From Marx to Mao – And After: V

Could the Rightist Coup have been prevented?

Ray Nunes

Overdoing Adulation

Of course, by this time a steadily growing anti-Mao campaign was underway, ostensibly to destroy the ‘cult’ that had grown up, which virtually accorded Mao divine status, in reality to prepare the ground for major policy reversals. Mao himself had led the way in dismantling what had become known as the cult of personality in 1970. Actually he had unwillingly acceded to it in 1966, as he says in a letter to Chiang Ching of July 6, 1966. He wrote: “The Central Committee is in a hurry to publicise the speech of my friend [i.e., Lin Piao]. I am ready to agree…Certain of his ideas greatly disturb me. I could never have believed that my little books could have such magical powers. But now that he has extolled them, the whole country will follow his example…My friend and his partisans have forced me to act…apparently I cannot do otherwise than approve them…It is the first time in my life that I am in agreement with the others on the essence of a problem against my will.”[23]

Apparently it worried Mao that a conscious campaign of adulation was to be promoted. While upholding Stalin’s role as a great Marxist-Leninist, in 1956 he had been critical – among other things – of the adulation around him. Edgar Snow, reporting a discussion with Mao in 1970, said: “I asked the Chairman when I saw him: ‘In the Soviet Union China has been criticised for fostering a cult of personality. Is there a basis for that?’ Mao replied that perhaps there was. It was said that Stalin had been the centre of a cult of personality, and that Khrushchev had none at all. The Chinese people, critics said, had some (feelings or practices of this kind). There might be good reason for some (more?). Probably Mr Khrushchev, he concluded, fell because he had no cult of personality at all.”[24] In a further interview Snow says: “Later on he reminded me that he had told me in 1965 that there was some worship of the individual but that there was need for some more. At that time the power of the Party had been out of his control. But now [1970] things were different, he said. It (the cult) had been overdone, there was a lot of formalism. For example, the so-called ‘four greats’: that is, Great Teacher, Great Leader, Great Supreme Commander, Great Helmsman. What a nuisance! They would all be dispensed with sooner or later.”[25] Indeed, Mao saw to it that this did take place. Earlier in the interview Snow reports: “I had been criticised he [Mao] said, for some things I had written, but he had read excerpts and he did not see anything harmful in them. They did not expect everyone to agree with them on every subject and I was right to keep an independent point of view. As for what I had written about the so-called personality cult, there was such a thing, why not write about it.”[26]

Deng and the ‘Three Worlds Theory’

In regard to foreign policy, in the mid-1960s, when the ideological dispute was over and the Soviet armed forces were openly threatening China, it had become perfectly clear that the Soviet Union was now a country of imperialism, i.e., social-imperialism. It was a superpower contending and colluding with the other superpower, the US, for world domination, referred to by China as ‘hegemony’. Mao had formulated a policy of uniting all forces that could be united among both the advanced and the ‘backward’ countries against both superpowers. Some years later, in an interview with a visiting Japanese delegation, he was reported as saying that he thought there were three worlds: the first world, which consisted of the two superpowers; the second world, consisting of developed countries which were lesser powers, and the third world of undeveloped and underdeveloped countries. China belonged to the third world. He favoured uniting the second and the third worlds against the first world, opposing their hegemonism.

In 1974, Deng Xiaoping – again in a leading post – represented China at a meeting of the UN and elaborated on Mao’s remark. However, this was not regarded as ‘theory’, nor was there any reference to Mao’s ‘Three Worlds Theory’. Indeed, Mao had written nothing about such a ‘theory’. As previously mentioned, Chou En-lai had spoken in the 10th Congress of the need to form “the broadest united front against imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism, and, in particular against the hegemonism of the two superpowers – the US and the USSR.”[27] Again, in 1976, in the Report to the 4th National People’s Congress, Chou said: “The contention for world hegemony between the two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, is becoming more and more intense…The two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, are the biggest international oppressors and exploiters today…We should ally ourselves with all the forces in the world that can be allied with to combat colonialism, imperialism and above all, superpower hegemonism.”[28]

In neither report is there the least mention of any ‘theory of the three worlds’ created by Mao. (In both reports by Chou En-lai his remarks on foreign policy are, almost verbatim, in Mao’s own words.) There is need to spend a little time on this, because the bourgeois ‘China experts’ constantly refer to Mao’s Three Worlds Theory. Actually, a long theoretical document was issued by the Hua-Deng clique in 1977, which referred to the ‘Three Worlds Theory’ of Chairman Mao; it was almost certainly authored by Deng. The policy actually pursued first by Hua, then after his ouster by Deng, was to shift the emphasis from the struggle to unite those who could be united against both superpowers, to the policy of proclaiming the sole enemy to be the Soviet Union. The so-called ‘Theory of Three Worlds’ was to lay the basis for the change to Deng’s line. The object of this change was to open China to US capital investment and provision of technology, culminating by 1978 in a de facto military alliance between China and the US, when Deng visited the US for talks on new relations. China’s doors were thrown wide open to the monopoly capitalists of US imperialism who hastened to make the most of the offered investment opportunities. The US began to equip the Chinese armed forces with modern armaments and continued to do so up to what became known as the 1989 Tien An Men massacre. They were suspended then, but after a short time the US secretly restored at least part of its arms supplies. Needless to say, the Chinese Army of today is a far cry from that of Mao’s time, when it was, above all things, a people’s army.

Imperialism and the New Bourgeoisie

At the time of the 1989 suppression of the anti-government demonstrations in Tien An Men, the capitalist world’s media went into a frenzy, denouncing China’s ‘communist government’ as fascist, even though capitalism in China was by now well-recognised in the West as an established system. They were making use of China’s phoney revisionist ‘socialist’ facade to propagandise against communism to give world imperialism more years of life. Fundamentally, the new bourgeoisie had seized power in 1976, just as 20 years earlier they had seized power in the Soviet Union and, by extension, in almost all Soviet bloc countries. A marked difference existed between the two processes, however. Whereas no one in the USSR foresaw or warned of the danger of a restoration of capitalism by a new bourgeoisie that had secured dominance in the Party, Mao foresaw precisely this development as early as 1962[29] and sought for a method of preventing a similar restoration in China. The Socialist Education Movement was launched with this in mind. When it became clear by 1965 that this was not achieving the desired results, Mao reached the conclusion that nothing short of a thorough cleansing of the Party, and particularly of revisionist elements in the Party leadership, at the hands of the masses, could do the job required. He felt that he had found this method in the Cultural Revolution (CR).

Could the Rightist Coup Have Been Prevented?

Yet still, in 1976, only a month after his death, the right had seized power, as he feared would happen. So we have to consider, was the CR successful in its aim of consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat, and if not, (a) what went wrong? and (b) could the ascendancy of the new bourgeoisie have been prevented by other means?The answer to the first question has to be, of course, that it did not succeed. Considering the fact that the right was able to seize power so quickly, it is obvious that it was Mao’s leadership that was decisive in keeping the new bourgeois elements from power. Once he had gone, the revolutionary left represented by the four arrested radicals lacked the backing of the majority of the Party leadership. Some of those who played a decisive role in the coup such as Marshal Yeh Chien-ying and Vice-premier Li Hsien-Mien, had appeared to be Mao loyalists for a long time. Hua Kuo-feng was initially regarded as a Maoist. No doubt in all of them there was an opportunist streak. To what extent they were influenced behind the scenes by Deng Xiaoping is unknown. But the fact remains that the individuals concerned were representative of existing class forces. They were bureaucratic power-holders. Their aims were not those of the radical representatives of the CR. The right-wingers were all quickly committed to a fabricated campaign of lies and slander against the so-called ‘Gang of Four’, stooping to disgusting depths such as vilifying Chiang Ching as a prostitute. The class interests of the bourgeoisie blocked the road to continuing the CR, and that meant blocking the road to continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. All the authors of the coup must therefore have known that, even while paying lip-service to Mao and his revolutionary policies, they were now openly on the capitalist road, and with it the dismantling of socialism while keeping up a socialist signboard. After all, they had often enough discussed the Soviet betrayal to know that their seizure of power would put an end to proletarian dictatorship and continued revolution, and that they were now committed to establishing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. True, there was resistance. They forcibly suppressed it. Once Deng was back in his old positions (July 1977) he provided the theoretical underpinnings for the new course: (1) the ideological-political downgrading of Mao, and hence of his line of ‘politics in command’; (2) the primacy of technocracy and hence the necessity for foreign (mainly US) capital investment and loans; (3) the consequent abandonment of self-reliance; (4) the substitution of, and a need for, allies among the imperialists with technology and cash; and, of course, (5) the transformation of the state apparatus – mainly consisting of the armed forces – from a people’s army into a bourgeois army; from an army with a high level of class and socialist consciousness, trained to serve the people, into a bourgeois force, obedient to a bourgeois ruling class, ready and willing to shoot down the people when ordered to do so. Which, as we know, they did in 1989.

Notes:

[23] Han Suyin: Wind in the Tower, (Jonathan Cape, 1976, pp .277-278).

[24] Snow, E: The Long Revolution(Huchinson, London, pp. 69-70).

[25] Snow, E: op.cit., p.71.

[26] Snow, E: op.cit., p. 70.

[27] The Tenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (Documents) (Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1973, p. 29).

[28] Documents of the First Session of the Fourth National Congress of the People’s Republic of China (Foreign Languages Press, Peking, January 1975, p. 59).

[29] Han Suyin, op. cit., pp. 214-215.

(To be continued)