Late Imperial China
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Teng Hsiao-p’ing, I believe, has been called the Robin Hood of Szechuan for his 1930’s role as a peasant bandit against the landlords.
I do share your interest in China, Marcos, and am interested in your reading.
My subscription to China Pictorial was interrupted at the time of Hua Kuo-feng’s coup. Then I received the same issue again as the previous one, with interesting alterations. Mao’s wife Chiang Ch’ing was missing from her spot in a photo, replaced by a small table with a vase of flowers!! 🙂
My subscription to China Pictorial was interrupted at the time of Hua Kuo-feng’s coup. Then I received the same issue again as the previous one, with interesting alterations. Mao’s wife Chiang Ch’ing was missing from her spot in a photo, replaced by a small table with a vase of flowers!! 🙂
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They removed the picture of Mao wife because she was part of the gang of five instead of the gang of four becasue it includes Mao Tse Tung
After the coup, they initiated what was called the four modernization and it worked because China became an industrialized capitalist nation and the factory of the western capitalists and the USA, at the expense of the Chinese working class. Most parrots believe that the capitalist development was china came out of the blue, it was a long process, and it was not a transformation from socialism to capitalism, socialism never existed in China, on the contrary, it should have been a capitalist country away before England
There is another way out of the feudalism/not feudalism debate and that is to introduce a term that covers all pre-capitalist class societies:
The State and the Tributary Mode of Production
Actually, I think a good case can be made out for saying that the order of social evolution is: tribal communism, society based on the direct exploration of agriculture producers (peasants, if you like), capitalism, socialism.
That way, we don’t have to argue that feudal Europe was more advanced than the Roman Empire or that European feudalism existed all over the world. It was just the peasant-exploiting society out of which capitalism evolved. Capitalism then spread to the rest of the world at the expense of other types of peasant-exploiting societies.
The Historians  of the University of Mexico ( UNAM ) they also use the expression Tributary Mode of Production
There is some more on this here,
https://www.marxist.com/marxism-the-state-and-the-tributary-mode-of-production.htm
The party of the national bourgeoisie, the KMT, had to be beaten so that Chinese capitalism could succeed on the mainland. However, the KMT was perfectly adequate for presiding over Formosa’s development.
I read through that pamphlet-length article, Matt, and the introduction in which the author outlines the theory which he is going to criticise almost convinced me that the theory made some sense !
The criticism is basically that the concept is too wide to be useful as it covers so many different types of social  and state structures. This is some validity in this but the theory doesn’t mean that sub-categories couldn’t be identified on the basis of something that some but not all share in common.
The other criticism is that they can’t all have been basically the same as otherwise how come that capitalism only emerged out of one of them — European feudalism? Therefore,  this must have had a different “mode of production” to the others.
European feudalism had its own particular features and why capitalism emerged from it rather than one of the others is an important question. But this does not mean that the difference that led to this had to result from a different way in which the producers worked the land. That would be difficult to show.
In Defence of Marxism is the theoretical journal of those in the old Militant Tendency who remained loyal to Ted Grant and stayed in the Labour Party (where they still are I suppose).
What are we to call the class that ruled China and stood against its  bourgeoisie?
If the landlords were not the ruling class, what were they?
Who were the warlords (as a class?)
Some historian are skipping the word despotism. Â For the Incas mayas and Aztec they have used both
It’s all in that article by the SWPer you posted a link to. Accordingly to him, it would be the imperial bureaucracy as a collective-owning class. But I think it depends on what period of history you have in mind. Anyway, he seems to know what he’s talking about.
Lawrence Krader, Asiatic Mode of Production
China, for the last two millennia, was one of the world’s largest and most advanced economies.
(Wikipedia: Economic history of China before 1912.)
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