I dunno how to properly quote you so am gonna respond in a big old lump of text!
So in regards to literacy, I don't think even a comparison to Russia is all that useful considering how dire conditions of literacy were in China by 1949. Let's compare them to a country with similar rates of (il)literacy at the time - India. This is what Jay Taylor does in his book The Dragon and the Wild Goose. Despite the shit title, it is a good book in that it uses a comparison that is fairly apt - by 1950 both countries had similar metrics in pretty much everything (actually India, having not gone through a devastating war with Japan, was slightly better off in terms of industrialization etc). He states that China had a literacy rate in 1951 of 26% compared to 77% in 1982. (I believe in the 71 it was something like 70%, but I am having a harder time finding my previous sources for that) I believe Wang Zheng's recent book also notes that women's literacy is harder to track, but she estimates that by the mid-1970s it was around 50%.; at 1949 it was less than 5%. For comparison, in India (which also had a relatively interventionist state, and a few fairly well-run literacy programs in certain states) had 18% women's literacy in 1971. Total literacy that same year was 34%. That is a monumental difference. Only Sri Lanka was able to outperform China in Asia.
In terms of depoliticization of local life, I mean that in the Maoist era power ultimately did stem, at least in part, from 'the people', or 'the mass line'. People went out on campaigns. Bands of women beat up abusive husbands. You'd insult your landlord on the street. In the village you would all work together and learn from your local cadre and then distribute the material to your neighbors. In the urban danwei you would live next to your manager, wear the same clothes, get called off from work to go to protests, signature campaigns etc. There was a sense that life was inherently poltiical, because it is. Today, there is nothing along those lines. Wang Hui makes note of this, but after the protest movements of the 1980s were crushed, people's relationship to politics (Party endorsed or otherwise) became entirely disembodied. Politics became something only a very small subset of individuals did. 'Campaigns' in China now are not so much little laboratories of people's democracy wherein individuals have a huge role in making sure they are carried out in a certain way. Rather, they are systematized, choreographed little things that have little substance beyond the full power of the state. Now granted, that counts for a lot - but it does mean your local kuaidi deliver man is probably not thinking about campaigns as integral to his life. In my opinion, this isn't a simple issue of ideals or even ideology - practices are what make politics and can have a profound affect on the way people interpret and understand their material conditions. People are not thinking in such a way in China anymore, and this is a massive issue.
I actually reject stagism entirely. Several historians of Maoist China (Viren Murthy, Rebecca Karl, Arif Dirlik - all Marxists) have mentioned that the profound theoretical contribution of Maoism lies in its desire to break the idea of historical teleology. Revolution is possible, Maoism states, because one is backwards. To be 'backwards' means that you can transform things in a way that advanced capitalist powers cannot. I am aware that this goes against orthodox Marxist understandings of revolution. But pretty much every major revolutionary force in Asia disagreed with that understanding (and also with the Soviet notion of WORKERS and not peasants driving revolutionary change) because they saw it as too dogmatic and teleological. I think we ought to respect this somewhat. The idea that Maoism was doomed to fail materially doesn't really stand up to snuff. The economy had certainly had its ups and downs but a lot of modern economic historians note that post-Deng growth would have been impossible without Maoist industrial policy. Who knows what the future could have looked like?
I agree a communist party is important. I believe, at least somewhat, in something resembling a vanguard party. I do not believe the CCP meets that category necessarily. I do not think they are holding back the tide of reactionary forces. Certainly, if one looks at cultural attitudes in China (for example, towards women, towards Confucianism, towards family hierarchy etc), the reform era has seen a lot of setbacks. My worry is that actually many cultural conservatives with a veneer of supposedly 'socialist' economic thinking have been in the Party for a while and are a pretty core element of its leadership. Again, the overtures towards Confucianism, against the discussion of sexual harassment etc all bodes badly. But even just from a purely materialist perspective, I believe that the level of collusion between Party elites and domestic and international capital is high enough to merit tremendous concern.
thanks for elaborated answer! i'll avoid quoting too so we don't delve into massive posts
my discussions about china aren't coming from personal ego, or from picking a team and wanting it to win or whatever; like i said earlier, i'm from the 3rd world myself so i'm interested in discussing every aspect of the chinese experiment (and the cuban, the vietnamese, the bolivian, etc) as they're going to give us clues on how to solve our own problems. so i really like that i can have some useful discussion for once lol
regarding literacy rates: thanks for the sources, and i'm gonna read that book as china really should be compared to india (this is something vijay prashad insists on and i deeply agree with). but i did agree with you that the country improved a lot with mao, what i don't see is how we could say the country was in a good position back then, even compared to other 3rd world countries, aside from specific areas of low material requirements
regarding depoliticization: i'm aware people were more politically active in that sense, and i understand the new left's criticism - but do you think that resulted in an overall positive for china? to me it seems like a defense of aspects that would ultimately result in another cultural revolution, and it would again happen at the wrong time and space
regarding stagism: i dislike the term and i very much disagree with my position being teleological - i think there's a dialectical relationship between ideals and material conditions too, and stating that we need to deal with material limitations before we can move forward is in no way dogmatic, but a way of avoiding what marx used to call the various kinds of conservative socialism. it's not dogmatic to say decommodification requires a certain level of abundance (and therefore, development), it's just empirical observation; it's also just empirical, not dogmatic, to think market forces play a very useful part in the beginning, before the contradiction between productivity incentives and rates of profit becomes unsustainable (as is already the case for so much of the modern economy in developed countries). in fact, i think the dogma lies in believing we can have (and maintain) these large productivity rises under a decommodified economy in spite of all the empirical evidence to the contrary from the previous experiments - especially the USSR before, during and after the NEP, but also just china itself
i guess if we disagree on these premises we're not gonna find common ground in the inferences either; for instance, i'm getting the impression you believe china could've got here (and kept moving forward, in terms of economic, and therefore social, development) without the reforms, and i clearly don't
i'm not well-versed in confucianism and which aspects of it have been focused on in their more recent cultural developments, i would enjoy sources on this if you've got any (though i guess this would be wang hui as well?)
I believe that the level of collusion between Party elites and domestic and international capital is high enough to merit tremendous concern.
can you go into more details on that level of collusion, especially since xi? i understand they negotiate with capital, and like i said, i'm ok with that; actual rampant collusion would be an entirely different thing and yes, a huge issue
Regarding China being 'better off', again I think if one compared the metrics that I think are quite pertinent (infant mortality, longevity, literacy, unemployment, wealth inequality), China was doing very well and better than most of the Third World. I don't think using GDP or GDP per capita to analyze the question is enough. The point was that certainly by the mid 70s, when the very high of the Cultural Revolution (though I want to talk about this more as you mentioned it as well) was done with, necessities of life were decommodified and provided for most people. There were of course problems (the rural and urban divide, for one) but I think what ultimately made the economy function relatively well was that China had a large enough internal market to keep demands for production fairly high.
Regarding depoliticization, I think it really depends on what you regard as a revolutionary society. For me, such a society necessitates some element of mass participation, because otherwise I think the Party becomes disconnected from social reality. In fact, lots of scholars would call what happened after the reform as essentially a technocratic revolution - a class of cadres who became suspicious of the 'mass' after the Cultural Revolution and were trained mostly at Tsinghua in engineering and other sciences made it their mission to reformat the political economy in a way that the 'mass' could never again challenge elements of the Party bureaucracy. That chilled discourse in society in a very profound way. As to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, I think we are often fooled into thinking it was a purely chaotic time for ten years. The Cultural Revolution actually formally ended in 68/69. Most of the violence that happened in the whole period, in fact, came when Mao turned on the Red Guards and sent the PLA to clear them out. What some authors argue is that Mao very clearly did fear the Party was going revisionist and needed disciplining by the people, but then ultimately backed down from going ahead with his real goal ('bombard the headquarters' ie restart the Party). So in some ways this wasn't even the consequence of the mass going crazy or anything, rather it was the product of a lot of politics going on behind the scenes.
I actually just completely disagree with your empirical evidence in that again I am not sure there is any real proof that the Maoist economy was crumpling or under any particularly dire productivity issues. I understand Marx's position on it and yes I would certainly agree there are some material limits that one runs into without a certain amount of capital accumulation. The question really is a matter of did China need foreign capital and demand to fuel its rise or could some form of sustainable development have taken place by replying on the internal market alone. China followed a playbook that was used successfully by S Korea in the 60s and 70s - have the state basically throws firms to the mercy of the international market in order to compete and grow, and use excess human capital to give them a fighting chance. It is a model that works for becoming a rich society, yes. But I am unwilling to state it is the only one.
In regards to Confucianism, it is actually pretty easy to see. I don't have an academic work on hand at the moment but there has been a lot of writing on the CCP promoting certain family values and Xi, for example, going to Qufu (Confucius' birthplace), making a fairly praising speech of traditional Chinese values etc. Actually you can see a lot of this cultural shift just by the way Chinese history is invoked. The 'five thousand years of continuous history' and other civilizational language was almost never used in the Maoist era, because it was seen as pretty ahistorical. I agree that it is, and I think it promoted a certain cultural chauvinism amongst the Han in ways that has manifested itself quite clearly in attitudes towards minorities etc.
In regards to negotiating with capital vs collusion, for me it is a rather simple question - look at reforms or lack thereof of mechanisms that have rendered huge sectors of the working class impotent. For example, Xi has talked about the growing divide between rural areas and urban ones as a massive issue. He has made a lot of effort to promote devopment in deprived areas and yes poverty as a metric has decreased, I won't deny that. But as one of the consequences of this divide, rural people have flocked to cities at huge rates. Not in itself any different from any developing country. But the issue lies in the fact that China's hukou system prevents rural migrants from accessing healthcare, from having their kids go to most schools, from being able to rent in certain parts of the city, from being able to buy land at all, and basically makes them an underclass due to their lack of institutional and legal access. This system is what has been able to fuel fast economic growth. Basically the principle is you can just take very cheap labor and then replace it (rural migrants have little choice but to leave after a few years, not by any formal mechanism but just because you do ultimately want to go back to your family back home and there are limited opportunities of advancement available to you in the city. So cities get fresh pools of labor all the time, providing wages to rural migrants that are better than rural areas but certainly very far off from 'fair' when looking at their contribution to the economy.
Pretty much every leader since Jiang Zemin has said they want to reform this. They've all done something - Xi implemented a sort of temporary housing permit that one can get if they have lived in a place for a certain amount of time and have a certain level of education. But no one, despite them proclaiming that hukou is an issue, wants to do away with the system. Largely, again, this is because both domestic capital and foreign capital requires this large pool of expendable bodies. China has noted at every turn that this gives itself an advantage in terms of luring investment and manufacturing from foreign across in comparison to say India. Maybe with an emphasis on dual circulation this may change but there are also growing cultural norms. Rural people are denigrated for being uneducated, having low suzhi (hard to translate, basically status of value as a person), lazy etc even as urban economies run on their efforts. Actually this is discussed a lot in rural workers' new literature efforts. There are some really harrowing stories, I'd be happy to send them your way.
Now some of these growing pains are to be expected when going through a phase of capitalist development, sure. But when does it really end? Mao certainly thought you needed state capitalism for a time, thus New Democracy existed for five years. Does China really need fifteen more years to complete a transition? If interest groups prevent reforms to stop the unceasing exploitation of rural migrants (who are, again, a huge portion of the population), can we really say with total confidence that all the new wealth and capital in the country that has captured the Party's interests will allow it to also jettison these interests and squash them eventually? Because ultimately if you believe in class struggle then you must believe that the Party is currently empowering the working classes to engage in a conflict with its homegrown bourgeoisie in order to reach a new form of political economy. What the 1980s represented (again, Wang Hui) was a reverse form of this wherein new bourgeoisie interests aligned with the party against mass interests and destroyed them. Will the 2030s really strive to completely undo that?
I dunno how to properly quote you so am gonna respond in a big old lump of text!
So in regards to literacy, I don't think even a comparison to Russia is all that useful considering how dire conditions of literacy were in China by 1949. Let's compare them to a country with similar rates of (il)literacy at the time - India. This is what Jay Taylor does in his book The Dragon and the Wild Goose. Despite the shit title, it is a good book in that it uses a comparison that is fairly apt - by 1950 both countries had similar metrics in pretty much everything (actually India, having not gone through a devastating war with Japan, was slightly better off in terms of industrialization etc). He states that China had a literacy rate in 1951 of 26% compared to 77% in 1982. (I believe in the 71 it was something like 70%, but I am having a harder time finding my previous sources for that) I believe Wang Zheng's recent book also notes that women's literacy is harder to track, but she estimates that by the mid-1970s it was around 50%.; at 1949 it was less than 5%. For comparison, in India (which also had a relatively interventionist state, and a few fairly well-run literacy programs in certain states) had 18% women's literacy in 1971. Total literacy that same year was 34%. That is a monumental difference. Only Sri Lanka was able to outperform China in Asia.
In terms of depoliticization of local life, I mean that in the Maoist era power ultimately did stem, at least in part, from 'the people', or 'the mass line'. People went out on campaigns. Bands of women beat up abusive husbands. You'd insult your landlord on the street. In the village you would all work together and learn from your local cadre and then distribute the material to your neighbors. In the urban danwei you would live next to your manager, wear the same clothes, get called off from work to go to protests, signature campaigns etc. There was a sense that life was inherently poltiical, because it is. Today, there is nothing along those lines. Wang Hui makes note of this, but after the protest movements of the 1980s were crushed, people's relationship to politics (Party endorsed or otherwise) became entirely disembodied. Politics became something only a very small subset of individuals did. 'Campaigns' in China now are not so much little laboratories of people's democracy wherein individuals have a huge role in making sure they are carried out in a certain way. Rather, they are systematized, choreographed little things that have little substance beyond the full power of the state. Now granted, that counts for a lot - but it does mean your local kuaidi deliver man is probably not thinking about campaigns as integral to his life. In my opinion, this isn't a simple issue of ideals or even ideology - practices are what make politics and can have a profound affect on the way people interpret and understand their material conditions. People are not thinking in such a way in China anymore, and this is a massive issue.
I actually reject stagism entirely. Several historians of Maoist China (Viren Murthy, Rebecca Karl, Arif Dirlik - all Marxists) have mentioned that the profound theoretical contribution of Maoism lies in its desire to break the idea of historical teleology. Revolution is possible, Maoism states, because one is backwards. To be 'backwards' means that you can transform things in a way that advanced capitalist powers cannot. I am aware that this goes against orthodox Marxist understandings of revolution. But pretty much every major revolutionary force in Asia disagreed with that understanding (and also with the Soviet notion of WORKERS and not peasants driving revolutionary change) because they saw it as too dogmatic and teleological. I think we ought to respect this somewhat. The idea that Maoism was doomed to fail materially doesn't really stand up to snuff. The economy had certainly had its ups and downs but a lot of modern economic historians note that post-Deng growth would have been impossible without Maoist industrial policy. Who knows what the future could have looked like?
I agree a communist party is important. I believe, at least somewhat, in something resembling a vanguard party. I do not believe the CCP meets that category necessarily. I do not think they are holding back the tide of reactionary forces. Certainly, if one looks at cultural attitudes in China (for example, towards women, towards Confucianism, towards family hierarchy etc), the reform era has seen a lot of setbacks. My worry is that actually many cultural conservatives with a veneer of supposedly 'socialist' economic thinking have been in the Party for a while and are a pretty core element of its leadership. Again, the overtures towards Confucianism, against the discussion of sexual harassment etc all bodes badly. But even just from a purely materialist perspective, I believe that the level of collusion between Party elites and domestic and international capital is high enough to merit tremendous concern.
thanks for elaborated answer! i'll avoid quoting too so we don't delve into massive posts
my discussions about china aren't coming from personal ego, or from picking a team and wanting it to win or whatever; like i said earlier, i'm from the 3rd world myself so i'm interested in discussing every aspect of the chinese experiment (and the cuban, the vietnamese, the bolivian, etc) as they're going to give us clues on how to solve our own problems. so i really like that i can have some useful discussion for once lol
regarding literacy rates: thanks for the sources, and i'm gonna read that book as china really should be compared to india (this is something vijay prashad insists on and i deeply agree with). but i did agree with you that the country improved a lot with mao, what i don't see is how we could say the country was in a good position back then, even compared to other 3rd world countries, aside from specific areas of low material requirements
regarding depoliticization: i'm aware people were more politically active in that sense, and i understand the new left's criticism - but do you think that resulted in an overall positive for china? to me it seems like a defense of aspects that would ultimately result in another cultural revolution, and it would again happen at the wrong time and space
regarding stagism: i dislike the term and i very much disagree with my position being teleological - i think there's a dialectical relationship between ideals and material conditions too, and stating that we need to deal with material limitations before we can move forward is in no way dogmatic, but a way of avoiding what marx used to call the various kinds of conservative socialism. it's not dogmatic to say decommodification requires a certain level of abundance (and therefore, development), it's just empirical observation; it's also just empirical, not dogmatic, to think market forces play a very useful part in the beginning, before the contradiction between productivity incentives and rates of profit becomes unsustainable (as is already the case for so much of the modern economy in developed countries). in fact, i think the dogma lies in believing we can have (and maintain) these large productivity rises under a decommodified economy in spite of all the empirical evidence to the contrary from the previous experiments - especially the USSR before, during and after the NEP, but also just china itself
i guess if we disagree on these premises we're not gonna find common ground in the inferences either; for instance, i'm getting the impression you believe china could've got here (and kept moving forward, in terms of economic, and therefore social, development) without the reforms, and i clearly don't
i'm not well-versed in confucianism and which aspects of it have been focused on in their more recent cultural developments, i would enjoy sources on this if you've got any (though i guess this would be wang hui as well?)
can you go into more details on that level of collusion, especially since xi? i understand they negotiate with capital, and like i said, i'm ok with that; actual rampant collusion would be an entirely different thing and yes, a huge issue
Regarding China being 'better off', again I think if one compared the metrics that I think are quite pertinent (infant mortality, longevity, literacy, unemployment, wealth inequality), China was doing very well and better than most of the Third World. I don't think using GDP or GDP per capita to analyze the question is enough. The point was that certainly by the mid 70s, when the very high of the Cultural Revolution (though I want to talk about this more as you mentioned it as well) was done with, necessities of life were decommodified and provided for most people. There were of course problems (the rural and urban divide, for one) but I think what ultimately made the economy function relatively well was that China had a large enough internal market to keep demands for production fairly high.
Regarding depoliticization, I think it really depends on what you regard as a revolutionary society. For me, such a society necessitates some element of mass participation, because otherwise I think the Party becomes disconnected from social reality. In fact, lots of scholars would call what happened after the reform as essentially a technocratic revolution - a class of cadres who became suspicious of the 'mass' after the Cultural Revolution and were trained mostly at Tsinghua in engineering and other sciences made it their mission to reformat the political economy in a way that the 'mass' could never again challenge elements of the Party bureaucracy. That chilled discourse in society in a very profound way. As to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, I think we are often fooled into thinking it was a purely chaotic time for ten years. The Cultural Revolution actually formally ended in 68/69. Most of the violence that happened in the whole period, in fact, came when Mao turned on the Red Guards and sent the PLA to clear them out. What some authors argue is that Mao very clearly did fear the Party was going revisionist and needed disciplining by the people, but then ultimately backed down from going ahead with his real goal ('bombard the headquarters' ie restart the Party). So in some ways this wasn't even the consequence of the mass going crazy or anything, rather it was the product of a lot of politics going on behind the scenes.
I actually just completely disagree with your empirical evidence in that again I am not sure there is any real proof that the Maoist economy was crumpling or under any particularly dire productivity issues. I understand Marx's position on it and yes I would certainly agree there are some material limits that one runs into without a certain amount of capital accumulation. The question really is a matter of did China need foreign capital and demand to fuel its rise or could some form of sustainable development have taken place by replying on the internal market alone. China followed a playbook that was used successfully by S Korea in the 60s and 70s - have the state basically throws firms to the mercy of the international market in order to compete and grow, and use excess human capital to give them a fighting chance. It is a model that works for becoming a rich society, yes. But I am unwilling to state it is the only one.
In regards to Confucianism, it is actually pretty easy to see. I don't have an academic work on hand at the moment but there has been a lot of writing on the CCP promoting certain family values and Xi, for example, going to Qufu (Confucius' birthplace), making a fairly praising speech of traditional Chinese values etc. Actually you can see a lot of this cultural shift just by the way Chinese history is invoked. The 'five thousand years of continuous history' and other civilizational language was almost never used in the Maoist era, because it was seen as pretty ahistorical. I agree that it is, and I think it promoted a certain cultural chauvinism amongst the Han in ways that has manifested itself quite clearly in attitudes towards minorities etc.
In regards to negotiating with capital vs collusion, for me it is a rather simple question - look at reforms or lack thereof of mechanisms that have rendered huge sectors of the working class impotent. For example, Xi has talked about the growing divide between rural areas and urban ones as a massive issue. He has made a lot of effort to promote devopment in deprived areas and yes poverty as a metric has decreased, I won't deny that. But as one of the consequences of this divide, rural people have flocked to cities at huge rates. Not in itself any different from any developing country. But the issue lies in the fact that China's hukou system prevents rural migrants from accessing healthcare, from having their kids go to most schools, from being able to rent in certain parts of the city, from being able to buy land at all, and basically makes them an underclass due to their lack of institutional and legal access. This system is what has been able to fuel fast economic growth. Basically the principle is you can just take very cheap labor and then replace it (rural migrants have little choice but to leave after a few years, not by any formal mechanism but just because you do ultimately want to go back to your family back home and there are limited opportunities of advancement available to you in the city. So cities get fresh pools of labor all the time, providing wages to rural migrants that are better than rural areas but certainly very far off from 'fair' when looking at their contribution to the economy.
Pretty much every leader since Jiang Zemin has said they want to reform this. They've all done something - Xi implemented a sort of temporary housing permit that one can get if they have lived in a place for a certain amount of time and have a certain level of education. But no one, despite them proclaiming that hukou is an issue, wants to do away with the system. Largely, again, this is because both domestic capital and foreign capital requires this large pool of expendable bodies. China has noted at every turn that this gives itself an advantage in terms of luring investment and manufacturing from foreign across in comparison to say India. Maybe with an emphasis on dual circulation this may change but there are also growing cultural norms. Rural people are denigrated for being uneducated, having low suzhi (hard to translate, basically status of value as a person), lazy etc even as urban economies run on their efforts. Actually this is discussed a lot in rural workers' new literature efforts. There are some really harrowing stories, I'd be happy to send them your way.
Now some of these growing pains are to be expected when going through a phase of capitalist development, sure. But when does it really end? Mao certainly thought you needed state capitalism for a time, thus New Democracy existed for five years. Does China really need fifteen more years to complete a transition? If interest groups prevent reforms to stop the unceasing exploitation of rural migrants (who are, again, a huge portion of the population), can we really say with total confidence that all the new wealth and capital in the country that has captured the Party's interests will allow it to also jettison these interests and squash them eventually? Because ultimately if you believe in class struggle then you must believe that the Party is currently empowering the working classes to engage in a conflict with its homegrown bourgeoisie in order to reach a new form of political economy. What the 1980s represented (again, Wang Hui) was a reverse form of this wherein new bourgeoisie interests aligned with the party against mass interests and destroyed them. Will the 2030s really strive to completely undo that?