358 { China’s Quest
capitalist countries were entering the “information era”—a transition of cre-
ative destruction as profound as the steam revolution of the nineteenth cen-
tury or the amalgam of electricity, internal combustion engines, and radio of
the early twentieth century. The military implications of this “information
revolution” were also profound. By the 1980s, the United States was integrat-
ing new information technology into a revolutionary new style of war of far
greater precision, speed, and lethality, radically reducing the traditional mili-
tary advantage of superior numbers. The United States would not try out this
new style of warfare until 1991 in Iraq. But already by the late 1970s, the impli-
cations were apparent to those who paid attention.
China in 1978 was outside of the scientific and technological revolution that
was transforming the advanced capitalist countries. Most of China’s leaders
simply were not aware of how far behind China had fallen. Very few had had
the opportunity to travel to advanced capitalist countries. What travel oppor-
tunities there were under Mao were mostly to socialist or developing coun-
tries (Burma, India, Pakistan, etc.). The few Chinese officials that traveled to
capitalist countries (France or Switzerland, perhaps) were tightly constrained
by both their itineraries and ideological rigidity at home. It would have been
very foolish for a Chinese leader, perhaps in France in 1965, to report favor-
ably to Beijing on the strengths of French capitalism. CCP ideology of that era
declared that the working classes of advanced capitalist countries lived in pri-
vation and squalor little different than the conditions described by Karl Marx
for Britain in the 1840s. In terms of level of wealth and development, how was
it possible for countries with reactionary counterrevolutionary imperialist
elites to be superior to progressive socialist countries led by the dictatorship
of the proletariat with its “scientific” understanding of economics, society,
and history? Marxist ideas of this sort were not merely one point of view at
the beginning of the opening period. They were, instead, absolute scientific
truth, unchallenged by other ideas and propounded nearly daily.
Profound revelation occurred when personal observation in advanced
capitalist countries became possible and confronted traditional ideological
verities. Again a personal antidote. In the early 1990s, my family and I lived
in a neighborhood of northeast Beijing. There was one state-run store serving
the neighborhood. It was a dingy single room about as big as the average
American living room and was stocked with several hundred goods: pens,
pencils and paper, soap and other toiletries, canned foods, thermos bottles,
batteries and light bulbs, liquor, beer and soft drinks, pots and pans, etc. Such
was the fare of Chinese consumers in the capital of the country. In interior
regions, supply was even worse. Again, suppression of even the most basic
consumer goods was a key dimension of the Stalinist strategy of hyperac-
cumulation. During the same era, when acquaintances from China would
visit us in Atlanta during their first trip to the United States, we would take
them to a typical US supermarket with its football-field-size offering of tens