Paradox of Mao's legacy: How revolutionary flexibility shaped China's economic miracle

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OPINION

By Nnanda Kizito Sseruwagi

Different political scientists have argued that the market reforms implemented in China, which explain its great economic success today, were engineered and inherited from Mao Zedong’s theory and practice in guerrilla tactics, which premise flexibility as a key strategy in any exercise.

I want to share my thoughts on this idea and argue against the common assertion that Mao was a disaster for China, and that only post-Mao leaders take credit for the country's economic transformation. I would like to read the Chinese economy as one punctuated by the characteristics of pragmatism, flexibility, experimentation, and adaptability. And these characteristics, I posit, are deeply founded in Mao’s leadership norms as a guerrilla fighter and revolutionary.

During Mao Zedong’s leadership, he faced mainly two opponents – the Nationalists and the Japanese invaders. To defeat them, he employed guerrilla tactics to overcome the overwhelming odds, and thus he had to fight flexibly, improvise for his weaknesses, and adapt to local conditions in order to survive.

These practices were embedded in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) organisational culture and survived Mao, thereby finding new applicability when post-Mao CCP leaders embarked on economic reforms. China’s transformation was never inevitable.

It is possible that without the influence of Mao’s ideas, CCP leaders might have insisted on the rigidity of Soviet-style central planning, which would have stunted China’s economy longer and further. But to adopt the constant experimentation of what works and flexibly abandoning what didn’t, they managed to spur growth.

It is not fair to judge Mao only based on the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. His legacy was wider than that. And his failures inherently initiated positive outcomes because they made way for pragmatism, flexibility and adaptation. Mao had preceded Deng Xiaoping in pragmatism because he had deviated from the dogmatic application of Marxist-Leninist economic prescriptions.

Therefore, when, in highlighting China’s shift towards result-oriented governance, Deng famously adage (d) in the 1970s that “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice,” he was walking in the footsteps and echoing the voice of Mao. The market reforms that Deng and other post-Mao leaders implemented germinated out of soils tilled and mulched by Mao’s institutional and ideological legacy.

Under Mao, the CCP had to navigate delicate and complex challenges. They faced external threats from the West, dealt with excruciating internal conflicts, got sunk into economic crises, but surmounted them all. It was the resilience acquired in these turbulent times that allowed the flexibility of change that saw the CCP dismiss Mao’s collectivist policies and embark on freer market reforms.

Moreover, the framework of ideology and rhetoric that reformers applied to maintain and continue the socialist revolution in China was critical to Mao’s legacy.

Mao’s ideas and practices as a guerrilla can also be traced in the establishment of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in the 1980s. One can see the tactics of experiment, flexibility and adaptability in the way the SEZs were operated, with cities like Shenzhen working as laboratories in which foreign investments were tested, private enterprises were nursed, and export-led growth was first risked before it was scaled nationwide.

This is how economic instability was avoided and instead poverty was reduced, GDP growth was sustained, and China was able to integrate into the world economy without incident. It is not difficult to see consistency in how Mao attempted to industrialise China’s rural areas during the Great Leap Forward with the model of SEZs, which experimented with localised economic reforms, although with the necessary modifications.

We should not fail to analyse the paradox of Mao Zedong’s complex legacy because of his weaknesses and mistakes. History is more complex than that. It is highly possible that the mistakes of a leader play a critical role in the success of her or his successor.

And when this happens, one cannot distinguish or remove the “mistakes” from the “success.” This is true of Mao’s legacy. It is hard to imagine the economic success and political resilience of China without the foundation laid by Mao’s ideas and practices, even those judged by history as disastrous failures.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Development Watch Centre