The "Asiatic mode of production", or more generally, "Oriental despotism", is an element of Marxist-Leninist thought that should be revisited today, in the early 21st century, in the context of communist China's dramatic rise to the forefront of the global economy.
Specifically, it will be argued here that the main continuity between imperial China and the People's Republic - namely, the all-pervasive bureaucratic apparatus state - is every bit as crucial to our understanding of modern China as the much more widely discussed discontinuity brought about by the communist revolution; in the final analysis, one can actually make the case that it is even more so.
As a start, China has been an empire since 221 BC, the date of its initial unification by one ruler, the first Qin emperor; indeed, the term "China" itself is derived from "Qin".
What is remarkable from a Western point of view is that practically all of the greatest innovations and developments in Chinese thought - notably the Confucian worldview - took root and matured around that date, that is, in the late pre-imperial (territorial states) and early imperial (especially Han dynasty) eras. In the subsequent two millenniums, Chinese civilization followed a very notable cyclical pattern of imperial rise, decline, and fall: while the dynasties varied in the degree of absolute political power they enjoyed as opposed to the civic strength of their subjects, their overall foundations for legitimacy were unmistakably little altered. In a nutshell, it boiled down to a so-called "mandate of heaven" of the reigning dynasty, based upon its ability to effectively administer and defend the imperial domain and thus preserve the exalted basic qualities of societal existence, namely stability and harmony.
In the modern age beginning around 1500, but especially since the industrial revolution about 1750, the stunningly rapid technological, socioeconomic, and ultimately political transformation of the West gave rise to an ever-increasing Western consciousness of the "otherness" of the East, i.e. the Orient, of which China among all the great eastern empires - notably Turkey, Persia, and India - appeared to be the representative par excellence. This otherness, in essence, was the apparently static and unchanging nature of Eastern society in stark contrast to the dynamism and progress of the West. Unsurprisingly, by the mid-1800s, as the industrial revolution accelerated to propel European Christian civilization into a position of unprecedented dominance over others, this awareness came to acquire an increasingly patronizing tone, and it would undergird the white man's imperialist colonization of most of the colored world in the closing decades of the 19th century and the early 20th.
It was in this context that Marx and Engels, among others, discussed what they termed the "Asiatic mode of production", or "Oriental despotism" per earlier Enlightenment terminology. Drawing from other Western thinkers, whether in their own day, such as John Stuart Mill, or from such earlier luminaries as Montesquieu and Hegel, they latched onto the central element of this peculiar form of non-Western autocracy: the seemingly all-powerful bureaucracy.
However, it was the 20th-century German Marxist/Sinologist-turned anti-communist, Karl August Wittfogel, who in 1957 published the definitive volume discussing this topic, "Oriental Despotism". Deeply disillusioned by the regressive autocratic retrenchment of both Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, Wittfogel laid the foundations for a systematic deconstruction of the pattern of continuity between Czarist Russia and the former and between imperial China and the latter; in doing so, he expounded upon the not insubstantial writings of the late 19th and early 20th century socialist thinkers - not least Marx, Engels, and Lenin themselves - to arrive at his critical conclusion that the entire theory of the "Asiatic mode of production" was deliberately abandoned by the Bolshevik revolutionary generation because it presented such a scathing indictment of the retrograde true nature of their supposedly progressive and scientific movement.
Today, as China is ruled by a party-state that continues to call itself communist but has obviously engaged in arguably the most blatant appropriation of public wealth for private interests in modern history, it behooves us to explore the possibility that, far from being an extraordinary deviation of the natural flow of human (specifically Chinese) affairs, it's more accurately a modern iteration of China's dynastic past of bureaucratic despotism.
What follows will be a multi-part critique on my own part of Wittfogel's aforementioned magnum opus on Oriental despotism.
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