48 { China’s Quest
Soviet Union. Mao now decided to eliminate capitalism and replace it with
state-owned, state-operated, and state-planned economic activity. From the
standpoint of Stalin’s and Mao’s Marxism-Leninism, market-based produc-
tion of goods for sale, i.e., capitalism, was irrational and inhumane and must
be superseded by rational, comprehensive economic planning done by the
state on the basis of the interests of the working classes. In a Soviet-style com-
prehensively planned socialist economy, there were virtually no markets.^36
Instead, officials in state planning agencies calculated exactly how much of
each particular type of good would be produced over the next several years,
what factories would make exactly how much of that good, which other fac-
tories would make the necessary components for each good, and so on. All
the productive resources of society, or at least the “basic” ones, were owned by
the state and operated under the direction of central state planning agencies.
Production quotas were assigned by the plan to each enterprise, and party
committees within each enterprise ensured that enterprises complied with
the plan. Effective comprehensive economic planning in a large economy
was an immensely complex and difficult task. The Soviet Union had worked
out practical organizational solutions to this problem starting with its First
Five Year Plan in 1928. By 1951, it was beginning its Fifth Five Year Plan, giv-
ing it a quarter century of experience in “constructing socialism.” It was this
Soviet model of comprehensive, centralized economic planning that the CCP
imposed on China in the early 1950s.
Mao’s model of socialism, and the process of socialist construction which
was transposed on China in the 1950s, was a copy of Soviet experience in the
1920s and 1930s. The main vehicle through which this model was conveyed
to Mao and the CCP (as to communists around the world) was the Short
Course on the History of the All-Russia Communist Party (Bolshevik), usu-
ally known simply as the Short Course. This book was drafted under Stalin’s
close supervision in 1937 and published in the Soviet Union in 1938. Forty-
two million copies would be published in sixty-seven languages between
1938 and 1953 (when Stalin died). While Stalin lived, the Short Course was
treated by communist parties around the world as the absolute scientific
truth about socialist revolution and construction and as a virtual sacred
text and handbook of Marxism-Leninism. Stalin ordered the Short Course
written for use in the ideological indoctrination of CPSU members. Mao
used it for the same purpose. The book became the key vehicle for “unify-
ing thinking” within the CCP about how socialism was to be constructed.
It was translated into Chinese in 1938 and assiduously distributed around
China by the CCP.^37
Mao first encountered the Short Course in Yan’an in the 1930s. Once
settled in Yan’an after the end of the Long March, Mao turned to study of
Marxist-Leninist theory to arm himself against Soviet-trained rivals in the
CCP who had a better grasp than Mao of these vital theoretical weapons.