by SLAVOJ ZIZEK
The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor
Allen Lane, 302 pp, £25.00, June 2010, ISBN 978 1 84614 173 7
Khrushchev’s speech in 1956 denouncing Stalin’s crimes was a political act from which, as his biographer William Taubman put it, ‘the Soviet regime never fully recovered, and neither did he.’
…
Khrushchev was gambling that his (limited) confession would strengthen the Communist movement, and in the short term he was right: one should always remember that Khrushchev’s era was the last period of authentic Communist enthusiasm, of belief in the Communist project. When, during his visit to the US in 1959, he said to the US agriculture secretary, ‘Your grandchildren will live under Communism,’ he was stating the conviction of the entire Soviet nomenklatura. Even when Gorbachev attempted a more radical confrontation with the past (rehabilitations included Bukharin), Lenin remained unassailable, and Trotsky continued to be a non-person.
Compare these events with the Chinese way of breaking with the Maoist past. As Richard McGregor shows in The Party, Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reforms’ proceeded in a radically different way. In the organisation of the economy (and, up to a point, the culture), what is usually perceived as ‘Communism’ was abandoned, and the gates were opened to what, in the West, is called ‘liberalisation’: private property, the pursuit of profit, a life-style based on hedonist individualism etc. The Party maintained its hegemony, not through doctrinal orthodoxy (in official discourse, the Confucian notion of the Harmonious Society replaced practically all reference to Communism), but by securing the status of the Communist Party as the only guarantee of China’s stability and prosperity.
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