In this interview, Max Ajl discusses his research on the influence of China’s agrarian reform on Arab countries, particularly Tunisia, highlighting how China’s experience with an alternative development path resonated with local conditions and inspired Tunisian intellectuals and planners.
Can you discuss at the broadest level how your research intersects with China?
My work treats four areas of study in the Arab region: the history of decolonization, the history of planning, the intellectual history of heterodox planning alternatives, or “paths not taken” in the post-colonial world, and broader Arab agrarian questions. Within the first, China registers most lightly, although China sent arms to Algeria and even Tunisia, as my colleague Rebecca Gruskin uncovered in the archives. Furthermore, China was central to the world-wide mass mobilizing peasant wars of the mid-to-late 20th century, more commonly called the national liberation struggles.
In relation to the second and third themes, China becomes much more salient. By the time planners were thinking about how to move from under-development to development in the Arab region, and particularly Tunisia, as I discussed in my article, “Planning in the Shadow of China,” they were looking for models. Some, of course, drew on the mainstream and lightly heterodox development discourses, from Ragnar Nurkse to Albert Hirschmann. But for nearly all of them there was knowledge of, if not enchantment with what they understood, the Chinese Communist development model, by the late 1950s. Through party-overseen study tours, delegations, and research trips and the resultant books by the most prominent French left-leaning or Marxist development writers, people like Charles Bettelheim, Rene Dumont, and others, China was on everyone’s mind as a possible option or model for what countries like Tunisia could do to extirpate the poverty blighting their bidonvilles and their countrysides.
Furthermore, the young cadres studying abroad were generally studying in Paris or elsewhere in France. Communism was magnetic and China was on everyone’s minds. One finds more and more mention of China – or oblique references to the country’s policies rather than as a proper noun – in documents from UGET, the UGTT, and even nationalist bourgeois writers. Later, China was an inspiration for the explicitly Maoist segments of the Perspectives student movement as well. Concerning China’s impact on the Arab nationalists, we frankly know less, but their painting of the Fellaga and Youssefite armed struggles (1952-1954 and 1955-1956 as the conventional dating for each, although armed flash-fires of Youssefism ignited in the Tunisian Southwest until the late 1950s) as a “people’s war” is very suggestive of the way China may have begun to inflect the thinking of the Arab nationalist wing of the Tunisian national movement, including in exile.
What themes did they explore?
China in the 1950s seemed to be developing in a way that resonated incredibly powerfully with the conditions and sufferings cutting across the Tunisian countryside. Like China in the 1940s and early 1950s, Tunisia was poor if not starving, with massive rural under- and unemployment, an unequal agrarian structure, and stunted and sectoral industrialization. The Chinese Communist Party addressed these issues in the countryside through collectivizing and thereby helping make more rational rural production patterns and the allocation of labor. Yields increased generally through labor-intensive and capital-light mechanisms, although with a modulated appropriate-scale industrialization of tasks. Labor flows to the cities to fill the circulatory needs of a national industrialization effort took place but at a controlled pace, far from the rural flight convulsing the Third World. And rural industrialization was coupled with these efforts, allowing for a broad-based scienticization, or understanding of the principles of scientific investigation and the mechanisms of industry, of the people living in the countryside. News of these achievements began to trickle then gush from China to other countries, and their people learned about it and were impressed with what they understood of China’s achievements.
In that sense, with varying degrees of specificity, or explicitness, you begin to find China all over Tunisian heterodox thought. The example of an agrarian reform and the ability of a sharply hierarchical Third World society to shatter the spine of rural feudalism meant everything to planners who wanted to go beyond the mechanical equations of how much you could extract via saving towards investment, and instead asked a different question: could you increase incomes by changing the factor endowments in the countryside, or in less jargony terms, by taking from the rich to give to the poor, and thereby increase the magnitude of internal markets, increase rural incomes, and do so even while making it easier to reserve a surplus for infrastructural and industrial investment?
Indirectly, radical Tunisian planners seemed clearly inspired by the deployment of so-called “traditional” agricultural technologies as part of the productivity-enhancing suite within the Chinese countryside, as well as the allure of a decentralized industrial fabric which worked within rather than over and above the existing artisanal manufacturing sectors. These were often state technical attachés or employees in state institutions where China was reviled – Destourian socialism, the policy adopted officially by the Neo-Destour party in 1964 as part of its commitment to an increased state role in the economy, was avowedly anti-Marxist and anti-China – and therefore one must read those documents between their black-lettered lines to discern China’s impact.
What about the third arena of study?
My third area of study is where I go beyond the relatively siloed approach to Tunisian intellectual history – although that is a pillar – to also look at Egyptian and to a lesser extent Moroccan intellectual history. Algerian, and for that matter Mashreqi and overall Third World thinking about development that burgeoned in the 1970s and 1980s. Here, through a series of declarations and meetings, from the Arusha Declaration, which prominently featured self-reliance and helped inform the Tanzanian economic policy and was contoured by the impact of the Chinese-influenced brilliant young economist Justinian Rweyemamu, self-reliance became a Third World policy pillar (if also sometimes buzz-word). Samir Amin was furthermore a – probably the – major disseminator of the idea of self-reliance based on the Chinese model, beginning to disseminate this very widely in French by the early 1970s. Others in Amin’s direct circles like Mohamed Dowidar and Ismail-Sabri Abdalla were enchanted with the Chinese experience and began to write systematically on self-reliance, taking their understanding of the Chinese model of modulated engagement with world trade, a cautious diversion of surplus from countryside to industrialization, and the need to fulfil basic needs as the model to follow for the Third World.
This debate was grounded in the Third World Forum, the International Foundation for Development Alternatives, the Center for Arab Unity Studies, and other Third World-centered institutions, meeting, and fora. By the late 1970s ideas of self-reliance were dominant (or even hegemonic?) within Third World heterodox development spaces, with the Chinese horizon dominating its socialist inflections and a certain vagueness concerning models, commitments, and class animating the less-socialist notions of collective self-reliance. By then Chinese achievements such as breaking through the food grain constraint and achieving a comparatively significant level of industrial capacity at a comparatively low social cost, especially as compared to the “achievements” of export-oriented industrialization in general and its paragons, the “Brazilian model” or the “Mexican model” in particular, were well-known. They were, in turn, increasingly beguiling in terms of the prospects China offered for actually breaking the vicious circles of colonial and neo-colonial underdevelopment.
My work on Tunisia in the 1970s and 1980s returns to some of these themes through the muted impact of China on the work of the most heterodox Tunisian development planners, agronomists chiefly but also economists. I have focused on the work of Slaheddine el-Amami, who was in fact a member of Perspectives, somehow escaping the state drag-net which caught so many of its young members, and a close colleague of the better-known Gilbert Naccache at the Ministry of Agriculture. Already then, in the early 1960s, I believe he had developed an interest in so-called “traditional” technologies, which were being studied or examined or integrated into development proposals by figures like J.P.-Chabert, Monique Laks, Yves Younes, Naccache, Habib Attia, and others. By the late 1970s he was a forerunner in the broader Arab debate about alternative technologies, in his own committed and idiosyncratic way taking the lessons of the Chinese experience concerning traditional approaches to terracing, water harvesting, natural fertilizer and bio-gas production and partially closing nutrient loops, as well as the need for a decentralized development matrix as the necessary framework for a Third World development which would stem rural out-migration and ensure a decent life in the countryside.
Amongst these alternative technologies influenced by the Chinese agrarian model, his great romance was with traditional irrigation, a central vector and mechanism for neo-colonial underdevelopment and misuse and marring of the ecology and agriculture of Tunisia on the one hand through the bloated budgets for big dams which filled to bursting the state agricultural research budgets. And on the other hand his deep economic-technical anthropological approach to traditional irrigation systems on the other – e.g. the rainwater harvesting or conservation systems which studded the Tunisian south like gems, allowing for run-off water to gather from mountain slopes or even milder grades and concentrate in the necessary quantities to allow fruit tree cultivation in arid areas, isohyets, where this would not be possible for most plants simply through allowing precipitation to take its normal course. These extremely labor- intensive models were more efficient, cheaper by orders of magnitude, mobilized labor, and allowed for the use of labor furthermore for farming temperate or semi-arid crops in arid zones, fertilizing a rural civilization in lieu of the dominant patterns of poverty pocking rural Tunisia.
In this Amami was joined at the economic-modeling and theoretical level by the extremely Chinese-influenced Azzam Mahjoub, for example, who put forward proposals for rethinking extant models of development. Mahjoub attempted to formalize notions of “another development” that ruptured with prevailing stageism or technological neutrality that marked dominant and even Marxist models. In this Mahjoub and Amami were part of a generation marked deeply by China and put forward ideas that are not just of interest as curios but as methods for rethinking not yesterday’s development but today’s, where amidst the dead-end of export-oriented industrialization, many are re-considering the agrarian question as again central to achieving well-being and development for the nation, its poor, and its ecology.
Max Ajl is a fellow at MECAM/Universite of Tunisia and the University of Ghent, an editor at Agrarian South and Journal of Labor and Society, and the author of A People’s Green New Deal.
Featured Photograph: China town in Johannesburg, South Africa (12 May 2011).
