The Historical Test of Socialism at the Turn of the Century

by Li Zhuoru

 On the Centenary of the Birth of Comrade Jiang Zemin

Historical boundaries at the turn of a century are not produced mechanically by the turning of the calendar; only when the existing balance of forces undergoes a substantive shift, the mechanisms sustaining the established order begin to break down, and new social relations together with their institutional forms have not yet attained stability does a transition between epochs acquire historically discernible contours. 17 August 2026 marks the centenary of the birth of Comrade Jiang Zemin. To re-examine his life today is neither to compress a historical period dense with intersecting contradictions and consequential choices into a personal encomium, nor to substitute individual volition for the determining role of the people and their social practice; it is, rather, to explain how a communist identifies the principal contradictions within conditions directly encountered and inherited from the past, how he organizes social forces through the Party and the state, how he chooses among several possible paths a political course with enduring consequences, and how he bears the historical responsibility arising from that choice. Marx wrote: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” A political figure, therefore, can neither be construed as the sole motive force of historical development nor dissolved into an irrelevant variable within an objective process; his role acquires specific determination only through such real mediations as the political party, the state, the masses, institutions, and organizational structures, and is tested against the actual consequences generated in social practice.
Measured against this historical standard, the final decade of the twentieth century reveals, first of all, a structural reconfiguration that altered the global balance of political forces. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the upheavals in Eastern Europe, the cause of world socialism—and the international communist movement in particular—suffered grave setbacks; apologists for the capitalist system hastened to interpret the temporary preponderance of forces as the final verdict of social development and to proclaim the political retreat of a particular historical phase as the failure of socialism itself. At the same time, new contradictions unfolded within China between the development of the productive forces and existing forms of economic administration, between the expansion of the market and social equity, between opening to the outside world and national economic security, and between the differentiation of interests and the capacity for political integration. If the existing pace of development were simply maintained, socialism might weaken its own social basis through insufficient material dynamism; if capital relations were permitted to expand without constraint, reform might, in its actual operation, depart from the social purposes of socialism. Although these two dangerous trajectories moved in opposite directions, each could lead to the same result: a weakening of the socialist system’s capacity to organize production on a sustained basis, integrate society, and safeguard the fundamental interests of the people.
Precisely because this historical juncture contained the possibilities both of ossification and of degeneration, assessments of Comrade Jiang Zemin and of the period identified with his leadership cannot be subordinated to the mutually mirroring narratives of liberalism and dogmatism. The former construes the market, opening, and economic growth as the spontaneous triumph of the logic of capital; the latter directly identifies certain concrete forms of administration that had taken shape under the planned economy with socialism itself. Although ostensibly opposed, both substitute a single economic form for a concrete analysis of the relations of production, the structure of ownership, state power, and social purpose, and thereby sever the internal connections between institutional form and class content, economic mechanism and political leadership, and the development of the productive forces and the interests of the people. The historical task assumed by Comrade Jiang Zemin as the core of the third generation of the CPC central collective leadership was, under these two-sided pressures, to uphold the basic socialist orientation while overcoming the ossified links that obstructed the development of the productive forces, and thereby to re-establish a unity—among reform, development, and stability, and between the state, the Party, and the armed forces on one side and the fundamental interests of the people on the other—that could be sustained in motion, continuously adjusted, and tested in practice.

I. The Defining Element Is Socialism: From Meihualing to the Fourteenth National Congress of the CPC

The practical capacity to find a viable way forward within the movement of contradictions did not arise suddenly after he assumed posts in the central leadership; its early practical foundations were formed in a life trajectory linking national crisis, underground struggle, and industrial labour. During his youth, Yangzhou was occupied by the Japanese invading forces, and Comrade Jiang Zemin frequently visited the tomb of Shi Kefa on Meihualing to pay tribute. After joining the Communist Party of China (CPC) in April 1946, he took part in the student movement against hunger, civil war, and persecution and, under difficult conditions, provided cover for revolutionary comrades; on the eve of Shanghai’s liberation, he also organized workers in the struggle to protect the factories. The cold stone of Meihualing, the circumspection required by clandestine liaison, and the machinery still running in the factory workshops made the connection among national independence, the liberation of the people, and the preservation of society’s productive capacity part of his political experience at an early stage, not as an abstract idea detached from determinate conditions, but as a concrete problem susceptible both to perception and to action.
With the transition from national crisis to socialist industrial construction, this experience acquired the precision required by engineering and technical work. In the early years of the People’s Republic of China, Comrade Jiang Zemin participated in food production and in providing material support for the Chinese People’s Volunteers, and later directed the design of a domestically produced turbo-generator; in 1955 he undertook an internship at the Stalin Automobile Plant in Moscow, Soviet Union, returned to China to participate in the construction of First Automobile Works in Changchun, and in 1961, amid strained coal supplies, directed the conversion of power boilers to crude-oil firing. Whether a boiler could be made to operate again did not depend on the forcefulness of the wording employed, but on whether the properties of the fuel, the control of pressure, the configuration of pipelines, the condition of the equipment, and the cooperation of labour could be brought into objective alignment; a failure to ground any one of these elements in actual conditions could render the entire plan ineffective. Social governance cannot, of course, be reduced mechanically to engineering design, yet the disposition formed in this process—to proceed from objective conditions, reckon with interdependencies, organize complex systems, and test judgement against practical outcomes—subsequently remained the engineering cast of mind underlying his treatment of major political and economic questions.
When the practical criterion formed in the workshop was carried into the planning of the special economic zones and the governance of Shanghai, it was further transformed into a criterion of institutional construction. In participating in preparations for the special economic zones, Comrade Jiang Zemin did not examine whether foreign experience should be accepted wholesale, but which external forms a socialist state could select, transform, and employ in accordance with its own developmental needs and which elements might conflict with state sovereignty, economic security, and the basic requirements of the socialist system. While directing work in Shanghai, he promoted the establishment of a system of expert appraisal for major projects and required the government each year to address a number of practical questions concerning residents’ food, clothing, housing, and transport. These two aspects of his work were not separate: expert appraisal embodied the requirement that decision-making conform to objective laws, while the resolution of problems affecting people’s everyday lives embodied the requirement that state construction serve the interests of the people. The evidence here shows that, unless a macro-strategy is brought into concrete connection with technical conditions, public resources, and the life of the masses, it remains an abstract intention not yet transformed into a real force; effective political leadership consists precisely in giving concrete form to an overall orientation through a series of institutional mechanisms capable of implementation, inspection, and correction.
When this practical method was applied at a historical moment of profound retreat in world socialism, the formulation of a socialist market economy ceased to be merely a change in the terminology of economic administration and became an institutional choice bearing on the direction of socialist China’s development. In a speech at the Central Party School on 9 June 1992, Comrade Jiang Zemin indicated that he was inclined to adopt the formulation “socialist market economy”; in October of the same year, the Fourteenth National Congress of the CPC formally established the creation of a socialist market economy as the objective of reforming the economic system. Engels observed: “A nation that wants to climb the pinnacles of science cannot possibly manage without theoretical thought.” Theoretical thought, as used here, did not mean appending a retrospective explanation to an established policy, still less concealing actual contradictions by substituting one concept for another; it meant discerning, beneath the apparent opposition between planning and the market, the deeper relations that determine the character of a social system, and thereby answering the question of what structure of ownership, what form of state power, and what social purposes determine the mode of operation of the economy.
The central point of the institutional proposition thus formed was not simply to attach the label “socialist” to the market, but to use the basic socialist system and state power to determine the political boundaries and social orientation of market operation. Comrade Jiang Zemin later described the term “socialist” as the formulation’s “defining element” and made explicit that this element specified the character of the market economy. As a mode of allocating resources, the market is not, within concrete social relations, a neutral apparatus devoid of class content; nor does planning, as an instrument of economic administration, produce socialist outcomes automatically by virtue of its form alone. What is decisive is whether the dominant position of public ownership can be consolidated; whether the socialist state can effectively regulate the movement of capital and the economic cycle; toward what developmental objectives the social surplus is principally directed; whether the working people can share in the fruits of social development through employment, distribution, social security, and public services; and whether economic growth can be transformed into a real capacity to strengthen the material foundations of socialism and improve the people’s lives. The question has never been whether the market should be used, but who leads it, under what institutional constraints it operates, through which distributive relations it operates, and whose interests it ultimately serves.
Furthermore, a socialist market economy does not imply that the contradictory tendencies inherent in market relations have disappeared. The market can facilitate the mobility of factors of production, raise economic efficiency, and expand social production; without institutional regulation, however, it can also intensify income disparities, promote the commodification of public resources, and permit sectional interests to encroach upon the interests of society as a whole. The tasks of a socialist state therefore include not only establishing and employing the market, but also restricting the spontaneous forces of the market and bringing the activity of capital within limits defined by the state’s development strategy, the requirements of social equity, and the fundamental interests of the people. The socialist character of the system cannot be guaranteed by its designation alone; it must be continually realized through the actual operation of the system of ownership, the distributive system, macroeconomic regulation, public services, and political leadership.
The practical tensions contained in this institutional choice subsequently manifested themselves in the adjustment of state-owned enterprises, the construction of the social security system, the effort to withstand the Asian financial crisis, the return of Hong Kong and Macao to China, and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization. Reform liberated and developed the productive forces, while also creating employment pressures, widening income disparities, and generating the risk of the commodification of power; opening to the outside world expanded the scope of the international division of labour and technological exchange, while also situating national economic security within a more complex international configuration of forces. At midnight, first in 1997 and then in 1999, the five-star red flag was raised over Hong Kong and Macao respectively; the texts negotiated for China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 inscribed rights and obligations into the institutional conditions under which China entered the world market. Sovereignty did not disappear as a consequence of opening; on the contrary, under conditions of opening it had to acquire more precise expression through the legal system, industrial policy, financial supervision, macroeconomic regulation, and national strategy. Opening therefore did not abolish the functions of the state, but required the socialist state to possess a stronger institutional capacity to manage the contradictory relationship between domestic development and the world market.
Yet a simple and unequivocal answer to the question of the standard by which this major institutional choice should ultimately be tested was furnished by an episode on 5 December 1993. On that day, in Beijing, Comrade Jiang Zemin administered an oral poliomyelitis vaccine to a kindergarten child; after taking the vaccine, the child turned and kissed “Grandpa Jiang.” This brief gesture could not, of course, substitute for a scientific demonstration concerning the economic system and public policy, nor did it constitute institutional evidence in a statistical sense; it nevertheless gave the value criterion of institutional practice a directly perceptible form: the productive forces, the market mechanism, and state capacity must ultimately be embodied in the health, security, conditions of life, and future of ordinary people. The social content of the socialist market economy is not realized by its designation alone, but can be demonstrated only through development outcomes that the masses actually obtain.

II. Military Effectiveness and the Preservation of Political Character: From the Jingjiang Dike to the Cessation of Commercial Activities by the Armed Forces

If the socialist market economy answered the question of how commodity relations and market mechanisms could be used to develop the social productive forces, the cessation of commercial activity by the armed forces answered a different question: into which domains commodity relations may enter and which forms of public power they must under no circumstances be permitted to dominate. At a meeting of the four General Departments of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army held on 21–22 July 1998, Comrade Jiang Zemin announced that the commercial companies affiliated with the military and the People’s Armed Police Force must be thoroughly reviewed and brought into order and that the armed forces and the armed police would henceforth cease all commercial activity; local political and legal organs subsequently proceeded according to the same principle. This decision was not an industrial adjustment or routine business rectification in the ordinary sense, but an institutional answer to whether the people’s armed forces could be exposed to erosion by commodity relations and whether the coercive power of the state could be transformed into an instrument for the self-expansion of special interests; it thereby reaffirmed the boundary between public power and the profit-seeking mechanism of capital.
The principled significance of this decision lay in the fact that the public resources controlled by the people’s armed forces could not be converted into conditions for capital accumulation in the service of special interests within the organization. The armed forces possess weapons, land, transport, storage facilities, and administrative authority; once these resources become durably combined with profit accounting, relations of command may be disrupted by relations of interest, while public power may acquire, in its actual operation, a material basis detached from public purposes, thereby fostering rent-seeking practices, vested-interest groups, and a relaxation of organizational discipline. Lenin observed: “The role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory.” In this context, “theory” does not mean repeating the designation “people’s armed forces,” nor using their political character to obscure a concrete problem; it means discerning, behind the partial returns that commercial activity may generate, the danger of the capitalization and self-reproduction of public power, and severing the institutional conditions on which that danger depends before it congeals into organizational inertia and a stable structure of interests.
The same historical moment soon demonstrated, through another scene, where the people’s armed forces properly belonged. The July decision to end commercial activity separated the barracks from commercial interests; on 13 August, Comrade Jiang Zemin went to the front line of flood control and emergency relief along the Yangtze River in Hubei, where, standing on the dike at the hazardous Zhongshajiao section in Wulin Town, Honghu City, with a megaphone in his hand, he addressed the soldiers and civilians gathered around him, their clothing covered with mud and water; on 16 August, he ordered all troops stationed along the river onto the dikes. The words spoken on the dike did not derive their force from rhetoric, nor did the flood admit of any declaration detached from reality. Military uniforms, sandbags, boats, and lights that remained burning throughout the night demonstrated more clearly than abstract definitions that withdrawal from profit-seeking activity and deployment to the front line of flood control were two institutional expressions of the same political character of the people’s armed forces: the former removed the armed power of the state from the sphere of capital valorization, while the latter placed it at the forefront of the protection of the people’s lives and property.
Pursuing the implications of the military question further, the stability of a socialist state cannot be reduced to the concentration of administrative power; it depends on whether the ruling party can restrict the combination of public power with special interests, preserve its capacity for political integration as the social structure and relations of interest change, and ensure that the extension of its organizational base remains subordinate to its political programme. The important thought of the Three Represents therefore addressed not only how the Party’s organizational reach might be extended, but how, under conditions in which the productive forces were developing, social strata differentiating, and economic components becoming more diverse, a ruling party could broaden its connections with advanced forces in all sectors of society while preserving the Party’s character as the vanguard of the working class and maintaining the socialist orientation; and how the requirements for developing advanced social productive forces, the orientation of advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people could be constituted as a unified whole whose elements are interrelated, mutually constraining, and mutually verifying. If the development of the productive forces is detached from the interests of the people, economism may reinterpret it as capital valorization; if the extension of the organizational base is detached from the Party’s class character and socialist programme, the broadening of social connections may be transformed into a retreat from political principles.
When these theoretical determinations entered organizational life, the cessation of commercial activity by the armed forces, the “Three Stresses” education campaign, efforts to improve Party conduct and build a clean government, and the adjustment of primary-level Party organizations disclosed a common internal logic: through ideological education, organizational discipline, and institutional constraint, public power was to be prevented from becoming detached from the interests of the people, while the Party’s advanced character was to be continually reproduced under new social conditions. Stalin observed: “Of course, theory becomes purposeless if it is not connected with revolutionary practice, just as practice gropes in the dark if its path is not illumined by revolutionary theory.” A communist party that has governed for a prolonged period cannot, in other words, preserve its advanced character automatically on the strength of past revolutionary achievements, nor can it regard existing organizational forms as permanently effective institutional guarantees; as social relations change, it must demarcate anew the boundaries between public power and private interest, organizational incorporation and political principle, and economic efficiency and social purpose, while continuously eliminating, through self-education, self-restraint, and institutional correction, the factors capable of eroding the Party’s character. Theory acquires a material form capable of transforming reality only when it is converted into institutional procedures that can be implemented, inspected, corrected, and made subject to accountability.
Accordingly, Comrade Jiang Zemin’s formulation that the armed forces must be able “to fight to win while never degrading in character” did not refer to two parallel and separable requirements of military work, but to the unity of the effective capacity of state force and its political character. The requirement to “fight to win” specified the concrete capacity that the people’s armed forces had to possess in order to defend state sovereignty, the social system, and the interests of the people; the requirement to “never degrade in character” specified who must control that capacity, according to which political principles it must be employed, and to what social purpose it must remain subordinate. Without the capacity to win, the state could not effectively defend the social achievements already secured by the people; if degeneration occurred, however, the stronger that force became, the more readily it might depart from the historical mission entrusted to it by the people. The events of 1998 made this conclusion particularly clear: the commercial enterprises divested from the military establishment and the people’s armed forces rapidly assembled on the dikes defined from opposite directions—one through negative restriction, the other through positive fulfilment of public duty—the proper relationship of the state’s armed forces to capital and to the people.

III. “To Develop Our Socialist Cause Successfully”: From the Individual Cultural World to Internationalism

The institutional choices of the state and the Party did not exclude the role of personal character in political practice; personal character, however, can be converted into political influence only through organization, institutions, and social relations. In Comrade Jiang Zemin, the precision of the engineer, the erudition of the intellectual, and the organizational capacity of the political leader were brought, over the course of sustained work, into a relationship of mutual complementarity. He was able to converse with foreign guests in English, Russian, and Romanian; in preparation for delivering a speech in Spanish in Latin America, he devoted several successive weekends to working on pronunciation. He was familiar with classical Chinese poetry and took an interest in European literature and music. Language, poetry, and melody were not ornaments external to political activity; they constituted an individual condition that enabled him to understand the cultural psychology of different nations and to unite political principle with communicative capacity, thereby furnishing institutionalized interstate interaction with a more concrete cultural medium.
This cultural disposition may be illustrated by an ordinary and unassuming scene. At a small gathering, Comrade Li Lanqing was invited to play František Drdla’s Souvenir; when he momentarily forgot the melody, he shifted smoothly into Enrico Toselli’s Serenade. Comrade Jiang Zemin immediately recognized the change and, smiling, asked how Souvenir had become Serenade, before singing the latter in English. There is no need to elevate this episode into an event possessing independent political significance; it nevertheless discloses an aspect often obscured by grand narratives: rigour is not incompatible with humour, and knowledge is not confined to documents, reports, and formal speeches; political life, while maintaining principle and assuming responsibility, does not necessarily exclude human interests, memories, and feelings.
When this individual cultural world entered the sphere of international relations, socialist internationalism acquired a tangible human dimension extending beyond the procedures of protocol. Before his visit to Latin America in 2001, Comrade Jiang Zemin studied Spanish for seven or eight successive weekends, sometimes repeating the pronunciation of a single word more than ten times in order to achieve accuracy; after arriving in Havana, he greeted Fidel Castro in Spanish and opened the talks with several minutes of remarks in Spanish. Repeatedly correcting the pronunciation of a single word may appear a minor matter, yet it enabled the comradely relations between the two states to move beyond conventional protocol and gave respect an immediately audible expression. At a time when Cuba continued to endure the pressure of blockade, such respect could not substitute for political cooperation and material support between states, but it gave concrete form to interaction on a footing of equality, national dignity, and comradely solidarity as required by internationalism.
The political significance of this internationalism can be determined with greater precision only when situated within the actual circumstances of the world socialist movement after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 1990 Comrade Jiang Zemin stated: “We must acknowledge that world socialism is at a low ebb; nevertheless, we must stand firm—stand firm despite the adverse circumstances—while at the same time developing our socialist cause successfully.” The force of this statement lay not in rhetorical intensity but in the clarity of its judgement. To acknowledge the low ebb was to refuse to allow subjective wishes to obscure the change that had already occurred in the international balance of forces; to insist on “standing firm” was to refuse to abandon the socialist orientation because of a temporary setback; and to require that “our socialist cause be developed successfully” was to translate the responsibility of internationalism into the concrete practice of developing the productive forces, strengthening state capacity, consolidating Party organization, improving the people’s lives, and broadening the social basis of socialism. Internationalism cannot be sustained by declarations of conviction detached from material conditions; every concrete position of world socialism can be preserved only by relying on the productive forces, state capacity, Party organization, and the support of the people.
Developing this judgement further, the significance of the Chinese path for the international communist movement lies not in furnishing a formula that can be mechanically transplanted, but in preserving the historical possibility of socialism as a real institutional choice. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, restoring the old organizational structure in which directives were issued from a single centre was neither supported by the requisite objective conditions nor compatible with the requirement that communist and workers’ parties in different countries independently formulate their own lines, policies, and strategies of struggle. Each party must determine its own path in accordance with the class structure, national history, political system, and social conditions of its country, while forming a new international solidarity in the common struggle against imperialism, hegemonism, and the monopolistic domination of capital. A national path severed from internationalism readily degenerates into state egoism; internationalism that is not mediated through concrete national conditions and class relations becomes an abstract phrase lacking a social basis and organizational force. Their unity must therefore rest on the equality and autonomy of the parties, mutual respect, and concrete cooperation, rather than on the replication of any model detached from the conditions that made it possible.
In the final analysis, the question of the historical future of world socialism must be answered by the practice of the masses, and Comrade Jiang Zemin’s own historical place can be determined only by the same criterion. Chairman Mao Zedong observed: “The people, and the people alone, are the motive force of world history.” The youth at Meihualing, the young participant in the struggle to protect Shanghai’s factories, the organizer of the boiler-conversion project in Changchun, the speaker delivering the report at the Fourteenth National Congress of the CPC, the Chairman of the Central Military Commission on the Jingjiang Dike, and the head of state offering greetings in Spanish in Havana are not isolated commemorative images; a single fundamental question connects them: by what social forces are production, the state, the armed forces, the political party, and international relations organized; by what institutional relations are they governed; and to what social purposes are they subordinated? The historical role of the individual acquires its concrete and limited determination precisely in the process of answering and practically addressing these questions.
Accordingly, what should be preserved in commemorating the centenary of Comrade Jiang Zemin’s birth is not a static portrait abstracted from the movement of contradictions, but the political character of a communist who, at the historical rupture marking the turn of the century, translated theoretical judgement into institutional choice and submitted that choice to the test of the people’s practice and the historical process. The period in which Comrade Jiang Zemin acted did not eliminate all the contradictions of socialist development, but caused them to assume new forms at a new level of development of the productive forces, amid expanded market relations and altered international conditions; his historical role lay not in bringing contradictions to an end, but in contributing, together with the Party and the people, to ensuring that socialist China did not withdraw from the process of world history during the low ebb of the international communist movement, and in preserving for the new century the material positions and institutional conditions required for further practice, cognition, and development.
This conclusion requires no embellishment, for the facts themselves are sufficient to establish it; nor can it remain confined to a commemorative text, because the historical contest between socialism and capitalism as two social systems will, in the final analysis, continue to be decided by the organized people, the developing social productive forces, and institutional practice tested in reality. To commemorate Comrade Jiang Zemin therefore means not only to look back upon the history that has already unfolded, but also to continue, under new conditions, the investigation of the actual contradictions between the market and socialism, capital and public power, Party building and the interests of the people, and the national path and internationalism, while subjecting every institutional choice anew to evaluation from the standpoint of the people and to the test of social practice. Only in this way will socialism avoid becoming a merely inherited designation and instead continue as a real social system continually constructed and developed by the masses through their practice of understanding contradictions, organizing forces, and transforming society.

 Li Zhuoru is a Special Research Fellow at the Institute of National Security Studies, Nankai University, and Deputy Secretary-General of the World Association for Political Economy