REVIEW OF MARK SELDEN's BOOK “THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE”1

REVIEW OF MARK SELDEN's BOOK “THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE”¹

In this 460 pages book published in 1979, Professor Mark Selden presents a short and consistent analysis of the Maoist uprise and government in China from 1937 to 1978, with some punctual and instrumental uses of earlier historical and social facts, as well as a concluding exercise of prediction on further challenges to be faced by the Communist Party after 1978. The book is organized through an initial presentation of the authors view of the facts following a chronological sequence, and further brings some relevant primary sources that, altogether with short commentaries of Mark Seldon, support and illustrates his positions.

In order to present his analysis of the historical effects and causes regarding what he considers to be the paradigmatic events in the history of the Maoist rule over China he starts the book with a rather extended introduction of 160 pages. Along those initial pages he quilts the historical moments of Maoist-China according to the joint role of land and industry/agriculture taken to be the core lines of orientation at each period analyzed. With those backdrops he presents understandings over a much larger group of aspects, such as the managerial and administrative policies of enterprises, the relation between the center and the units, the rights of property, the role of education, the political struggles inside the Communist Party, China's Foreign policy (more specifically in reference to its relations with USSR), and the role and rights of women. As a result the book figures as a historical analysis of development-aimed politics in China from 1937 to 1978 and divides this 41 years period under 10 periods in which the core aspects of development come as outcomes of the different roles kept for the issues of land use and the relations between agriculture and industry. Therefore, he makes an historical division of those times just as follows: The Peoples war and the origins of the Chinese road to socialism (1937 to 1949); The eruption of land revolution from bellow (from August 1945 to October 1947); The high tide of land revolution (from October 1947 to February 1948); The movement towards the moderation of the land revolution (from January 1948 to June 1950); The land revolution in the service of production (from June 1950 to spring 1953); The first “Five Year Plan” (from 1953 to 1957); The Great Leap Forward (from 1958 to 1962); The aftermath of The Great Leap Forward resulting in a struggle between the socialist and the capitalist roads (from 1962 to 1965); The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (from 1966 to 1976); The class struggle, modernization and the future of socialist development (from 1976 to 1978 and onwards predicaments).

According to one such periodization it is clear how the particular issue of the land and the relation between agriculture and industry will be the core forces shaping his comprehensions of the distinct development-aimed policies to take place during that time. This, however, should not lead one to see this book as an over-exaggeration on the role of land and relations between agriculture and industry in its comprehension over the development policies during this period. As already mentioned, his approach will be made taking into consideration their – land and agriculture/industry – relations with the other social aspects closely linked to development policies. Indeed, the very preeminence of the analytical value of land and the relations between agriculture and industry will decrease when the book analyses further stages of Maoist China in which some startlingly marginalized aspects gained more relevance. On that respect its important to note also that the documentary part of the book, in which the author presents primary documents of each time in thematic collections (e.g. relation city-countryside, role of women, marriage laws, management rules, etc...), stresses the relevance of social aspects which were important to define the guidelines of some periods analyzed but which couldn't gain the proper relevance for the sake of a parsimonious explanation in the introductory part of the book.

If one can not say his analysis on Chinese development policies is biased in favor of land and agriculture/industry, but rather an outcome of the concrete role played by those factors in the different moments of Maoist China, there's, however, plenty of space for criticizing the absence of outside-in analysis in his work. Despite some scarce references to the Cold War and to the way the Communist Party used it as rhetorical backdrop for most varied domestic interests, there's absolutely no reference in the introductory part of the book to the concrete effects of a bipolar order on constraining the Chinese politics. The only interpretations of a domestic policy which lays its causes outside the sphere of China domestic scenario are; the one accounting for a huge withdraw of Sovietic technology and technicians in 1960, leading to a infrastructural gap accounted to be largely responsible for the Great Famine; and the recurrent references for Sovietic interventions through factions inside the Chinese Communist Party. Both analysis which are more concerned to the organic links between Chinese domestic scenario and the Soviet initial support than properly evaluations of bilateral relations framed by a global or regional structure.

Other than those exceptions mentioned above there's absolutely no reference to the properly Cold War constraints, such as: The U.S. Strategic belt while aligning with Japan and Pakistan; the presence of the 7th Fleet (from U.S.) in the Chinese Sea; the Korea War (1950); besides the many economical and political blocks formed at that time. Not even the regional level structures were given attention since important issues like the war with India (1962), the Taiwan and the Tibetan issues were not even mentioned.

Of course there's no use on criticizing the author for not using a massive outside-in approach in an essay aimed at explaining the domestic process guiding the political process in China since 1937, however, its pretty reasonable to point out a big comprehensive loss in not even contextualizing those domestic events in the light of mainstream global and structural constraints. Indeed, one can inquire rather the investigation of how those outside events were managed and impacted inside China wouldn't make his analysis even richer. The case of radical domestic approach exclusivity in this book also jeopardizes the methodological credibility of some analysis in the scarce situations the author resort to external explanations for some domestic events, as one can say that such ad hoc loans from international politics can be seen as anti-scientific for the arbitrariness with which they are used only when the author positions can not be sustained by his previously discriminated variables. Making the case for the two moments in which the author resorts to international politics, one can argue that the external support coming from Sovietic Union could not be taken into consideration to understand the Great Famine without some acknowledgement of this technology assistance in previous periods, what is not the case in this book. Indeed, Mark Seldon hardly mention the Sovietic role on the “conquests” of China from 1937 to 1960, therefore it seems arbitrary that the withdraw of a variable not even worth to be mentioned on explaining the success of development in early Communist China could suddenly raise to explain the fiasco of the 1960 Famine.

Similarly, the explanation he presents on the formation of the Communist Party does not refer significantly to the role of the Soviets, and this variable just come into his analytical frame while explaining some moments of destabilization in the Chinese Communist Party. Indeed, when it comes to the role of internal politics within the party Selden is by and large absent, just raising the importance of those variables when analyzing the Cultural Revolution and the uprise of Deng Xiaoping, therefore neglecting analysis in this level for the first 29 years of Chinese history he passes through (from 1937 to 1966).

In short, what is being criticized here is not the fact that he explained some internal splits in the Chinese Communist Party and the Great Famine as consequences of the Chinese relations with the USSR, even because that is too obvious to be denied. Instead, we point to the mistake of not considering those same factor while analysis previous events in the Chinese history which ended up being accounted only to domestic forces. Since the explanation of the biggest fiascoes in the history of Maoism are clearly an outcome of the relevance of Chinese foreign affairs with URSS, than its natural to claim that this weight in the bilateral relations of the countries be shown in previous moments of the Chinese history. As an example, one can claim that the relevance of Chino-Sovietic relations should also have been exposed while understanding the early land reform movements, the First Five Year Plan, and the Great Leap Forward, instead of appearing in a negative way simply to explain the Great Famine of 1960.

More than highlighting some important methodological failures in his own book, of which the arbitrary and ad hoc resort of variables seems to be the biggest one, this aspect of Selden's essay helps understanding why such a paradoxical process as the Maoism sounds so logic according to his historical narrative of the facts. Crude perceptions regarding the many opposite politics taken by Mao, such as massive rural-aimed policies followed by massive urban-aimed policies, or an energetic support to education followed by immediate censorship policies, are simply besotted into a rather logical transition which make those shifts to sound almost like natural.

The trick for making such a paradoxical process to resemble so harmonious relies precisely in the fact that Selden's critique of Mao's methodology is even more absent than his own methodological standards. Therefore he does not attempt to the fact that Mao built the revolutionary forces to guide China on the basis of a socio-structural critique (Marxist-Leninist inspired) but in fact ruled out in a problem-solving basis. This way Selden payed a too big attention to the problem-solving imperatives faced by Mao, but neglected acessing rather such measures fitted the structuralist rethoric sustaining the Communist Party and the hard-power instruments ruling China since the Maoist uprise.

In some points of the book a distracted reader can really pass without bigger traumas from, lets say, a mass campaign to foster education into a national policy of closing universities and persecuting dissidents. That's because the author goes too deep in the problem-solving challenges and makes any concrete answer to sounds coherent for there's no bigger scrutinizing of the structural claims of Marxist-Leninist social transformation. In some points he induces the reader to think strictly in the problems of shortage of food, infrastructural gaps and widespread dissidence, without including the imperative of ending class struggle and collectivizing the economy as also relevant variables to be taken into account.

One would say that Selden's book champions to give coherence to Maoist rule over China because it simply takes Mao's methodological contradictions for granted and focus on the simple problem-solving routine, therefore he accepts the many contradictory reformulations of the social transformation to be promoted by Mao and leads the reader to judge him only by his capability of solving the immediate problems, instead of issuing the case of judging him according to his capability of solving the problems and preserving the coherence with the seminal cause of fighting capitalism. In sum, Selden's focus on the Maoist ideology and governability and neglects to access the object of this ideology and the outmost purpose of governing, which even if unreachable to a descriptive language, are still a necessary investigatory effort that enable the investigator to understand and identify the cases of ideological flexibilizations and the cases of ideological organical transformations.

On this respect its important to stress that the last period analyzed, from 1976 to 1978, setts the case for an analysis in which Selden takes the radical ideological transformation of Deng Xiaoping with the same naturality he understand the concrete measures that Xiaoping took to champion some immediate problems. By doing this Selden hardly expresses the huge deviation between the object of the Maoist ideology and that of the “revisionist” ideology and, consequently, fails to predict this new era as the defeat of the values and beliefs which once made China to struggle against its Oedipal capitalist fate.

1By Pedro Lara de Arruda.