In the Soviet Union, the Stalinist regime exhausted its potential several decades ago to accelerate economic growth and raise labor productivity by opening up new lands to cultivation and drawing peasants in large numbers out of the countryside into mining, oil extraction, and industrial production. A similar pattern holds true for the deformed and degenerated workers states of Eastern Europe, despite their varying histories and class structures. Only in Albania is more than 50 percent of the labor force engaged in agriculture. Elsewhere the percentage is less than a third of the labor force, usually far less.

In China, on the other hand, nearly three-quarters of the population still live in the countryside, and more than 90 percent did so as recently as the opening of the 1980s. So it is still possible in China to draw toilers off the land into the cities and industry on a large scale, raising the productivity of labor in this way.

Central to the industrialization of every modern nation is a transformation of relations between town and country, such that labor power is pulled into the factories. Capitalism has a very brutal way of doing this. Peasants' land is taken away from them. Their fields are fenced in and turned into grazing lands for herds of cattle and flocks of sheep owned by capitalist farmers. They lose traditional rights to the use of common lands, to forage for firewood, to hunt and fish. This process is accelerating in parts of Mexico today and lies behind the Chiapas resistance, for example.

Marx provides a good summary of how this happened in Britain, in the closing part of volume 1 of Capital. He chose chapter titles like "The expropriation of the agricultural population from the land," "Bloody legislation against the expropriated," "The genesis of the cap-italist farmer," and "The genesis of the industrial capitalist."  
 

The Chinese revolution of 1949

But doesn't China's class structure, then, make it much more like many other countries in the Third World, which also have huge reserve armies of labor in the countryside? The answer is no. That would be to ignore the central fact of history and the class struggle in China in this century: the revolution of 1949.

Coming out of World War II, China — above every country in the world — had been the apple of the eye of U.S. imperialism. In the wake of the Chinese revolution, an incipient fascist move-ment in the United States, spearheaded by Senator Joseph Mc-Car-thy and then-U.S. congressman Richard Nixon, began agitating around the question: "Who lost China?" But it was the wrong question. No one lost China. The Chinese took it — that was the real answer.

Through the Chinese revolution, the workers and peasants eliminated imperialist pillage and expropriated the emerging capitalist class in both agriculture and industry. These conquests made possible China's centralization as a modern nation, with a massive network of production and distribution that operates to a significant degree on a national scale. This is true despite all the distortions from forced collectivization of agriculture and Stalinist methods of economic planning and management of industry.

India is similar to China in many ways —not the least in its size, some 900 million people compared to China's 1.2 billion. More than 70 percent of the population of India lives in rural areas. Both countries experienced centuries of colonial domination and superexploitation (even if China maintained its formal independence through most of that period).

But India never had a socialist revolution. And that is a big difference. There will undoubtedly be a large expansion of both imperialist and domestic capital in India over the coming decade. But the capitalists will confront the fact that India has still never truly been formed as a modern, centralized nation-state with a unified national market. Commodities sell at completely different prices from one region of the country to the next. Products are taxed as they are transported internally across state borders, as they were prior to the bourgeois revolutions in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. India is still saddled with this legacy of precapitalist society and colonial exploitation that in China has been largely overcome through a massive workers and peasants revolution.

The manifestations of this class difference between China and India are tangible and dramatic. To this day, life expectancy in China is about ten years longer than in India; infant mortality is a third lower than in India; and the illiteracy rate in India is twice that in China.¹  
 

Massive migration to the cities

That is the framework in which to look at the gigantic migration from the countryside to the cities that is unfolding in China. As the regime has reorganized agricultural production over the past fifteen years, dismantling the giant collective farms forcibly imposed on peasants during the revolution's first decade, tens of millions of rural toilers are being pushed off the land year in and year out.

A friend from Minnesota recently sent me an article that first appeared in the Baltimore Sun and then in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It reports that the percentage of China's population living in rural areas has declined by 20 percent just in the past fifteen years — that is, a shift of some 200 million people. Almost as large as the entire population of the United States!

Some 80 million of these former peasants, the article says, have migrated to big cities, especially along the coast, where many live in wretched conditions. In search of a livelihood, millions of toilers from the countryside in China continue to head toward the cities, to head toward the small towns, to head toward the factories and manufacturing establishments large and small.² What is happening to them is comparable in many ways to what happened to those pushed off the land in England several hundred years ago, described by Marx.

Because of the Stalinist "population policies" imposed in China, working people there are required to carry ID cards and are supposed to seek permission before moving. As a result, the article reports that many of the rural toilers who have migrated to urban areas are denied legal residence in the cities and thus are not able to send their children to school or to use public health facilities. (These reactionary population measures also include forced sterilization and abortions, as well as economic and other penalties against families with more than one child.)

Horrible living and working conditions are being created in the swelling proletarian neighborhoods and in both the huge state-owned enterprises and rapidly expanding capitalist-owned factories in China today. Workers face low wages, extremely long hours, and often appalling health and safety conditions.

Because of the socialist revolution, however, workers and peasants in China have a different view of themselves, of what they are capable of, and of their social rights earned as part of the working class. Toilers in China have a different attitude toward their right to land; their right to a job; their right to a certain level of education and health care; their right to a place to live at a payable rent; their right to jobless benefits and a retirement pension.  
 

Giant struggles are coming

This is what the imperialists confront in attempting to restore the dominance of capitalist social relations. This is not the China whose land, resources, and cheap labor the U.S. rulers lusted for coming out of their victory over Japan at the end of World War II. The U.S., Japanese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, and other capitalists setting up shop in China today — as well as the expanding capitalist layers and wannabe capitalists within China's dominant social caste — are already meeting resistance from workers and peasants. As these class battles develop, we will see in practice why the socialist revolution in China and the fact that a workers state still exists — no matter how horribly deformed —remains the key to politics there.

Clashes are also bound to sharpen inside the Stalinist bureaucracy in China, which still dominates the country to a greater degree than in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where these apparatuses have shattered since 1990. Big sections of the bureaucratic caste in China, including in the armed forces officer corps, are determined to maintain centralization and control over the departments and state enterprises from which they derive their power and privileges. This brings them into conflict not only with workers in these enterprises, but also with other sections of the bureaucracy trying to open up China more to capitalist relations and foreign investment.

Giant struggles are coming in China. And given the massive urban migrations, the coming history of the countryside there will be settled more than ever by what happens in the cities, not vice versa.

For communists, it will be a great pleasure to be part of the changes that hundreds of millions of Chinese workers on the march will bring to the world working-class movement.

¹ In a November 1995 commentary on China and India, three economists for Wall Street's Merrill Lynch investment house wrote that "during the past quarter-century, China's economy has grown considerably faster than India's, on average — roughly 8% a year vs. 4.5%. . . . Internally, China has built a more extensive infrastructure than India [and] has a healthier and better-educated workforce than India."

² The estimated number of migrants reached 100 million by late 1998.  
 
 
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