Jack Gray, Mao Zedong and the Political Economy of Chinese Development

This note summarizes and assesses Jack Gray's understanding of the challenge of Chinese development in general, and of rural develop ment and Mao's contribution to transforming the Chinese country side in particular. The exercise seems worthwhile at a time when popular under standing of 20th-century China, certainly if measured by recent book sales, is divided between two quite different approaches: one frames the story of Mao and the Chinese revolution in terms of terrorists and totalitarians; the other, agog at recent miracles, equally dispenses with the Chinese revolution, ignores the implacable international environment and other obstacles that have historically confronted poor agrarian nations, and tends to ignore social problems that have accompanied economic growth. Falling by the wayside in both approaches is any recognition of the significance for China, and not only for China, of war and revolution, imperialism, the great social issues of regional and class inequality, and the difficult political and economic choices that have confronted and continue to confront new nations seeking to break the grip of poverty. I met Jack only twice, at conferences in England and the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We shared with a number of others at the time not only a sense that the central problem of the Chinese revolution was one of rural development, but that China's developmental experience could offer clues to the possibilities of addressing the intractable problems of poverty and exploitation that characterized the world's peripheries and not only its peripheries. Was Jack a Maoist? Certainly, he had a deep appreciation of what he saw as the rural development insights in Mao's thought. But it seemed to me then and now that Jack was at heart a Nurkseian economist who had absorbed elements of Scotch pragmatism, Owenite socialism and Labourite grassroots democratic proclivities. He came to his views through diverse experiences as coal miner and later soldier in the Second World War, local community activist, university and community teacher, and amateur artist, musician and farmer. Above all, his study of Mao and of Chinese rural industry led him to conclude that labour, particularly community-based labour, if appropriately transformed, could overcome obstacles such as the