778 { China’s Quest
The communist vision was immensely attractive in many lands and for
many years. In China, many high-minded, energetic, and intelligent people
embraced it as the solution to their country’s woes and imported into China
Leninist-Stalinist economic and political models in the belief that this would
“save China.” Imposition of those institutions had to overcome strong resis-
tance from many sectors of the Chinese people and occasionally (as with the
rapid transition to the socialist stage) from within the CCP elite. Mobilization
of nationalist sentiments via international confrontation, war, and prepara-
tion for war, facilitated crushing that resistance. Domestic opponents were
linked to foreign enemies. Since those dangerous enemies had to be defeated,
immense sacrifices had to be borne by the Chinese people: lives of priva-
tion and hardship to fuel the maw of Stalinist hyperaccumulation that was
supposed to propel China to great-power status and communism. Linking
the myriad hardships imposed on the Chinese people to foreign threats
and malevolence helped persuade people to endure those heavy burdens.
Mao saw war and international tension as essential tools in the destruction
of structures of power in China’s presocialist society, crushing the forces of
counterrevolution and overwhelming all opposition, within and outside the
CCP, to the repeated coercive campaigns necessary to twist China into the
communist utopian mold. Fear and hatred of foreign enemies helped cre-
ate domestic conditions allowing the revolution’s “advance.” Thus the Korean
War paralleled the liquidation of the bourgeoisie and transition to socialism.
The Taiwan Straits crisis paralleled the collectivization of agriculture, and
the war with India paralleled the leftist push toward the Cultural Revolution.
Polemical struggle against the CPSU paralleled the internal struggle to “pre-
vent the restoration of capitalism” in China. Creation of a vision of global
revolutionary wave inspired by and looking to China’s revolution also helped
generate internal revolutionary impetus. The result of this was the isolation
of China from the world and deep poverty and bitterness among the Chinese
people.
After thirty years of attempting to force Chinese society and individual
Chinese human beings to conform to Mao’s utopian vision of communism,
the Chinese people turned away from the Lenin-Stalin economic model. Under
the leadership of Deng Xiaoping—a man who for all his grave shortcomings
must, I believe, be recognized as one of the giant liberators of humankind in
the twentieth century—China took a new path. Step by step, Deng and his
reform-minded comrades rolled back state control, creating and expanding
a sphere of individual freedom, albeit not one yet protected by rule of law or
encompassing autonomous political activity. Rapid improvement in the stan-
dards of living of the Chinese people—driven largely by market-based entre-
preneurial activity—became the new basis for legitimacy of the CCP regime
under Deng. Achieving this required drawing broadly and deeply on the
capital, technology, export markets, and scientific and managerial knowledge