Mao and the Economic Stalinization of China, 1948–1953 (review)

In September 1953 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chairman, Mao Zedong, announced his "general line for socialist transition" that set the People's Republic of China (PRC) on a disastrous course of revolutionary economic and social transformation, ending only with Mao's death 23 years later. This course was a radical departure from the relatively moderate and socially inclusive policies of the New Democracy, the approach espoused by the CCP to rally non-Communist forces to its banner during the Chinese civil war (1946–1949) and the first four years of the PRC. Hua-yu Li's tightly focused monograph, a revised Columbia University political science dissertation, addresses the question of why and how this fateful shift in CCP policy occurred. Her answer (a three-character answer in Chinese) is Mao Zedong.

Li's thesis is that Mao reproduced in China the Soviet development trajectory of the late 1920s and 1930s charted by the Soviet dictator Josif Stalin, who defined the economic system of socialism as consisting of the forced collectivization of agriculture, state-run industrialization focused on heavy industry, and the total elimination of capitalism and the capitalist class. This course was spelled out in perhaps the most notorious book ever to appear in the USSR, the Short Course of the History of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), published in Moscow in 1937 and eventually translated into 67 languages. A Chinese edition of the book, which Stalinists revered as a holy text, was rushed into print in 1938 and served as a major reference work for Mao Zedong.

Over the past fifteen years, documentary evidence from Soviet archives and a variety of Chinese sources has destroyed the long prevalent notion—a notion consistent with the CCP's own version of its history—that Mao Zedong was an independent-minded and innovative Marxist thinker who creatively adapted the Stalinist version of Marxism-Leninism to Chinese circumstances. Li correctly insists that Mao was a devoted Stalinist whose ascendance to the leadership of the CCP was promoted and endorsed by the Soviet-dominated Communist International and who regularly sought and usually followed Stalin's political advice during the civil war and the early years of the PRC until Stalin's death in March 1953. In instituting the general line for socialist transition in China, Mao was merely following a trail pioneered by the great Stalin, a man whom he simultaneously worshipped and resented.

This political-psychological perspective is at the heart of a paradox about which Li can only speculate because the available evidence permits no definitive answer. Stalin himself, in his advice to Mao and other CCP leaders after 1949, consistently urged a moderate course of development. He specifically warned the Chinese against replicating the radical policies of the first Soviet Five Year plan, particularly his unrelenting use of ruthless violence against the so-called kulaks (wealthier peasants), a policy from which Soviet agriculture never fully recovered. Yet Mao ignored the advice of the living Stalin and instead followed the example of the radical Stalin as distilled in the pages of the Short Course. Li argues that Mao, who was ambivalent toward Stalin and possessed at best a rudimentary understanding of Marxism-Leninism, chose the version of Stalin that accorded with his own desire to accelerate China's transition to socialism. Mao waited until after Stalin died to embark on the economic Stalinization of China—a course that Stalin himself had thought premature and ill-considered.

Although Li is given to understatement and cautious judgment, the Mao that emerges from the pages of her book is a thoroughly unattractive political operator. The moderate program of the New Democracy that he himself devised was simply an attractive form of bait to lure the unwary into the Venus flytrap embrace of the CCP from which no escape was possible. Mao kept his own counsel and often concealed his innermost thoughts and plans even from his closest political confederates. He crammed his...