The Chinese Clock (Part One): Mao's super synthesis
I.
In line with my a-periodic commentaries on this blog about the situation in Egypt, the Middle East (Syria, Israel, Palestine, Turkey), I accentuate those sporadic analytical visits even further east.
When we approach China we are imbued with a sense of entering a space where strategic thinking has been not only conceptualised but efficiently put into action, over several groups of hundreds of years summing up millennia, almost in a continuous way through time and space. There, the greatest strategic change emerged at Mao's death with the development of an unprecedented and far-reaching action, which was not initially understood in the West: the operational synthesis of successful Western capitalism with a local form of war communism, in fact a variant of the one triumphantly imposed by the Bolsheviks around 1922 on the ruins of the defeated Tsarist Empire, and on the defeated Western alliances to wipe out communism militarily.
II.
Mao conceived years before his death the fundamental theoretical principle used by the political-military leadership of the Chinese system during the post-Mao transition. This Maoist concept, his main contribution to political theory, is based on how to overcome the "classical" Hegelian, Marxist and Leninist debate on "reality". Until Mao, the highest level of the socio-economic historical process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis ended with "the change of reality" which arises from an organised political will, oriented towards the seizure of power in order to precisely "change the reality" of the living conditions of the population. Mao proposes something radically different, going beyond the classical synthesis, which he criticises as "weak": it is no longer enough to interpret reality, nor to change reality... but: a new reality must be created.
Thus, the successors of the "great helmsman" did not deepen the errors of the war communism practised by the Soviet Union and its satellites, for they did as their leader had written: the chinese did not reinterpret or change reality... they created another reality. They made the most innovative strategic synthesis since the Council of Nicea, 1694 years ago, when the Roman Empire converted to Christianity. The Maoist synthesis can be called the Super Synthesis because it surpasses the previous level of strategic analysis and practice. It was Mao's political adversary, Deng Xiaoping, who launched the experiment, but conceptually it was totally in line with the political-theoretical line that Mao had created. Thus, all political-military and civilian cadres of any rank were perfectly familiar with that part of Mao's theoretical legacy. In the West, only the few communists who had seriously read Mao understood the profound meaning of this concept, of this Super Synthesis, when the profound economic transformations in China began 10 years later. What was mistakenly seen from the West as the partial or complete westernisation of a communist regime, for millions of senior cadres, Chinese communist party militants and ordinary citizens, it was actually the creation of a new singular reality , not a mere change of reality. The gang of 4 belonged to the past with their criticism of this radically new policy for a new reality, they still were about changing reality, thus they totally lost their ticket to the big scenario.
In the Western we tend to operate under pre Maoist rationales , just doing a simplistic kind of taxonomy when we say that the Chinese are just summing up capitalist market concepts and practices within a communist formal dictatorship. I dare to say that this is a weak analysis of what is really happening in China.
Igor Parra, Vitacura-Lebu 2021
