Socialist Transformation and Economic Miracle

Abstract

If change in the quality of Chinese Man betokens change in the quality of his life, the ‘socialist transformation’ which the Chinese Communist Party proclaims for the former ought to have wrought profound change in the latter. Analogous change is implied in talk of ‘the economic miracle’ in Taiwan and Hong Kong and Singapore — less certainly in Southeast Asian countries where the Chinese are a minority. Under Mao Tsê-tung’s 1954 Constitution (no longer in force), the tactics of socialist transformation were economic — the Marxian ‘unleashing of the forces of production captive under the old, capitalist, regime’, especially in agriculture; but the strategic aim behind socialist transformation was social engineering to produce the new Socialist Man, presumably in the engineer’s (Mao’s) own somehow pre-transformed image. I share the opinion of Professor Lifton¹ that Mao worried over the ‘immortality’ of his social achievement; but I would go further than he does.

‘Not till the granaries are full should one talk about moral uplift.’

(Ancient Chinese maxim)