Between 1949 and 1956, China intensively emulated Soviet experiences in its quest to establish socialism. Starting in 1953, roughly 10,000 Soviet advisors (or 11,000, according to Shen Zhihua in Sulian zhuanjia zai Zhongguo) were dispatched to help the Chinese in this quest, and to teach them the methods the USSR had used in its transition. These advisors served in nearly every branch of the economy and other places throughout China. The Soviet Union also sent money, industrial plants and other physical assistance. This book brilliantly shows that although the Soviet advisors were involved heavily in China for only a few years, their impact was deep and long-lasting, as were the effects of China's dependence on the Soviet model.
This excellent book highlights and largely fills in many gaps in the history of the Sino-Soviet relationship; it also indicates the numerous areas still in need of study. Spanning roughly 60 years of interaction, imitation and rejection, 20 scholars from China, the US and Europe delve into various aspects of China's adoption of the Soviet model. (Including a couple of Russian scholars would have enhanced this collection.) The most intriguing years, those of the “friendship” in the 1950s, occupy the bulk of the articles, with some attention paid to the later years.
As Bernstein points out in his succinct introduction, Soviet influence underwent various waves in China, from being viewed as positive and helpful in the early years, to Mao's advice that China avoid copying the USSR “indiscriminatly” in 1956, to being a “negative teaching experience” (p. 2) for China during the 1960s, to a renewal of interest in the early Gorbachev period, to again becoming a negative example as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. These trends would be interesting enough as they stand, but the particular case of the Sino-Soviet relationship is notable because China actively sought to emulate the Soviet model. The Stalinist experience in China was quite profound and, as several scholars (You Ji, Goikhman, Rohlf, Jian Zang, to name a few) in this volume document, long-lasting.
This volume is an important addition to the literature because of its focus on the Soviet model, the definition of which remains unclear and ambiguous. At the macro level, of course, there was no question that the Chinese accepted the Stalinist methods of socialist construction, including state ownership and central planning. But at the micro level, the Chinese found themselves making judgments when implementing the model in practice. Bernstein suggests three variants. The first is the early Leninist idea, a relatively moderate approach of gradual change for Russia's peasantry. The second is the Stalinist revolutionary model, taken from the coercive years 1929–34; and the third was the bureaucratic socialism that existed in the late Stalin period. Questions and problems inevitably ensued “on the ground” for the Soviet advisors who came with their 1950s familiarity of socialism, when they had to interact with other possible versions.
Many of the authors in this volume address this issue of contested emulation. As Lorenz Luthi asserts, “The Sino-Soviet relationship rose on the basis of their shared ideology, yet fell as a result of interpretive disagreements about it” (p. 27). Hua-yu Li details this dispute in her admirable piece on China's use of Stalin's The Short Course, which was the most influential book in instilling Stalinism in Chinese Party members in the 1950s. After Khrushchev's 1953 de-Stalinization campaign rocked the socialist world, the USSR repudiated The Short Course, but the Chinese never rejected the old textbook and continued to use it. China's profound ideological transformation based on Stalin's teachings continued, and Stalinism reverberated in later years as the first generation became teachers and spread the word.
Xiaojia Hou's article nicely illuminates this complexity in China's development of socialist agriculture. “At times there was more than one Soviet model available; even a single model appeared in more than one version; even one version was given different interpretations” (p. 189). This picture was confused even more by Mao's habit of saying one thing and doing another: for instance, the moderate approach to agricultural development was abandoned in 1953 with the imposition of mutual aid teams (Bernstein, p. 10). The same thing ensued in the transition to socialism, which Mao said would be attained in 1967, but the “High Tide” of 1955–57, China completed collectivization and socialization of private businesses. Conversely, state agricultural farms were set up bureaucratically, relying heavily on Soviet blueprints for farming methods current in the USSR of the 1950s (Rohlf, p. 197).
In industry, as Kong Hanbing points out, the Chinese adopted the Soviet model wholeheartedly, sending a delegation led by Zhou Enlai to the USSR for eight months during 1952–53 to study how to draw up a five-year plan. Their goal was to be able to use the 156 plants the Soviet Union was sending and integrate them into a centrally planned economy. Miin-ling Yu's superb article compares the Soviet Stakhanovism movement emanating from the 1930s, with the model labourer movement in China. She finds that the Chinese largely followed the Soviet 1930s experience, except that Mao was more preoccupied with political consciousness than Stalin.
Donghui He discusses China's efforts to mould the new socialist man in China by the translation and mass printing of the 1934 Stalinist classic How the Steel was Tempered. This had been widely read and used as a propaganda device to bind individuals to both the Soviet Union and to the Chinese state. Tina Mai Chen's article looks at the importation of Soviet film in the 1950s through the mid-1970s, and discusses the importance of cinema in the Sino-Soviet relationship in defining the role of women, and in reinforcing the legitimacy of socialism in both countries. Most of these films came from the third model of developed socialism, spreading Soviet middle-class ideas and images in a country that was still rather undeveloped.
This volume's other very welcome contribution focuses on the importance of Soviet experts and exchange programmes for the development of Chinese socialism. Several scholars parse the Sino-Soviet relationship at the personal level. Izabella Goikhman looks at academic interactions between the USSR and China in the 1950s, finding that China's gains in educational structures were long-lasting and mostly positive. Douglas Stiffler's nuanced account of the relationship between Soviet and Chinese professors at Chinese People's University 1950–57 emphasizes the political and historical dimensions to China's borrowing. Elizabeth McGuire writes a very interesting piece on the Chinese students who studied in the Soviet Union in the 1948–66 period, negotiating the more personal aspects of the Sino-Soviet relationship.
And finally, several fine pieces present topics ranging from the impact of Lysenkoism in China (Schneider), the role of the Changchun Railway in Sino-Soviet relations (Shengfa Zhang) to the reform era and the impact of the USSR's collapse on China (Rozman, Minglang Zhou, Guan Guihai and Vamos).
In sum, the sheer scale and scope of the effort of the transmission of the Soviet model to China mean it constitutes one of the largest transfers of its kind in recent history. The topic certainly deserves such a large and significant volume. This book is a fantastic resource for professors and students alike. It is a major work that will help scholars around the world to better understand the Soviet model's enduring legacy and how it affected and will continue to affect modern China.
