Chapter 29 25. Still facing "two Chinas"

Sino-US relations are now in the honeymoon phase, but it is obviously necessary for us to look to the future and look back at the past.We are well aware that China used to be obsessed with Marxism every once in a while, while the US emphasized anti-communism.So, can we hope that the honeymoon in US-China relations will last?Did Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping want permanent friendship between the two countries, or did they just start a new cycle of love-hate relationship?Can the Chinese revolution live in harmony with the American improv? The United States played a role in the Chinese revolution during Mao's lifetime from 1893 to 1976.After the imperialist powers invaded China between 1899 and 1900, we announced the Open Door Policy; in 1912, we welcomed the sudden (and failed) attempt by the Republic of China to introduce parliamentary government.When China began a political party dictatorship in 1923, we blamed the policy on the Reds and ended up supporting the anti-Reds party of Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, who graduated from Wellesley College, and his brother-in-law, who graduated from Harvard. dictatorship.Mao later called us imperialist exploiters, accusing us of supporting "feudal reactionaries."The feudal reactionaries they talk about refer to private property, privileges and the privileged class.Today, we are once again privileged tourists and foreign investors (who also help China's modernizers create a new class of technological privilege).Will history throw us back into the quagmire?

Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping's plans to modernize industry, agriculture, science and technology, and national defense are the latest transformative approach China has taken to solve the age-old problem of how to manage the countryside from the cities.China's rural areas now have 800 million people, while the cities only have 200 million.By the year 2000, regardless of whether the four modernizations can be realized, China's rural population will reach 1 billion, and the urban population will increase to 300 million.Food and administration will remain big problems.Americans are more used to farms than villages, and rural America has generally become suburbs.Therefore, Americans can only imagine the situation in China in their minds.Population pressure raises complex economic, governmental and ethical issues, including human rights issues.All these questions are extremely foreign to us.

If we repeat what we did in the 1930s when we dealt with Kuomintang China, and just do production, investment, education and tourism in the cities, then we may be surprised, confused and angry about the situation in the countryside again.Chinese peasants are not going to disappear into urban centers like our peasants have been in the countryside before American independence and will no doubt continue to be.Modern changes are only just beginning to touch them.Zhou and Deng's modernization plan is seeking our technology investment in training, equipment and joint ventures.We can no longer focus on the cities we are familiar with, such as Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing, and we should think more about the countryside that we don't know yet.If we are blind when we provide help to China, and only understand what they tell us in English, but do not understand the difficulties and problems of our Chinese friends, then we will repeat the mistakes of the 1940s and cause another American disaster in China.

We now agree that Taiwan is a self-governing, armed province and that Beijing has sovereignty over it in the long run.Thus, the two China problems that have persisted for 30 years have been resolved.However, we are now faced with another "two Chinas" problem, that is, urban China and rural China.The Chinese revolution is not over, it can actually be divided into two revolutions: a social revolution and a technological revolution.The two sometimes coincide, sometimes conflict, and thus lead to policy twists and turns that always confuse us and are as inevitable a phenomenon in the revolutionary process as "walking on two legs" as they say.

Mao Zedong's social revolution, aimed at rescuing the peasantry from the status of second-class citizens, ignorance and lack of food and clothing, attempted to destroy the old rule of privileged intellectuals, officials, businessmen, landowners and all urban exploiters stage.However, in the process of mobilizing peasants to achieve this egalitarian goal, a high degree of worship for Mao inevitably arose, just like belief in a certain folk religion; followers of Mao in his later years (led by the so-called "Gang of Four") ) eventually became an irrational dogmatist.Just as the Calvinists purged original sin, they used "politics in command" to attack "bourgeois tendencies" and opposed material incentives, which they believed were not true socialism.As a result, there is neither education nor production, leading to economic stagnation. After the "Gang of Four" was crushed, China changed course again.

Another revolution under Deng Xiaoping, aimed at applying modern technology to all areas of Chinese life, is now underway, and we should help it succeed.But just how far can it achieve, and will Beijing see it as a major long-term national policy?This depends in part on our behavior.All types of foreigners can find partners in China.Our opium merchants have found the Chinese to sell opium for them, and our missionaries have found the Chinese who are benevolent.Without the help of our money-swindling experts in the General Administration of Services, the Chinese who do procurement in capitalist America will really feel that they are in an enemy country.When eating with us, they have to use long chopsticks.Even the $10 bills doled out by foreign tourists staying in the big new hotels in China can corrupt.We respect Coca-Cola, which has indeed indisputably made the name of the United States, but we also doubt whether Coca-Cola really meets the palate of Henan people.In the summer season, it can meet the requirements of Shanghainese, but can it increase the cultivated land in Lin County?Do people who drink Coca-Cola water more arable land?

When planning the production of steel, coal, and oil and strengthening industry, we must wear bifocal glasses so as not to lose sight of the 800 million people in the countryside. The rural population has doubled since 1949, but they remain extremely poor.If the new privileged classes in the cities we helped to foster lose their connection with the countryside, Mao's ghost is sure to appear in many villages, shouting "Don't forget me!" The most united and largest group of people is expecting more.Deng Xiaoping's plan to control a certain degree of chain reaction in rural China will have many risks.It can be expected that in another 10 to 20 years time, we will be able to provide food rations to Chinese cities in exchange for goods that we cannot produce cheaply.But this symbiosis involves only a small part of the modernized and internationalized Chinese, 200-300 million people, and the 1 billion peasants who are still impoverished and may need to be reorganized.In short, we need to study more than the technology China needs, taste more than the delicacies that China offers to tourists, and offer more than the enthusiasm shown when hearing about the great achievements of the Chinese people.They are also problematic, and we cannot escape our connection to them, given that the future is a globally shared world.

Current publications comprehensively reflect these issues and Western concerns about them.Some books also explain why many Chinese officials consider foreign China experts to be completely useless.Currently, they definitely prefer Western economists to Western sociologists. Mao called for class struggle as a means of transforming people's consciousness and moral standards, while Deng advocated material production.Deng's plan was formulated in a series of meetings in 1975, and contained three documents; but the "Gang of Four" denounced these three documents as "three big poisonous weeds".In Deng's general policy statement, quotations from Chairman Mao are quoted in every paragraph; while the exposition on industrial development makes a realistic and quite specific forecast of the line now being implemented.

In general, the People's Republic of China has made great achievements in material production, with an average annual increase of 5.5% in gross national product and 9% in industry.This growth rate is the envy of us.Provided political stability and military spending are kept in check, the prospects for gradual, slow improvements in living standards are bright.But living standards will not improve automatically, and several factors may prevent it from improving.These factors include not only political turmoil and military expansion, but also bad weather or natural disasters like the 1976 Tangshan earthquake.

A key problem is China's lack of arable land.Practices such as leveling and consolidating land, terracing hills and clearing wasteland have all become increasingly ineffective.Certain agrarian programs will baffle Americans.For example, they grow crops in the river bed, and dig a tunnel under the river bed to let the river water pass through.The stones used to construct such a river tunnel were excavated by hand.These manpower are as cheap as the labor to build the Great Wall.This labor force is still China's main resource; moreover, productivity remains low due to a lack of production equipment.Deng's main purpose of mechanizing agriculture was to transfer labor to township enterprises.These TVEs now supply the local villages with cement, chemical products, iron, electricity, machinery and consumer goods.By American or Soviet standards, these small businesses were of poor quality and a waste.However, industry must be established in the countryside, and although large-scale production in central cities is economical, China has to abandon this practice because it lacks the transportation system to reach 800 million consumers.Villages and towns must be industrialized in situ.

China has a huge population and the statistics are mind-boggling.For example, China is the fourth-largest energy producer in the world (behind the United States, the Soviet Union, and Saudi Arabia), yet it ranks close to 100th among 175 countries in the world in terms of per capita consumption of modern energy.And China has a huge proportion of other things: an army of 3.5 million people; the third largest air force in the world, the third largest non-military aid program, sending 24,000 Chinese technicians to the third world every year, and the largest machinery in the world manufacturing.All of this makes it a big country.But due to their large population, the standard of living in China is still lower than we thought.Greater China is huge statistically, but the Chinese must live on tight terms. The fundamental problem in China is: the rapid development of industry, but the annual increase of grain production in the countryside is only about 3% to 3.5%, which just exceeds the growth of population (1.8% to 2%).As a result, there is little agricultural produce left for commercial and industrial use to provide for export to earn foreign exchange.Although the average annual growth rate of grain production from 1964 to 1974 was less than 3%, the current plan calls for an annual growth rate of 4.5%, and no major grain-producing country in the world can maintain a growth rate of 4.5%.The new fertilizer plants (as the economists vividly describe them) are "all in," helping to boost food production.Another strategy to increase food production is to intensify land use, planting not just two but three crops per year.However, our economic analysts believe that such multi-crop practices require a cost analysis.Since this practice requires early maturing seeds, more labour, fertilizer and irrigation, it may not actually be economical. At the same time, Deng struck a string of intermittent deals to buy Japanese trucks, British aircraft, French reactors, German chemicals, American hotel chains, and oil technology with foreign money, suggesting that he had abandoned Mao's creed of self-reliance.Deng also negated the Cultural Revolution, restored the "authoritarianism" of one-man rule of the factory, pursued profits, opposed egalitarianism, and re-mobilized the peasants.All these practices are aimed at strengthening the strength of the country through the four modernizations. It can be seen that Chinese cities have made a lot of progress in material and technological aspects, and they seem to be very prosperous.In rural China, however, the situation is different.Although Deng's reforms made some farmers rich, others got poorer.If the poor greatly outnumber the rich, Maoism could be revived.There have been peasant uprisings in China before, and we must pay careful attention to rural China. This review is "China's Economy After Mao's Death, Summary of Official Documents," Volume 1: (Policies and Current Situations), published by the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress on November 9, 1978 (Washington, D.C.: Government Press Office, 1978 2000); Chi Xin ((The "Gang of Four" Case: The First Transformation of Deng Xiaoping's "Three Poisonous Weeds"" (Hong Kong: Universe Publishing House, no publication date) and "Deng Xiaoping: A Political Biography" (Hong Kong: Universe Publishing House, No date of publication) and similar works, published in The New York Review of Books, March 8, 1979, entitled "The New Two China Questions."