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CONTENTS Vol. 17, No. 3: July–September 1985 •

Maurice J. Meisner - The Chinese Rediscovery of Karl Marx: Some Reflections on Post-Maoist Chinese Marxism

• Tamae K. Prindle - Shimizu Ikko’s Silver Sanctuary (Gin no seiiki): A Japanese Business Novel / A Translation • Tinna K. Wu - A Translation of Hou De-jian’s Poem Heirs of the Dragon • Suniti Kumar Ghosh - On the Transfer of Power in India • Jon Halliday - Women in North Korea: An Interview With the Korean Democratic Women’s Union • Corrina-Barbara Francis - Interview with Kang Ning-hsiang • Bruce Cruikshank - Villains, Victims, and Villeins: Studies of the Philippine Economy / A Review Essay • Eddie J. Girdner - Storm over the Sutlej: The Akali Politics by A.S. Narang / A Review

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CCAS Statement of Purpose Critical Asian Studies continues to be inspired by the statement of purpose formulated in 1969 by its parent organization, the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS). CCAS ceased to exist as an organization in 1979, but the BCAS board decided in 1993 that the CCAS Statement of Purpose should be published in our journal at least once a year.

We first came together in opposition to the brutal aggression of the United States in Vietnam and to the complicity or silence of our profession with regard to that policy. Those in the field of Asian studies bear responsibility for the consequences of their research and the political posture of their profession. We are concerned about the present unwillingness of specialists to speak out against the implications of an Asian policy committed to ensuring American domination of much of Asia. We reject the legitimacy of this aim, and attempt to change this policy. We recognize that the present structure of the profession has often perverted scholarship and alienated many people in the field. The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars seeks to develop a humane and knowledgeable understanding of Asian societies and their efforts to maintain cultural integrity and to confront such problems as poverty, oppression, and imperialism. We realize that to be students of other peoples, we must first understand our relations to them. CCAS wishes to create alternatives to the prevailing trends in scholarship on Asia, which too often spring from a parochial cultural perspective and serve selfish interests and expansionism. Our organization is designed to function as a catalyst, a communications network for both Asian and Western scholars, a provider of central resources for local chapters, and a community for the development of anti-imperialist research. Passed, 28–30 March 1969 Boston, Massachusetts

Vol. 17, No.3/July·Sept., 1985

Contents

MauriceJ. Meisner

2

Tamae K. Prindle

17

Shimizu Ikko's Silver Sanctuary (Gin no seiiki): A Japanese Business NovellA Translation

TinnaK. Wu

28

A Translation ofHou De Jian 's Poem "Heirs of the Dragon"

Sunili Kumar Ghosh

30 46

On the Transfer of Power in India

Corinna-Barbara Francis

57

Interview with Kang Ning-hsiang

Bruce Cruikshank

65

Villains, Victims, and Villeins: Studies of the Philippine Economy/review essay

Eddie 1. Girdner

70

Storm Over the Sutlej: The Akali Politics, by A. S. Narang/review

72

List of Books to Review

Jon Halliday

i

The Chinese Rediscovery of Karl Marx: Some Reflections on Post-Maoist Chinese Marxism

Women in North Korea: An Interview with the Korean Democratic Women's Union

I

,

Contributors

Bruce Cruikshank: Unaffiliated Historian, Ann Arbor, Michigan Corinna-Barbara Francis: East Asian Institute, Columbia University, New York, New York Suniti Kumar Ghosh: Calcutta, India Jon Halliday: Writer on Japan and Korea, London, England Maurice J. Meisner: Department of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin Tamae K. Prindle: Department of Modem Foreign Languages, Colby College, Waterville, Maine Tinna K. Wu: Chinese Language Program, Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota The poster by Zhao Ningmin and Chen Guo/i on the front cover appeared in the People's Daily (Beijing) of Nov. 26. /984. The slogan on the poster says "Work makes you rich and helps the nation." The photograph on the back cover is of Japanese employees eating in a company cafeteria.

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The Chinese Rediscovery of Karl Marx: Some

Reflections on Post-Maoist Chinese Marxism

by Maurice J. Meisner Preface One of the more striking features of Chinese Marxist thought in the years since the death of Mao Tse-tung has been the revival of many original Marxist concepts and orthodox Marxist-Leninist perspectives. This, of course, does not accord with the conventional view of the post-Maoist era which has it that Mao's successors have all but abandoned Marxism in favor of "pragmatism." Those who seek Chinese Communist abandonments of Marxism might be better advised to look to the Thought of Mao Tse-tung in Maoist times. However that may be, in this essay I am concerned not with the Maoist past but with the post-Maoist present. But before beginning the inquiry into certain aspects of recent Chinese Marxism, perhaps a word or two should be said to explain (if not necessarily to justify) the title under which my comments appear, 'The Chinese Rediscovery of Karl Marx."* Karl Marx was of course discovered by Chinese intellectuals during the first decade of the century, largely as a by-product of their interest in Western anarchist and other socialist doctrines derived mostly from Japanese and French sources. Marxist theory did arouse intellectual curiosity among a few early revolutionary intellectuals, most notably Chu Chih-hsin, but for the most part it struck few responsive intellectual or political chords at the time. The reasons for the lack of appeal are rather obvious. Marxism, in its orthodox and pre-Leninist form, taught that socialism presupposed capitalism and the material and social products of a highly­ developed capitalist economy, namely, large-scale industry and a large and mature urban proletariat. Consequently, it was a

* This essay is based on a paper presented at the Modern China Seminar, East Asian Institute, Columbia University on April 19. 19X4. Portions of the essay are drawn from chapter 8 of my book Marxism, Maoism, alld Utopianism (University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).

doctrine that addressed itself to the workers and intellectuals of the advanced industrialized countries of the West. It offered no political message to nationalist intellectuals in a largely pre-capitalist and mostly agrarian land. Or more precisely, the political message orthodox Marxism conveyed was the disheartening one that there was little to do but wait until the forces of modem capitalist production had completed their historical work. Few Chinese were attracted to this wisdom, dispensed in the writings of such orthodox Marxists as Kautsky and Plekhanov. It was not until the triple impact of the May Fourth Movement, the Bolshevik Revolution . and the arrival of the Leninist (and Trotskyist) version of Marxism that significant numbers of Chinese intellectuals embraced the theory. In many respects, the embrace was a rather superficial one-and remained so for many decades. The reasons are more political than intellectual. Unlike Marxists in Russia and the Western countries, who generally spent many years immersed in reading the classic Marxist texts before committing themselves to a course of political action, youthful Chinese converts to Marxism lived in a land which lacked a Marxian Social-Democratic intellectual tradition and one where they were immediately caught up in what undoubtedly was the most massive, intensive and desperate revolutionary struggle of the twentieth century. Those who survived (and most did not) the prolonged revolutionary trial of more than a quarter of a century were afforded little time, and even less leisure, to study and assimilate the inherited body of Marxist theory. It is thus hardly surprising that the Marxist writings of Chinese Communists during the revolutionary era, in striking contrast to their political deeds, do not excite the observer's imagination. The demands of political struggle no doubt account for the anomaly that the Marxist works of Chinese Comn~unists often appear less learned and less theoretically sophisticated than the writings of such Kuomintang Marxists as Hu Han-min. (In

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rejecting the theory of class struggle, at least insofar as China was concerned, the Marxist credentials of Hu Han-min and other non-Communist Marxists are of course a bit suspect­ although it was precisely that rejection which afforded Hu the leisure to acquire his relative theoretical sophistication. The history of Marxism in China, as elsewhere, is not without its ironies.} The theoretical level of Chinese Marxist writings did not rise markedly in the years after 1949, even though the volume increased enormously. If there was now more time and many more theoreticians to study the doctrine under whose banner the revolution had been carried out, study and investigation of the inherited Marxist intellectual tradition was inhibited by the canonization of Mao Tse-tung Thought as the official Marxist state orthodoxy (actually canonized, with the generous assistance of Liu Shao-ch'i, at the Seventh CCP Congress in 1945). The official orthodoxy demanded conformity to interpretations laid down in Peking on a relatively narrow range of topics and questions, and confined study of the tradition to a rather small number of Marxist-Leninist texts (or portions of texts) officially approved by ideological czars in the capital. If Marxist intellectuals and scholars read more of Marx and other Marxists than was formally sanctioned, they wrote little on the basis of those readings, and virtually nothing found its way to publication. If Mao was free to make innovations in "Mao Tse-tung Thought" (and he freely made some rather interesting ones after 1957), this was not the case for others. On the whole, the post-1949 period was not an era when creative Marxist thought flourished in the People's Republic. The impoverish­ ment of official Chinese Marxism in the late Maoist era is perhaps most strikingly revealed by the fact that the polemical pamphlets of Yao Wen-yuan (even thin as polemics) were celebrated as creative innovations-and even taken as serious theoretical contributions by some serious Western observers of the People's Republic. (It would be unkind to cite names and examples at this late date.) Post-revolutionary eras, Marxist or otherwise, have not been terribly conducive to intellectual creativity as a general rule. One exception that comes to mind is the 1920s in the Soviet Union-a decade of quite extraordinary intellectual and cultural creativity and utopian experimentation, until stifled by the imposition of newly-invented Stalinist orthodoxies around the time of "the great turn." There is no comparable period in the history of the People's Republic, in any event. In the post-Mao years much has been heard about a "crisis of faith" in Marxism in China, not only from many Western observers who long for an "end of ideology" (and often have prematurely proclaimed it) but also from official quarters which have complained about the general inadequacy of Marxist knowledge while deploring the revival of interest, particularly among youth, in Social Darwinism, religion, and the ideologies of the capitalist West. I This latter portrait, fulsomely reproduced in the Western press over the past few years, is a rather partial one and partly misleading. To be sure, the widespread political disillusionment and cynicism resulting from the Cultural Revolution (or more precisely, its failures) and from the Byzantine degeneration of political life during

1. For example, Lou Jingbo, "What Should Young People Believe In?", Xin Shiqi (New Era), November, 1981, pp. 4-7. JPRS 80272, pp. 10-14.

the last years of the Maoist regime continues to find expression in rejections of, or indifference to, Marxism. But the "crisis of faith" has been accompanied by a less noticed, but perhaps more politically and intellectually significant, revival of faith, a renewal of interest in the entire Western Marxist tradition and particularly in the original texts of Marx and Engels, so long neglected during the Maoist era for the most part. The result has been something of a Marxian renaissance in China, an era of intellectual and scholarly creativity among the Chinese Marxist intelligentsia unprecedented in the history of the People's Republic. While the emphasis has been on the original writings of the founding fathers of Marxism, there has been a growing interest in the entire Western Marxist tradition, not excluding a good many theoreticians (such as Kautsky, Lukacs, Gramsci, and the writers of the Frankfort School) hitherto banished from the official Marxist-Leninist pantheon. Over recent years, Chinese scholars have pursued inquiries into such previously forbidden or neglected areas as the writings of the young Marx, Marxist humanism, Western Marxist aesthetics, the concept of alienation, the theory of the Asiatic mode of production, and a vast variety of topics in modem world history as well as the full range of Chinese history and philosophy - to mention but a few of the many avenues that have been opened for inquiry.

It should hardly be any cause for surprise that politically disillusioned Chinese intellectuals today turn to Marx to seek solutions for the problems that beset their land-just as politically disillusioned Confucians in imperial times often sought answers in an uncorrupted version of the teachings of Confucius.

In contrast to the Mao period, when there was much Marxian ideological fervor but little study of Marx, we are presently witnessing what is undoubtedly the most intensive and serious era of Marxist scholarship in the history of China. One example of this Marxian renaissance, although hardly the most intellectually intriguing one, was the "First National Academic Forum on Das Kapital" held in Wuxi in December 1981. Presided over by Yu Guangyuan and Xu Dixin, the forum was attended by 232 delegates representing 120 research and educational institutions who (among other things) founded "the Das Kapital Research Association of China" to coordinate the activities of the thousands of scholars said to be engaged in the study of what was described as "the most important work in Marxist literature.'" Quantitatively, at least, it was a most

2. Yu Guangyuan, "Several Questions on the Research ofDas Kapital," Jingji Yanjiu (Economic Research), 20 February 1982, p. 10. (JPRS 80478, pp. t-7 for a translation of Yu's article). A summary of the forum appears in Jingji Yanjiu, 20 February 1982, pp. 3-7.

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impressive affair. It should hardly be any cause for surprise that politically disillusioned Chinese intellectuals today turn to Marx to seek solutions for the problems that beset their land-just as politically disillusioned Confucians in imperial times often sought answers in an uncorrupted version of the teachings of Confucius. Marxism, after all, is the sole politically acceptable mode of intellectual and political discourse in the People's Republic, and, more importantly, Marxist theory informs the dominant worldview of the great majority of the contemporary Chinese intelligentsia. At least among social scientists and humanists, as distinct from the numerically larger technological intelligentsia, basic Marxist assumptions and concepts are generally (if not necessarily universally) accepted, even though they may be differently understood and variously interpreted. However that may be, they share the view that during much of the Mao era the inherited Marxist tradition was both neglected and distorted. If Marx has been rediscovered by Chinese Marxists in the post-Mao period, they have searched for-and found-rather different ideas in the classic texts. Whereas official ideologists have seized upon the more economically deterministic strands in the Marxist tradition, many individual Marxist intellectuals have been drawn to the writings of the "young Marx," to the long tradition of Marxist "humanism," and especially to the concept of alienation. In part they have been searching less for ideological rationalizations for the policies of the current regime than for a moral basis for socialism and ethical philosophy of life. Thus there is a distinction to be drawn in post-Maoist Chinese Marxism between the official Marxist ideology of the Party and the Marxism of the intelligentsia, although there is much intellectual overlapping and the ideological lines are indistinct. Certainly a good many members of the intelligentsia, consciously or not, have provided copious ideological, theoretical and historiographical support for the Deng regime. On the other hand, some official ideologists have lapsed into ideological heresies, most notably Marx's concept of alienation. It is both ironic and heartening to observe Chou Yang, so long a guardian of official ideological orthodoxies and veteran witchhunter, drawn in his later years to the writings of the young Marx. And it is heartening if not necessarily ironic to read the Marxian humanist and democratic writings of an official theoretician of the stature of Wang Roshui. Both Chou and Wang, of course, along with others, have paid political penalties for their ideological heresies; Chou Yang has publicly confessed his ideological sins and Wang Roshui was dismissed from his post as deputy managing editor of the People's Daily. The Marxist theory of alienation, with its universally radical social and political implications, is of course threatening to anyone in power and, as recent events have confirmed, is no more likely to be tolerated by the present regime than it was by its predecessors-or for that matter, than by its counterparts elsewhere. The theory of alienation not only raises embarrassing questions about the alienation of workers from the products of their labor; it also teaches that the state is an expression of alienated social power. This is not a message that holders of state power typically find congenial. The relationship between the official Marxist ideology of the party under its current leadership and the Marxism of the intellectuals, insofar as a meaningful distinction might be drawn between the two, is a matter filled with complexities and ambiguities which I fear I am ill-prepared to attempt to

discuss here. Perhaps it might suffice for the moment to note that while the former (official Party ideology) certainly places political and ideological limitations on the latter, the limits thus far have been sufficiently broad (albeit narrowing in the last year or two) to permit a remarkable degree of intellectual creativity and theoretical innovation on the part of the intelligentsia. Indeed, the recent flourishing of Marxist thought in China bears certain affinities to the reanimation of Marxism in the Eastern European countries during the post-Stalin "thaw" in the 1950s and 1960s, movements of intellectual and political renewal variously labelled "revisionism" and/or "democratic socialism." Whether the Chinese movement will prove abortive, as did its East European counterparts, remains to be seen. China, of course, is not subject to the same kinds of external Soviet pressures as are the East European countries, but the internal workings of the Leninist party-state apparatus may well result in the imposition of a new ideological straitjacket, albeit one differing in form and content from the discarded Maoist one. Yet apart from the ultimate political and ideological implications of current Chinese Marxist thought, it is certainly now clear that the history of Marxism in China did not come to an end with the canonization of "Maoism" but rather has resumed processes of change which have proceeded in new and unanticipated directions. Those processes of change call for, among other things, a reconsideration of Benjamin Schwartz's influential thesis that Marxism has undergone progressive phases of "disintegration" or "decomposition" in its journey eastward-to Russia and China-from its Western European homeland. 3 Whatever the utility of the thesis for studying the history of Chinese Marxism in its Maoist phase, it has little relevance for understanding Chinese Marxist thought in its current phase. Post-Maoist Chinese Marxist writings, far from showing signs of "decomposition," are above all characterized by the revival of (and return to) many original and orthodox Marxist conceptions. Indeed, contemporary Chinese Marxism, both as an official ideology and as an ideology of the intelligentsia, is a doctrine whose authors seek to establish firm (albeit often politically selective) links to the Western Marxist theoretical and intellectual tradition. The pages which follow are concerned primarily with the official Marxist ideology of the Party in the post-Maoist era and largely ignore the Marxist writings of the intelligentsia. (The latter is far more intellectually interesting but the former may prove more politically significant.) Moreover, the essay makes no attempt to treat, much less evaluate, the whole of official theory, which now has grown into a voluminous and complex body of economic, political and historical literature. Rather, the focus is on what appears to me to be one of the less positive tendencies in the post-Maoist version of Chinese Marxism, namely, the profoundly anti-utopian character of the doctrine. Whether the purge of the "utopian" elements from the body of official theory still celebrated as "Marxism­ Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought" is viewed as desirable or not depends, of course, on one's point of view. From an orthodox Marxist point of view, the elimination of the utopian

3. The thesis was of course set forth more than three decades ago in Schwartz's pioneering study Chinese Communism and the Rise ofMao (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), and subsequently has been repeated, with variations, by Schwartz and a variety of other scholars. © BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org 4

aspects of Maoism should be regarded as a desirable and progressive development, removing from the scene ideological conceptions and visions (and actions inspired by them) which exceed the limits of "objective historical possibilities" -and thus removing one source of destructive or regressive tendencies. Such a view would be shared by orthodox modernization theorists, who regard utopian social strivings, and indeed socialist goals in general, as at best "dysfunctional" elements in an inevitable and universal "modernization process." My own point of view is rather different, and might briefly be summarized at the outset. The discussion which follows rests on the premise that without a utopian reading of Marx, and the voluntaristic and politically activist impulses such a reading sanctions, Marxism would have been politically impotent and historically irrelevant in the essentially pre­ industrial environment of modern China. And I would further suggest that had it not been for the survival of a vital utopian vision of the socialist future in post-1949 China, Marxism in the People's Republic would have become-and is probably now becoming - little more than an ideology of modernization. Such has been the fate of Marxism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, and it offers abundant historical evidence for Adam Ulam's gloomy prediction that "socialism, once it assumes power, has as its mission the fullest development of the productive resources of society," that the socialist state "will in no wise proceed differently from the capitalist," and that "socialism continues and intensifies all the main characteristics of capitalism."4 For Marxism to retain its vitality as a force for social revolutionary change, an activistic utopianism remains essen­ tial, both in pre- and post-revolutionary societies. With the waning of that utopian spirit, Marxism in the advanced industrialized countries becomes an ideology that adapts itself to the social reformism of the capitalist "welfare state." And in "socialist" societies it degenerates into vacuous revolutionary rhetoric only thinly disguising the banal nationalist and modernizing aims of the rulers of autonomous bureaucracies. 5

1. The Post-Revolutionary Era "The socialists might conquer, but not socialism, which would perish in the moment of its adherents' triumph," Robert Michels wrote at the turn of the century. 6 The histories of twentieth-century socialist revolutions offer little evidence, and even less comfort, for those who might be inclined to dispute Michels' cynical prediction. However one may choose to judge the social and economic accomplishments of revolutions which have proceeded under Marxi!it political auspi