Page 2 of
4 The
historical significance of
Mao By Henry C K Liu
Russia and China, both great nations with
glorious histories that had fallen
socio-economically and technologically backward,
were not touched by Industrial Revolution to bring
forth a class of industrial workers. The oppressed
classes in these two agrarian societies were rural
peasants who constituted over 80% of the
population.
However, in semi-colonial
China, a powerful domestic comprador class had
emerged to serve advancing Western imperialism.
Compradors in China were Chinese managers or
senior local
employees who worked for large
transnational foreign commercial enterprises
active in China. These compradors, becoming rich
and powerful serving foreign economic and
political interests against China's national
interest, had close symbiotic connections with
Western imperialism and its exploitative foreign
capital and businesses.
This comprador
class flourished in Western colonies in China such
as Hong Kong and the five Open Port Cities
established by unfair terms of the unequaled
treaties forced on China by Western imperialist
powers after China repeatedly lost the Opium Wars
of 1839-42.
Under the current market
economy in present-day China, a large new
comprador class has re-emerged to again serve
foreign corporate interest backed by US global
geopolitical strategy, to defuse revolutionary
pressure while transferring wealth from China to
the West in the name of free trade denominated in
paper fiat dollars.
Even Chinese
state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have become leading
compradors for foreign commercial and financial
enterprises in China's increasingly open markets
since the introduction of the "reform and open"
policy in 1978. The full implementation of World
Trade Organization rules will strengthen the
comprador role of Chinese state-owned banking
institutions.
These SOEs have been tutored
by experienced Chinese compradors from Hong Kong,
which became a British colony in 1841 and did not
return to Chinese sovereignty until 1997. Even
after Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty,
its compradors have continue to provide traitorous
advice to Chinese leaders who did not know better,
having been involuntarily isolated from the
economic process of the modern world through
decades of US anti-communist total embargo. These
Hong Kong compradors have profited obscenely from
bridging the gap in the different levels of
development between China and the advanced Western
nations while locking China by policy into another
century of semi-colonial fate.
The two
most grievous errors made by China's "reform and
open" policy of 1978 by following poisonous advice
of Hong Kong compradors are: 1. China by
policy tries to modernize and develop its economy
through the exploitation of low-wage labor for
export, leading Chinese society to structural
faults of low income and wealth disparity as well
as uneven locational development. China has now
developed not regions where China needs most, but
regions Western markets find most convenient from
which to exploit the Chinese economy.
2.
China by policy voluntarily opens its market to
domination by Western capital, and returns its
national economy to semi-colonial status while
being idiotically pleased with comprador earnings
from commission while massive amounts of wealth
leak into foreign pockets.
This kind of
bad advice naturally came from Hong Kong
compradors to reflect the limit of their own slave
mentality. It was like asking a house slave for
advice on liberation by armed uprising. The answer
is always: "Don't even think about it."
These are the structural reasons why the
Chinese economy built on the "reform and open"
policy is blighted by inequality and unevenness,
not to mention corruption. While "reform and open"
can be good policy for all nations in the modern
interconnected world, the strategy and
implementation of China's "reform and open" policy
needs to be reconsidered to correct its foundation
of pernicious new compradorism and to prevent this
unsavory practice from siphoning more wealth into
foreign pockets in a zero sum game.
Mao
Zedong wrote the following words in Analysis of
the Classes in Chinese Society (March 1926) to
combat two deviations then found in the Party:
The exponents of the first
deviation, represented by Chen Duxiu, were
concerned only with cooperation with the ruling
Kuomintang and neglecting the peasants. This was
Right opportunism.
The exponents of the
second deviation, represented by Zhang Guotao,
were concerned only with China's [non-existent]
industrial labor movement, also neglecting the
peasants. This was Left opportunism.
Both were aware that they were lacking
in mass support, but neither knew where to seek
reinforcements or to generate popular support on
a mass scale.
Mao pointed out that the
Chinese peasantry was the most oppressed and
numerically the largest force of the Chinese
proletariat, defined in Chinese political
nomenclature as a property-less class, not just
factory workers, and placed class struggle in the
Chinese revolution as one between the peasant
proletariat class and the comprador class as local
agents of Western imperialism.
Moreover,
Mao saw that the national bourgeoisie is actually
a vacillating class, being antagonistic to
stronger foreign competition and being quick
studies of imperialist modes of operation to in
turn oppress a small but growing new working class
of factory workers in the home market. Mao
predicted that the national bourgeoisie as a class
would disintegrate in an upsurge of popular
revolution, with its right-wing going over to the
side of Western imperialism. This prediction had
been borne out a year later by political events
surrounding Jiang Jieshi's counter-revolutionary
coup d'etat in 1927.
Today, the national
bourgeoisie in China constitutes what General
Secretary Xi Jinping calls "special interest
groups", which present themselves as formidable
organized obstacles to true reform. Many of them
are modern-day compradors.
Mao asks: "Who
are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a
question of the first importance for the
revolution."
It is a question that needs
to be asked today by all Chinese patriots.
"The landlord class and the comprador
class are our enemies," Mao answers.
In
China today, a new landlord class is emerging as
real estate developers and speculator, and a new
comprador class is firmly in charge of the Chinese
economy to serve the benefit of foreign
institutions of neo-liberalism, the new face of
Western imperialism around the world.
In
the first general study meeting of the Politburo
of the 18th Party Congress late last year, General
Secretary Xi talked emphatically about "firmly
upholding the socialist road, firmly upholding the
people's democratic dictatorship, firmly upholding
leadership of the Communist Party of China and
firmly upholding Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong
Thought".
Echoing Deng Xiaoping's famous
1992 Southern Tour 20 years ago to reaffirm the
policy of "reform and open", Xi as new leader
conducted his own new Southern Tour to Shenzhen
shortly after assuming office as Party general
secretary to reaffirm the continuation of China's
policy of "reform and open".
Large in Xi's
reform policy are new emphases on anti-corruption
and an attack on special interest groups,
adjustment in income disparity and aggressive
improvement in the living standard of the people
by promoting common prosperity. The compromise of
"letting some people get rich first", in which the
comprador and national bourgeoisie classes have
conveniently dropped the word "first", in practice
appears to be ending under the new leadership of
Xi.
Mao said that in economically backward
and semi-colonial China, the landlord class and
the comprador class were appendages of the
international bourgeoisie, depending on
imperialism for survival, prosperity and growth.
These classes represented the most backward and
most reactionary relations of production in China
and hindered the development of her own productive
forces. Their existence is utterly incompatible
with the aims of the Chinese revolution, Mao
emphasized. He went on to crush them as enemy
classes early after gaining state power.
The big landlord and big comprador classes
in particular always sided with imperialism and
constituted an extreme counterrevolutionary group.
They made counter-revolutionary careers for
themselves by opposing the Communist Party and
received subsidies from various groups of
reactionaries in power, from imperialists and the
right-wing of the Kuomintang, Mao added.
Under the "reform and open" policies since
1978, a new landlord class has re-emerged made up
of real estate developers and speculators, and a
new comprador class has re-emerged in the
commercial and financial markets in China. The
nation's best young talent, after having been
educated in top Chinese universities and foreign
graduate schools, have mostly been co-opted by
Western companies to act as compradors in all
sectors in the Chinese economy: industry,
commerce, technology, journalism, and even
national security analysis.
China's
"reform and open" policy has legalized foreign
infiltration into every aspect of its economy and
society, allowing Hong Kong, now officially under
Chinese sovereignty, to continue to be an
anti-China foreign base and a hot-bed safe haven
for corruption on the mainland.
The
greatness of Mao Zedong lies in his revolutionary
insight that socialist revolution in China must
come from liberating the peasants and that the
purpose of revolution is to rid China of Western
imperialistic oppression to revive China's
historical greatness as an prosperous, independent
great power. Mao understood clearly that such
purpose can only be fulfilled with the support of
all Chinese people around the world who have not
sold out mentally or financially to foreign
enemies.
The task of the Chinese Communist
Party is to galvanize the power of the masses for
a victorious revolution, to unite all who can be
united and to crush traitorous special interest
groups, the new compradors. A harmonious society
has no room for comprador traitors and other
enemies of the people. The revolution cannot be
won by catering to the democratic politics of
special interest groups acting as agents of a new
global imperialism.
Mao understood that
the path of reviving China to its historical
greatness as a nation lies in creating a
harmonious society of equality within China before
China can gain equality among nations of the
world. Harmony and inequality are not compatible
conditions in any society. Harmony cannot be
achieved by appeasing new compradors who are bad
elements that create disharmony and inequality by
helping foreign interest exploit the Chinese
people. A harmonious organism cannot tolerate a
growing cancer in its body.
Mao saw
Marxism as the most appropriate and effective
ideology to implement the national goal of
harmonious revival. Mao was the first Chinese
revolutionary to advocate an approach that later
came to be known as "socialism with Chinese
characteristics". To Mao, Marxist-Leninist
ideology must be adjusted to Chinese situations to
serve the revitalization of China's historical
greatness, not the other way around.
The
Chinese characteristics Mao had in mind are not
the same of Chinese characteristics of the "reform
and open" policy since 1978. Mao never entertained
the fantasy that letting enemies of the revolution
into the Party Central Committee was the path to
revolutionary victory. Victory by Surrenderism is
merely self-deception. The Party must purge such
self-deception from the highest level of its
leadership to continue to deserve the support of
the people.
Mao's post as a librarian
assistant in Beijing University in 1918 gave him
the opportunity to discovering first-hand newly
translated socialist writings in Chinese, further
expanding his understanding and commitment to the
revolutionary socialist cause. He read Chinese
translations of Thomas Kirkup's A History of
Socialism, Karl Kautsky's Karl Marx's
Okonomische Lehren (translated from German)
and most importantly, Marx and Engels' political
pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto.
Mao also read widely beyond Marxist works.
He read the translated works of Western classical
liberalism such as Adam Smith's The Wealth of
Nations which deals with the necessary role of
government to restrict monopolistic international
trade, ideas that influenced Alexander Hamilton's
protectionist, nationalist industrial policies,
modeled after Colbert's dirigism in France under
Louis XIV to resist British monopolistic dominance
over New World commerce in the United States
during its infancy. For the first 100 years in the
two centuries of US history, the young nation
resisted British and French domination to build
its own prosperity through protectionism and
nationalist industrial policies of support
national industries.
Mao also read
Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, which
identifies environmental influence as a material
condition of national socio-political culture. He
read John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, in
which Mill addresses the nature and limits of the
power that can be legitimately exercised by
society through government over the political
rights of individuals, and that individuals need
to be restrained by government from doing lasting
and serious harm to themselves and to the
community by the "no harm" principle. Because no
individual can exist in isolation, harm done to
oneself or one's own property or well-being also
harm others and the community as a socio-economic
organism. The destruction of even one's own
property deprives as well the community of its
communal interest in that very property.
Mill also holds the opinion that
dictatorship is an acceptable form of government
for those societies that are still developing, as
long as the dictator serves the best interests of
the people, because existing barriers to
spontaneous socio-economic progress can only be
overcome by strong and effective political
leadership. Mill argues against the danger of
"tyranny of the majority" in democratic systems.
Mao's view on political rights runs parallel to
Mill's view on the necessity of strong leadership
for a good cause. All revolutionary governments
are dictatorial governments by definition. They
turn democratic only after the revolution has been
solidly won. On economic development, democracy is
a product, not a cause of prosperity, US
neoliberal propaganda notwithstanding.
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