“一切历史都是当代史”
“All history is contemporary history”
“一个民族如果不能面对历史,这个民族就没有未来”
“A nation that cannot face its history has no future.”
― Yang Jisheng, historian known for a book on the Great Leap Forward (link in Chinese)
In these posts, I often get the nagging sense that I frequently make claims that are begging for further elaboration. I find it very difficult to leave these thoughts hanging but I do so because I recognize that, even on Substack, it is necessary to exercise some message discipline.
In a previous post reflecting on debates about whither China pending the release of the history resolution following the 6th plenum, I made a provocative comparison between the U.S. Republican Party and the Chinese Communist Party. Increasingly, I am not alone in making this comparison. When promoting his book on neo-Maoism, Jude Blanchette often repeated what he readily admits is an imprecise analogy to the U.S. Tea Party following Obama’s election in 2008. Kaiser Kuo made the analogy between Donald Trump instructing the MAGA mob to storm the Capitol to Chairman Mao’s Red Guards explicit on Twitter. More recently, I encountered a very interesting Twitter thread that emphasized the parallels between red state growth and the Chinese economic miracle. Clearly, liberalism is no pre-requisite for dizzying urban growth. Houston and Shenzhen should be sister cities.
But the heart of the claim comes from Evan Osnos’ work, who is the ideal authority as he casts an impossibly wide net that spans the Pacific. He is the author of two books published eight years apart; the first was on China’s ambition and the second on the making of America’s fury. In each instance, there is a engulfing chasm between discourse and reality because we choose to examine our histories through a fun house mirror, the image Osnos selects to end his column on the resolution:
In July, in a speech marking the Party’s hundred year anniversary,… [Xi said] ‘Through the mirror of history, we can find where we currently stand, and gain foresight into the future.’ Perhaps, but only if the mirror is true.
At the end of a discussion led by CSIS unpacking the 6th plenum, Jude Blanchette noted that by triumphantly proclaiming that major issues of China’s governance, discussed in the prior resolutions in 1945 and 1981, have been resolved, a new principal contradiction has come into being. The panelists implied that China’s evolving posture of governance may not only jeopardize the norms that brought it success but the legitimacy of Reform itself.1 In the language of Stein Ringen’s typology of Party legitimacy, the Party likely cannot exist if it is trivial—that is, merely to ensure conviction of belief in the Party—it must also achieve higher order goals. Ringen speculated that China under Xi was drifting from a welfare state to a power state. Legitimacy may be stable under either formulation of state power, after all there is a reason Ringen described the dictatorship as “perfect”. The point is that it likely has to choose in ways that Common Prosperity does not yet appreciate. Trivial stasis is not an option and neither is the all-of-the-above luxury of both welfare and power. We know this tradeoff to hold because fuqiang 富强 has proved to be an elusive goal on both sides of the Pacific.
Examining History: Damned if You Do, Damned if you Don't
Why doesn’t Xi Jinping, self-installed as the head of the historical resolution drafting committee, simply choose to look through the correct mirror? When in a more reflective mood out of power and with China’s growth miracle hanging in the balance, Deng frankly admitted many narratives promulgated in the 1981 resolution did not reflect reality (不实的). There have been many opportunities since then to correct these falsehoods, but the Party consistently worries, as Deng once did, that would be a course that would easily drift to historical nihilism. They are not necessarily being irrational. As the Chinese historian known for his research on the Great Leap Forward, Yang Jisheng, wrote in a 2011 essay (link in Chinese),
For a social group, [this relation between history and future] is different. If the history of this social group has many disgraceful aspects… then it may not have a future if it truly faces history. So such social groups are most afraid of the real history.
The nation might not have a future unless it faces history, but that future may not include the Party if it reveals facts about the Party’s leadership that prove to be disgraceful. Thus, the 1981 resolution began a pattern picked up last month of acknowledging but not elaborating. The panelists implied this is strategically strange. Yes, there were “mistakes” in the Mao era, but didn’t Deng’s efforts to establish clear lines of succession and promote collective leadership succeed to the point as to reliably prevent another devolution? Wouldn’t this institutionalization allow for a certain degree of liberality, as Deng himself hoped would materialize once he was out of power?
For this reason, I would like to propose that there are two equal and opposite historiographical problems from outside expert opinion and the Party itself. The first proposes the issues of the two past historical resolutions were once on the way to being resolved, but they have recently regressed. They mainly differ on how long ago they regressed with some arguing that the slide can be dated to the late Hu era, while others emphasizing that the nail in the coffin was not struck until recently. The Party proposes a more linear teleology in keeping with their original mission to sinicize Marxist-Leninism. After racing past the aim of a moderately prosperous society, applying familiar output targeting to eliminate extreme poverty, leadership has its eyes on achieving the second centenarian goal of becoming a fully modern socialist nation by 2049.
Each view neglects the possibility, usually dismissed as absurd, that nothing has changed. Past administrations all the way to Xi ran a trivial state that was dedicated to maintaining Party discipline. Everything else was window dressing. The gap between discourse and reality can be understood as an anxiety that this fact may one day reveal itself to be true. In President Xi’s view, a bold new agenda is needed to fundamentally change the nature of state power and Party legitimacy.
Party like it’s 1980
The question is a classic historical exercise of continuity or change. A great deal of the confusion between the two comes from attempting to dissect the black box that is Chinese politics. As journalist James Fallows recently noted on his Substack and economist Branko Milanovic satirized on his Twitter, there is a Scrhodinger’s cat element to China knowledge. When dealing with layered complexity at unique historical junctures, both continuity and change have a way of being simultaneously true.
The tension was perhaps best captured by Wilson Center fellow, Joseph Torigian, in a bit he shared to the Wall St. Journal:
There is nothing new about this tension. When President Xi was still firmly in the power consolidation phase of his tenure in 2013, Chris Buckley, one of the participants at the CSIS event, wrote a column on the lessons Party leadership drew from the Soviet Union. In attempting to distinguish himself from his predecessor, Hu Jintao, without making hard political choices that would sustain Reform, one analyst is quoted as saying, “For now, he’s a guy who is trying to do two things at once.”
You could also go back even further to develop the origin story. The head drafter of the 1981 resolution, Hu Qiaomu, was responsible for the revisions of a document drafted initially in mid-1980 that Deng regarded as of poor quality and even threatening to the Party’s raison d'être. In particular, throughout the process Deng wanted to keep criticism of Mao to only what was needed and was receptive to conservative Chen Yun’s suggestion from a Beijing hospital bed that the resolution include Mao’s positive contributions during his revolutionary years. Chen Yun of course is the same man who is famous for a remark that thoughtful Chinese intellectuals regularly repeat of Mao:
Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?
As a consequence of the inclusion of Chen’s advice and Deng’s recognition that Mao is both the most important and most dangerous resource for the Party as the founder of the country, the overwhelming majority of the 101 references in the text of the resolution are to the revolutionary period or Mao Zedong Thought as the foundation of the Party. The emphasis on the latter is likely Hu Qiaomu’s touch, who was Deng’s leading theorist in much the same way Wang Huning is the man behind Xi. Hu relied on a rather awkward division between Mao Zedong Thought and Mao Zedong Thinking with the former right and correct on a “scientific” basis, while the latter was wrong as it was erratic and in the end destabilizing.2 He may have been a reader of Wang Fanxi’s Trotskyite critique of Mao, formerly banned in the mainland but one of the grey-yellow books available to high-ranking officials responsible for formulation of Party narratives. Exiled in Macau when he finally published the history in media res in 1973, Wang had a division of Mao that is likely too similar to be a coincidence:
[There is] actual Mao Zedong Thought and [Mao Zedong thought], a system of thought artificially confected to raise Mao’s status in the Party and in the country to godlike heights, always perfect, always right, and on par with, or even higher than, Marxism.
Ultimately, this characterization of Mao’s personality cult was rejected, most forcefully by Deng himself. In a welcome piece of revisionism, Torigian argues that it is Deng, not Mao, who is the long shadow that haunts Chinese politics. After beating out Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, Deng was the big man who had little use for meetings. Torigian argues that his often cited warnings on over-concentration of power were politically motivated in the context of that leadership competition, and scrapped when the Party learned of the Solidarity movement in Poland later in 1980. From that moment on, the Agenda was building off a weak industrial base, re-balancing away from overproduction of heavy industry, and branching out into private enterprise in service of the Party’s survival, while the non-Agenda was liberalization and inter-party competition (see extract from Schwarzman scholar, Chris Vassallo’s thesis). Even during the golden age of Reform, there was a kind of Straussian pessimism that pervaded throughout. Party elites believed they had the affirmative obligation to “steer” opinions3 so society would not lose its ideological bearings during this critical pivot, realizing China’s growth potential characterized aptly by systemic vulnerability.
The sidelining of the principal proponent of political reform, Zhao Ziyang, after the Tiananmen massacre crystallized this basic dynamic, where fang/shou cycles occur but firmly bounded by the Party’s Agenda. Every government since Burke has to make decisions about what it specifies in detail what falls under its purview and what to leave alone. Perhaps it is in this respect that adds a dimension to historian Adam Tooze’s claim that the pinnacle of Keynesianism can be found in Xi’s China Dream.
The limits of political reform from the onset aligns remarkably well with President Carter’s description of his interactions with Deng Xiaoping, who in his estimation seemed to almost always act by fiat with little consultation from others in the Party’s inner circle. In a lecture I attended at Emory University in 2018, President Carter argued that media portrayals of President Xi are not grounded in actual history. His authority is no more over-concentrated than Deng, to say nothing of Mao. The real and necessary difference with both Mao and Xi is that references to his personal leadership were almost eliminated from publications like the People’s Daily. Eager to learn from foreign country’s histories, he perhaps took to heart Teddy Roosevelt’s adage, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you’ll go far.” Deng’s version of that phrase on diplomacy is widely known as, “Bide our time and build up our capabilities.” The mistake is to attribute its significance narrowly to diplomacy; it is perhaps the slogan of the Reform era that ties together foreign and domestic policy.
The significance of the dual-reform trajectories of the third revolution notwithstanding, the cleavage of the debate surrounding the 1981 resolution remains. Later, intellectuals, such as sociologist Ma Yong and former Party school professor Cai Xia, articulated that debate as one between constitutionalism and dictatorship. These intellectuals are not Western democrats as they do not share a deontological objection to dictatorship. The concern is that if dictatorship concentrates such that clear lines of succession are absent and norms erode, it will not merely be a period of tutelage that gives way to the end goal of democratic constitutionalism. Critically, the constitutionalism is couched in the language of Party control and stability. For example, Cai cites Deng on what the errors of the Mao period represented, channeling a Kantian wisdom on the role to be played by institutions in the future of the Party:
It is true that the errors we made in the past were partly attributable to the way of thinking and style of work of some leaders. But they were even more attributable to the problems in our organizational and working systems. If these systems are sound, they can place restraints on the actions of bad people…Even so great a man as Comrade Mao Zedong was influenced to a serious degree by certain unsound systems and institutions, which resulted in grave misfortunes for the Party, the state and himself ... the problems in the leadership and organizational systems are more fundamental, widespread and long-lasting, and they have a greater effect on the overall interests of our country…and should therefore command the attention of the entire Party.
In the interest of stability and self-preservation, the Party ought to commit to constitutional checks, Cai argues. No good comes from assuming a nation of angels, the Party must govern as if it is nation of devils. The alternative is a neo-Maoist future that intellectuals would rather steer clear from as anathema to the ambition of forging a welfare state suited for a fully modern socialist nation. Buckley accurately characterized the cleavage in the aforementioned article on the profound influence of Soviet collapse:
Some progressive voices are urging China’s leaders to pay more than lip service to respecting rights and limiting power promised by the Constitution. Meanwhile, some old-school leftists hail Mr. Xi as a muscular nationalist who will go further than his predecessors in asserting China’s territorial claims.
The cleavage persists, as perhaps one of the most locked-in observers to China’s high politics, Jude Blanchette, noted in the conversation on the history resolution:
I heard chatter that this could go one way or the other. Either this was going to be a whitewashing of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution or the other way some more pronounced reconciliation with the past. I know from the neo-Maoists that I followed that they were certainly hoping for a move away from the 1981 resolution’s line on the Mao period. Point of fact is that when the final document came out the message was we had already discussed history, let’s move on.
That is certainly the correct interpretation of each of the past resolutions, as they are no more about history than the People’s Daily is of the news of China. As Manoj Kewalramani noted in a recent conversation with ChinaTalk’s Jordan Schneider, there could be a massive flood, and you would still see pictures of Xi’s shining smile plastered all over the front cover. The question posed by Yang Jisheng in the hook on whether the ambition of the resolution to present the official future closes off when history is not faced truthfully and honestly remains unsettled.
Conclusion
I recognize this commentary may be too revisionist to seriously stomach. To argue for continuity over the course of the greatest transformation in mankind, resulting in what economist Jeffery Sachs calls the most successful developmental project in history is surely prima facie absurd. But I do believe, perhaps without substantial evidence, that China remained a trivial state throughout, intent on preservation of power above all else. Hence, China is now in an interregnum such that it will either have to take the course of the welfare state provided by constitutionalism or the power state buttressed by dictatorship. Though they may complain of inequality, the prize sought after by the Neo-Maoists is national glory strongmen promise. As noted in a 2018 New Yorker column, Make China Great Again has a certain ring to it.
Facing these competing pressures, I can sense that Xi’s temptation is to split the difference, represented well in the different facets of the Common Prosperity agenda, encompassing issues from military modernization to inequality. In this sense, someone like David Harvey who so emphatically believes in the veracity of Xi’s claim to look after welfare that he has retracted his assessment as “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics” and those warning of an increasingly assertive China are both correct at the same time. China is squarely in the Schrodinger zone.
Though China over the last 40 years has a proven track record of managing contradictions of all sorts, this cleavage appears irreconcilable without first settling the question of history, namely Mao’s haunting shadow. As Nils Gilman concluded in The American Interest, when the official future can no longer be controlled, it is the Leninists who win. Unfortunately for President Xi, there are two revolutionary camps other than the Party itself he has to contend with—the Goddess of Democracy and the Neo-Maoists. He rides on the back of both, risking the possibility that he may one day end up inside.
Scott Kennedy said, “The reason why those four elements [of Reform] are understated or ignored is because Xi Jinping is trying to say that the current trajectory of economic policy is a natural extension of what happened before…In fact, the differences are much larger, but they can’t say that without undermining what they are trying to do now.”
Literally, the language was Mao Zedong Thought (sixiang) and Mao Zedong mistaken thought (cuowu sixiang).
Look for Barry Naughton’s claim in link that opinion steerage of the Reform era preceded more sophisticated grand steerage, which came later in the Xi administration.