The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor
Allen Lane, 302 pp, £25.00, June 2010, ISBN 978 1 84614 173 7
Khrushchev’s speech in 1956 denouncing Stalin’s crimes was a political act from which, as his biographer William Taubman put it, ‘the Soviet regime never fully recovered, and neither did he.’ Although it was plainly opportunistic, there was just as plainly more to it than that, a kind of reckless excess that cannot be accounted for in terms of political strategy. The speech so undermined the dogma of infallible leadership that the entire nomenklatura sank into temporary paralysis. A dozen or so delegates collapsed during the speech, and had to be carried out and given medical help; one of them, Boleslaw Bierut, the hardline general secretary of the Polish Communist Party, died of a heart attack. The model Stalinist writer Alexander Fadeyev actually shot himself a few days later. The point is not that they were ‘honest Communists’: most of them were brutal manipulators without any illusions about the Soviet regime. What broke down was their ‘objective’ illusion, the figure of the ‘big Other’ as a background against which they could exert their ruthlessness and drive for power. They had displaced their belief onto this Other, which, as it were, believed on their behalf. Now their proxy had disintegrated.
Khrushchev was gambling that his (limited) confession would strengthen the Communist movement, and in the short term he was right: one should always remember that Khrushchev’s era was the last period of authentic Communist enthusiasm, of belief in the Communist project. When, during his visit to the US in 1959, he said to the US agriculture secretary, ‘Your grandchildren will live under Communism,’ he was stating the conviction of the entire Soviet nomenklatura. Even when Gorbachev attempted a more radical confrontation with the past (rehabilitations included Bukharin), Lenin remained unassailable, and Trotsky continued to be a non-person.
Compare these events with the Chinese way of breaking with the Maoist past. As Richard McGregor shows in The Party, Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reforms’ proceeded in a radically different way. In the organisation of the economy (and, up to a point, the culture), what is usually perceived as ‘Communism’ was abandoned, and the gates were opened to what, in the West, is called ‘liberalisation’: private property, the pursuit of profit, a life-style based on hedonist individualism etc. The Party maintained its hegemony, not through doctrinal orthodoxy (in official discourse, the Confucian notion of the Harmonious Society replaced practically all reference to Communism), but by securing the status of the Communist Party as the only guarantee of China’s stability and prosperity.
One consequence of the Party’s need to maintain hegemony is its close monitoring and regulation of the way Chinese history is presented, especially that of the last two centuries. The story ceaselessly recycled by the state media and textbooks is of China’s humiliation, which is supposed to have begun with the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century and ended only with the Communist victory in 1949. To be a patriot is to support the rule of the Communist Party. When history is used for the purposes of legitimation, it cannot support any substantial self-critique. The Chinese learned the lesson of
Gorbachev’s failure: full recognition of the ‘founding crimes’ brings the entire system down: they must be disavowed. True, some Maoist ‘excesses’ and ‘errors’ were denounced (the Great Leap Forward and the widespread famine that followed it; the Cultural Revolution), and Deng’s assessment of Mao’s role (70 per cent positive and 30 per cent negative) is enshrined in official discourse. But Deng’s assessment functions as a formal conclusion that makes any further discussion or elaboration superfluous. Mao may be 30 per cent bad, but he continues to be celebrated as the founding father of the nation, his body in a mausoleum and his image on every banknote. In a clear case of fetishistic disavowal, everyone knows that Mao made errors and caused immense suffering, yet his image remains magically untainted. This way, the Chinese Communists can have their cake and eat it: economic liberalisation is combined with the continuation of Party rule.
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