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      Prior to 1978, surplus labor was primarily not appropriated privately but in a manner mediated by the political administration. After 1949, the state bureaucracy certainly had no immediate interest in facilitating and guaranteeing private-sector profit maximization. Instead, the political elite were far more interested in maintaining their redistributive powers. First, the subordinate classes did not exercise their democratic right of disposition over the means of production and consumption. They were denied access to strategic resources, had virtually no decision-making authority, and were subservient to the state functionaries and the party’s auxiliary personnel. Second, the decisions of the bureaucracy were typically not subordinated to the material needs and normative expectations of the majority. The redistributive institutions diverted a considerable share of the country’s resources to industry to meet quantitative growth targets and to withstand the pressure of competition (also militarily) from abroad. Against this backdrop, national development targets evolved into the equivalent of a compulsion to accumulate. Not least owing to the absence (or rather exodus) of a strong bourgeoisie, to a certain extent, the Communist Party leadership became the executor of a “mission” that Marx had, in fact, assigned to the bourgeoisie.

      While on free markets companies attempt to link the supply (of goods) to what they expect to be lucrative demand with the intention of increasing their profits in order to survive, incentives in state redistributive economies are inherently quite different. Here, supply is determined by redistributors as part of a macroeconomic plan and demand adjusted to this accordingly. The next step is then for the redistributors’ decisions to be implemented by (typically state-owned) enterprises. In China, in reality, this ideal-typical model constituted a “plan anarchy” comprising numerous particularistic disposing centers of power. I will attempt to substantiate this on the basis of the following excursus.

      Excursus: The 1949 Revolution and Maoism

      Historically, after 1927, the CCP evolved from a party representing the industrial working class and its struggles into a party of national modernization embedded in the peasantry.⁵ In circumstances of a permanent liberation struggle and civil war, in the 1930s, the party began to create a counterelite. War was the external prerequisite for the survival of this elite, which resulted in a “party in arms” (Osterhammel 1989, 344).

      The party derived its legitimacy from various sources: the successful resistance to Japanese imperialism, in particular, gave it both an anticolonialist aura and that of a national force (Selden 1993, 5). A generation of intellectuals was attracted to the party because of its consistent opposition to colonialism and its promise to provide an alternative to imperialism/capitalism. Further, compared with the policies of the Guomindang, to broad swathes of the rural population, the proposition of progressive agrarian reforms appeared to be a welcome development.

      The successful national liberation of China in 1949 embodied an anticolonial revolution. Nevertheless, Mao’s assumption of power did not equate to a “socialist” revolution although it was accompanied by peasant revolts and social movements in some cities prior to 1949 (Spence 1995, 575–615). Rather than a revolution where the masses strive, through their own efforts, to bring about a fundamental reorganization of society, this revolution mostly stemmed from military actions originating in rural regions. It was effectively based on the creation of a counterstate:

      A revolution can break the monopoly of the state’s power by destroying the legitimacy of its rule, so that coercion cannot be exercised to repress the movement against it…. Alternatively, a revolution can pit an insurgent violence against the coercive apparatus of the state, overwhelming it in a quick knock-out blow, without having secured any general legitimacy. This was the Russian pattern, possible only against a weak opponent. Finally, a revolution can break the state’s monopoly of power, not by depriving it from the outset of legitimacy, nor rapidly undoing its capacity for violence, but by subtracting enough territory from it to erect a counter-state, able in time to erode its possession of force and consent alike. This was the Chinese pattern. (Anderson 2010b, 64; see also Osterhammel 1989, 343–47)

      The struggle between two collective actors with quasi-state structures—the CCP and the Guomindang—over the succession of the Chinese Empire was ultimately not won by the Guomindang with its superior military power, but by the CCP with its greater legitimacy. The result was less a democratization of power or even a partial dissolution of domination per se but more a transfer of power to a group of military actors and CCP leaders who declared themselves representatives of the socialist construction yet effectively commanded a development dictatorship in an undeveloped agrarian country.

      The revolution represented liberation from foreign imperial powers and the reactionary nationalist Guomindang. In the long term, it created a degree of nationwide unity that was unprecedented over the last century. The Communist Party forged ahead with a land reform in which it broke the hold of the “parasitical landlord families” (Osterhammel 1989, 357); the CCP succeeded in halting inflation and, for the first time, reestablished a central state authority that maintained order across China.⁶

      From then on, the CCP established a bureaucratic party-state. The party’s leading staff regarded Marxism-Leninism as an ideology of national modernization and ruthlessly forged ahead with this latter objective using various means. “Inasmuch as the CCP came to power through a popular, anti-imperialist revolution, the very essence of the legitimacy of the communist state was not Marxism but nationalism” (Zhao 2004, 209).⁷ Of course, the CCP’s nationalism was not solely a result of a national ethos: it was also an attempt to adapt, dictated by external circumstances, to survive in a world that was dominated by far more developed countries.⁸

      In contrast to ruling parties in postcolonial Africa and the Middle East, for example, the CCP drew on a rich tradition of statist ideas. “The Maoists never paid much attention to the liberal and democratic elements in the teachings of Marx and Engels, such as those dealing with free development of the individual and the relationship between the individual and the state. In fact, it can be argued that Mao drew more inspiration about governance from Chinese classics such as Shi Ji (Historical Memoirs, by Sima Qian) [from around 145 BC to around 90 BC] and Zizhi Tongjian (Compendium on Governance, by Sima Guang) [1019 AD to 1090 AD], which he reread dozens of times” (Lam 2006, 260).⁹

      Similar to other developing countries at the time, which were partially established on a foundation of “socialist” principles, partially on the basis of “capitalist” norms, this new society displayed features that were far more reminiscent of the primitive accumulation of capital discussed by Marx than socialist or communist ideals. These included the separation of manual and mental labor, a subsumption under state capital, highly pronounced hierarchies in the workplace and in everyday life, and the suppression of opposition, as well as patriarchal family structures, nationalism, and censorship of the arts and sciences.

      The key institutions of the Maoist era such as work units (danwei) which isolated the industrial labor force, people’s communes (renmin gongshe) that enforced rural self-sufficiency, job allocations (fenpei) that rendered intellectuals dependent upon state favor, labor insurance (laobao) that bestowed generous welfare benefits upon permanent workers at state-owned enterprises while leaving the majority of the workforce unprotected, personnel dossiers (dang’an) which marked citizens with “good” or “bad” political records, household registrations (hukou) that separated urban and rural dwellers, class labels (jieji chengfen) that categorized people into “five kinds of red” (hong wulei) and “five kinds of black” (hei wulei)—all served to divide society and foster subservience to the state. (Perry 2007, 11)

      In order to challenge the established perception of what has been dubbed “anti-bureaucratism,” Whyte distinguishes between two distinct aspects of bureaucratization. On the one hand, he sees the term as referring to a process by which more and more elements of social life come to be governed by large hierarchical organizations (Whyte 1989). On the other hand, he draws on the finding that these organizations approximate the ideal type of bureaucratic organization based on legal-rational authority and formal rules and procedures rather than charismatic or other traditional types of authority. Because Mao and his supporters predominantly attempted to stave off this latter

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