MIM NOTES No. 197,		November 1, 1999

Bourgeois reporting of China's 50th anniversary used to bash 
revolution History disproves reactionary accounts

by MC12

The bourgeois media and the counterrevolutionary regime rehashed 
their line on China during the celebrations of China's 50th 
anniversary. A review of articles in the major U.$. newspapers 
shows that almost nothing new was said. In contrast, MIM takes the 
opportunity to review some of the unprecedented accomplishments of 
the revolution (1949-1976), and the fallout from the capitalist 
return to power after 1976.

The basic story as told by the various mouthpieces for imperialism 
is that the Maoist era in China was marred by "descents into 
collective folly" (1), including especially the Great Leap Forward 
of the late 1950s and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 
(GPCR) of 1966-1976. The GPCR, which represented the farthest 
advance toward communism ever, is attacked as "a cruel and 
irrational phase of Chinese development" (2), with reference to 
"the death and terror of the Cultural Revolution" (3), and "the 
madness of the Cultural Revolution."(4)

In Chapter 2 of the imperialist story, calmer heads prevailed in 
the late 1970s, "restoring" capitalist market principles, 
"freeing" the peasants from communes and cooperatives, and leading 
to unprecedented economic growth. So the New York Times, for 
example, says: "Virtually all the economic progress of the past 
half century has occurred since 1978, when Deng Xiaoping discarded 
the precepts of Maoist socialism, opened China's economy to the 
world and liberated the entrepreneurial energies of the Chinese 
people."(5) And the Toronto Star concludes: "the Chinese people 
today are freer, wealthier and happier than ever before."(1)

With awesome yet unsurprising disdain for any standard of 
evidence, they repeat the conventional imperialist wisdom: "The 
country has traveled a huge distance since [the revolution], a 
half-century in which Marxism became the mold of a new China, one 
that sought to restore the glories and power of the old imperial 
China but stumbled time and again, unable for decades to find the 
politico-economic model that would deliver. It has begun to find a 
way now, and in the last two decades, particularly, China has been 
delivering a better life to many of its people. ... Deng Xiaoping, 
Mao's successor, succeeded in delivering pragmatic changes 
directed toward a life less onerous for everyday Chinese. Mao put 
China through more than 20 years of wrenching political oppression 
and crippling economic experimentation."(6)

There is a footnote of concern to the capitalist era, which is the 
lack of democracy under the capitalist Communist Party of 1976 to 
the present. The San Francisco Chronicle put this idea in racist 
terms -- "China should evolve from its authoritarian roots" (7) -- 
as if shedding "authoritarianism" is part of some march of 
progress from yellow monkey to Amerikkkan Man.



Real Maoist progress

At the time of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, two out of every 
ten babies born died in their first year of life -- or a rate 200 
out of every 1,000 live births.(8) By 1976 -- the year that 
capitalists came to power again -- the rate was about 46 per 
1,000.(9) So the infant death rate fell 77% in the Maoist years.

What does this Maoist-era improvement mean for the critics of 
socialism in China? It means they don't care about the deaths of 
millions of children.

Exact data are hard to come by, and different people have 
different estimates, but MIM did a small simulation to illustrate 
the effect of cutting infant mortality so effectively for so large 
a country. With an infant mortality rate in 1972 of 60 (9), we 
estimate 1.2 million infants died that year, out of almost 20 
million births in a population of 850 million. Now, if the infant 
mortality rate would have still been 200, as it was before 1949, 
3.9 million infants would have died. That's a difference of 2.7 
million infants' lives saved in that year alone.

Still, you might say that even in the non-socialist countries 
there were some declines in infant mortality from 1949 to 1972. 
So, let's say China's infant mortality rate was the same as 
India's in 1972, which was 139. In that case, 2.7 million infants 
would have died, which means that Maoist-led socialism still saved 
the lives of 1.5 million infants in that year alone.(10)

There are a lot of ways to do this kind of exercise, but there is 
no getting around the simple fact that by slashing infant 
mortality the Maoist-led Chinese revolution saved millions and 
millions of lives. Further, infant mortality is a commonly used 
measure of well-being, because it also identifies the state of 
wimmin's well-being, nutrition, medical care, the state of 
infrastructure for the people and education, all of which greatly 
affect children's survival.

Those public health specialists who pay attention have long known 
of the great advances under Mao. "In the late 1950s, when China 
was a very poor nation, it developed an innovative system of 
medical care. Each community or town organized funds from the 
government, households, and communes to finance village health 
stations and 'barefoot doctors' to deliver preventive and basic 
health services to more than 90 percent of the population."(11) 
This was a socialist model of health care, based not on protecting 
the salaries of specialized experts at the expense of basic care 
for all, but instead on attacking at the roots the most imminent 
threats to the people's health. "Between 1952 and 1982 [with most 
of the change happening before 1976 -MC12], China reduced the rate 
of infant mortality from 250 to 40 deaths per 1000 live births, 
decreased the prevalence of malaria from 5.5 percent to 0.3 
percent of the population, and increased life expectancy from 35 
to 68 years."(11)



Real capitalist reversal

By 1998, the infant death rate was estimated to be 45 per 1,000 by 
the U.S. Census Bureau (12), no better than it was when Mao died. 
The World Bank estimates it was 42 in 1980, and fell to 32 in 
1997.(13) In any event, various sources agree that the rate of 
improvement was much slower, or nonexistent, in the 1980s and 
1990s.(11, 9)

Under the Maoist-led socialist system, health centers were 
supported by the government, and patients paid if they could. But 
starting in the 1980s, government support was cut way back for 
health care. Most services now have to be paid for by patients, 
and only 25% of the people have health insurance (11), down from 
71% in 1981 (14). A recent study found that, for 420 million rural 
people, a single hospitalization would cost more than the average 
annual income. A detailed study of 30 poor counties in the 1990s 
found that 30% of the villages had no doctor at all, 28% of the 
people did not get health care even when they were sick because of 
the cost, and more than half of those who were specifically 
advised to go to a hospital by a health practitioner did not -- 
because of the cost.(11) As in the bad old days in China, a health 
crisis is all it takes to drop hundreds of millions of people into 
complete poverty.

The privatization of health care -- and the replacement of the 
collective farming system with family-based farming -- drove many 
former barefoot doctors out of health care work. They could no 
longer afford it, and had to return to farming to feed their 
individual families. The number of health care workers increased 
in the cities, where they could be paid more, and decreased in the 
countryside. In the 1980s, the number of township clinics fell 
14%, and the number of primary health workers fell 36%.(14) An 
absolute drop in the number of primary health care workers and 
clinics is an astounding monument to the disregard for the 
people's health of the current regime.

As the cooperative health care system was destroyed -- the 
percentage of villages covered by the system fell from 85 in 1978 
to less than 10 in 1993 -- other problems emerged. In particular, 
with health care centers forced to pay their own bills directly, 
many have taken to over-prescribing the medicines that are most 
profitable for them to sell, often without proper diagnosis or 
other treatment.(15)

One of the most important effects of all this has been the 
widening of inequalities in the health system. A study of height-
for-age of young children -- a general indicator of health -- 
found that between 1987 and 1992, the average height for urban 
children increased much more than it did for rural children. In 
1990, they found that 38% of rural children had "moderate" 
stunting of growth, and 15% had "severe" stunting, compared to 10% 
and 3% of urban children.(16) In terms of mortality, rural infants 
were already 1.7-times more likely to die than urban children in 
1981, but by 1993 they were 2.9-times more likely to die. In the 
30 poor counties studied, infant mortality actually increased -- 
from about 50 to 72 -- from the late 1970s to the late 1980s.(14)



Stabbing socialism -- and

the people -- in the back

One slogan used for the 50th anniversary was: "Adhere to the basic 
economic system with public ownership dominant and diverse forms 
of ownership developing side by side, and 'to each according to 
his work' as the main distribution form and with other forms as 
well."(4) Those diverse forms of ownership and other forms of 
distribution is how the capitalist regime describes the millions 
of Chinese wimmin who work for Gap, Nike, Radio Shack, IBM, and 
many others, often 12-hour days, for 25 cents an hour. Many suffer 
corporal punishment, and sometimes "beatings, insults, arbitrary 
fines, body searches, forced overtime, restricted use of 
bathrooms, few or no holidays, and embezzlement of their 
wages."(17)

For the first time President Jiang Zemin, age 71, displayed a 
giant poster showing his picture in a national day parade.(18) 
Flanked by Premier Zhu Rongji and former Premier Li Peng, Jiang 
also made a point of wearing a gray "Mao suit." Floats in the 
parade represented the Mao era (not including the GPCR), the 
economic reforms begun under Deng Xiaoping and now Jiang's 
leadership, which in reality is a direct continuation of the Deng-
led counterrevolution. Jiang said: "Let us hold high the great 
banner of Marxism, Leninism, 'Mao Tse-tung Thought' and 'Deng 
Xiaoping Theory' and march bravely toward our sublime objectives. 
China will surely emerge as a prosperous, strong, democratic and 
culturally advanced modern socialist country."(19) In feigned 
celebration of Mao, they issued a new 100-yuan banknote with Mao's 
portrait.(20)

The current counterrevolutionary regime in China pays lip service 
to Mao the person -- who is of course still loved by many Chinese 
-- but not Maoism the scientific socialist practice that brought 
China out from under imperialism and pushed closer toward 
communism than ever gone before, or since. Together with the 
imperialist media, they are rewriting the history of China to 
claim credit for the advances in basic conditions that came from 
Maoism, while undermining and attacking the revolutionary changes 
in the structure of society that were required to bring those 
changes about.

The Maoist cat is out of the bag, and revolutionaries all around 
the world carry on the great legacy of the revolution.

Notes:
1. Toronto Star, October 2, 1999, Saturday, Edition 1.
2. Washington Post editorial, October 3, 1999, p. B6.
3. New York Times, October 3, 1999. Section 4, p. 4.
4. Toronto Star, October 3, 1999, Sunday, Edition 1.
5. The New York Times, October 1, 1999. p. A24. Editorial Desk.
6. Los Angeles Times, October 1, 1999. p. B8. Editorial Writers 
Desk.
7. San Francisco Chronicle, September 28, 1999. p. A28; 
Editorials.
8. Victor W. Sidel and Ruth Sidel, Serve the people; observations 
on medicine in the People's Republic of China. New York: Josiah 
Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1973.
9. Mei-Yu Yu and Rosemary Sarri. "Women's health status and gender 
inequality in China." Social Science and Medicine, v. 45, no. 12 
(1997). pp. 1885-1898.
10. To do this simulation, we estimated the birth rate to be 23 in 
1972 (by interpolation from the 1964 rate and the 1998 as supplied 
by the U.S. Census Bureau's International Programs Center). We 
applied that birth rate to the 1972 total population (estimated to 
be 853 million by interpolation from the 1970 and 1980 population 
figures supplied by Census). The 1972 India infant mortality rate 
is from Sidel and Sidel (op cit., p. 258).
11. William C. L Hsiao and Liu, Yuanli. "Economic Reform and 
Health -- Lessons from China." New England Journal of Medicine 
(NEJM) 1996; 335: 430-432. August 8, 1996. For more of this 
information, see Hsiao W.C. "Transformation of health care in 
China." NEJM 1984;310:932-6; and Hsiao W.C., "The Chinese health 
care system: lessons for other nations," Social Science and 
Medicine 1995;41:1047-55.
12. U.S. Census Bureau International Programs Center, 
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/.
13. World Bank World Development Report 2000 at 
http://www.worldbank.org/wdr/2000.
14. Yuanli Lio, William C. Hsiao and Karen Eggleston. "Equity in 
health and health care: the Chinese experience." Social Science 
and Medicine, vol. 49 (1999), pp. 1349-1356.
15. Gerald Bloom. "Primary health care meets the market in China 
and Vietnam." Health Policy v. 44 (1998). pp. 233-52.
16. Shen, Tiefu; Habicht, Jean-Pierre; Chang, Ying. "Effect of 
Economic Reforms on Child Growth in Urban and Rural Areas of 
China." NEJM 1996; 335: 400-406, August 8, 1996.
17. Medea Benjamin (founding director of Global Exchange), San 
Francisco Chronicle, October 1, 1999. p. A23.
18. Atlanta Journal and Constitution, October 2, 1999. p. 1B.
19. Los Angeles Times, October 1, 1999. p. A24.
20. Ottawa Citizen, September 30, 1999. p. D1