54 { China’s Quest
Stalin’s and the Short Course’s notion of fueling industrialization by
starving agriculture was among the first elements of Stalin’s model to be
thrown out in the Soviet Union by the post-Stalin leadership. After Stalin
died, agricultural procurement prices were raised, taxes on farming cut,
investment in agriculture was raised, and bureaucratic control of farming
was eased.^48 In China too, collective farming was one of the first things
to be thrown out after Mao died. In 1978 (perhaps a year earlier in key
provinces), after twenty years of “experimentation” with Soviet-style col-
lective farming, it was “reformed” out of existence via the “family respon-
sibility system.” Land was again parceled out to individual families, who
regained wide latitude in the operation of their family plots and who prof-
ited directly from successful farming. Agricultural output began immedi-
ately to climb. Within a very few years, the chronic food shortages that had
plagued China since collectivization disappeared.
In 1979, thirty years after the CCP imposed the Soviet economic model
on China, Deng Xiaoping replied to a question posed by Frank Gibney of
Encyclopedia Britannica, “Could China have been so ideologically confused
initially as to have completely imitated and adopted the socialist style of the
Soviet Union”? Deng replied that China’s socialist road was different from
the Soviet Union’s “from the very start.” In essence, Deng said that the CCP,
unlike the CPSU, did not kill its capitalists in the process of socialist transfor-
mation, or kill oppositionists within the party. These were generally accurate
judgments, although several million landlords and non-CCP dissidents were
killed. Then Deng continued:
However, some of our economic systems, especially enterprise man-
agement and organization, have been greatly influenced by the Soviet
Union. For this reason it is advantageous that we inherit the advanced
method of operation, management, and scientific development from
advanced capitalist countries. We are still having many difficulties
reforming these aspects of our economy.^49Soviet Economic Assistance and the Construction of SocialismDuring the 1950s, the Soviet Union provided large-scale assistance to China’s
socialist industrialization effort.^50 Indeed, it was one of the largest transfers of
capital equipment in history. China in 1949 had some industry: in the Northeast,
built up by massive Japanese investment over a period of fifty years; some light
industry and public utilities in China’s coastal cities as part of China’s integra-
tion into the global economy under the treaty system; and some defense indus-
try in interior provinces, as part of the ROC’s anti-Japan war effort. But overall,
the process of China’s industrialization was just beginning. Extensive Soviet
assistance in the 1950s helped China greatly expand and upgrade its industrial