Most of the communist societies we’re told about have ended in disaster, or transformed into something else entirely: The Berlin Wall came crashing down, the USSR dissolved, Cuba is an impoverished mess, North Korea a nightmare, and China is now chugging along, full-bore, with its mighty capitalist engine. Most of it is, anyways.
Yes, it turns out that while the vast majority of the nation opted to partake in a society based on private ownership, one tiny village with 2,000 resident decided to hold firm to the principals of Mao-inspired communism. That meant shared sacrifice and shared investment. And in this case of the town of Huaxi, it meant shared wealth beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
The New York Times explains how this happened:
When China effectively embraced capitalism in the 1980s, Huaxi was an agrarian hovel, reachable by dirt roads. Mr. Wu, then the local Communist Party secretary, seized on the new market freedoms to shift the Huaxi economy from farming to manufacturing and trade, but with a twist: the residents would throw their money into a collective pot and share in the take from whatever new businesses they bought.
“In the 30 years after the opening up, the system changed in many places,” Mr. Wu’s son, Wu Xie’en, said in a recent interview. “Some chose private ownership, but we Huaxi people chose public ownership. The biggest benefit is that the people share the common prosperity.”
Now, the small village of Huaxi looks anything like a typical small village in China: There’s a 74-story skyscraper in the city center, a massive luxury shopping mall, and gilded sculptures of the city’s mascot, the water buffalo, throughout. Each of the villagers live in spacious homes and drive imported cars. Chinese tourists evidently come from all over to marvel at the place. And yes, the 2,000 own all of it together — from the mill to the behemoth skyscraper. It is indeed a communist-organized utopia fit to the Western ideal of prosperity.
But the Times also notes that what began as a truly egalitarian society now looks more like a giant corporation — the 2,000 wealthy residents now acting as shareholders. The grunt work behind the city’s marvels is now largely done by thousands of immigrants — though the 2,000 still work seven days a week, they don’t do much of the heavy lifting anymore. And those immigrants don’t get a stake in the town (though they do get higher wages than elsewhere in China).
Huaxi’s leaders don’t plan on abandoning communism — they say they’re merely using capitalism as a tool to develop, before they can instate true Maoism. But that will mean extending equal shares to thousands of new people who have helped build (and sold their labor-power for, to use the communist lingo) Huaxi into what it is today.
Right now, Huaxi seems more like a prosperous, unusually-structured corporation than a utopian society — there’s an elite class, and underclass, and the wealth is concentrated at the top. And many are quite skeptical that Huaxi can translate its current model into a similarly prosperous egalitarian society, in true communist form. But one thing is beyond doubt: the city is a beguiling modern marvel.
Photos by Remko Tanis via Flickr/CC BY-SA
