Providing an overview of 100 years of the political economy of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) is not an easy task. This is not, however, because
a century is an excessively long era to study. On the contrary, the problem is
how short the period is. Or, more correctly, the problem is how quickly and
how many times things have changed – and often rather dramatically – in
such a relative short time scale. Studying all the changes in the post-Mao
era alone would be enough to fill the pages of a number of books. But, if
anything, the pace and extent of change in the first decade of the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) was even faster and more dizzying. And, as we are
studying the CCP and not just the PRC, we should not forget that over
a quarter of this century had passed before it even came to power.
Nevertheless, while it entails providing a broad-brush and, at times, stylised analysis of different eras, we argue that it is possible to identify unifying strands that cut across all of these 100 years (albeit at times in different ways). We do this by focusing on three fundamental issues that have been at the heart of the political economy of Chinese Marxism. The first is how the Party dealt with the missing (more or less) industrial base that Marx and Engels thought would be the determinant of the ideational change that would bring about a Communist revolution. The second is the Chineseness of Chinese Marxism. Since its very birth, the CCP incorporated in its DNA a nationalistic approach: the emphasis on the Party delivering China back to its rightful place in the world provides a thread that runs through the years. Moreover, rather than seeing the writings of Marx and Engels as providing a blueprint that had to be followed, there has instead been an emphasis on the need to treat Marxism as a rather flexible and malleable guiding theory. It is the specifics of the Chinese case that should dictate exactly what can and should be done at any moment in time and not the revolutionary expectations of the original Marxist texts. Our third constant is the importance of identifying the ‘primary contradiction’ facing the Party and the revolution at any given time.
We combine these three in a single emphasis on ‘Whatever It Takes’. This, in part, refers to an overarching objective to do what it takes to regain full sovereignty (that had been stolen by the colonial powers) and to ‘catch up’ with the West by turning China into a major modern(ised) economy. All China’s leaders have shared these goals.
But there is more to Whatever It Takes than just national rejuvenation.
Once the primary contradiction has been established, then anything and
everything is justified in dealing with it and warding off the potential
existential threat to the Party and the regime. In the earlier years of the CCP,
the revolutionary and then state consolidation goals of the Party resulted
first in a rather pragmatic, results-driven political economy epitomised by
the idea of a ‘New Democracy’, and then conflicting ideas over how best to
move forward in the 1950s. But once Mao identified class conflict as the
primary contradiction threatening the regime, this justified whatever it took
to eliminate those counter-revolutionaries.
In Deng’s era, the identification of underdevelopment as the primary
contradiction resulted in a dramatic shift from politics to economics in
command, and doing whatever it took to spur development. In the 1990s,
as Jiang Zemin promoted growth at all costs (but not at the expense of the
CCP’s monopoly of power), the economy became unbalanced. Addressing
overinvestment, indebtedness and inequality was the main focus of the Hu
Jintao-Wen Jiabao era. Finally, Xi Jinping has been concerned more with
the contradiction between unsustainable growth and satisfying the people’s
needs for a better quality of life. Here, while Xi is trying to move on and
do something new, he justifies innovation by explaining that he is repeating
what his predecessors did when they applied Marxism–Leninism to China’s
specific conditions in earlier eras. In the differing emphasis on being more
‘Communist’ or more ‘Chinese’ at any moment in time, we find evidence
both of change and continuity at the same time.
This text is taken from The Chinese Communist Party: A 100-Year Trajectory, edited by Jérôme Doyon and Chloé Froissart, published 2024 by ANU Press, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, and is republished under the Creative Commons CC BY NC ND license. The original text is available at doi.org/10.22459/CCP.2024.08.
