one continuous narrative and mapped out the main ruptures and continua. The result is a matrix that depicts the different periods of PRC history according to the dynamics of social unrest and regime countermeasures.

I wrote the book less for those already familiar with the details of PRC history than for anyone who is interested in learning more about it. Readers could start with the introduction, which explains the main concepts and hypotheses and theorizes a particular perspective on social relations and struggles in the PRC since 1949. Yet the book is designed in a way that also allows readers to skip the introduction and start reading the historical chapters before returning to the conceptual parts in the introduction.

It was a challenge to do justice to the complexity of the historical trajectory without going into too much detail, so that the length of the book would remain reasonable and the narrative and analysis digestible. The necessary briefness meant that some sections were left rough and edgy. I hope this encourages readers to add their own insights and criticisms, and that it creates space for collective discussion. The political message, meanwhile, is clear and provocative, since the long-term perspective on the seventy years of PRC history reveals a distinct historical tendency: while the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) described its socialism as an interim stage on the way to communism, in reality, it turned out to be the interphase on the road to capitalism. In other words, what was meant to be a revolution abolishing all forms of oppression and exploitation ended up as a socialism with reconfigured class and gender hierarchies and conflicts that later entered an evolutionary path to capitalism. Socialism, it turned out, created the economic, social, and political foundation on which capitalism was built—under the leadership and governance of the CCP.

For current and future revolutionary attempts, this means two things: we need to rethink the strategies used by Maoist activists or CCP cadres during and after socialism in the PRC (and similar strategies in other socialist countries); and we have to develop new forms of social and political grassroots organizing, support, or struggle and link up with similar attempts in the PRC and elsewhere. Only in that way can we avoid making the same or similar mistakes in the present and the future.

Ralf Ruckus, February 2021

1      The gender asterisk (*) following women serves as a reference to the constructed character of gender. Going beyond binary and heterosexual gender concepts, women* refers to all who are described as women and all (trans*, inter*, or queer*) who intentionally choose a femme-like gender expression. Men with an asterisk (*) is used for a similar reason, while keeping in mind that cis men are not to the same extent subjected to patriarchal violence and oppression in capitalist (and socialist) countries as women* are.

2      Most of this engagement is documented on the website https://www.gongchao.org.

INTRODUCTION

ONE PARTY, TWO SYSTEMS

This book is a historiography of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and delineates social struggles and responses of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime. It covers the period following the PRC’s founding in 1949, the socialist period after the mid-1950s, the transition from the mid-1970s onward, and the post-socialist or capitalist period after the mid-1990s. This inquiry is not meant as mere intellectual exercise or historical description. With its left-wing and grassroots focus, this book aims to inspire current debates on how to topple class rule and abolish capitalist exploitation, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression.

The first section of this introduction describes the starting points of the inquiry and discusses different left-wing positions on the PRC’s development. The second section introduces the questions and hypotheses underlying this book and outlines the scope of the inquiry. The third section points out historical patterns that deserve special attention in this context. It introduces the specific historical periodization or narrative matrix used to describe the dynamics of struggles and countermeasures, and it gives an overview of the following chapters.

1  RUPTURE, CONTINUITY, AND THE LEFT

Rupture and continuity occurred concurrently in the PRC’s recent history. While economic and political structures went through severe crises and historical transformations over the past seven decades, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remained in power. What exactly produced the ruptures and led to fundamental changes and how the CCP leaderships survived all these changes are controversial questions in left-wing discussions.

Initial Observations

Before the PRC was founded in 1949, the country was torn apart by colonial occupation, regional segregation, the invasion of the Japanese imperial army, and the civil war. At the time of its foundation, the PRC had the world’s largest population, the vast majority of which was poor and lived and worked in the countryside. The new country’s share of global industrial production and of global trade was minimal, and its political and military power was dependent on its main socialist ally, the Soviet Union. Seventy years later, in 2019, the PRC still had the largest population, but the majority lived in cities and worked in services and urban industries, and the country had the second largest economy (by GDP), held a large part of the world’s industrial capacities, owned a major share of global trade, and had become a growing political and military power on its own account (see Table 1).

During the more than seventy years of its existence, the PRC has gone through several social, economic, and political crises and a monumental—albeit gradual—transition from actually existing socialism to a political and economic system the CCP leaders call a socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics.² The enduring historical continuity of CCP rule since 1949 is no less than stunning. The party itself has gone through various transformations, starting as an organization of urban intellectuals and workers in the 1920s, continuing as a revolutionary peasant army in the 1930s and 1940s, turning into a bureaucratic socialist institution in the 1950s, and finally becoming the core of the recomposed ruling class in the 1980s and after. Throughout all the CCP’s post-1949 metamorphoses, its adaptive leadership remained at the center of ruling-class power, orchestrated the country’s progress and development,³ and dealt with and subdued social and political unrest from below.⁴

When, in October 2019, the CCP leadership celebrated the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the PRC, it praised the country’s trajectory since 1949 as a coherent story of economic and political success. The various phases of economic crisis, political turmoil, and social conflicts—which include events like the 1966–1969 Cultural Revolution and the Tian’anmen Square Movement in 1989—were simply omitted. Its Reform and Opening policies, which were officially introduced in the late 1970s, were presented as the continuation of the CCP course of socialist national development.⁵ Staying true to the Party’s founding mission remains the slogan of a CCP campaign today, and the current party leader Xi Jinping demands national rejuvenation, while drawing on the socialist legacy.⁶

Left-Wing Positions on PRC History

Various left-wing perspectives contest the CCP leaders’ historical narrative on the PRC history.⁷ In fact, over the past decades, left-wing circles around the globe have been heatedly debating the country’s political, economic, and social trajectory. These debates were shaped by ruptures and transformations, such as de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries in the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution and its impact around the globe in the 1960s, and the market reforms and military crackdown on the Tian’anmen Square Movement under CCP leadership, with their global repercussions, in the 1980s and 1990s.

Recently, different parts of the left inside and outside the PRC have held often contradicting views on the country’s development under CCP rule since 1949. They particularly disagree on the question of how the economic and political systems before and after the CCP-led Reform and Opening, which began in the late 1970s, should be defined. Four left-wing positions stand out (see Table 2). The first one can be summarized as one system = socialism. It designates the political and economic system installed in the 1950s as socialism, state socialism, or actually existing socialism. Characteristically, it detects a continuation of socialism after the reforms in the late 1970s. What qualifies the PRC as socialist before and after the reforms according to this position are the rule of a communist party, the grip of the state administration on large parts of the economy, certain welfare policies, and the anti-imperialist stand against US hegemonic power. From this point of view, any changes over the past decades have been pragmatic or cosmetic adjustments, as the CCP is supposedly still on the road to communism and is an important counterpart of US imperialism. This position is shared by Maoists supporting the CCP leadership, as well as certain other Marxist-Leninists and anti-imperialists (and, by the way, also by certain liberals and right-wingers hostile to socialism).

The second position can be described as one system = capitalism. It interprets the nature of the post-1949 political and economic system in the PRC as a different kind of capitalism or as state capitalism, because the CCP leadership did not abolish wage work and the extraction of surplus labor, money and credit, top-down management, and the factory system, and it tried to establish a socialist development regime in just one country (thereby betraying the idea of world revolution). From this perspective, the reforms after the mid-1970s changed economic and political institutions, as well as social relations, but still represent a continuation of capitalism. This position is shared by certain Trotskyists, anarchists, and left communists, among others.⁸

The third position can be framed as two systems = first socialism, then capitalism. It resembles the first position insofar as it characterizes the PRC from the 1950s to the mid-1970s as socialism, state-socialism, actually existing socialism, or a degenerated form of socialism. However, it sees the reforms starting in the mid-1970s as a historical rupture and resembles the second position to the degree that it sees that rupture as the beginning of a transition from (degenerated) socialism to capitalism. Regarding the reason for and initiator of that transition, some argue that PRC socialism was betrayed by so-called capitalist roaders in the CCP leadership who undermined the dictatorship of the proletariat and deliberately started reforms in the late 1970s that were meant to lead to capitalism. Today, this position is shared by many oppositional Maoists in the PRC.⁹ Others point to the class contradictions in the PRC and attribute the transition to social pressures from below that forced the CCP leadership to make changes. According to this analysis, the reforms attempted to hold onto socialism (by adjusting it) and to secure CCP rule. Subsequently, they unleashed capitalist forces that accidentally pushed the country toward capitalism.¹⁰

This book adds a fourth position that serves as an initial hypothesis for its inquiry. It concurs with the third position in characterizing a certain period before the mid-1970s as socialism and a certain period after that as capitalist. Yet it highlights two transitional periods that led to the consolidation of a socialist and a capitalist system respectively. The first transition is situated in the early 1950s, when socialist institutions and structures were established. The second occurred from the late 1970s to the late 1990s and is marked by an erratic and gradual development that led to the deconstruction and partial remolding of the socialist institutions, as well as the establishment of capitalist relations. The analytical addition of two transitional periods—the making first of socialism and then of capitalism—allows for a more nuanced understanding of various social and political confrontations between the CCP regime and workers, peasants, women*, youth, and migrants that shaped those transitions and their outcomes.

The concluding chapter of this book recapitulates and reassesses these left-wing positions and their conflicting views.

2  FOCUS OF THE ANALYSIS

This book looks at the PRC trajectory since 1949, and specifically the periods before, during, and after the reforms. Its main focus lies on, first, the social relations of production and reproduction, modes of exploitation, repression, and exclusion used by the CCP rulers from above, second, forms of resistance, organizing, and struggle of various class subjects from below—i.e., peasants and workers—and, third, social contradictions and conflicts along lines of gender and origin. This section introduces the questions and hypotheses that set this inquiry in motion and discusses choices regarding the scope and foci of the analysis.

Questions and Hypotheses

The periods before, during, and after the reforms that were officially initiated by the CCP leadership in 1978 are central to the analysis. Special attention is given to the continuities and ruptures that connect and disconnect these periods. Key questions include: What economic and political structures emerged or consolidated in the respective periods? What social actors or classes played a major role and what forms of social protest did they use? How did the CCP regime react to social unrest or other challenges, including internal disputes within the leadership? What adjustments and adaptations were elicited by social and political conflicts? Why did the dynamics of social unrest and regime countermeasures produce particular historical ruptures, while the CCP remained in power?

For the transitional period in the first half of the 1950s and the subsequent socialist period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, this means analyzing what kind of socialism was actually established, whether (and if, then in what way) it represented an alternative to capitalist structures and patriarchal relations, why major social conflicts developed in this period, and how the CCP leadership reacted to these conflicts. An initial hypothesis is that the actually existing socialism constructed was very different from both the preceding and the following economic, political, and social system. Furthermore, actually existing socialism was largely distinct from the socialism desired by proletarians, peasants, and women* who had been involved in revolutionary organizing since the 1920s. It reestablished and reconfigured social divisions, most obviously between urban and rural workers, between socialist managers and workers (as well as mental and manual labor), and between men* and women*. The reformed class and gender divisions and the making of a socialist ruling class of CCP leaders triggered new waves of social and eventually political struggle. The CCP regime reacted to the unrest with containment measures and reforms to restabilize its rule, a pattern visible in the following periods as well.

For the transitional (or first reform) period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, the main issues are why major reforms were started in the mid- to late 1970s, what their general aim was, which features of socialism fostered the transition to capitalism under CCP rule, and what forces eventually produced the full and final transition. An initial hypothesis is that the first reforms were essentially the result of social conflicts and political crises during the previous two decades. The aim was to assuage these conflicts and crises, thus safeguarding the rule of the CCP leadership. While actually existing socialism, up to that point, had been mainly run as a planned economy, with the state in control of certain economic decisions and processes, the reforms gradually introduced an extended private sector and gave more leeway to market forces. The transition that unfolded from the 1970s to 1990s went relatively smoothly, because actually existing socialism shared certain central features with capitalism, among them surplus production and accumulation,