China's Economy in the Year of the Cockerel

Abstract

The Year of the Cockerel (starting in February 1981) seems a good time to reflect on China's record past, present and future. Officially, of course, the lunar cycle has been replaced by the secular calendar, but in the wide expanses of the Chinese countryside old traditional ways die hard. In the family circle, the beliefs of the ancestors are still respected and the days around the lunar New Year and the Spring festival are still celebrated, even though a day's work-points can be earned by those who prefer to attend the public functions on formal occasions. Of good intentions there were many at the start of the Year of the Cockerel one of the twelve animal symbols of old such as devotion to work and scholarship, industry and punctuality, bravery and generosity. Those interested in continuity and change could not but register certain similarities between the old virtues and the modern aims. Today, more than during most of the last twenty years, the old and the new intermingle. The decade preceding Mao's death is dismissed officially as a decade of unmitigated disaster, and approval of the early years following the revolution of 1949 knows no bounds. The outside observer may be forgiven if he remembers the praises and the condemnations of the recent past and allows his judgement to be swayed towards the middle ground. The so-called Cultural Revolution (now invariably put in quotation marks and no longer printed with capital letters) has been extended in the official records from May 1966 beyond the ninth Party congress (April 1969), when it was originally said to have ended, to October 1976 when the great helmsman was no longer in charge. Its excesses were at times even worse than the public records tell ; but there were also successes which are sometimes drowned nowadays by the accounts of individual horror and mass hysteria. Western admirers of the Maoist era will consider it unfair to be reminded of their past eulogies; but open critics of the last decade or so of Chinese history should beware of saying smugly: 'we told you so'. The reality of China yesterday, today and tomorrow is too complex to fill a canvas in mere black and white; there is an awful lot that is very much grey on grey, though those in search of a new credibility and respectability may not see it that way.