Routledge China and the Crisis of Marxism-Leninism

Is the failure of communism in China inevitable? So argue the authors of China and the Crisis of Marxism-Leninism, who believe that Mao’s programs were utopian fantasies that greatly aggravated the incurable flaws of the Stalinist order, now eroding worldwide. At the time of the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 China was in a state of disarray, and the new leadership believed that only drastic economic and institutional reforms could salvage the communist order. Thus, Deng Xiaoping, without abandoning Marx’s value system nor Lenin’s totalitarianism, introduced a reform program that outlined the parameters of acceptable changes. In the economic sphere, the government would maintain party-state control but permit contractual relationship with producers of goods, first in the agricultural and then in the industrial sector. In the political sphere, it would decentralize control within the party between central and local authority and between policy decisionmaking and execution. Deng’s measures not only failed but finally sparked a protest by students, who were soon joined by factory workers, office employees, newspaper staff, and other urbanites–all told over a million demonstrators in Beijing and eighty other cities and towns throughout China. Even some soldiers and police joined the uprising, many of them communists who wanted a genuine break with the past–“freedom and democracy” was their key slogan. However, the protesters, with their peaceful demands for change, were brutally suppressed by military forces armed with tanks and machine guns. The failure of Deng’s policies is the focus of China and the Crisis of Marxism-Leninism, written by four authorities on Chinese communism. The book is of foremost importance not only for China specialists but for all Westerners who seek to understand the world-shaking events that originated in China. Although the first bloody confrontation took place in Beijing, its impact has now spread to the rest of the communist worl