China and the Crisis of Marxism-Leninism

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Is the failure of communism in China inevitable? So argue the authors of China and the Crisis of Marxism-Leninism, who believe that Mao’s programs were utopian fantasies that greatly aggravated the incurable flaws of the Stalinist order, now eroding worldwide. At the time of the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 China was in a state of disarray, and the new leadership believed that only drastic economic and institutional reforms could salvage the communist order. Thus, Deng Xiaoping, without abandoning Marx’s value system nor Lenin’s totalitarianism, introduced a reform program that outlined the parameters of acceptable changes. In the economic sphere, the government would maintain party-state control but permit contractual relationship with producers of goods, first in the agricultural and then in the industrial sector. In the political sphere, it would decentralize control within the party between central and local authority and between policy decisionmaking and execution. Deng’s measures not only failed but finally sparked a protest by students, who were soon joined by factory workers, office employees, newspaper staff, and other urbanites–all told over a million demonstrators in Beij

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