At the beginning of his essay ‘Two Revolutions’, published in nlr five years ago, Perry Anderson described its aim as an explanation of the contrast between the historical outcomes of the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions. His attempt would involve, he went on, reflection on four levels: original revolutionary agencies; objective starting points for reform; policy choices during reform and their consequences; and long-term cultural-historical determinants. The reader could thus be led to expect a symmetrical treatment of the two revolutions, but this is not what followed. ‘Since the prc has outlived the ussr,’ Anderson remarked, ‘and its future poses perhaps the central conundrum of world politics, the organizing focus of what follows will be China, as seen in the Russian mirror.’footnote¹ In other words, the function of the Russian case was to help throw light on the Chinese, but not vice versa. The Soviet Union failed, and its failure might serve as a testament to the prc’s success.

This is not the only asymmetry in the four-part text. Part i, ‘Matrices’, covers in nine pages the span from late-imperial rule to the first thirty years of Communist Party government in each country. By contrast Part ii, ‘Mutations’, dealing with reforms of the post-revolutionary regime in each society from a fixed point in the early 1980s, and Part iii, ‘Breaking Points’, focusing on the crises of 1987–89 in China, account for twenty-two pages. The fourth part, ‘The Novum’, summarizes the main existing interpretations of China’s economic performance in the past three decades and compares it briefly with that of other Asian countries—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore—in another six pages.

Although the essay opens with a look at the ‘arresting contrast’ between the two countries today, it is clear from this distribution of space that the core of ‘Two Revolutions’ lies in its analysis of the respective initial reform periods in Russia and China, before the two revolutions came ‘down to their common moment of truth at the end of the 1980s’. Neither the Soviet Union nor Russia figures in the last part. The historical outcome that requires explanation is thus fixed already in 1989–91. For Anderson, the foundation of the prc’s success story was laid in the first decade of the Chinese Reform Era, determined by three decisive features inherited from the Chinese Revolution: an energetically spirited peasantry; a national leadership still retaining the strategic skills and self-confidence of the original Revolution; and a critically confident attitude, like that once displayed by Lenin and his comrades, towards both the national culture and the outside world.

A comparative perspective can shed fresh light on a subject that has become overly familiar. When the comparison extends across a century, and covers social, cultural, economic, and political issues, while keeping an eye on international contexts, handling all this in less than forty pages is a tall order. Even setting aside space considerations, however, all comparisons have their limits, and Anderson’s enterprise is no exception. When comparing the two Communist revolutions with a focus on the 1980s, for example, China’s reform experience, launched within three years of Mao’s death, is seen in a Russian mirror of more than three decades (1953–85), a discrepancy of periodization so major that it inevitably generates simplification and misconstruction of the process in China. Another key problem is the precarious connexion between the question that frames the essay—the historical outcome of the Chinese Revolution, in light of the economic rise of the prc in the twenty-first century—and the answer it implicitly offers, the three distinctive features rooted in the Revolution and actively visible in the eighties. Do these really explain China’s trajectory since 1978? Can they offer any guide for prediction of the country’s future? In his brief conclusion, glancing at the last twenty years of the Chinese experience, Anderson leaves such questions open, pending further developments.

In my response I will first focus on some key questions raised by Anderson’s comparison of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, and then seek to correct his account of China’s entrance into the Reform Era with a more detailed analysis of its trajectory, contending that it is not the irrepressibly positive features rooted in the Revolution, but the party’s disregard and even outright suppression of them, most notoriously in the Tiananmen crackdown, that has shaped the specific path of China’s ascent in the world economy today.

Taking Weber’s definition of the state as ‘the exercise of a monopoly of legitimate violence over a given territory’, Anderson argues that a political revolution can come about by a break in any one of its terms—monopoly, legitimacy or territory—allowing the overthrow of an existing regime and its replacement by a new one. Since his essay extends backwards to the matrices of Tsarist Russia and Qing China in the nineteenth century, Anderson could with this conception have considered the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia and the Republican Revolution of 1911 in China, which brought down these two long-standing imperial regimes. By omitting the anti-dynastic upheavals in the two countries, Anderson’s comparison focuses on the Communist-led revolutions that succeeded them, but says little about what defined them as Communist, as opposed to other types of regime change. The word ‘communism’ is used in the essay alternately in upper or lower case, sometimes ironically. But the ideologies of the parties that made these revolutions, and the kind of state formation they represented, are not specified. They need to be considered. From an international perspective, they established two rather different forms of ‘communism’, whose theoretical, political and economic strengths and weaknesses require their own historical assessment.

Intellectually speaking, the Russian Bolsheviks, under Lenin’s leadership, had long been actively engaged in the international labour movement, participating in many heated theoretical debates, and developing their own strategies for the organizational task of constructing—usually underground—a modern revolutionary party. Convinced that the development of advanced forces of production was a precondition for communism, the Leninist party viewed Russia’s majority peasantry with prudence, if not vigilance, as a potential bastion of petty-bourgeois commodity production in the countryside, that was likely to be an obstacle to the party’s goal of large-scale industrialization. This ideological commitment remained constant under Stalin and his successors. Stalinism interpreted Marxism mechanically and implemented it violently and dogmatically in a programme of brutal collectivization and forced industrialization before the war. Thereafter, expanding industrialization and increasing mechanization in agriculture were policy mainstays in the ussr. As Anderson notes, more than 80 per cent of the Russian population lived in the countryside in 1917, whereas by the 1980s its rural labour force accounted for merely 14 per cent of the national total.