Revolutionary Nation-Building: The Chinese Model

Abstract

For two decades Chinese Communist leaders have been attempting to transform their vast underdeveloped country into a modern revolutionary state. This endeavour has been motivated by ideological convictions and nationalist ambitions which have become very powerful since the late 1950s. The strategy which has been followed, however, has been heavily influenced by apprehensions about problems of social control, posed in the context of doctrinal and political challenges at home and in the Socialist camp. Since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, in which power shifted from the party to military leaders professing a kind of Marxist-Leninist fundamentalism, a concern with manipulating the psychology of the masses and building up a totally committed revolutionary elite has dominated internal policy. The new authorities conceptualize nation-building primarily in terms of remoulding personalities in order to produce absolute conformity with the correct proletarian doctrine; this social transformation is felt to require profound hostility to bourgeois values, and on that account there is a determination to keep up what might be called a permanent purge, thus minimizing prospects for internal peace and order. In addition, there is a rather desperate zeal to keep down levels of sophistication, even at the cost of retrogressive educational changes, in order to facilitate unquestioning acceptance of the ideology and protect it from challenge. Because of these changes, internal disorders associated with the Cultural Revolution, and some unfriendly shifts in foreign policy, the regime's programme of development is making less favourable impressions in the rest of Asia than