Mao's Economy
Industrial Society in Communist China.
by Barry M. Richman.
Random House. 968 pp. $15.00.
This massive volume lives up to its subtitle: A Firsthand Study of Chinese Economic Development and Management—With Significant Comparisons with Industry in India, the USSR, Japan, and the United States. The author is an industrial management specialist with experience in comparative studies. He made a two-month visit to Communist China in 1966 as a Canadian citizen, visited eleven major cities, and surveyed thirty-eight industrial enterprises, formally interviewing more than two-hundred Chinese and compiling and collecting data moment by moment. As a management specialist, he knew what he was after and he sets it all forth systematically and in detail. The book is long-winded partly because the author wants to make his observations available to the general reader as well as the specialist, and so he spells things out at length. He devotes his first 120 pages to a “conceptual framework” and the next 450 pages to the Chinese “environment,” prefatory to a final 300 pages on “structure, operations, and performance.” The book thus embodies an entire course of study and plunges one into micromanagement and macromanagement and such arcane matters as “the constraint management-process matrix.” In this terminology, instead of facing “problems” like most of us, management faces “constraints” of all kinds. Under these rather esoteric headings Professor Richman actually lays out his impressions and a good deal of information on subjects like the state of Chinese education; the general range of attitudes toward authority, work, science, risk-taking, and the like; the bearing of law, the military, and politics on management; and the general economic situation in which it has to operate. He then summarizes quantitatively the often fragmentary and disconcertingly wide-ranging evidences of growth in various lines, takes a look at the organization of planning, and finally analyzes the summarized data from the thirty-eight enterprises he visited.
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The result of this vigorous look-see and report is over-long but nevertheless systematic and comprehensive within its terms of reference. The occasional comparisons with other countries in which the author has had experience give an added dimension, and his firsthand observations on the firms he visited are obviously skilled and highly critical. He is modest in his claims to wisdom, though certainly loquacious and full of his observations. For example, on industrial planning in China he describes the general “planning methodology,” which uses “planning by material balances . . . a rather crude form of input-output procedure.” He then describes “the planning process,” which goes through various “up” and “down” stages, and gives examples. Next, an account of “supply and sales-order conferences,” which are unusual in Communist countries, again with examples. Finally, some comments on “flexibility in planning.”
Judging by his notes, Mr. Richman is versed in the literature on the Chinese Communist economy, though his Y. L. Wu of p. 939 is the same as his W. L. Yuan of p. 932; his H. Suyin is surnamed Han; and his J. Caber of the Harvard Law School is Jerome Cohen. Such minute slips lend a refreshing verisimilitude: here is a man actually reporting from a field investigation on the scene, not from the literature in our libraries. This is very much to be welcomed and applauded.
Richman concludes that “China currently has a significant lead over India” in her economic performance. In 1966 the average Chinese citizen, he thinks, was living better than at any time before the Communists came to power. But he comes down hard on the economic evil of “ideological extremism.” The real issue for China is whether fanaticism is to prevail or whether “managerial, technical, and economic rationality” prevails. He finds that “key aspects of Red China's brand of Maoist-Marxist-Leninist ideology are in basic conflict with effective management and efficient enterprise performance.” Unfortunately the “Red Chinese fanatics are following a blindly revolutionary, grossly impatient, and irrational course.” The issue, one gathers, is in the minds of the Chinese leadership—the more they feel impelled to extremist ideas, the more they are likely to be frustrated in their desire for economic strength. This seems like a formula for an explosive mixture, but perhaps for implosion more than explosion. The whole thrust of Mr. Richman's report is to suggest that even during the most extreme ideological divagations, the Chinese leadership stratum is pretty well absorbed in its domestic situation.
