From Marx to Mao – And After: III

Contradictions Among the People

Ray Nunes

During the period 1967-1971 a great deal took place. In 1967 there was a lot of faction fighting at all levels. In some areas Red Guards seized arms from the militia. Some of those concerned in the seizures were actually counter-revolutionary elements, criminals released from jails. This required intervention by the army to protect state property. There was widespread disorder, which had to be ended. Weapons were also seized from supplies being transported to aid Vietnam. In these cases, to recapture them, force had to be used by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Otherwise all their actions were unarmed. In many of the universities armed anarchist groups had seized control and had set up military-type defences, including trenches and barbed wire. By July 1968 masses of unarmed workers aided by PLA propaganda teams set out to take control of the universities and schools by reasoning. This they did, though many were killed and injured. According to both Han Suyin and Edgar Snow (who quoted Chou En-lai’s figures), each writing independently and both then supporters of Mao and new China, there were hundreds of thousands of casualties in the PLA during the many Cultural Revolution (CR) struggles. In the main, the contradictions between and among workers, students and soldiers were contradictions among the people and not contradictions between the people and their class enemies. The aim, therefore, was to resolve them without the use of force, and in general this was done. In cases where force had to be used it was usually the result of ultra-left forces gaining control of sections of student rebels.

In August 1968, the press put forward the line for revolutionary youth. It stated that youth was the vanguard but it was the workers and peasants who were the basic strength of the CR. [17] One of the objectives of the CR was beginning to be achieved. The workers’ propaganda teams were to remain permanently at the universities and schools in a directing role, while in the countryside the poor and middle peasants were to play a similar role. All this, of course, was with the object of securing the dictatorship of the proletariat in the field of education, formerly a preserve of the bourgeois and feudal classes.

By 1969, although all was not quiescent, the cadre force of the Party was largely restored, the new tripartite state form was largely in being, and it became possible to hold a Party Congress, the Ninth (the 8th had been in 1956) in April 1969. Party committees had not yet been properly rebuilt, but a good deal of the dissension had died away, although ultra-leftism remained a danger. The task now was to rebuild and consolidate the Party as the leading core of the Chinese Revolution, strengthening its base with new cadres drawn from the masses.

Role of Lin Piao

It was from this point that Lin Piao’s opposition and manipulation of the ultra-left began to be exposed. This final chapter would still take some time, however. As the Vice-Chairman, Lin was to deliver the main report, but the theses he advanced were repetitions of the erroneous ones of Liu Shao-chi, which negated class struggle. The report had to be rewritten for him. This was done under Mao’s direction. For a long time, Lin Piao, assisted by a leading propagandist, Chen Po-ta, had authored a pro-Lin campaign as someone who had never made a mistake and was absolutely loyal to Mao.

As was known, Mao was concerned, with advancing age, to ensure a strong Marxist-Leninist as successor. He felt that Stalin had given too little thought to this question, enabling Khrushchev to usurp power. Lin Piao had anticipated being chosen to succeed Mao, and had inspired great publicity about his own military genius to prepare the ground. Mao must have suspected that Lin was a wrong choice, but the Congress declared him Mao’s ‘close comrade in arms’ and successor.

Why did Mao go along with this? At this stage Lin had not properly shown his hand as the prime mover in the ultra-left. Many mass organisations supported Lin as successor, taken in by his self-inspired publicity campaign. As well, the US was bombing Vietnam and an invasion of the North was a possibility. Also, there were large Soviet forces, a million strong, poised on China’s northern border, and many border clashes had taken place. Unity against a possible aggressor was the order of the day.

Mao No Warmonger

Mao made a most significant statement to the Ninth Central Committee soon after the Congress, on April 28, 1969. He warned that the Soviet revisionists were still attacking China and that there should be preparedness against war:“Others may come and attack us but we shall not fight outside our borders…but if you should come and attack us we will deal with you.” [18]

The Soviet revisionists had repeatedly – and lyingly – denounced Mao as a warmonger. Mao’s statement is a direct rebuttal of their lies.

The Lin Piao Danger

The Ninth Congress of the CPC took place in April 1969. Formally, the CR appeared over. Liu Shao-chi and his revisionist clique appeared to have been substantially defeated. Liu was denounced and expelled in 1968. A new Party Constitution was adopted, which stated that Lin Piao was Mao Tse-tung’s close comrade-in-arms and successor. Mao declared that it was a Congress of unity. Nevertheless, in the same month he declared that one cultural revolution was not enough, and said: “In a few years we shall have to carry out another one.” He added that more work remained to be done in the current one.

A growing conflict took place between Mao and Lin in the next two years as Mao struggled against the opposition of Lin to rebuild the Party as the leading core in the revolution and re-establish its authority over the army. Seeing his hopes of becoming Mao’s successor fading, Lin turned to plotting. During August 1971 Mao made a tour of Central China where he discussed ‘the Lin Piao problem’ with a widely representative group of military commanders. He stated what soon became known as the three principles of Party building: “Practice Marxism and not revisionism; unite and don’t split; be open and above-board, and don’t intrigue and conspire.” He also gave a brief but profound guide to revolutionary development: “The correctness or incorrectness of the ideological-political line is the key; it decides everything.”

On Mao’s way back to Peking, on September 11, 1971, Lin Piao organised an attempt to assassinate him. Due to the active intervention of Chou En-lai, the Prime Minister, it failed. The conspirators commandeered a Trident aircraft and set off for the Soviet Union, but the plane crashed in Inner Mongolia, killing all occupants. It was evident that the struggles to achieve the aim of the CR to consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat were by no means over. Indeed, it was only in 1970 that the universities were able to reopen. Many lecturers were reluctant to return, feeling that teaching was dangerous and the future uncertain.

Tenth Party Congress

Still, by the time of the 10th Party Congress in August 1973, Chou En-lai in the main Congress Report was able to point to an all-round improvement in the socialist economy and in the political situation, both internally and externally. (It was about at this time that Nixon had begun making approaches in regard to recognition of China and its right to Taiwan, and also to indicate that, given reasonable conditions, he was prepared to withdraw US forces from Vietnam). At the same time the Report stressed the need to “strengthen our unity with the proletariat and the oppressed people and nations of the whole world and with all countries subjected to imperialist aggression, subversion, interference, control or bullying and form the broadest united front against imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism, and in particular, against the hegemonism of the two superpowers – the USA and the USSR.” [19] The four who had come notably to the forefront during the CR, Chang Chun-chiao, Yao Wen-yuan, Wang Hung-wen and Chiang Ching were all now on the Party’s Political Bureau, and Wang delivered the Report on the Party Constitution.

Revisionists Return

However, big changes were soon to take place in the leadership of the Party and the state. Teng Hsaio-ping (or now Deng Xiaoping) had been closely linked with Liu Shao-chi from the beginning of the CR. In fact, the revisionist views they both held were called the Liu-Deng line. After having been removed from all leading positions as a capitalist-roader, in 1969 he was sent from Peking to a distant province for ideological re-education at a cadre school. However, in the wake of a reshuffle of leaders in 1973, following the death of Lin Piao, Deng was brought back into the leadership, having made a self-criticism that was accepted, and was soon back on the Politburo. No doubt Chou En-lai was the main influence in Deng’s restoration. One must assume, however, that Mao took some convincing. One of Deng’s famous remarks, made before the CR, indicated that he was more a follower of pragmatism, the philosophy of big business, than of Marxism. It was: “I don’t care whether a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.” What’s wrong with that? one may ask. Simple. At a time when the Soviet revisionists had substituted technocracy for Marxist-Leninist principles, and when the line of the Party was to place politics in command of technocracy, it was a defence of revisionism, of pragmatism. It was affirming that the politics of the working class didn’t matter. They could be bourgeois, fascist or anything else, so long as they produced well. Soon after Mao remarked: “Black cat, white cat. This man knows nothing about Marxism!”

Chou himself, though most of the time a loyal supporter of Mao, showed in certain speeches that he held some similar views. However, Chou was hospitalised with cancer in May 1974, and in January 1975, Deng became – with Chou’s support, senior Vice-Premier, Party Vice-Chairman, and PLA Chief of Staff.

Reporting to Karl Marx

Chou died in January 1976. This meant that within about a year, four of Mao’s trusted supporters among the top leadership had all died: Chu-Teh, who had been Commander-in-Chief of the Chinese Red Army on the Long March; Kang Sheng, formerly Director of the Party School in Yenan, member of the five-man Party Secretariat and a close associate of Mao’s; Tung Pi-wu, a founder of the Party and a General from the earliest days of the Red Army; and, of course, Chou En-lai himself.

Deng had not changed that much. His support still for the line of technocracy above politics soon alienated Mao and his principal supporters during the CR. He was attacked in the press as an “unrepentant capitalist roader”. He was recognised as being the prime mover in what became known as the Tien An Men Incident that took place on April 5, 1976, when demonstrations in memory of Chou En-lai turned into a riot, which was suppressed by police. On Mao’s initiative the Politburo resolved to remove Deng from all positions of leadership, the riot being declared counter-revolutionary in character.

This brought Hua Kuo-feng still more to the fore. At the time of the Tenth Congress he was Chairman of the Hunan Revolutionary Committee and First Secretary of the Provincial Party Committee. At the Congress he was elected to the Standing Committee of the Politburo. In February 1976, he became Acting Premier, to succeed Chou En-lai, and Minister of Public Security. After Deng’s ouster, in April he became Prime Minister. Mao wrote to him on April 30: “With you in charge, I’m at ease.” He obviously took Hua to be a Maoist who would pursue the aims of the CR but would also seek to unify the growingly disparate elements in the Central Committee. Mao himself knew that his own end was not far off. He would say to visitors (New Zealand Party Secretary VG Wilcox was one): “Soon I’ll be going to report to Karl Marx.” Various Western writers, including the generally truthful Edgar Snow, have reported him as referring to seeing God, not Karl Marx. It is possible. But to Communists – as Wilcox was then – he would certainly not refer to God. Mao was reported to have nominated Hua as Vice-Chairman – i.e., his own successor – the same time as Hua became Prime Minister.

On September 9, 1976, Mao died, probably from Parkinson’s disease, at the age of 82. In spite of attempts since by both Chinese revisionists and Albanian dogmatists to downgrade his life and achievements, almost to obliterate him from history, he remains, next to Lenin, the greatest political leader, thinker and revolutionary of the20^thcentury.

Notes:

[17] Han Suyin: Wind in the Tower, p.331.

[18] Ibid., p. 338.

[19] The Tenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (Documents) (Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1973).

(To be continued)