Standard texts on Maoist China often describe its regime as having a centralized and omnipresent party organization, a hierarchical bureaucracy, and a nomenklatura personnel system, and its economy as a planned, command system with collectivized agriculture, state-owned industries, rationing of food staples and consumer goods, nonexistent labor, capital, and land markets, a repressed service sector, and goods shunned by domestic consumers at home and international buyers abroad. There was no autonomous civil society—religion was managed and subservient to the state, education and research institutes were run not by academicians but party cadres, and film and literature had only Stakhanovite workers, patriotic fighters, and selfless party members as heroes. Maoist China was a Communist nation, a Leninist party state with a Stalinist economy. Where basic political, economic, and social institutions are concerned, it is indistinguishable from Soviet Russia, as the two Communist powers share the same basic genetic traits. Such a focus on genus characteristics to the exclusion of individual traits implies not only a rejection of the possibility of mutation in political evolution, but also a denial of the sovereignty and individual identity of unique political systems.
Drawing from work presented at an international conference in 2007, coeditors Thomas P. Bernstein and Hua-yu Li place their analytical foci not on the genus but on the individual level. China was not a passive learner but an active and discriminating borrower, sorting the Soviet experience into parts that it wanted to emulate and segments that it intended to avoid. Covering a large spectrum, the seven-part volume includes three chapters on Sino-Soviet relations, two on ideological and military influence, three on the economy, four on science and education, two each on social relations and the arts, and concludes with three chapters on the reform era.
The effectiveness of Chinese learning from the Soviet Union depends on what China had, what it needed, and what the Soviet Union was willing and able to offer. As in organ transplants, success is contingent not only on Samaritan goodwill, but also on whether the donor and recipient are genetically identical, or at least anatomically compatible. Success stories appear to be more plentiful in popular culture and social mores; Russian films and female movie stars captured high box-office returns and the public psyche in the 1950s, and the classic Stakhanovite novel, How the Steel Was Tempered, remained a best-seller throughout the prereform period. Soviet conceptions of gender economic equality, in particular—equal pay for women and men and the promotion of women to high-status positions—appear to have survived the vicissitudes of political history and found greater reception in China than Western ideas of women's liberation.
As one moves up the policy ladder where stakes were higher, Sino-Soviet relations, party and bureaucratic politics in the two capitals and local governments, and the personal relations between Mao, Stalin, and Khrushchev often trumped dispassionate calculations of economic rationality and national interests. Soviet transplants were more readily received and appreciated in the early 1950s, as China embarked on its First Five-Year Plan and prepared for agricultural collectivization. The honeymoon did not last long, when China's policy of “leaning to one side” was replaced by more frequent calls for self-reliance and less mechanical learning from the Soviet Union.
The increasing divergence was attributable to the differences in their revolutionary legacies and revolutionary age. Urban-based Soviet Communism adopted a heavy-industry-first policy, bureaucratic state-farms, and formalistic rule-based, professional military, while rural-based Chinese Communism preferred greater investments in agriculture, mass mobilization in communes, and the egalitarian, voluntaristic, and ideological People's Army model. Moscow and Beijing were not on the same page because they were on different sides of the generation gap. Like the ex-hippie dad who failed to convince his teenage son not to smoke weed, youthful adventurism often triumphed over elderly wisdom, as when China chose to downplay material incentives upheld by the Soviets, or to accelerate its agricultural collectivization schedule while Russia aborted it. Cognitive mechanisms of learning theory were also at play. The inconsistency among socialization agents weakens the message for the learner, as when the dispute between Stalin and Bukharin diminished the persuasiveness of the efficacy of the Soviet model of agrarian development, or when the early adoption followed by subsequent rejection of Lysenko genetics and Michurin biology in Russia led to the downfall of the false science in China.
Both the authors and the research in this volume are products of the postcommunist and reform era in Russia and China, respectively. Sources include memoirs and biographies of top Chinese and Soviet leaders and foreign affairs officials, unpublished documents for internal distribution, the Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, U.S. State Department papers, the Hungarian National Archive, and provincial archives in China that have become accessible to international scholars only in the reform period. Many of the authors are bilingual or trilingual scholars who have done research in one or both nations, with teaching or research appointments in North America, Western Europe, and Australia. They are institutionally based in the United States, China, Taiwan, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Hungary. Around half of the authors of the nineteen chapters are historians by training, with the rest from political science, sociology, and literature. The book project itself is a great example of international and interdisciplinary learning.
