Брежнев и Сталин в китайской советологии 1990-х гг.

Apart from Brezhnev, another Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had become the subject of avid study in 1990s China. After Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour in early 1992, China began to reflect on its past inefficient socialist economic system, for the take-off of a new wave of reforms after the backlash of Tiananmen. In late 1992, the new CCP Secretary General Jiang Zemin delivered an opening speech at the 14th CCP Congress. He remarked: This new revolution is not going to change the nature of our socialist system; instead, it is a self-improvement and a further development of socialism. However, it is also not a simple repair to our economic structure, but a fundamental reform of it. The past economic system was born under the special historical circumstances, and it had once played a key role in our socialist construction. However, as time goes on, the system becomes increasingly unfit for the requirement of modernization (Jiang, 2006: 212).

Jiang’s words revealed that after Tiananmen and the perdition of European communism, China had no intention to change its political system to adjust to the post-communist world. However, the CCP was eager to tackle its economic institution in order to make the regime more viable after the worldwide crisis of socialism.

Encouraged by the official announcements, Li Zongyu (李宗禹), a researcher in the Institute of Studies of the International Communist Movement at the CCP Central Bureau for the Compilation and Translation, reactivated the attacks on Stalin in late 1992. In his article published in Dangdai shijieyu shehui zhuyi (当代世界与社会主义 Contemporary World and Socialism), the author made the point that all problems of the former Soviet Union had originated from the Stalinist model after Lenin. He contended that such a model had overly excluded the capitalist elements and obstructed the productive forces and economic development, when Soviet socialism was still in its infancy – thus contributing to the subsequent dissolution of the state. In his opinion, both Deng’s theory of building socialism with Chinese characteristics and the goal of the 14th Congress in establishing a socialist market economy, were “a breakaway from Stalin’s formulaic understanding of Marxism and the highly centralized plan economic system founded by Stalin, respectively” (Li, 1992: 23).

In his book published by CASS in 1994, the well-known Soviet historian and independent scholar Shen Zhihua (沈志华), by quoting the classics of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, pointed out that socialist agriculture needs to be privatized and complemented by capitalist management methods, thereby criticizing Stalin’s notion that only collectivization was socialist in nature and the state was the owner of the land (Shen, 1994: 21). Throughout the book, Shen stated unequivocally that building socialism needs to be guided by the line of state capitalism. He argued strongly that Stalin had overturned Lenin’s liberal approach to Soviet agriculture initiated during the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1922-1928) period. Such a move paved the path to not only the subsequent disastrous rural famine in the 1930s, but also the final collapse of Soviet economic and political system in 1991 (Shen, 1994).

Afterwards, throughout the 1990s, numerous articles appeared in various academic journals and studied the Stalinist model for helpful lessons in building socialism in China. Most of them resembled the tone of Li Zongyu’s article; they were criticizing Stalinism as a distortion of Leninism and socialism, the origin of leftism in the international communist movement, and a fundamental cause of the Soviet demise (Zhao, 1993: 3-9; Yu, 1994: 64-69; Zheng, 1995: 7-12; Zuo, 1996: 57-63). In the late 1990s, several articles generated new arguments and went further to attack the Stalinist model. Unlike some erstwhile Chinese writings, which justified that the Stalinist economic institution was absolutely essential during the period of war, but not necessary in the time of peace (Wang, 1989: 58; Kong, 1990: 29-34; Zhang, 1990: 188), Wu Kequan (武克全), a researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, dismissed the historical inevitability of the Stalinist model and concluded that such a highly militarized but inefficient system was by no means a measure of building socialism under any circumstances (Wu, 1998: 13-17).