by Wendy Liu
For Those Whose Concept of China Has Frozen in the 1970s and for Anyone
Who Would Like to Know About Today's China.
3. China's Redness Kept Shedding...
China, nevertheless, kept shedding its redness throughout the 1980s. The beginning of the decade was marked by two historic events initiated at the Twelfth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in September of 1982.
One, China was going to reach an ambitious economic target: quadrupling its 1980 GNP (Gross National Product) by the year 2000 (It was met several years early), as part of a three-stage development of the country's modernization: the first stage was to double the size of 1980's GNP and solving the food and clothing shortage, the second stage was to redouble the GNP by the year 2000 and to enable people to lead a relatively comfortable life, and the third stage was to reach the standard of middle-level developed countries in terms of per capita GNP in the mid-21st century, and basically realize modernization.
Two, Deng Xiaoping, in his speech to the CPC Congress put forth a new and unorthodox concept for the country: "socialism with Chinese characteristics." He pointed out that to build China's modernization, China's reality must be the starting point and that China must walk its own road. Therefore, he declared famously, China must build socialism with Chinese characteristics.
The term "socialism with Chinese characteristics," together with Deng's earlier idea of socialist market economy were more than a little paradoxical, though. They were indirect, tactful and face-saving ways for the Chinese government to promote a more market-oriented economy under
the current Chinese political system. The country needed badly to carry out the new economic drive, while the economic drive needed even more badly a flexible political atmosphere. With these seemingly simple word games, that in fact represented significant conceptual changes, the CPC made it possible that China could pursue its economic reforms and modernization programs without changing, yet, its political system and that China's rigid command economy could now be replaced by a new one, albeit mixed or confused: central planning plus market forces.
To better understand the significance of the mix of central planning and market forces, one has to go back 30 years. After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the country underwent a socialist transformation of the economy. By the time it was completed in 1956, 99
percent of China's private industry and 85 percent of its private commerce had been switched to public ownership, cooperative ownership and public-private joint ownership. The private economy was not completely wiped out, but remained tiny, restricted to only individual operations of small repair service, food service or manual industry. Considered "the capitalist tail" during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, this tiny private sector was cut even further between the 60s and 70s. After that, China's private sector was close to nonexistent until the late 1970s.
(To be
continued...)
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