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Turning Point in China

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Writing a book ten years after an event is difficult enough but to try and write a book while an event is still occurring seems to be a task fraught with difficulties and problems. Turning Point in China: an essay on the Cultural Revolution by William Hinton is such a book. The book contends that Mao Zedong's revolutionary line of mass political education and cooperation will win out over modernization and mechanisation in the development of Chinese society. The evidence that Hinton uses is often lacking or fails to support his argument. This is not helped by the minimal use of sources to support his claims. However, for what it is, it is relatively well written.

Hinton argues that the Socialist revolutions which sprung out of the October revolution of 1917 had success in a number of countries though they had failed to solve the problem of bourgeois restoration. Hinton believed that by 1966 "working class power had already been subverted in Russia and most of Eastern Europe and was under serious challenge everywhere else" (p.10). It was at this point that the Chinese working class went on the offensive and launched the cultural revolution to `expose and defeat' the revisionist forces within China. Hinton breaks the main contending forces of the Cultural Revolution into the `Socialist Road' versus the `Capitalist Road' (p. 41).

Turning point in China was published in 1972, while the Cultural Revolution was still being played out. As a result this book does not have the advantage of information and evidence that retrospective essays and books on China during this period have. This leads to shortfalls in the book and many of the arguments that Hinton makes are unsubstantiated. An example of this is his argument in Chapter 3 titled `Whose Politics Takes Command' (p. 41). In this chapter Hinton argues that revolutionary politics must take command over technique in the production process in order for China to modernize. To support his argument he uses the example of the Dazhai work brigade.

The Dazhai work brigade was credited with transforming a rocky and eroded part of the Shanxi landscape into fertile and productive land. It was said that this brigade had worked on highly egalitarian principles to achieve its ends and moreover achieved it without government support. The supporters of Mao used the Dazhai Brigade to show how, with collective spirit and the casting off of greed rather than relying on modern technology or investment, they were able to transform the environment.

The Dazhai work brigade was used by Hinton to show the advantage of using politics and protracted political education as a means of raising production. He suggested that cooperation and relying on collective spirit, as opposed to the individualism and the private-profit mentality of the capitalist road, led to the increased standard of living in the area. He uses the example of the Taoyuan brigade which was located on a plain in Hebei. According to Hinton, the Taoyuan brigade had favourable conditions and relied on investment and mechanisation, or the technique approach, rather than the cooperative approach, but while they showed early promise the initial high yields could not be maintained. Hinton suggests that this led to decline in morale and caused in-fighting and apathy. This, if we are to believe Hinton, was the failure of the `technique in command system' (p.45). What Hinton did not succeed in recognizing was that the Dazhai work brigade was heavily subsidised by the government and even with these subsidies the actual level of production was not as high as reported by the Maoists (Moise, 1994, p.208). While it would be easy to suggest the lack of hindsight hindered Hinton, it must also be recognised that he failed to question the validity of or to source these claims. This is just one example of how Hinton fails to recognise the reality of the situation and lacks sound supporting evidence.

Hinton's thesis that "Mao Zedong and Mao Zedong's revolutionary line are winning out in China" and that "the working class is beating back the bourgeoisie" (p.112) failed to materialise. Evidence used within the book show that those supporting Mao and the ideal of political education campaigns to raise production and prevent the re-emergence of the bourgeois class were more successful than those who followed the principals of Modernization and Mechanisation. This evidence has now not only been questioned but has been found to have been spurious.

While the essay Turning point in China by William Hinton suffers from lack of hindsight and Hinton's belief that Mao and his supporters would succeed in wining the Cultural Revolution did not eventuate, it does illuminate the tragic nature of the time of the Cultural Revolution. Anyone reading this book needs to understand it within the context and the time in which it was written. Many of Hinton's arguments and predictions are discounted or did not occur and thus the book fails to fulfil its aim, though it must be remembered that when it was written the battle and the direction China would take still hung in the balance. While this book is on the whole well written the events described in chapter four can be difficult to follow. On top of the above mentioned weaknesses, Hinton does not include a bibliography or index and other than the occasional use of sources does not make much of an effort to support his arguments.