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Selected Works #2
Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1975-1982)
English, Chinese (translation)
418 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 29, 2021
Just contrast Deng's clarity of vision with the inane, incoherent ramblings of Gorbachev in the mid-1980s and you have a pretty decent indication as to why 'reform' went so badly in the USSR and so well in China. Deng: maintain socialism, maintain the working class orientation of the state, don't denigrate your own history, don't split the ruling party, don't unleash forces of nationalist separatism, do take a science-based experimental approach to fixing the economy, do ensure everyone's living standards continue to increase. Gorbachev: the opposite.
April 7, 2024
Anyone doubting Deng’s commitment to socialism would do well to read through the second volume of selected works. Words and deeds do not always align, of course, but words indeed matter, and Deng speaks plainly. “The Present Situation and the Tasks Before Us”, a 1980 speech that was also published separately as a pamphlet in China, is probably the singular highlight in terms of sussing out Deng’s position on things, though many other works are also essential for filling in the blanks, such as his “Remarks on Successive Drafts of the ‘Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party…’” (the Resolution being a key party text of the Deng era), and his Q&A with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci.
Overall what we can see is a determined focus on two things — party building and efficiency, and rapid growth of the productive forces. Vulgar Maoists and Western Marxists will point to the second thing as the proof that Deng was a capitalist, but in his own words we can see the opposite. Many of the texts are borderline repetitive as he repeats many of his concepts to various parties, internal and external. But we also get pieces in every text that help illuminate Deng’s underlying beliefs. Building the productive forces was key for Deng in realizing true prosperity for all. And if you are indeed a Marxist, the question cannot be ignored. For Deng, economic reforms of all sorts were on the table, and the ones implemented were always done on an “experimental” basis, in one or two provinces first, and if they did not produce results, they would be abandoned as practice. Is this not a scientific socialist way of doing things? Deng certainly thought so.
And to the other focus, party building. A lot of the actual text has to do with essentially bureaucratic reform. Cutting inefficient departmental cadre sizes, organizing new consolidated departments, finding new and younger cadres. But the subtext for someone involved in party building work in the West will find useful information here.
A couple criticisms are apparent— Deng focuses a lot on “Lin Biao and the Gang of Four” here in laying the blame for the chaos of the cultural revolution. But he never really lays out any kind of theoretical or philosophical reasoning against them. He calls their way of thinking anarchist, petty-bourgeois, and feudalist at various times, and I would argue he’s on to something with all three, but to my recollection he doesn’t actually elucidate on the reasons why except for some bits on the feudalist angle in his comments on the Resolution of 1981 drafts. I would have liked for him to expand on that more. It’s possible it was in the Chinese Marxist journals du jour, but we don’t get it here, unfortunately. My other criticism would be China’s 1979 “counter-attack in defense” on Vietnam. In general, Deng’s continuation of Mao’s line on the Soviet Union being their number one enemy (and thus Vietnam, their ally, was their puppet), I have huge problems with, post-Stalin revisionism and historical nihilism of the USSR and all. It’s just hard to believe in light of the atrocities the US got up to during the Cold War that anyone would ever reach that conclusion. Of course, a lot of these things weren’t out in the open. But still. Deng even says in one speech that the US are not hegemonists like the USSR are! That was possibly to a US ambassador or something like that, but good grief. This was to me a huge mistake of the PRC, arguably their biggest in terms of theoretical clarity anyway, but this stuff was started with Mao, so it shouldn’t be some kind of red flag to Maoists like it is. And in fact I would even go so far as to say that it’s a consequence of the ultraleftist policies in foreign politics that began under Mao.
Overall what we can see is a determined focus on two things — party building and efficiency, and rapid growth of the productive forces. Vulgar Maoists and Western Marxists will point to the second thing as the proof that Deng was a capitalist, but in his own words we can see the opposite. Many of the texts are borderline repetitive as he repeats many of his concepts to various parties, internal and external. But we also get pieces in every text that help illuminate Deng’s underlying beliefs. Building the productive forces was key for Deng in realizing true prosperity for all. And if you are indeed a Marxist, the question cannot be ignored. For Deng, economic reforms of all sorts were on the table, and the ones implemented were always done on an “experimental” basis, in one or two provinces first, and if they did not produce results, they would be abandoned as practice. Is this not a scientific socialist way of doing things? Deng certainly thought so.
And to the other focus, party building. A lot of the actual text has to do with essentially bureaucratic reform. Cutting inefficient departmental cadre sizes, organizing new consolidated departments, finding new and younger cadres. But the subtext for someone involved in party building work in the West will find useful information here.
A couple criticisms are apparent— Deng focuses a lot on “Lin Biao and the Gang of Four” here in laying the blame for the chaos of the cultural revolution. But he never really lays out any kind of theoretical or philosophical reasoning against them. He calls their way of thinking anarchist, petty-bourgeois, and feudalist at various times, and I would argue he’s on to something with all three, but to my recollection he doesn’t actually elucidate on the reasons why except for some bits on the feudalist angle in his comments on the Resolution of 1981 drafts. I would have liked for him to expand on that more. It’s possible it was in the Chinese Marxist journals du jour, but we don’t get it here, unfortunately. My other criticism would be China’s 1979 “counter-attack in defense” on Vietnam. In general, Deng’s continuation of Mao’s line on the Soviet Union being their number one enemy (and thus Vietnam, their ally, was their puppet), I have huge problems with, post-Stalin revisionism and historical nihilism of the USSR and all. It’s just hard to believe in light of the atrocities the US got up to during the Cold War that anyone would ever reach that conclusion. Of course, a lot of these things weren’t out in the open. But still. Deng even says in one speech that the US are not hegemonists like the USSR are! That was possibly to a US ambassador or something like that, but good grief. This was to me a huge mistake of the PRC, arguably their biggest in terms of theoretical clarity anyway, but this stuff was started with Mao, so it shouldn’t be some kind of red flag to Maoists like it is. And in fact I would even go so far as to say that it’s a consequence of the ultraleftist policies in foreign politics that began under Mao.
May 28, 2023
Alludes to Tiananmen Square, but never addresses it directly. Go figure. But yeah, I like Deng, he showed a lot of leadership.
August 11, 2023
We must say that without a realistic approach by Deng Xiaoping, it is impossible for China to become what it is today. His concern about economic, political, and stability reform made China take a different path from a common communist goal. Rather than taking a full scale of support for the communist revolution in this entire world like the Soviet Union, Deng focused on how to make his country prosperous. This book will share with you how ambitious Deng Xiaoping was for his dream, which he called socialist modernization, especially because this book gathers all the selected works in the most turbulent time in China, which is after the Cultural Revolution.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews