Read The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics Online
Authors: Iain McLean
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (112 page)
BOOK: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics
3.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Grandes écoles
Collective name for the eight or so leading specialized higher-education institutions outside the university system in France. Their graduates provide most ministers, in governments of all persuasions, they educate the highest echelons of the public service, and provide three-quarters of managers in the two-hundred largest private companies, as well as filling a huge percentage of responsible posts elsewhere. The most prestigious is the école Polytechnique, followed by the école Normale d'Administration and the école Normale Supérieure. Despite differences in the subjects studied and in style, there is a certain intellectual community which gives a degree of continuity to governments of the left and the right, and to the other ruling groups. The Grandes écoles demonstrate the hierarchical nature of education in France and its immense importance in political and economic life.
CS
CS
grandfather clause
(1) Legal provision granting vote to persons whose ancestors had voted prior to 1867, used by Southern states in the US to disenfranchise blacks. Grandfather clauses were declared unconstitutional in 1915.
(2) The phrase is now used non-pejoratively to denote existing rights protected by an Act which removes the entitlement to the right from any future claimants.
Great Leap Forward
In 1958–61, the attempt, initiated by Mao Zedong , to resolve China's economic problems by mass industrialization.
China launched her First Five Year Plan in 1953. It was accompanied by the phased collectivization of agriculture and the nationalization, with compensation, of industry and commerce. The plan was based on the Soviet model: using concealed taxation of peasant incomes in the form of controlled low farm-gate prices, giving massive priority to heavy industry, concentration of industry in the cities, and comprehensive command planning of the economy. The plan, in its own terms, proved highly successful, but the ambivalence of many of China's leaders towards centralized planning on the Soviet model is obvious in the fact that the plan was not fully applied or fully published until 1955, was subjected to severe criticism by 1957, and was virtually superseded by the Great Leap of 1958, never to be fully restored. China's devotion to the centralized command economy (already under attack elsewhere in the communist world) was thus very brief.
Mao Zedong had already begun to adumbrate an alternative from December 1955 (Preface to
The High Tide of Socialism in the Chinese Countryside
), fully expressed by 1958 in several subsequent intra-Party documents. It represented a reaction to Stalin's exploitation of agriculture, and his stress on heavy industry and neglect of investment in agriculture and light industry. It was also a reaction against authoritarian bureaucracy, the unpopularity of which had been dramatically expressed during the Hundred Flowers and to which Mao was by temperament (and guerrilla experience) extremely hostile. The alternative sought also to deal with specific Chinese problems:
In 1957 the Chinese government, following Soviet precedents, began to decentralize control of the state sector to provincial governments and, under their aegis, to individual enterprises. Under Mao's influence, this reform was overtaken by a contrasting form of decentralization directly to the village communities. A vast campaign began to encourage the rural communities to transform their own lives by self-initiated development. Subsequently, in mid-1958, the communes were created as an appropriate planning framework for this effort, as all-purpose local administrations staffed for the most part by leaders paid by the communities themselves and responsible to them.
The movement roused great enthusiasm at first: but faltered as local leaders competed to outdo the promises of their neighbours. Wild local claims were accepted and turned into national targets. Ideas such as village iron-and-steel-making (perfectly viable where resources and traditional skills existed) were made virtually compulsory and universal. Persuasion gave way to coercion, in spite of the solemn public promises which had been elicited from all concerned before the movement was launched, that it would be a democratic movement, an application of the mass line. So many new tasks were undertaken that the rural labour force, normally 30 per cent surplus, was stretched to breaking point. Extremists announced that full communism had arrived; field kitchens, a practical necessity in view of the vast redeployment of labour, became to-each-according-to-his-needs institutions.
Even the peasants' courtyards with their pigs and fruit trees were made communal property. China's local Party cadres in fact did the only thing they knew how to do—they carried the Stalinist command economy right into the grass roots. The commune, quite against the original concept, was made a single vast farm. Prosperous villages were forced to invest for the benefit of poor villages swept into the same commune, and were bitterly resentful.
Mao condemned the requisition of peasant property and justified peasant resistance. He insisted on restoring the original concept of the Great Leap as a process in which voluntary participation in a successful effort of local economic development would create a new rural consciousness of the potentiality of communal planning. But he would not cancel the movement, and he could not in fact control it.
Meanwhile bad weather struck and devastated an already weakened and demoralized rural economy. By 1961 mass starvation, not policy, had brought the Great Leap to an end. Those who lived through it now look back with a mixture of horror at its consequences and some pride in its vast and permanent achievements in the form of dams, roads, railways, mines, factories, and forests. At the time, however, the political consequence was to weaken Mao's authority, discredit his alternative to the command economy, destroy the commune and brigade enterprises which were the fulcrum of his effort—‘our great and glorious hope for the future’, as Mao had called them—and initiate a period of retreat from collectivism in the countryside.
JG
China launched her First Five Year Plan in 1953. It was accompanied by the phased collectivization of agriculture and the nationalization, with compensation, of industry and commerce. The plan was based on the Soviet model: using concealed taxation of peasant incomes in the form of controlled low farm-gate prices, giving massive priority to heavy industry, concentration of industry in the cities, and comprehensive command planning of the economy. The plan, in its own terms, proved highly successful, but the ambivalence of many of China's leaders towards centralized planning on the Soviet model is obvious in the fact that the plan was not fully applied or fully published until 1955, was subjected to severe criticism by 1957, and was virtually superseded by the Great Leap of 1958, never to be fully restored. China's devotion to the centralized command economy (already under attack elsewhere in the communist world) was thus very brief.
Mao Zedong had already begun to adumbrate an alternative from December 1955 (Preface to
The High Tide of Socialism in the Chinese Countryside
), fully expressed by 1958 in several subsequent intra-Party documents. It represented a reaction to Stalin's exploitation of agriculture, and his stress on heavy industry and neglect of investment in agriculture and light industry. It was also a reaction against authoritarian bureaucracy, the unpopularity of which had been dramatically expressed during the Hundred Flowers and to which Mao was by temperament (and guerrilla experience) extremely hostile. The alternative sought also to deal with specific Chinese problems:
(1) factor proportions characterized by a vast and rapidly increasing population, inadequate arable land, and lack of capital;Mao's alternative owed much to his wartime experience in organizing scattered guerrilla bases and developing their economies in co-operative forms. It also quite clearly owed much to Western development theory of the 1950s, with the stress on using surplus rural labour, via programmes of integrated rural development, to create local industry and improve local infrastructure.
(2) the fact that an attempt to increase agricultural procurement quotas in the good harvest years of 1954 and 1955 had proved strongly counter-productive, showing the limits of peasant tolerance of state accumulation at their expense;
(3) the danger from US hostility combined with Khrushchev's co-existence policy, a threat which China could meet only by a decentralized guerrilla-style resistance dependent on local development of the means to maintain supplies of ‘millet and rifles’.
In 1957 the Chinese government, following Soviet precedents, began to decentralize control of the state sector to provincial governments and, under their aegis, to individual enterprises. Under Mao's influence, this reform was overtaken by a contrasting form of decentralization directly to the village communities. A vast campaign began to encourage the rural communities to transform their own lives by self-initiated development. Subsequently, in mid-1958, the communes were created as an appropriate planning framework for this effort, as all-purpose local administrations staffed for the most part by leaders paid by the communities themselves and responsible to them.
The movement roused great enthusiasm at first: but faltered as local leaders competed to outdo the promises of their neighbours. Wild local claims were accepted and turned into national targets. Ideas such as village iron-and-steel-making (perfectly viable where resources and traditional skills existed) were made virtually compulsory and universal. Persuasion gave way to coercion, in spite of the solemn public promises which had been elicited from all concerned before the movement was launched, that it would be a democratic movement, an application of the mass line. So many new tasks were undertaken that the rural labour force, normally 30 per cent surplus, was stretched to breaking point. Extremists announced that full communism had arrived; field kitchens, a practical necessity in view of the vast redeployment of labour, became to-each-according-to-his-needs institutions.
Even the peasants' courtyards with their pigs and fruit trees were made communal property. China's local Party cadres in fact did the only thing they knew how to do—they carried the Stalinist command economy right into the grass roots. The commune, quite against the original concept, was made a single vast farm. Prosperous villages were forced to invest for the benefit of poor villages swept into the same commune, and were bitterly resentful.
Mao condemned the requisition of peasant property and justified peasant resistance. He insisted on restoring the original concept of the Great Leap as a process in which voluntary participation in a successful effort of local economic development would create a new rural consciousness of the potentiality of communal planning. But he would not cancel the movement, and he could not in fact control it.
Meanwhile bad weather struck and devastated an already weakened and demoralized rural economy. By 1961 mass starvation, not policy, had brought the Great Leap to an end. Those who lived through it now look back with a mixture of horror at its consequences and some pride in its vast and permanent achievements in the form of dams, roads, railways, mines, factories, and forests. At the time, however, the political consequence was to weaken Mao's authority, discredit his alternative to the command economy, destroy the commune and brigade enterprises which were the fulcrum of his effort—‘our great and glorious hope for the future’, as Mao had called them—and initiate a period of retreat from collectivism in the countryside.
JG
BOOK: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics
3.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Other books
Naked Economics by Wheelan, Charles
Act of Revenge by Robert K. Tanenbaum
Soldier's Heart by Gary Paulsen
Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) by Christian A. Brown
Real Vampires Don't Diet by Gerry Bartlett
Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing by David Farland
Whispers from the Shadows by Roseanna M. White
Thaumatology 101 by Teasdale, Niall
Taking Liberties by Jackie Barbosa
Absolution by Michael Kerr
