9
INTRODUCTION
The pace of change in contemporary China is so intense that discussions of it intended for publication are often overtaken by events before they appear in print—a fate from which contributions to collections of essays are not exempt. It would therefore be futile to try to register every episode down to the one that happens to be current as I write (the impact of Chinese textiles on European markets), the historical significance of which is in any case unlikely to be apparent immediately. I want instead to situate recent Chinese developments, particularly since 1978, within the framework of uneven and combined development. If there is one place in the world where the process is unmistakable, it is China, but what should the theory lead us to expect from the process?
THE FIRST PHASE OF UNEVEN AND COMBINED DEVELOPMENT1
China was the first country outside Russia for which Trotsky argued that a strategy of permanent revolution was applicable; and, although he did not formulate the law of uneven and combined development until after the revolutionary crisis of the 1920s had ended in disaster for the working class, it clearly lay behind his political conception. Combination emerges from unevenness where a backward country attempts to “catch up” with the advanced in terms of capitalist development, but is unable to complete the process fully in the way that Scotland did in the eighteenth century or that Japan did in the nineteenth. These countries are then in a contradictory position. They may have adopted the most modern forms of technology, industrial organization, and scientific thought in certain areas, but most of society remains at a much lower level. The decisive point, however, is that the archaic and modern do not simply sit side by side, offering a picturesque or appalling contrast according to personal taste, but interpenetrate to produce new hybrid forms of explosive instability. The importance of China in relation to Trotsky’s theorization of the process was that it clarified two important issues that the Russian experience did not.
First, it made clear that the process of uneven and combined development was not confined to countries, like Russia, that were either politically independent of imperialism or themselves imperial powers. The precise forms that combination took in these countries obviously varied depending on whether the country involved was a formal colony controlled by a single imperial power, like India, or one nominally independent but actually subdivided between several warlords and imperial powers, like China. Clearly there were differences. Unlike tsarist Russia, neither imperial nor republican China was in a position to stimulate capitalist industrial growth. Where similarities did exist was in the role of foreign capital and imported technology, and in the limited geographical implantation of capitalist industry.
Second, it demonstrates that “combination” does not necessarily involve two different modes of production. Where industrial capitalism was established in China, the changes it involved for the working class were dramatic. After 1918, these workers were mainly former peasants or rural laborers, who were now subject to the very different and unaccustomed rhythms of industrial urban life without any intervening stage. Jean Chesneaux writes that the main characteristics of the Chinese proletariat were “its youth, its instability, its swollen lower ranks and its lack of a developed labor elite.”2 And in this the Chinese working class closely resembled its Russian forerunner, not least in the openness to Marxism that these conditions tended to produce.
Combined development was not only experienced in the workplace, of course, but in the entire texture of urban life where capitalism took hold. Shanghai was in the vanguard in terms of both production and consumption. It had textile mills before anywhere in the southern states of the US and by 1930 was home to the largest mill in the world; the first cinema in Shanghai opened only five years after the first large cinema opened in San Francisco.3 But important though it was, Shanghai was not the only site of these transformations. By the 1920s Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, was “a study in contrasts weighted towards the pre-industrial”: “A few official buildings, banks and hospitals in Lanzhou were modern style and of two or three stories. But most residences and shops had dirt floors, mud roofs and old-style paper windows. Self-consciously conservative Lanzhou residents described their community as one in which ‘women’s feet are small [bound] and heads [hair-styles] are big.’ But more recently, the number of women with natural feet and bobbed hair had seemed to increase day by day.”4
The parallels between the 1920s and what is currently happening in China are striking. Harold Isaacs opened his classic account of the Chinese Revolution of the former decade with this evocative picture:
On the fringes of big Chinese cities the shadows of lofty factory chimneys fall across fields still tilled with wooden ploughs. On the wharves of seaports modern liners unload goods carried away on the backs of men or shipped inland on primitive barges. In the streets great trucks and jangling trams roar past carts drawn by men harnessed like animals to their loads. Automobiles toot angrily at man-drawn rickshaws and barrows which thread their way through the lanes of traffic. Streets are lined with shops where men and women and children still fashion their wares with bare hands and simple tools. On some of these streets are huge mills run by humming dynamos. Airplanes and railroads cut across vast regions linked otherwise only by footpaths and canals a thousand years old.5
Yet a recent account of China found different, but equally evocative, contrasts in the rapidly growing cities of the 1990s:
We find, at one end of the economic scale, international hotels, shopping malls, housing developments, nightclubs, gold shops, modern factories funded largely by foreign investment, Development Zones, new roads and airfields. . . . At the other end of the urban spectrum, we find serious overcrowding in colorful but unmodernized lanes, alleys, sweatshops and back-street factories which are frequently ill-lit and unsafe, an array of small peddlers and street stalls reflecting considerable underemployment, and a new underclass composed of part-time or professional criminals, beggars and even street-children (now estimated to total at least 200,000 throughout China).6
The same process has obviously not persisted uninterruptedly over the intervening period of eighty years. What has happened?
DECADES OF REVERSAL
In effect, the components of the Chinese social formation separated out as the process of combined development went into reverse toward the end of the 1920s. The defeat of the working-class movement by the Kuomintang alone would not in itself have achieved this result. More significant was the devastation caused by civil war between the Kuomintang and the People’s Army, and, overlapping with it, the subsequent national war between the Japanese and both Chinese forces. “In Shanghai, which had been the center of the textile industry and of working class formation, the war essentially wiped out the working class as factories closed and workers retreated to the countryside to survive.”7 What is interesting is that the process of uneven and combined development did not resume with the advent of the Maoist regime in 1949.
After the Second World War almost every developing nation pursued a strategy of urbanization, in addition to one of industrialization, whatever the ostensible nature of the regime. In some cases the cities expanded regardless of whether a conscious strategy of growth had been pursued or not. Many former country dwellers found even the dangerous uncertainties of life in the shanty towns that circle all the great Third World conurbations more attractive than the unchanging, unending toil of peasant life. China was the major exception. From the launch of the First Five-Year Plan in 1952, investment was concentrated into production for heavy industry, not consumption. In this respect the Chinese path resembled that of Russia after 1928 and Eastern Europe after 1948. However, it diverged from them in that the growth of urban population was far more tightly controlled. Labor requirements were met through the “temporary worker system,” which conferred no rights on incomers and was widely criticized when state control temporarily slackened during the Cultural Revolution.8 It was successful enough, as R. Bin Wong puts it, to have “effectively created distinct economic worlds in China’s cities and the far vaster countryside.”9 Consequently, although industrial output grew 17 times between 1952 and 1978, the urban population in 1978 was only 2.4 times larger than it had been in 1949.10
One of the main sites of combined development is the industrial city, the breeding ground in which new mutations are born. The Maoist regime seems to have consciously aimed at preventing China’s cities from playing this role. In part, this was because the cities could not have accommodated migration from the countryside, and any influx would have threatened social order. But the regime had no intention of expanding the urban area to house potential migrants: “Communist bureaucrats feared urban growth, because they recognized the peril in population concentrations that weighed too heavily on public infrastructures, with some people enjoying secure jobs in state run enterprises and bureaucracies while others scrambled at the margins of society.”11 The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), it seems, was not only opposed to Trotsky but to the social process that he identified and sought to theorize. In effect, it sought to compartmentalize all sections of Chinese society in a process that one is tempted to call “uneven and separate development”: “In the years of 1954–1956, a constellation of policies created a great divide between the state and the collective sectors, between city and the countryside, and between industry and agriculture. These multifaceted processes formalized sectoral divisions, gave local and political sanction to lifetime (and even intergenerational) positions, and permanently froze individuals and households in sectoral jobs and residential pigeonholes.”12 Unevenness remained and grew. Ajit Bhalla notes that there was a conflict between the twin strategies of “self-reliance” and “balanced regional development”: “The strategy of self-reliance and self-sufficiency seems to have reinforced regional inequalities and may in practice have neutralized the egalitarian effects of redistributive measures. The promotion of rural industry, within the framework of a local self-reliant strategy, seems to have widened regional inequalities.”13
In addition to preventing the social combustion of unfettered development, the regime also tried to bind the new working class materially to the state. Raymond Lau has noted that “the workers were tied to the enterprise’s exploitative and hierarchical relations by means of a form of lifelong personal (and family) dependence on its leaders who, inter alia, took care of them as a ‘parental authority’ by means of collectivist practices.” He argues that in the enterprise or “work unit,” “hierarchical relations were a modified form of the organization of socio-political life in the traditional village, and recogniz[ed] the predominant peasant origins of the CCP and the newly created working class.” Exploited though they obviously were, workers were therefore spared full exposure to the accompanying effects of industrialization and urban modernity.14
UNEVEN AND COMBINED DEVELOPMENT RESUMED
It was the break with Maoist economic and social policy initiated in 1978 that allowed the process of uneven and combined development to resume. Harvey has argued that the reforms (the “Four Modernizations”) initiated by Deng have to be seen as an early episode in the global turn to neoliberalism.15 The inclusion of China within this trend is apt, perhaps even more so than Harvey supposes. If we regard the Chinese system after 1949 as a form of bureaucratic state capitalism (as I do), then events after 1978 are best seen as shifts within an already dominant capitalist mode of production—more extreme than those in the West, of course, because of the almost total level of state ownership and control in China, but essentially of the same type. It is the social impact of neoliberalism, rather than the policies themselves, that distinguishes China from the rest of the world, even the rest of the developing world.
The outcome has by no means been entirely negative for the mass of the population. In 2000 over 1.2 billion people in the world were living on less than one dollar a day and 2.8 billion on less than two dollars a day. The fact that by 2002 the number of those living on a dollar a day had fallen from 30 percent to 23 percent is almost entirely due to economic growth in one country—China.16 Behind these social changes were the so-called third and fourth waves of industrialization. The first fell between the First World War and the Japanese invasion of 1937. The second began with the First Five-Year Plan (1953–57) and collapsed in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution (1965–68). The third resumed with the rural industrialization projects launched in 1978. But the fourth, from the mid-1980s, has been the most far-reaching and sustained: “Chinese industrialization in the last two decades of the century took place at a speed and on a scale unequalled anywhere in the world.” The economy grew by an annual average of 10 percent and per capita income doubled twice over.17 In 1981 only 53 percent of Chinese exports were manufactures; by 2001, 90 percent were.18Only the prior experiences of Lowland Scotland (1760–1820) and Stalinist Russia (1928–41) come anywhere near to matching the speed and intensity of Chinese growth.
Internal unevenness has been exacerbated by post-1978 developments. “While China as a whole is in the middle range of human development, by global standards, some individual regions, such as Shanghai and Beijing, score well above that and would separately rank as high as 25th and 27th in the world; while poor and minority nationality regions such as Tibet and Qinghai belong in the lower range of human development and would rank 147th and 135th respectively.”19 “First World and Third World coexist in China,” write Shaoguang Wang and Angang Hu; but First and Third World also coexist within regions, not only between them.20 This is important for two reasons.
First, taken as a whole, it is possible to underestimate the extent of Chinese economic achievement. Andrew Glyn notes that “China is still as far behind the USA as Korea and Taiwan were before their three decades of rapid catch-up beginning in the late 1960s; its percentage GDP is still well below that from which Japan started its spectacular growth climb in the mid-1950s.”21 But the regional figures give quite a different picture. The most extreme example, Shanghai, has seen the most spectacular growth, with a GDP twice that of the capital Beijing and 5 percent of the national total. It had an average annual growth of 9.5 percent over 1999–2000 and attracted 10 percent of foreign investment in China. The population is over 20 million (although this is still only 1.6 percent of the national total), but of these, only 13.5 million people are permanent residents. The remainder are temporary workers and their families who join them for at least part of the year. Many earn only a fifth of the average income of employed permanent residents ($4,300), although even that is far greater than they would have been able to earn in the countryside where 90 cents a day is common.22 In the four years between 1994 and 1997 total office space rose from 500,000 square meters to 3.5 million square meters: “Shanghai is achieving in one decade what it took Hong Kong the best part of four decades to do.”23 As an economic actor Shanghai would outperform many Western national capitals.
Second, the mass of the Chinese are becoming aware of the inequalities associated with unevenness in a way that they were not previously:
Before 1978, China was a closed society. Not only did the country close its doors to the outside world, but localities within the country were also largely cut off from one another. . . . At that time, peasants had little chance of leaving their villages. To them, regional disparities were nothing but differences between production brigades or among different communes. Nor did urban dwellers have much chance of travelling. They knew that there were regional gaps, but without travel and access to television, it was hard for them to imagine how serious regional inequality really was. Quite possibly, perceived regional gaps were smaller than objective ones during the pre-reform years. . . . No longer comparing their localities to neighboring communities, people may now use what they know of the most advanced regions in the country as the benchmark for comparison.24
The difference in attitude has been caused by access to media and, more importantly, the freedom—in practice, if not fully in law—to migrate. By the early 1980s there were around two million rural migrants, but by the mid-1990s the figure had risen to around eighty million.25 In the countryside this has led to enormous pressures as the young in particular are drawn to the cities. In part they are pulled by the possibilities of different experiences, new skills, and higher incomes. In part they are pushed by the rural economic crisis generated by market Stalinism, in which peasants have high and rising production costs but low and falling sales prices; many of the young are consequently surplus in the sense that their families can no longer afford to keep them. The resulting fault line runs throughout Chinese society. Within the family itself it threatens the collectivist approach to intergenerational division of income that both preceded and continued under the Stalinist regime. Hitherto children had contributed to the familial income according to their abilities, and this had been redistributed throughout the family. But with the flight to the cities many children no longer feel the need to assist their siblings who earn less or are simply unable to afford to contribute to the family income because of their own requirements. The regime remains unwilling to encourage permanent urban settlement, although it is prepared tacitly to encourage temporary migration as long as conditions are made so bad that workers are unwilling to consider relocating. This seems to correspond to the wishes of many—particularly the less well educated—of the migrants themselves, the majority of whom retain some links with the countryside and wish to return there someday. On the other hand, the employers of migrant labor are unwilling to train workers only to see them leave and have to be replaced by a new wave of unskilled ones.26
It was estimated that in the mid-1990s there were over seventy million farmers “floating” in cities throughout China. These urban nomads are not permitted household registration and are consequently excluded from access to free education, subsidized housing, and pensions. “Rural to urban migrants could only find housing in the flourishing private-rental sector and it is not unusual to find several rural migrants crowded into one room in the suburban areas of large cities.”27 The floating population does not simply apply pressure on the urban infrastructure: “Further spatially detached from their home villages, rural migrants could no longer be directly reached by the rural authority in their places of origin. But at the same time, migrants, considered outsiders by local officials, were not effectively brought within the local control system.”28 And the comparisons they draw with their rural situation are exactly the ones that the regime struggled to deny them the opportunity to make: “The peasants and semi-peasants who winter in the city feel comparatively deprived by the tightly locked city walls. Peasants coming in want to enjoy this fat meat with city people. When in the countryside, they feel that everyone is poor, so [their poverty] can be tolerated. But differences in wealth become obvious after entering the city.”29
Unevenness therefore possesses its own potential for social unrest. But it is especially with reference to the experience of the cities that we see the particular form taken by combination. In 1949 there were only six cities in China with more than a million inhabitants; by 2000 there were twenty-three. Yet the greatest growth in both population size and levels of urbanization has come in the last twenty years: between 1949 and 1978 the number of cities of all sizes only grew from 135 to 192, but by 2000 there were nearly 400.30 There were no cities in the southwestern province of Yunnan in 1949, and the urban population (meaning those who lived in towns not big enough to be called cities) was only 5 percent of the provincial total. By 1989 there were four cities and an urban population of 12 percent, and by 1999 there were fifteen cities and an urban population of 45 percent. In 1994 the urban section of Xuanwei County comprised no more than 7 square kilometers; by 1999 it had nearly doubled to 13 square kilometers. While “the growing urban population and expanded business activities put increasingly high demands on public sanitation and energy supply,” it also led to an increased demand for educational provision, which was extracted from the peasants of the rural hinterland through the levy of an “educational surcharge” to pay for what, in China as in Britain, is referred to as “modernization.”31
Behind the statistics it is the experience of the city, particularly for the recent rural migrant, that offers new forms of consciousness and perception. Rowe has written of the “strange new world” effect experienced by migrants to the cities:
Many if not most have practically no prior urban experience, given the persistence and strong enforcement of China’s household registration system. Although the effect of this sudden change of living environment is also difficult to gauge fully, it will surely be palpable in the future majority’s perception and appreciation of life and the manner in which they lay claim to issues on the national agenda. It was often said of Shanghai during its heyday in the 1930s that it was like no other place in China. The effect of this “otherworldliness” now seems likely to spread both widely and rapidly and, when it becomes more fully familiar, the impact on Chinese society will likely be considerable.32
But the city is not only a postmodern wonderland of sensory overload: for the majority of urban Chinese, it is a site of intense social struggle. Neoliberalism has brought with it the inevitable increase in sectional unemployment. The official rate in 1997 was 6 million, or 3.2 percent of the urban labor force, although most sources regard this as a massive underestimate. In 1998–2000, 21 million workers in State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) were sacked, although the regime claims that 13 million of these have since found other jobs. If we add to this number perhaps 15 million workers not formally sacked but “stood down” or suspended from their jobs, and the “floating” population, the true level of unemployment may be nearer 20 percent, or 150 million people.33
Even those who are still in work are faced with attacks on their living conditions while they see vast and ostentatious displays of wealth by the “little princes and princesses,” the offspring of the bureaucracy and—increasingly—the bourgeoisie proper:
Today one senses the presence of the new rich throughout the coastal region and larger cities. One not only notes the prevalence of luxury vehicles, four and five star hotels, golf courses, exclusive gyms and clubs, but in many places (such as Shanghai) there are even posh housing complexes that rival the residences of top government officials, surrounded by forbidding gates and separated from ordinary society. . . . [T]his middle class makes up less than 1 percent of the population, but controls at least half of the gross national income.34
The balance of employment is shifting from the state sector to that of new private capital. Between 1995 and 1997 the number of workers in the industrial state sectors fell by four million and those in the private sector rose by ten million. The latter figuretherefore does not simply represent transfers from one sector to the other but involves the proletarianization of new generations of workers. As Henderson writes: “The benefits of the iron rice bowl were psychological as much as they were real.” For a hundred million state workers, “the smashing of the iron rice bowl is a deeply traumatic message, as well as representing a threat to their financial well-being”: “Difficult working conditions which were taken for granted in the past when Chinese society was in fact relatively egalitarian (in its misery if nothing else!), are now less tolerated in a time when the official mantra is ‘to get rich is glorious.’ The perception of widening income gaps reminds the ‘proletariat’ first and foremost of their stifling working conditions on the factory floor, where advantage is gained by whom one knows rather than what.”35
The differences between workers in the SOEs and those set up by foreign private capitalists are extreme. And it is not only in terms of wages that the divisions are enormous. Workers in the Reebok factories are expected to work an average of eighty-six hours a month in compulsory overtime. They receive no compensation for dismissal and are “represented” by business unions whose officials are appointed by the factory management. The workforces are almost exclusively female because of the assumption that they will be more docile than ones that are male.36
TOWARD THE NEXT CHINESE REVOLUTION?
The resistance to restructuring has been spectacular. Between 1992 and 1997 an estimated 1.26 million workers were involved in disputes, with this figure rising to 3.6 million in 1998 alone.37 In one center for foreign capitalists, Xiamen, incomplete strike figures show that there were 50 disputes in 1991, rising to 450 by 1993.38 Yet it was only in the spring of 2002 that what Leung calls the “third wave” of post-Mao labor movements began to emerge. The first coalesced around the Workers’ Autonomous Federations that were set up during the democracy movement of 1989, initially to support the students, who were also allowed to join. After Tiananmen Square and the repression that followed (in which working-class spokesmen for the movement were treated with particular brutality), the second movement took shape between 1990 and 1994 as a series of mostly short-lived underground organizations (such as the League for the Protection of Working People). These were often led by intellectuals and not necessarily involved with the actual, if inchoate, struggles taking place against liberalization. Nevertheless, they were focused on particular issues of concern to the working class, rather than democracy in general. The third wave emerged in the northwest of China in the provinces of Daqing and Liaoyang, where between eighty and one hundred thousand workers, mainly from the oil and metal industries, were involved in strikes, occupations, demonstrations, and road blockades against retrenchment, the absence of social security, and official corruption. The name of one organization, the Daqing Provisional Union of Retrenched Workers, gives some idea of the defensive nature of the movement. Nevertheless, the demands made by workers show an opposition to the bureaucracy that is based on its failure to be sufficiently socialist and supportive of the working class. As Trini Leung writes:
The 2002 spring protests are still a far cry from mass strikes waged by hundreds of thousands of dock and railway workers in Canton, Shanghai and Beijing in the 1920s and 1930s, which delivered the first Chinese labor movement. But these early labor struggles of the 20th century were primarily nationalist struggles. The 21st century labor movement takes shape as a defensive and class-specific struggle. In their struggle for the rights to defend their work and livelihoods in the face of privatization and globalization, the Chinese labor movement has at last found common ground with the democratic labor movements around the world.39
It would not be the first time in history that an attack on established terms and conditions of skilled workers has detonated a more general struggle, spreading out beyond the groups initially involved. The most immediate comparison here is the generalized assault on skilled metalworkers across Europe during the First World War.40 What will be crucial in China is the link between threatened or displaced workers from the SOEs and the new workers in foreign and privately owned enterprises—and beyond these, with the vast incendiary countryside.41 As one reformist intellectual, Li Minqi, said in a recent roundtable discussion:
The situation will be different [from 1989] in years to come. For the first time in Chinese history the modern working class will soon make up a majority of the population. This is going to make a decisive contribution to the victory of democracy in the future. . . . In the West, the historic strength of the labor movement forced the bourgeoisie to make major concessions to the working class, including political democracy and the welfare state. . . . But in the case of China, where capitalism depends so much on the abundance of cheap labor, is there any comparable room for the Chinese bourgeoisie to make similar concessions—to grant political democracy or social welfare—and at the same time maintain competitiveness in the world market and a rapid rate of accumulation? It seems rather questionable.42
As Li suggests, the so-called Fourth Generation leaders (i.e., since the Revolution of 1949) have no intention of moving toward bourgeois democracy. Andrew Nathan and Bruce Gilley report from their study of internal party documents: “Some of them want to soften authoritarian rule, make it more responsive, and use the media and some political institutions, such as elections and courts, as tools to discipline the lower bureaucracy. But they think that their society is too complex and turbulent to be governable by a truly open, competitive form of democracy.”43
Leaving aside appearances, the current discontent has been met by ferocious levels of repression. An internal investigation report on Lu Gan, the politburo member responsible for law and order, notes that more than sixty thousand people were either executed or killed by the police between 1998 and 2001—an unsurprising result given that China currently has sixty-eight capital offenses on the statute book including “bribery, pimping, selling harmful foodstuffs and stealing gasoline.” If these figures are correct—they are far higher than the Amnesty International estimates—then in 2002 the Chinese state was responsible for approximately 97 percent of all executions committed in the world.44 This is slaughter on a truly eighteenth-century British scale, what Peter Linebaugh once called “capital punishment as the punishment of capital.”45 Western governments and media offered token protestations—epitomized by Rupert Murdoch in this respect as in many others—but they have no real objection to the repression: “They need the authoritarian rule of the Party to safeguard their billions of dollars of investments, and for this reason are prepared to shut their eyes to any number of crimes it may commit against its own people, first delinking human-rights violations from trade and now keeping silent about the numerous bans on critical works and the suppression of the Fa Lun Gong.”46 In fact the CCP today plays a similar role to that previously played by the Russian tsar or Chinese emperor as the bearer of pure parental authority, no matter what the crimes and corruptions of its representatives in the factory: “Despite widespread corruption, among both SOE leaders and government officials, and notwithstanding the victimization of workers in the state’s drive towards reforms, one should not underestimate the extent to which the populace in general, and workers in particular, remain attached to the CCP in the absence of an alternative.”47 Feng has argued that there are parallels here with the moral economy displayed by eighteenth-century British crowds in protecting traditions or established practices and norms in the face of encroaching market relations.48
Here we can see aspects of the downside of uneven and combined development, the “debasing of achievements” of which Trotsky spoke in The History of the Russian Revolution.49 In particular, the resumption of the process has left social movements in China at an ideological level below that of the 1920s. Given the way in which the exploitation of the Chinese workers and peasants has been carried out under the banner of Marxism, it is unsurprising that historical materialism has not instantly become the theoretical guide to forces seeking to challenge the regime. Instead many have turned to religion. “The desire for a better life has also seen a religious revival in the country, and for most Chinese the desire for property and material things is complemented by an appeal to the supernatural for aid in that quest.”50 For a large minority this led to support for the Falun Gong, certainly the best known of Chinese religious movements, but it is not alone.
Balong is a hamlet of ninety households in the village of Landu, in the (to Western ears) evocatively named county of Shangri-La. The population was originally Muslim, but increasing religious repression after 1949, climaxing during the Cultural Revolution, led to a situation where virtually no one even recalled what their belief system had involved, except for the prohibition on eating pork. However, during the period of market reforms the hamlet experienced a resurgence of Islamic belief: “Balong’s story is not atypical in contemporary China. Across the country there are an increasing number of examples of rural communities that are inventing a heritage, be it through religion or lineage, to promote group identity, rebuild solidarity and safeguard the interests of the community.”51 Or take Sipsongpanna in the southwestern border region of Yunnan, where “hills have been levelled to make way for new roads, power lines have replaced the canopy of the rain forest, and new migrants from the coast are building cities in place of villages.” The Buddhist religion practiced by the Tai population has been repressed since 1953, but has recently experienced a revival as monks operating across the national borders of Thailand, Laos, Burma, and China have attempted to introduce these religious beliefs to a new audience, “though today they carry it not on palm leaves but on floppy disks, videos and CDs.” As Deborah Davis says: “Thus we should attend not just to the video itself but to the person who carries the video, who puts it in the machine and presses ‘play,’ who explains the images that appear in terms a village teenager can understand.”52 Religion represents a consolation or defense against the intrusion of capitalist modernity, but religion is also communicated and celebrated using the techniques and technologies that capitalist modernity has provided. State repression of religion may in time drive its adherents to more secular ideologies of resistance, a possibility that is made more likely by the spectacular level of resistance to neoliberal restructuring that is already taking place.
Stanley Rosen has argued that “as the economy continues to grow at a reasonably high rate, the state and society is not likely to produce an unmanageable crisis for the regime in the near term.”53 But this assumes that a crisis will only emerge as the result of economic downturn. However, this survey suggests that it is the very success of the Chinese economy that has produced the internal strains and tensions that threaten to explode. From Tocqueville on, serious students and practitioners of revolution, of whom Trotsky himself was perhaps the most eminent, have argued that revolutions are more likely to occur when social classes see the possibility of improving conditions, rather than when they are in the depths of economic depression or the grip of political repression.54 In China, conditions for many have improved, and repression is not consistently applied. At Nanchong in Sichuan province, twenty thousand workers besieged the town hall for thirty hours demanding unpaid wages, until officials were forced to organize loans and partial back payments.55 As one commentator has noted:
Workers may soon begin to demand more of the benefits that market globalization is bringing to some Chinese. Like workers elsewhere, Chinese laborers may not be satisfied with the line that their wages and benefits must be kept low so as to maintain Chinese “competitiveness” in a global market. In Shekou we saw a rise in worker solidarity as factory laborers described workmates as their closest friends, even across regional and linguistic lines. If these feelings become more widespread, they may give workers the social cohesion to challenge the state and system more forthrightly.56
The competitive struggle within the world system led the Chinese ruling class to unleash social forces that for thirty years they had, more or less successfully, prevented from forming. To say, therefore, that China is entering a revolutionary situation, is not to utter a truism about the general objective readiness of the world for socialist revolution, it is to say that quite specific conditions are pushing China in that direction. Although China develops more dramatically than any of the other countries, like India, with which it is usually bracketed, it is unlikely in any remotely foreseeable scenario to “catch up” with the West overall. The tensions that uneven and combined development has brought therefore remain, awaiting release. It may be that China does indeed show us the future, but not quite in the way that those who look to it to save the world capitalist system imagine.