SOVIET COMMUNISM VS. CHINESE COMMUNISMThe Soviet Union and China are the two important states in the world history that practiced a form of communism. However, communism in the Soviet Union collapsed while it still survives in China. What were the reasons: what caused the collapse in the Soviet Union and why has the Chinese communist-party state has been more durable than the Soviet Union s?The Soviet communism ignored basic human desires like desires to own property and to express your opinions freely. Under communism, there were no free elections, no freedom of thought, and no freedom of speech. Communism bounded to create a surreal society in which people keep their thoughts to themselves being tied to the official ideology in public. Consequently, human desires and freedom were suppressed. On the contrary, the aim of Soviet communism was to increase the satisfaction of human desires. Then, how could it be that the communist regime in the Soviet Union achieved the opposite? In the former Soviet Union, every means of production was state-owned. Every thing you produced, everything you did was for the sake of state. The communists in Russia were mistaken by the belief that abolishing private ownership would lead to a higher economic growth. Yet, if people do not own their means of production, they have no incentive to be efficient or innovative. Hence, many sectors in Russia reflected inefficient use of work force. Labor productivity was low and work discipline was weak. A Soviet saying of the time describes the situation very well: we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us. There was a very low level of inequality. Every one got almost the same wage regardless of how skilled they were, or how hard they worked. Why should people be more efficient when they do not gain from such efficiency? The Soviet Union also couldn t develop technologically. Why should the people be interested in trying or developing a new technology when all get the same salary anyway? With the undeveloped technology, industrialization process could not proceed. The USSR fell behind the information technology, started to fell behind the Western powers. Gorbachev recognized that the USSR was falling apart, and whole system had to be transformed as soon as possible to catch up with the West. Democratization was uncontrollable because a serious economic decline had begun. As Marx said, If relations of production did not follow forces of production, the system was doomed to fall apart.
Chinese had a lesson from all of these. Chinese communism is very different from Soviet communism. Lenin believed that revolution should come from the proletariats, and therefore from the cities. Mao relied upon the support from peasantry. Peasantry was the revolutionary class and the base for a new society. He believed, unlike in the Soviet Union, revolution should come from the least developed part of the society, and then spread into the urban areas. Consequently, the Soviet peasantry has been wiped out, while the Chinese peasants were able to increase production. Also, the Chinese communists were able to get more support, especially from the peasantry, than the Soviet communists who came to power much more Quickly through an urban revolution. The association of Maoism and communism with national liberation is another answer for the question of how could communism survive in China. Unlike in Soviet Russia, there has been a political thought against imperialism to liberate China from the dependency of outsiders. With Mao s Cultural Revolution, China could adopt its tradition and values in the communist system. After death of Mao, his successor Deng Xiaoping came to power. He introduced free-market both to raise China out of poverty, and to keep Chinese Communist Party in power. Industrial reform has been more successful in China. It was because Deng s free-market policy had let all the factories gain great benefits. Deng s reform lead to a huge increase in both quality and quantity of the good available in the stores. While China has created important economic zones, Russians were suspicious that the Western firms were trying to exploit them by turning the USSR some kind of a colony from which they could gather raw materials. As a result, the political legitimacy of communism in China was strengthened by the country s economic development. To conclude, the failure of communism in the Soviet Union was inevitable because of the economic decline and too much rapid political change. Chinese succeeded to associate communism and Chines nationalism, Maoism, and their enduring traditions and values. Above all, they could satisfy humans material by adopting free-market policy to the communist-party state and making a successful economic and industrial development.
