Teaching Comparative

Details of Chinese Political History

I read the most recent entry on Jottings From a Granite Studio, and was reminded of a lecture I prepared many years ago.

JGS is the blog of a graduate student in history who is researching Qing China, and the entry for 16 October was about the death of Wang Guangmei [at left, below], widow of former Chinese president Liu Shaoqi. Now, for those of us teaching comparative politics, not recognizing either name is probably forgivable. But I taught Chinese history before I taught comparative politics, so I recognized Liu Shaoqi.


Liu was a big name in a lecture I wrote (and revised for several years) thirty years ago. I was trying to explain to my very American students how there could be political competition in a one-party state like the PRC. The Qing historian who writes JGS identified Liu [shown at the left, below, with Mao in 1963] as "the leader of the 'pragmatists' as well as the head of the government..." That's exactly how I identified him and contrasted him to the Maoist "idealists" who advocated permanent revolution.


JGS notes that "After the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and the other grown-ups in the CCP suggested sweetly that Mao 'retire' and work on his memoirs. The new leadership worked to strengthen China's economy and proposed a series of policies not unlike those Deng Xiaoping would put forward 25 years later..."

But then, "In 1966, Mao replaced Liu with Lin Biao as Mao's heir apparent... By the end of the year, the Cultural Revolution was in full flower and chaos threatened to overwhelm China's major cities. Accused of being a traitor and a scab, Liu was placed under house arrest..."

"What I've always found fascinating about Liu is the big counter-historical 'what if?' In 1962, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping began experimenting with many of the same policies that would characterize the first phase of the Reform Era (1978-1984). Unfortunately, the first time through, those policies would not survive the challenge by Mao, and others within the party, who felt that what Deng and Liu really wanted to do was to take China down the 'Capitalist Counter-Revolutionary Road.'"

The JGS essay is a good primer on those politics of the first 30 years of the PRC and you might want to take some notes that will help you explain something about the left-wing critics of today's economic restructuring in China.

[For more on the left wing critics of current policies, see JGS's Wang Hui and China's New New Left, posted on October 13. It refers to International Herald Tribune and New York Times articles about Wang Hui.

[ "...Wang Hui, the Tsinghua University professor and editor of Dushu... who is perhaps the most prominent of China's New (New?) Leftist intellectuals. Wang's basic argument is that while the reform era has brought some good things to China this does not mean that socialism has lost its viability or that the Left in China has abdicated its responsibility to protect people from the ravages of laissez-faire capitalism and globalization..."]

posted by Ken Wedding @ 9:53 AM