This is the volume in which Soviet-bloc criticism of China had to stop being an argument and become a measurement. The four other China titles in this series are polemics, memoirs or philosophical indictments; Present-Day China: Socio-Economic Problems is a working conference of economists, demographers and agrarian sociologists, and it can be judged by the standard such people accept — whether the numbers are honestly got and what is done with them. On that standard it is a much better book than its neighbours on the shelf, and it fails at exactly one place, which happens to be the largest event it describes.
Begin with what it is. Thirteen papers, from seven countries: five Soviet contributors (M. I. Sladkovsky, E. A. Konovalov, G. V. Astafyev, G. D. Sukharchuk, V. I. Akimov, L. A. Volkova), two from the German Democratic Republic, and one each from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland and Mongolia. Every author's country is printed after their name, which tells you the multilateral character of the enterprise was the point. This is not a Moscow book with foreign decoration; it is the collective product of the China institutes of the Warsaw Pact, and the same roster of ruling parties that the companion volume Maoism Through the Eyes of Communists assembled in 1970 is here assembled again — and again with Romania, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam and Korea absent. But there the resemblance ends, because these people are not journalists. Sladkovsky, who opens the book with a fifty-page survey, is the senior figure here, and the volume's apparatus shows what stood behind him: sustained reading of the Chinese press, wage tables from named enterprises, and contributors who cite Chinese-language sources directly rather than at second hand. The Hungarian contributor G. Gidaszi does not write a paper on China at all but a paper on Hungarian studies of China — a research-programme report, complete with an admission that the whole field is "complicated by many factors, like the lack of any reliable statistical data". That is a scholarly volume's opening move.
The date on the spine is 1975. The date of the text is 1972. The latest evidence anywhere in eighty-two thousand words is a set of "figures carried by the Chinese press in early 1972"; the year 1972 occurs once, 1973 and 1974 not at all. Two chapters announce their vintage in their titles — J. Herbert's "The Chinese Working Class: Its Role and Condition in 1964 and 1965," J. Rowinski's "On the Question of China's Internal Development in the 1970s," the latter a forecast that had already been overtaken by Nixon in Peking before Galina Sdobnikova's translation reached the printers. Read it as a book of 1972 with a 1975 jacket, which also means reading it as a book written before the Tenth Congress of the CPC, before Lin Biao's death was public knowledge in the form the authors would have wanted, and before the reopening of China to Western economists.
The evidentiary problem these authors faced was real and is worth stating plainly, because everything else follows from it. The People's Republic published a full statistical apparatus through the First Five-Year Plan and then, from about 1960, essentially stopped. There was a census in 1964, but its results were not released for eighteen years. So an economist writing in 1972 about the Chinese economy had three things and no more: the official series up to 1959, the Chinese press, and arithmetic. This volume uses all three, and it is candid about the third. Konovalov, the demographer, writes "According to my estimates" and "the author's estimate" where he means it; the population chapter is openly a reconstruction. The press base is thin but real — Jenmin jihpao is cited fifteen times, along with Hungchi, the trade-union daily Kungjen jihpao, provincial papers like Liaoning jihpao, and Chinese-language economic literature in Russian translation. What the book conspicuously does not do is what Western Kremlinology of the period did, which is to build its picture out of refugee interviews and Hong Kong rumour. There is exactly one mention of Hong Kong in the whole volume.
Given that, a good deal of the empirical work holds up, and some of it is better than anything then available in English. The strongest single chapter is T. Feferkon's "On the Two Spheres of the Chinese Economy," a short piece of institutional economics that models the PRC as two interlocking systems: a centrally controlled sphere of large industry, arms, railways, banking, foreign trade and grain procurement, and a locally controlled sphere of agriculture, small industry, handicrafts and retail employing "more than 85 per cent of the total population" — whose function is to finance the first. Feferkon then does the arithmetic, estimating the agricultural surplus product at about 15 per cent of gross agricultural output, direct taxes at 7 per cent, and identifying the price spread between industrial and agricultural goods as the real extraction mechanism. He adds that the local sphere must absorb "the urban dwellers who are forced to move into the countryside," which is the rustication of educated youth correctly identified as an employment policy rather than a moral crusade. This is a serious model, and it anticipates by some years the Western consensus that Chinese industrialisation was financed by a price scissors against the peasantry. It is also, and the authors never say so, a straight description of the mechanism that Evgeny Preobrazhensky theorised for the Soviet Union in The New Economics (1926) under the name of primitive socialist accumulation — an argument for which he was expelled with the Left Opposition and shot in 1937. The concept is used here; the man is not mentioned.
L. A. Volkova's chapter on the countryside is the second genuine contribution. It is precise where precision is available: mutual-aid groups covering more than half of peasant households by 1954, the abandonment of the gradual timetable in the second half of 1955, 92 per cent of households in producer co-operatives by mid-1956, and then the communisation of August–September 1958 — "In only one month, by late September 1958, most of the co-operatives were united in 26,600 communes, whose membership totalled 98 per cent of all peasant households." Her verdict is a strictly Marxist one and it is correct: "The state of the productive forces in the Chinese countryside on the eve of the massive co-operation campaign showed that there was no objective need to rush into co-operation." The retreat to the brigade and then the team is traced accurately, and she draws the right conclusion — "The changes in the 'people's commune' system were indisputable proof that their establishment was premature."
Herbert's chapter on the working class is the third, and here the volume prints hard data of a kind that simply was not otherwise obtainable: a table of average wages and bonus schemes at named enterprises — the Second Textile Mill in Shanghai, a Shanghai grinding-tool factory — for 1963–66, sourced to the Chinese press, and the finding that skilled workers' monthly wages averaged 60–65 yuan in 1965. Sladkovsky's own chapter puts the same fact in a sentence with the household budget attached: "A wage of 50–60 yuans a month for a family of five or six persons went to pay only for the rationed foodstuffs and consumer goods, namely, three metres of cotton print and a few pieces of knitted goods a year."
And the book is right, as this series has now said three times about three different Soviet volumes, on what happened to Chinese workers' organisations. Sladkovsky sets it out without ornament: the campaign against "'bourgeois economism', that is, against the requirement of material incentives in production, was dubbed a class struggle, with the Maoists seeking to stamp out the working people's 'economism'"; the trade unions were disbanded and by 1972 had not been restored; on the new revolutionary committees "the working class has virtually no organised representation of any kind." Every clause of that is true. The anti-economism campaign of 1967 did criminalise the wage demand; the All-China Federation of Trade Unions was destroyed and not rebuilt for a decade; the Shanghai stoppages were suppressed. Livio Maitan, writing for the Fourth International from the same Chinese press, reached the same conclusions from the opposite direction and stated the principle the Soviet authors leave implicit: "Rejection of material incentives as the supreme criterion is justified but it would be absolutely wrong to reject not only all kinds of material incentives but also all wage and income increases for the masses" ("Report on the 'Cultural Revolution' in China," Intercontinental Press, vol. 7 no. 26, 14 July 1969). Maitan also noted, from outside, the thing this book's authors could establish only by inference: that "for all practical purposes, it seems that no more general increases were given after 1959."
Now the test. This is the socio-economic volume — the one with the demographer, the agrarian sociologist, and a whole chapter titled "The Mao Group's Economic Policy During the 'Great Leap Forward' and Its Effects." The Great Leap famine of 1959–61 is the largest event in the economic history of the People's Republic and one of the largest famines in recorded history. Modern estimates of excess deaths are genuinely contested and the range is wide: Frank Dikötter has argued for at least 45 million, Yang Jisheng for around 36 million, and a revisionist literature puts the figure closer to 15 million. Nobody serious puts it below that. This book does not put a figure on it, which in 1972 would have been forgivable. What it does instead is not.
The word "famine" appears twice in eighty-two thousand words. Neither instance refers to the Great Leap. One is Konovalov's hypothetical list of the conditions under which people postpone marriage — "war, forced labour, chronic famine or lack of sources of livelihood." The other is a quotation of the Maoist slogan about preparing the people for "war and famine." The word "starvation" does not appear. Nobody in this book dies.
M. Kubeshova's chapter on the Great Leap is fourteen pages of intelligent economics and contains no deaths. It has the shape of the catastrophe exactly right — the depletion of food stocks in the winter of 1957/58, the exhaustion of the manpower reserve by the summer of 1958, the harvest that could not be brought in, the supply crisis of the winter of 1958/59, the fall in farm output in 1959 and in consumer goods in 1960, foreign trade "largely switched to food imports." It even has the mechanism: the communes "sought to channel into accumulation too great a share of their income, even at the expense of the farmers' individual consumption," and consumption in China was already "somewhere round the bare subsistence minimum required to restore labour power. This level cannot be lowered, however selfless the people, for that would inevitably impair their capacity for work." An economist who writes that sentence knows what is on the other side of it. The chapter's actual vocabulary for the other side is "supply crisis," "supply difficulties," "the consumption barrier," and, of peasants sent back from the towns, that they were "regarded mostly as so many more mouths to feed." A companion volume in this series, Maoism Unmasked, went as far as "the verge of famine"; this one, written by economists with a chapter to themselves, does not go that far.
The demography is worse, because Konovalov looks straight at the evidence and reads it the other way. He records that Chinese population growth "has dropped to one of the world's lowest," that "In some years the population increased by no more than 0.5 per cent, whereas in some provinces it has even dropped in absolute terms," and that growth in the second decade was 70 million against 130 million in the first. Those numbers are the demographic shadow of the famine. He attributes them entirely to fertility: the raised marriage age, the two-child limit, the rationing system. Hunger enters his analysis once, and on the wrong side of the ledger — "Chronic malnutrition among the bulk of the population at the time also served to reduce the birth-rate." His mortality analysis stops at 1959 and does not resume. The one Soviet-bloc author who owned the tools to estimate excess deaths in China used them to estimate deferred marriages.
What the volume permits itself instead is euphemism, twice, and both times in someone else's mouth. Sladkovsky reports that Peng Dehuai at the Lushan plenum of August 1959 called the Leap "petty-bourgeois day-dreaming for which the Chinese people were having to pay dearly" — Peng's judgement, delivered before the worst year had begun, and not the author's. And Herbert, describing why Chinese workers would not rally against the Maoists in 1964, writes of them having "the bitter experience of 1959–62 still fresh in their minds." That is the whole of it: a bitter experience, a dear price, four years given a date range and no content.
Why the wall stands there is not mysterious. Volkova's argument against the communes is that socialist forms of property were imposed "on top of the old backward material and technical basis," in a countryside where "there was no objective need to rush into co-operation," with the result that output fell and the state got less than it had counted on. That is, word for word, the case against Soviet collectivisation in 1929–33 — and the famine that followed it in Ukraine, the Volga and Kazakhstan killed several million people and could not be printed in the Soviet Union until 1987. An author who described mass death by forced collectivisation in China would have handed the reader a template. The silence in this book is not indifference to Chinese peasants. It is a load-bearing wall.
The same wall accounts for the historical chapters. Sladkovsky's account of the origins of Maoism runs through Sun Yat-sen, the Kuomintang manifesto of January 1924, and the argument that Mao's "New Democracy" was a nationalist regression from Sun. The defeat of 1927 appears once, as a subordinate clause: "Once the Right-wingers headed by Chiang Kai-shek took over upon the failure of the 1925–27 Revolution." The bare year 1927 appears nowhere in the book. The Communist International is named once in eighty-two thousand words, and only to note that its dissolution in 1943 helped Mao. That the Chinese Communist Party had been instructed by Moscow to enter the Kuomintang as a bloc within, that it was still inside it when Chiang's troops killed its members in the streets of Shanghai in April 1927, and that the Comintern leadership defended the policy afterwards — none of this is in a volume that devotes fifty pages to the pre-revolutionary background.
Which is what makes the book's one mention of Trotsky worth pausing on. Sladkovsky writes that "in proclaiming the neo-Trotskyite doctrine of 'permanent revolution', the Maoists were in fact giving up the task of socialist construction in China." That is the whole engagement: an epithet, in a subordinate clause, with the theory neither stated nor argued against. Readers should know that the Chinese revolution of 1925–27 is the case from which Trotsky argued the theory, and that the argument is available and short. In The Third International After Lenin (1928), written the year after the defeat, he set out what the policy of the bloc within the Kuomintang had cost: the Kuomintang summit "wrote laws against strikes, throttled the uprisings of the peasants, shoved the communists into a dark corner, and, at best, allowed them to be only one-third of the party, exacted an oath from them that petty-bourgeois Sun Yat-senism takes precedence over Marxism" — this against Sladkovsky's fifty pages treating Sun Yat-senism as the proper framework for the Chinese revolution. The principle Trotsky drew from it is the one sentence Sladkovsky's epithet is meant to prevent the reader from looking up: "that is precisely why we are forbidden to subordinate the proletarian party to a bourgeois party, but on the contrary, must at every step, oppose the former to the latter." And in The Permanent Revolution (1930), sixth of the basic postulates: "Between Kerenskyism and the Bolshevik power, between the Kuomintang and the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is not and cannot be any intermediate stage." Agree or not, that is the doctrine; the reader of this book will never learn that it has any content at all.
One further silence belongs to the authors' own state. In 1960 the Soviet Union withdrew its technical specialists from China and cancelled its contracts, in the middle of the worst agricultural crisis in the country's history. This volume mentions Soviet assistance eight times — the 156 backbone enterprises of the First Five-Year Plan, the anti-epidemic service, the training of more than ten thousand Chinese engineers — and never once mentions the withdrawal. The Fourth International, no friend of Peking, called the rupture "a stab in the back of the Chinese revolution and the Chinese people, at the very moment when they were confronted with near-famine at home" in the resolution on the Cultural Revolution adopted at its Ninth World Congress and printed in Intercontinental Press, vol. 7 no. 26, 14 July 1969. "The historic responsibility for breaking up the Sino-Soviet alliance," it added, "and the advantages which imperialism could draw from this breakup, lie at the door of the Kremlin." Maitan, in the same issue, was more scrupulous than either party: he listed "the abrupt suspension of Soviet collaboration" among the non-economic factors that had aggravated the Chinese crisis, and did so in a report otherwise devoted to demolishing Maoist economics.
That comparison is the fair way to end. The anti-Stalinist left's own record on China in these years was sharp on structure and blind on mortality: Intercontinental Press, across eighteen years and some seven hundred and sixty issues, never printed an estimate of its own for the deaths of 1959–62; its high-water mark was the resolution's phrase "the near-famine period at the beginning of the sixties," and the only figure it ever carried came in 1980, in a translated Chinese dissident text that spoke of "hundreds of thousands of lives" — low by two orders of magnitude. Nobody outside China knew the size of it until the 1982 census was published and the demographers went to work. So the charge against this book is not that it failed to know a number that nobody knew. It is that its authors, uniquely equipped to reason toward that number, reasoned away from it — and that they did so because the reasoning, applied at home, ran through Ukraine in 1933.
Take the volume for its measurements and read them against Maitan's Party, Army and Masses in China (New Left Books, 1976), which covers the same ground from the same Chinese sources and is not obliged to stop anywhere. Feferkon's two spheres, Volkova's chronology of communisation, Herbert's wage tables and the shared verdict on the destruction of Chinese trade unions are all worth having, and they were produced by people doing real work with almost nothing to work from. What the book cannot do is the one thing a socio-economic study of China after 1958 exists to do, which is to say what the policy cost in lives. The chapter is there, the expertise is there, the arithmetic is there. The permission is not.