Why the West Rules--For Now (87 page)

“
Anything that makes
women work less is good,” Nixon opened, but Khrushchev was ready for him. “You want to keep your women in the kitchen,” he countered. “We don’t think of women in those terms. We think better of them.” Possibly so; more women worked outside the home in the Soviet Union than in the United States. On the other hand, another decade would pass before even half of Soviet households owned a washing machine. After taking the bus back from her factory job, the typical Soviet wife did an additional twenty-eight hours of housework per week. Only one apartment in eight had a vacuum cleaner, though perhaps, good Communists all, the comrades shared them.

Nixon responded with a paean to free enterprise. “We don’t have one decision made at the top by one government office,” he explained. “We have many different manufacturers and many different kinds of washing machines so that the housewives have a choice … Would it not be better to compete in the relative merits of washing machines than in the strength of rockets? … We won’t thrust it [our lifestyle] upon you,” he concluded, “but your grandchildren will see it.”

Nixon was right. In 1959 Khrushchev simply denied that American workers lived in such houses, but by the 1980s his grandchildren could see they were being lied to. In a way, the paradox of development was to blame again: most Soviet citizens did now have washing machines and vacuum cleaners, but they also had radios, televisions,
and black-market rock music records. They could see for themselves that Americans were pulling even further ahead. A joke started doing the rounds. A train, it said, is carrying former Soviet leaders across the steppes. Suddenly the train stops. Acting true to form, Stalin jumps up and shouts: “
Flog the driver!
” The driver is flogged but the train does not move. Khrushchev then orders: “Rehabilitate the driver!” This is done, but still nothing happens. Then Brezhnev smiles and suggests: “Let’s just pretend the train is moving.”

It was bad enough that the subjects of the Soviet Empire could turn on their televisions and see people like me with my guitars and jeans, but what was catastrophic was that they could see that a whole new phase of the industrial revolution was beginning, driven by information technology and generating even greater wealth for those on the right side of the Iron Curtain. The first American computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), had been unveiled in 1946. It weighed thirty tons and used so much electricity that when it was switched on, lights all over Philadelphia dimmed. Over the next thirty years, International Business Machines (IBM) sold smaller but still monstrous machines to the West’s corporations, but the real transformation followed the invention of the microprocessor in 1971.

As so often, the innovators came from the fringes of the elite—in this case, not from ultrarespectable firms such as IBM but, like Steve Wozniak, from garages in places such as suburban Menlo Park in California. Starting with just $91,000 capital and a few geeky friends, Wozniak and his business partner Steve Jobs released their Apple I microcomputer into the world in 1976. By 1982 Apple’s sales had reached $583 million and IBM had invented the Personal Computer to compete. By then the Harvard dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen had founded Microsoft and relocated to the West Coast. Computing moved into every office and home, getting cheaper and easier every year. It even became fun.

Computers changed how the Western core entertained itself, did business, and waged war. By 1985 there was no walk of Western life computers had not touched—except in the Soviet Empire. Pretending the train was moving was no longer an option.

THE PEOPLE’S PARADISE

Nor was it an option in the East, where America’s client states were rapidly pulling away from Communist China. Japan, followed by Taiwan and South Korea, swiftly moved up the economic food chain from the plastic toys I so appreciated in the 1960s to heavy industry and electronics, and as they did so, other Eastern nations (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand) took their places at the bottom of the ladder. All over the East wages rose. Lives lengthened; babies fattened up; bigger apartments filled with gadgets. There were far fewer televisions in China than in the Soviet Union, but the policy makers in Beijing saw all too clearly the threat posed by outposts of prosperity around their east coast. These “Asian Tigers,” as they became known, were an affront. All had more or less one-party rule and all shared China’s Confucian and Buddhist background. So if neither authoritarianism nor Eastern cultural traditions prevented meteoric growth, where could the problem lie except with communism itself ?

The century of civil war and factional fighting between the 1840s and 1940s had prevented China from following Japan’s rapid industrialization, but after his victory in 1949, Mao Zedong quickly adopted Lenin’s example and reorganized his realm as a subcontinental empire. Peace brought huge dividends, and just as had happened when the Sui dynasty reunited China in the sixth century, the Song in the tenth, and the Ming in the fourteenth, the economy revived. The Soviet-style Five Year Plan that Mao launched when the Korean War petered out was much less effective than the Asian Tigers’ capitalism, but it still more than doubled industrial output and pushed real wages up by a third. Life expectancy at birth soared from thirty-six years in 1950 to fifty-seven in 1957.

There is good reason to think the Chinese economy would have continued growing strongly through the 1960s and ’70s if Mao had let it, but, like so many earlier Chinese emperors, Mao mistrusted his bureaucrats. The spurious laws of economics, he insisted, must yield to the truer laws of Marxism, but his planners—with their slide rules and graphs—seemed suspiciously bourgeois. Only when the indomitable will of the masses was unleashed, Mao insisted, would the people’s paradise be established.

Mao had come of intellectual age in the 1910s, reading Marx (and Spencer); he was a long-term lock-in theorist, convinced that Eastern inferiority had been set in stone centuries ago. The answer, he decided, was to sweep away the “Four Olds”—old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking. Even the family had to go: “
The dearest people
in the world are our parents,” the
China Youth Journal
explained, “yet they cannot be compared with Chairman Mao and the Communist Party … which has given us everything.” Proclaiming a “Great Leap Forward” in which China would catch up with the West, Mao bundled 99 percent of the population into collective farms with thousands of members. In some places, utopianism ran riot:

The Party Secretary
of Paoma town announced in October 1958 that Socialism would end on November 7th and Communism would begin on November 8th. After the meeting, everyone immediately took to the streets and began grabbing goods out of the shops. When the shelves were bare, they went to other people’s homes and took their chickens and vegetables home to eat. People even stopped making a distinction as to which children belonged to whom. Only wives were safe from this sharing because the Party Secretary was unsure about this.

In other places, cynicism prevailed. Some called this the Eat-It-All-Up Period: with every incentive to work and save taken away, many people did neither.

Pressured from higher up to report bigger harvests even though yields were falling, party officials did so and then confiscated ever-larger slices of production to justify their figures. “
It is not
that there is no food,” one commissar insisted. “There is plenty of grain, but 90 percent of the people have ideological problems.”

To make matters worse, Mao fell out with Khrushchev. Cut off from Soviet aid, he tried to match Western steel production by pulling 40 million peasants off the land to build backyard foundries, smelting whatever ores they could find locally and even melting their pots and pans to forge homemade steel. Little of what they produced was usable, but no one dared say so.

The countryside became increasingly surreal. “
The air
,” said one reporter, “is filled with the high-pitched melodies of local operas pouring
through an amplifier above the site and accompanied by the hum of blowers, the panting of gasoline engines, the honking of heavily laden lorries, and the bellowing of oxen hauling ore and coal.”

“
Communism is paradise
,” the peasants were expected to sing; “the People’s Communes are the bridge to it.” But there was trouble in paradise. When not singing, the people were starving. The following recollection is unusual only in its dispassionate tone:

No one in our family
died. By February 1960, Grandpa’s legs were completely swollen. His hair fell out, his body was covered in sores, and he was too weak to open his mouth. A friend came by and drained off some of the sores and this helped. We still had three small goats and an aunt killed two of them secretly to help him. Unfortunately, the cadres discovered this and took the carcasses away.

Even so, Grandpa was lucky. According to another informant,

The worst thing
that happened during the famine was this: parents would decide to allow the old and the young to die first … a mother would say to her daughter, “You have to go and see your granny in heaven.” They stopped giving the girl-children food. They just gave them water … One woman was reported and arrested by the Public Security Bureau. No one in the village criticized her when she returned from a labor camp a few years later.

About 20 million starved between 1958 and 1962. After Mao’s death, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party officially concluded that the Great Helmsman had been right 70 percent of the time and wrong 30 percent, but around 1960 the party was much less convinced of this. A technocratic clique sidelined Mao and reintroduced some private property. By 1965 harvests had returned to 1957 levels.

Mao, though, was not beaten. China, like the West, had gone through a postwar baby boom, spawning a huge cohort of impatient teenagers. Affluent youngsters in the liberal Western core exploited their purchasing power to reorient taste around their music, clothes, and sexual mores, but in China Mao reoriented the tastes of angry youngsters around himself. Preaching a permanent “Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution,” in 1966 he incited the young to attack everything.

Abandoning schools and colleges, millions of adolescents became rampaging Red Guards, beating and humiliating first their teachers and then anyone else who looked reactionary. While Western youths sang about revolution, Chinese youths lived it. “
It was class hatred
that made me denounce [my classmate] Li Jianping,” one literature student proudly wrote on a poster,

and that drove the masses to such popular fury. They beat her—a counterrevolutionary element sheltered by the old municipal party committee for so many years—to death with their clubs. It was an immensely satisfying event, to avenge the revolutionary people, to avenge the dead martyrs. Next I am going to settle scores with those bastards who shelter traitors.

Mao tried to direct this rage against his rivals but never really controlled it. With no one safe from denunciation as a counterrevolutionary, people rushed to get their criticisms in first. To many it was just bewildering: one latrine attendant grumbled that he was out of work because too many professors were being forced to clean toilets as reeducation. Yet plenty found it exhilarating. Young workers flocked to join the students and factories ground to a halt. Red Guards invited film crews to record them smashing Buddhist statues, Confucian temples, and Han dynasty relics. One gang even occupied the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and appointed its own properly proletarian diplomats.

In 1969, with events apparently lurching toward disaster on the scale of the Great Leap Forward, even Mao lost his nerve. Thousands had died. Millions had had their lives ruined. The Asian Tigers were steadily pulling away from the People’s Republic. Relations with the Soviets were so bad that eight hundred Chinese had been killed in border clashes. Mao belatedly distanced himself from the radicals and looked around for a lifeline.

He was thrown one by perhaps the least likely person on earth—the United States’ virulently anti-Communist president Richard Nixon. Nixon saw a deal with China as a way to outflank the Soviets in the Cold War, and in 1972, after much back-channel diplomacy, he flew to Beijing and shook Mao’s hand. “
This was the week
that changed the
world,” Nixon crowed, and in some ways he was right. The prospect of a Washington-Beijing axis terrified Brezhnev so much that within three months of going to China, Nixon was sitting in Moscow making deals.

Mao profited almost as much. By meeting Nixon he signaled support for the pragmatists who hungered after Western technology and opposition to the radicals who had gutted China’s educated classes. In one celebrated case, a student won a coveted university place by turning in a blank examination book with a note claiming that revolutionary purity was more valuable than “
bookworms who
for many years have been taking it easy and have done nothing useful.” In a flourish that Soviet jokers might have appreciated, radical bigwigs (allegedly) argued that “
a socialist train
behind schedule is better than a revisionist train on schedule.”

After 1972 the pragmatists pushed back, although it was only after Mao died in 1976 that the tide turned decisively in their favor. Deng Xiaoping, twice purged as a Right Deviationist under Mao and twice rehabilitated, now muscled his rivals aside and showed his true colors. Taking Mao’s old mantra “seek truth from facts” as his motto, Deng squarely confronted the most inconvenient truth in China: that the population was growing faster than the economy. To feed all the empty stomachs that came onto the job market each year, China’s economy needed to grow by 7 percent every year for at least a generation. The alternative could be famines that would dwarf the Great Leap Forward.