The Political Economy of Counterrevolution in China: 1976-88

POST-LIBERATION ORIGINS OF THE NEW STATE CAPITALIST CLASS

   

             Since liberation, there have been two main sources of the bourgeoisie—one the capitalist class and landowners of the New Democracy period (remnants from pre-1949 China) and two the party members in the highest posts of the communist government itself. The first category was relatively more important at the beginning of China’s history since 1949. The state capitalist class did not become important until the 1960s, by which time the old exploiting classes were pretty much defunct.

             Still, one can only gain a full appreciation of China’s Communist Party as non-monolithic by looking at some of the class relations of the 1950s. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was victorious in 1949, socialism did not suddenly appear in China in a complete and entrenched way.

             Despite the considerable development efforts of the communist base areas during the civil war, China had one-eighth the per capita industrial base that the Soviet Union had in 1918. Furthermore, that industrial base was in the urban areas where the CCP had just entered. There were not enough CCP cadres with the capability of administering industry. With the threat of a full-scale U.S. invasion and the actuality of a U.S.-backed blockade of the Peoples’ Republic in 1949, there was not time for the masses to learn in practice what was necessary to replace the bourgeois experts. Consequently, the CCP was forced to rely on technical and administrative experts from the old regime, as well as urban capitalists. Allowing a role in economic construction for patriotic capitalists and bourgeois experts was part of the New Democracy program of the CCP.

             Up to 1952, the New Democratic stage entailed a radical bourgeois program of distribution to the peasants of confiscated land. The rich peasants gained most from this policy and went about developing agriculture at the fastest pace in China’s history; although, the base they started from was relatively small by recent standards.

             Thus, the rich peasants, technobureaucrats and urban capitalist class had some power at this stage. Later it was to be said that one of Liu Shaoqi’s five major errors in the eyes of Mao was to speak for a relatively long period of New Democracy. However, in the 1950s, the error of lagging was not evidence by itself of revisionism since it was debatable how far and fast China should go. The Trotskyists long criticized Mao for not pushing land reform fast enough. The error by Liu was not necessarily one of principle, only one of tactics and timing. Mao did not split with Liu for not knowing how far the peasants could go in China’s new experiment. In any case, the practical success of the collectivization of agriculture in the later 1950s resolved any questions as to how fast China should go in ending New Democracy.

             The first post-liberation split in the CCP was with Gao Gang in Manchuria. Secretary of the party bureau of Northeast China, Gao was closely linked to the Soviet Union. “80% of the Soviet aid and 40% of its experts went to Manchuria to help build up China’s industry.” Gao was also chairman of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association. His Soviet connection started when Stalin was still alive and before China’s break with the Soviet leadership. Still, Gao appeared to be setting up an “independent kingdom” which could look to the Soviet Union as a powerful ally in some bid to influence the CCP. Fears about Gao were also strengthened by the fact that as an “independent kingdom” the Northeast would develop its industrial base ahead of the country’s needs and thereby exacerbate the division of labor and class polarization. With connections to the East China Bureau and to Defense Minister Peng Dehuai, Gao was arrested as threatening to take over the CCP. Before and after his arrest calls were made for collective party leadership and after his arrest the collective leadership of the factory Party committee replaced that of one-man management.

             The next major stress in the CCP was caused by the Great Leap. Prior to the Leap, China was already reviewing its analysis of the Soviet Union. “On the Ten Major Relationships” was an important move away from the worship of productivity and heavy industry adopted wholesale from the Soviet model. Upholding Stalin as 70% correct, the Maoists saw Liu as taking cues from the Soviet Union at this time. Like Kruschev, Liu denounced the cult of the individual and saw that Mao Zedong Thought was removed from the phrase “Marxism- Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought” in the New Party Constitution. Also, at the Eighth Congress Liu’s Political Report said, “‘in China, the question of which wins out, socialism or capitalism, is already solved.’” Thus, there was already some similarity between Liu’s politics and economic strategies and those of the Soviet Union. The Great Leap, scorned by the Soviet Union, which saw itself outpaced in the race to communism, left a clear demarcation line in the party.

             Liu for his part often appeared as a leftist during the Great Leap by assuming the ultraleftist guise with the statement “‘communism is near at hand.’” Such statements appeared in public when lower level officials already seemed to being going too fast in collectivizing agriculture to the level of the commune. Communist utopia did appear in certain ways in the Leap—large scale and public eating facilities, massive reservoir and irrigation construction, backyard steel furnaces in the countryside and an upsurge in the volunteer spirit. For whatever reasons, Liu went at least as far as everyone else in public support of the Leap—perhaps too far.

             The argument is made that Mao criticized this “communist wind” while Liu discredited the Leap with his ultraleftism. Of course, Mao himself made his famous self-criticism and took blame for the Leap. Still, MacFarquhar tries to demonstrate that Mao attempted—too meekly—to head off the Ultraleft upsurge during the Leap in his chapter “Mao Veers Right.”

             There were not any major stresses or conflicts in the CCP before the Great Leap that foreshadowed the Cultural Revolution. Mao was quite suspicious of Khruschev for dropping the “sword” of Stalin and one clique was purged for its relationship to the Soviet Union. By itself, the emerging Sino-Soviet split would not have caused the Cultural Revolution, but it did serve as the historical background conditions for the eventual struggle against revisionism within the CCP.

             Real fallout in the CCP started with Peng Dehuai who severely criticized the Leap, as “petty-bourgeois fanaticism” as did other notables like Peng Zhen. Peng Dehuai also previously supported a conventional military strategy instead of Peoples’ War and was associated with the idea of a military alliance with the Soviet Union. After Peng’s dismissal, Khruschev called Peng Dehuai “‘correct’” and “‘best friend.’” Zhou Enlai and others backed Mao’s effort to dismiss Peng Dehuai at Lushan from the position of Defense Minister. Liu did not stand in the way of this effort. The result was that Lin Biao replaced Peng as Minister of Defense—an appointment with major implications as the subject that kicked off the Cultural Revolution and as an event that led to the eventual defeat of Mao’s revolutionary grouping in 1976.

             The failures of the Great Leap are well-known. For example, MacFarquhar has pointed to the Leap as a utopian dream that resulted in the starvation death of millions. Commune level organization—child care, eating halls for tens of thousands of people and truly commune-oriented building of reservoirs for one—was bound to be controversial, but 1958 and 1959 were not actually the problem years. The crunch hit in 1960. Since there had been terrible natural disasters and the Soviets had withdrawn their technical aid at the same time, there is a debate as to whether or not the problems of the Leap were a result of mainly human error or deviation or natural causes. Deng’s regime blames “‘Left’” deviations for the disasters. MacFarquhar, as an academic who is rewriting history in light of new information, sides with Deng. Yet, in Shantung Province, the Yellow River dried up for almost a month. One commune outside Canton withstood seven months drought with no effect thanks to a reservoir built during the Great Leap that held nine months of water. Overall, in 1959 almost half of the cultivated land was struck by “heavy floods or serious drought.” “In 1960, drought, typhoons, floods, and pests struck 800 million mou, more than half of the cultivated area, and seriously affected another 300 to 360 million mou, some of which bore no crop at all.” According to Wheelwright and McFarlane, “the commune system, by its ability to mobilize large numbers of people, undoubtedly helped in avoiding famine in these difficult years.” “The period from October 1957 to September 1958 saw irrigation and flood prevention works dug equal to that of 300 Panama Canals and an additional 16.5 million mou of land were irrigated.” There is a real debate about the Great Leap, but it is safe to say that material conditions contributed to a sense of retrenchment and caution.

             Once the Great Leap was over and Soviet aid had been withdrawn, Liu stepped in with his “Sixty Articles” and reversed the trends of the Great Leap. Before the Leap, Mao had established a “second line” to retire to with a post of “honorary chairman.” Among those who took the place of Mao on the first line were Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, Zhou Enlai and eventually Lin Biao. In the early 1960s, Mao retired again while anti-Leap forces instituted a mini-New Economic Policy for recovery.

             The results of the mini-NEP were that private cultivated land surged to 15 or 20%; team size was cut to 20 to 30 households in 1961 from the previous level of 40; the team was made the basic accounting unit; the party committee was removed from day-to-day management in the factories; the factory manager was given more authority under Bo Yibo’s Seventy Articles, which also reestablished profit in command, piece-work and material incentives in command; the bureaucracy was strengthened. In a preview of the post-Mao period, the NEP-style economists advocated the channeling of investment where the most profit could be made.

             In Yunan, private property went up to 50% and the private harvest became larger than the collective harvest. In the fall of 1961, Anhui adopted the method of assigning output quotas to households instead of collective units. Experimentation in the same methods spread all over China amid signs of popularity.

             Chen Yun emerged at this time to show his true colors. Not satisfied with assigning output quotas to households, in a February, 1962 Politburo meeting Chen Yun advocated that the land simply be redistributed to the households. Deng Xiaoping seconded this idea by saying that there really was not much difference between fixing output for households and private farming.

             At the level of implementation, peasants fondly referred to the “four treasures”—“private plots, private reclamation, the family side-line occupation, and the free market.” In this situation, landlords and rich peasants were found to be assuming leadership in the production teams and reports of class polarization thanks to the rise of middle peasants surfaced. For example, “over 70 percent of team land in the Chengpei communes near Shanghai was held by rich and well-to-do peasants in 1963.” In one brigade, it was found that only 25% of the peasants opposed the practice of these kinds of capitalist freedoms. Ahn concludes that “probably the majority of the cadres and of the peasants (including the poor peasants) wanted temporarily even more small freedoms to help solve the food crisis.”

             By 1962, Mao, who was polemicizing against Soviet revisionism was prepared to attack “right-wing opportunism” in China as revisionism. Using the PLA as a base, Mao started political education campaigns to prepare as many people as he could for political struggle against revisionism.

             At the same time, the Right, now grouped around Liu, generally criticized the Great Leap as the source of the problems in the countryside and the reason that China could not move forward and away from recent capitalist tendencies. Liu, in control of the state and party apparatus, sent out work teams to criticize the masses and corrupt cadres at local levels in what was the Socialist Education Movement. Mao, for his part, finally circumvented the party and state by starting a “Learn from the PLA” campaign in 1964. Furthermore, Mao worked through the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasant Associations. By December 1964, Zhou was on Mao’s side. Even though the party managed to undermine Mao’s “Early Ten Points” by obstructing their implementation and by replacing them with Liu’s “Later Ten Points,” which gave control of the movement to the work teams, two positions still crystallized. Mao used the PLA as an “organizational vanguard” in the words of some American analysts. To Mao, it did not matter if the PLA was the vanguard rather than the party. Political line, not formal organization was key to Mao.

             In fact, a major distinction between Mao and Liu was that Mao believed that

  

                         the correctness or otherwise of the

                         ideological and political line decides

                         everything. When the Party’s line is

                         correct, then everything will come its

                         way. If it has no followers, then it

                         can have followers; if it has no guns,

                         then it can have guns; if it has no

                         political power, then it can have political

                         power. If its line is not correct, even

                         what it has it may lose. The line is a net

                         rope. When it is pulled, the whole net opens

                         out.

  

  Zhang Chunqiao also saw that mere organization and labels guaranteed nothing for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The political content or actions of the leaders in the superstructure matter.

  

                         Whether the ideological and political line is

                         correct or incorrect, and which class holds

                         the leadership, decides which class owns those

                         factories in actual fact. Comrades may recall

                         how we turned any enterprise

                         owned by bureaucrat capital or national

                         capital into a socialist enterprise. Didn’t

                         we do the job by sending a military-control

                         representative or a state representative there

                         to transform it according to the Party’s line

                         and policies?

   

Here Zhang Chunqiao explains that having seized the national leadership, the proletariat went onto change the ownership of the factories at the local level. By itself neither local control nor national leadership were enough. Politics at both levels had to be correct to represent proletarian ownership.

             The Cultural Revolution was lead by intensely political people. Now we turn to some of the fine details of the political spectrum that determined whether or not a political line was correct.

  

  THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION POLITICAL SPECTRUM

    

             The political spectrum in China should be divided into two separate spectrums. One is the bourgeois or prerevolutionary spectrum and the other is the postrevolutionary spectrum. With the passage of history, the bourgeois spectrum became vastly expanded with the addition of political controversies born with the Chinese revolution. The result is that far from being monolithic as die-hard conservatives in the United States often claim, the political spectrum in China has become more complicated.

             The two spectrums are separated by the means that are used to wage the class struggle. During the days of the bourgeois spectrum, the bourgeoisie fought openly through bourgeois parties and the KMT. After the liberation of China, the bourgeoisie more consciously waged class struggle by going underground.

             Pre-revolutionary parties were relatively clear cut. Sun Yat-sen was a left-wing bourgeois revolutionary. Chiang Kai-shek was right wing. The CCP was the CCP. There was a battle over the legacy of Sun, but compared with the Cultural Revolution conflicts that later occurred in the name of Mao, this was a straight-forward time politically.

             Complexities did arise in a few ways however. First, the bourgeois parties relied on semi-feudal classes to one extent or another. Just how much was open to debate and interpretation. In particular, Sun Yat-sen’s work was even tinged with mildly socialistic ideas concerning the welfare of the masses.

             Secondly, the Trotskyists, some of whom were expelled from the Soviet Union by Stalin posed to the left of the CCP and tried to take over the CCP. Their posture consisted of advising against the Stalin-plotted alliance with the KMT; relying solely on the urban industrial proletariat; denigrating guerrilla warfare in favor of more open and seemingly quicker strategies of urban insurrection. Nigel Harris and other Trotskyists have also criticized Mao for moving too slowly on land- reform. Of course, all Trotskyists criticize the idea of a two-stage revolution in favor of a one stage permanent revolution initiated in the West. Some splinters from the Trotskyist movement even argue that China never had a workers’ revolution, only a bourgeois one.

             Finally, the anarchists likewise criticize the Maoists for never getting past a bourgeois revolution and for not abolishing the state. Still, on the whole, the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was nowhere near as complex as it was to become once the bourgeoisie consciously attempted the appropriation of Marxism- Leninism for its cause.

             The revolutionary political spectrum is composed of a fragmented bourgeois spectrum and a new spectrum overlaying the bourgeois spectrum. One of the major new categories is that of “revisionist” or “capitalist-roader.” Unified prior to the Great Leap, the CCP had no capitalist-roaders except in retrospect. Of course there had always been a two-line struggle in the CCP involving “opportunism” and “deviations” from the correct line, but it was only after the Sino-Soviet split and the internal debates over the Great Leap that Mao started China’s contemporary usage of the word “revisionist” in 1962: “I think that right-wing opportunism in China should be renamed: it should be called Chinese revisionism.”

             Revisionism when used to refer to a political line that is supposedly Marxist-Leninist is a charge that the political line in question changes or omits something fundamental to Marxism-Leninism. Simply put, a revisionist can usually be spotted for downplaying the importance of class struggle, especially over the continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, while playing up the importance of the struggle against nature for production. All revisionists ultimately find things more important than social relations, so they emphasize the seemingly apolitical struggle to promote production. (Western bourgeois economists would also favor this point of view, but they would not be called revisionists unless they claimed to be Marxist. Claiming to be Marxist is necessary to be charged with revising Marx.) In contrast, in talks with his nephew Mao said “the basic idea of Marxism-Leninism is that you must carry out revolution. . . and then afterwards setting up a workers’ and peasants’ political power, and moreover continuing to consolidate it.”

             In terms of political economy, the politics of revisionism translate into putting China on the capitalist-road. As we will see in section on China’s marketization, issues of payment according to work or “bourgeois right” are explicitly political. Advocates of bourgeois right in the highest party and government posts put China on the capitalist-road. Today these same capitalist-roaders are no longer just capitalist-roaders. They are the state capitalists.

             Another major division in the revolutionary spectrum concerns the relationship of the vanguard party to the masses. Opportunists are people who take advantage of the masses for the benefit of political power or bourgeois careers. Right-wing opportunists play up to the masses by relying on bonuses to promote production, by promoting the importance of consumer goods and by instigating strikes to cause political mischief. Right-wing opportunists of this kind are called revisionists. Right-wing opportunists who merely try to grab a career without claiming to be Marxist-Leninist are merely bourgeois. When the revisionists concentrate on the purely economic and spontaneous desires of the proletariat, they are promoting “economism.”

             Economism more generally refers to opportunism or an incorrect relationship between the party and the masses based on a deterministic belittling of the possibilities of political consciousness-raising and structural change. Right-economists believe that political work is unnecessary because the economic conditions will automatically give rise to political consciousness, revolution and proletarian political power. An example of right economism is the Shanghai dock strike and the handing out of bonuses in an effort to get workers out of the political arena in which the Red Guards were about to wage struggle for the Cultural Revolution.

             Left-economists including anarchists and pseudo-anarchists may believe that political work is necessary but only in quick adventures or terrorist acts that rely on the automatic support of the masses. The “Leninist” left-economist tends to see the masses as stupid and backward and simply in need of a good example or commandist leadership. Examples of left-economism occur frequently in the collection of ultraleftist essays in the Revolution Is Dead Long Live Revolution: Readings on the GPCR from an Ultra-Left Perspective. A famous essay by the Sheng-wu-lien called “Whither China” defends the struggle for Paris-style communes by saying new cadres who live without privileges “will be produced spontaneously.” Another essay by an ultraleftist Red Guard criticizes China’s “totalitarian state capitalism” and blames the situation on the masses, who treat socialism as a new religion. Only intellectuals and some cadres have “not yet lost the ability to think.” Some of the advanced in the masses escape religion “unlike the rest of the masses.” With such a view, the supposedly Leninist left-economist is apt to attack the masses.

             Liu’s sending of workteams to criticize the masses and lower level cadres during the Socialist Education Movement and to control students during the beginning of the Cultural Revolution are examples of ultraleft tactics Liu adopted in his overall right-economist and revisionist strategy. In an in-depth investigation of one brigade, Liu’s wife Wang found that “all cadres had practiced some form of the unclean. For instance, twenty-nine of the principal cadres in the brigade had misappropriated funds.” As a result, in this brigade 40 out of 47 cadres were publicly “struggled” against “and 155 peasants made self-examination.”

             The strategy to handle this problem in Liu’s view was to send out large, presumably pure elite-level workteams to do covert work and straighten out the lower levels. Mao on the other hand, held that the best way to attack the problem was structural—struggle against those power-holders who organized China in a capitalist fashion and hence opened it up to corrupt influences.

             The ultraleft faith in the spontaneity and stupidity of the masses is held together by the belief that whatever support adventurists and possibly terrorists can get is gotten spontaneously. In actuality the ultraleftist’s unwillingness to do political and educational work is blamed on the masses.

             The right economist, who often falls into reformism, holds the same medley of determinist beliefs that the ultraleftist does but concludes that it is necessary to stoop to the low political level imputed to the masses. The right economist belief is well cut out for putting experts in command to supposedly hasten the development of the economy which will supposedly automatically give rise to progress in class relations. While the left-economist does not bother preparing for the participation of the masses, the right-economist is often at home with experts and ironically, given the reformist and supposedly democratic tinge to right-economism found in the West (i.e. social democracy), an Orwellian “1984” situation.

             The differences among those claiming to be Marxist-Leninists are often profound. Many fundamental questions about politics come up within the Marxist- Leninist camp that have no parallel within the bourgeois spectrum. For instance, economism may be called instrumentalism or opportunism among presidential candidates in the U.S. presidential primaries, but it does not serve as one of the fundamental divisions of the spectrum. Nor is there a definable left and right economism within Western bourgeois politics. Conceptually, this is important for Western political scientists when they encounter the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat.” This phrase has meant more fundamentally different things to different people than the word “democracy.”

             When Red Guard organizations began to form in 1966, they started out by only allowing those children participate who had parents of good class background. Many students were from intellectual, bourgeois or Guomindang family backgrounds and the initial Red Guard organizations were anxious to prevent such students from rebelling against the CCP, which had won such gains for the poor peasants and workers in liberation.

             In addition, the leaders of the initial Red Guard organizations were often the sons and daughters of high-level cadres and party members. At Tsinghua University, a prestigious University and key battleground of the Cultural Revolution, Liu Shaoqi’s daughter, Ho Lung’s son and the daughter of the Chairperson of the Chinese Federation of Trade Unions led the original Red Guards. Reading the writing on the wall, these children tended to act in the interests of their parents. The key to this was to take action against any target which had some connection to the old pre-1949 society, but did not implicate higher ranks in the CCP. Hong Yung Lee has done the most to detail what kinds of things these “conservative” Red Guards did and how they differed from the more “radical” factions of the Red Guards. In examining the relationship between elites and masses in the Cultural Revolution, Lee analyzed these differences through his whole book, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

             Eventually, it became clear that most of the CCP leadership opposed the theory of hereditary redness. Lin Biao said, “there is no relation between standpoint and class origin.” Moreover, Mao said,

  

                         A person’s class origin should be distinguished from his

                         performance, which is more important than his class

                         origin. It is wrong to assume that class status is every-

                         thing. The crux of the problem is whether you adhere

                         to your original class stand or alter your class stand.

  

The leaders of the Cultural Revolution only backtracked from this stance somewhat when some Red Guard groups appeared to be formed by bourgeois intellectuals and others who might have the intention of overthrowing socialism in the name of fighting for Mao Zedong Thought.

             By “aiming the spear downward” at the masses and away from the elites, the conservative Red Guards hoped to divert attention from their parents and the rest of the CCP. The conservative Red Guards differed with ultraleft Red Guards only in that the ultraleft Red Guards “aimed the spear downwards” out of a genuine belief that the enemies of the Cultural Revolution were many. Both “conservative” and “ultraleft” Red Guards disagreed with “radical” Red Guards who stressed that the target was the handful of people with positions of power who were on the capitalist road. Although Lee attributes most of the activities directed against lower levels as part of the “conservative” Red Guard offensive, many of the same actions could have had ultraleft motivations. For example, many actions during the campaign to drag out the four olds gave the Cultural Revolution a bad name—such as when Red Guards raided homes to smash any vestige from old society. The conservative and ultraleft Red Guards felt they were being most correct in terrorizing bourgeois intellectuals and their children, who were told they could not even donate blood because it “lacked revolutionary character.” According to Lee, this sort of activity peaked in late August, 1966 and ended in October 1966 with a switch toward the radical line attacking capitalist-roaders. October 5th also saw the military and Mao order the party to surrender dossiers collected on Red Guard radicals by conservatives and party members. Arrests, kidnappings, photographing, fingerprinting and interrogating of radicals by conservatives resumed only briefly in the February Adverse Current of 1967.

             In Michael Frolic’s Mao’s People there is a story called “Down with Stinking Intellectuals” that most Westerner observers would consider hair-raising and indicative of the evil of the Cultural Revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat in China. However, even the exiled intellectual and former Red Guard interviewed by Frolic says he has no regrets about the politics of his Red Guard days. He said that people must do what seems right at the time and if necessary learn through experience. Furthermore, he points out that ultraleftists were quite active in the persecution of intellectuals. In China, this means that adherents of a certain political program were responsible for some abuses of blameless intellectuals. Only an assessment of the different political lines in China during the Cultural Revolution makes an analysis of the Cultural Revolution possible. Otherwise, the work of counterrevolutionary Red Guard units will be lumped together with those of Red Guard units sanctioned by Mao and Jiang Qing.

             Mao criticized Liu’s line on the Socialist Education Movement, as an example of ultraleftism— “left in appearance but right in essence.” Mao’s second document sent out about the Socialist Education Movement (in reply to a document sent out by Liu) emphasized that a tiny minority of revisionist cadres were the object of attack. Liu Shaoqi practiced ultraleftism by sending out the work teams to blame cadre corruption on the masses and lower cadres instead of the capitalist-roaders. Liu had some lower level cadres removed. According to Liu’s radical Red Guard opponents, the work teams he sent stigmatized 800 people at Tsinghua University, 829 at the Beijing Mining College and 220,000 in Canton as “rightists.”

             This was in effect saying that the masses were backward and that they should be criticized by the elite in order to solve the problem of corruption. In at least one case, a work team trying to quell rebellion on campus actually made explicit these assumptions:

  

                         

You may be considered high intellectuals, but from what you have done you do not deserve the name, and you know nothing about the Party's tactics. The masses are just like mobs, like a flock of sheep. Your sense of organization and discipline is low.

  

In this case, ultraleftism is an appeal to Leninist principles of the vanguard party. The result is a commandist party. Commandism is exactly what the word would seem to mean. A party cadre has a commandist organizational line when s/he decides that the party must be composed of philanthropists who correct and aid the masses. Commandists tell the masses to carry out their orders (often different from the directives from the Center) or be labelled anti-party.

             Charles Bettelheim, an ultraleftist himself since he attacks a relatively large group—cadres—as the basis of the counterrevolutionary coup in 1976, criticizes the Gang of Four for commandist errors in their political campaigns. He sums up the errors by citing an essay titled “Revolutionizing by Coercion.” Furthermore, he explains that the revolutionary trend was already a minority in the Political Bureau in 1971 and that the PLA’s new role allowed only for “criticism campaigns organized from above.” No one was “really trying to get the masses to take part.” Lines were thrown about “without really explaining to the masses what was at stake.” This is something that Zhang Chunqiao acknowledged implicitly when he recalled Lu Xun’s words “Name calling does not equal fighting.” In 1976 Zhang said, “from now on, criticism should be deepgoing exposure,” meaning that there had to be more concrete examples for the masses to understand the criticism of Deng. He went on to complain about the quality of the big character posters and the newspapers as correct but shallow. Furthermore, he saw the tendency to “Charge ahead when going to revolutionize somebody else, and sound the retreating drum when they are being revolutionized.” Thus, an important ultraleft error is to make vague orders and propagate them among the masses without explaining them. This kind of error sets the Leninist ultraleft apart from the anti-party ultraleft that would not bother with parties or other so-called authoritarian or totalitarian organizations. Of course, there is only one Leninism by Lenin’s own principles, but the division between those ultraleftists who believe in the need for leadership and the rest of the anarchists and ultraleftists is an important one.

             Mao considered himself “center-left.” The Shanghai Commune before it was changed to the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee had been the rallying cry of the ultraleft. The Gang of Four had a hard time trying to keep the ultraleft from breaking with Mao for not supporting the Shanghai Commune and the commune movement.

             Of course, the Shanghai Commune was not the model for the Cultural Revolution. Zhou Enlai found that model in the revolutionary committees, which were an attempt at a form of organization in which organizational leadership reestablished itself in three-in- one combinations of the army, cadres and mass organizations. Zhou’s pragmatism and eclecticism made him a centrist at times, a leftist at other times, but basically a center-rightist. The ambiguity lies in the fact that he was willing to go along with Mao to a large degree as long as he would be allowed to carry out what he saw as practical tasks for China’s modernization.

             It is interesting that just before Zhou was able to move the Cultural Revolution towards the path of revolutionary committees and away from radical and ultraleft mass-mobilization efforts, he had possibly reached his political nadir. On January 10th, 1967 Chen Boda was able to make a public speech criticizing certain government officials and “at the end of the speech, he arrogantly asked Chou En-lai whether he had any more persons to protect.”

              Zhou’s pragmatist philosophy made him a fit target for the ultraleftists, perhaps with between-the-lines support from the radicals. As the person in charge of the government’s day-to-day affairs, Zhou was open to attack for the actions of any of the ministers underneath him.

             In a fairly typical example, the ultraleftists of Sheng-wu-lien attacked Hua Guofeng openly in 1968. He was criticized as a bureaucrat and beneficiary of the February Adverse Current, which opposed the thrust of the Cultural Revolution.

             Eventually, the ultraleft 516 was labelled counterrevolutionary and its members arrested. The Sheng-wu-lien came under public criticism in January, 1968. The radicals apparently did not desire or could not afford to support the ultraleft. Jiang Qing said, “it is a counter-revolutionary organization, called the ‘May 16’ corps. . . it centers its opposition on the Premier [Zhou].”

             Subsequently, many ultraleftists abandoned Mao and even Jiang Qing as capitalist-roaders. Previously, the ultraleft was happy with Jiang Qing for supporting the gun-seizing movement of August and her slogan, later recanted, of “Attack with Words; Defend with Force.” The ending of the Shanghai Commune (to be replaced by what seemed to be bureaucratic committees staffed by the people just overthrown) and Jiang Qing’s disassociation from the ultraleft provided the basis early on in the Cultural Revolution for a genuine indigenous political dissident movement apart from those deriving inspiration from Hong Kong, Taiwan and the United States—the Leninist ultraleft.

             The Leninist ultraleft groups are in turn criticized by the anarchists and other ultraleft libertarians who say, “It is inevitable for a Leninist party. . . to follow totalitarian state capitalism.” The anarchists and ultraleft libertarians say the same of the Trotskyists, who are seen as seeing eye to eye with Stalin in essential respects.

             Matters are further complicated by the absolute disintegration of the coherence of the Trotskyist position. While he was alive, Trotsky lost many adherents who saw state capitalism as established in the Soviet Union while Trotsky still refrained from labelling the Stalinist system capitalism. One of his own secretaries split off for this reason and supports the obviously anarchist position of “doubt all; overthrow all.” The splits within Trotskyism before Trotsky’s death, the events in the Soviet Union and the events in China have left the Trotskyists scattered all over the bourgeois and postrevolutionary political spectrum.

             In general though, among the self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninists, the hard-core Trotskyists are the hardest on Mao. They are far more virulent than the most right-wing of Dengists and pro-Taiwan conservatives.

             Hard-core Trotskyists share a disdain for reality and history. However, it would be wrong to dismiss the Trotskyists without an argument since they have influence on academics and students. Also, the Trotskyist critique of China has affinities to the bourgeois critique.

             Nigel Harris of the Trotskyist International Socialist Party is an economist at Oxford. He is the author of the most sustained diatribes against Mao— Mandate of Heaven: Marx and Mao and “China: Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom” in the Revolution Is Dead.

             Harris lays out the standard criticism of Mao as a Stalinist, Stalinists as bureaucrats, bureaucrats as oppressors and totalitarians. “The Cultural Revolution was an attempt by a section of the central party leadership to re-establish central control over the whole country. . . . To do this, it had to destroy opposition at every level.”

             Leslie Evans, another less virulent Trotskyist chimes in that 5% of the population is considered the enemy by Mao, and this enemy has no human rights and may even be in prison. This is not to say that these same Trotskyists do not appear to attack from the left. Harris scorns Mao’s political line of uniting with 90% of the cadres and advocates attacking the CCP as a “Red Capitalist Class.” Indeed, Harris advocates “real—rather than rhetorical—class war.” Thus, the Trotskyists do much to earn their Maoist-given label as party splitters, anarchists and revisionists who attack the masses and relatively powerless cadres rather than the capitalist class.

             In fact, as far as Harris is concerned, poor old head of state Liu Shaoqi was a “scapegoat.” F.H. Wang, another Trotskyist, is also favorable to Liu.

             Trotskyist historian P. Broue supported Tan Li-fu, the son of an attorney in the highest people’s court. Tan’s theory of lineage held that children of revolutionaries were revolutionaries. This kind of theory was used by conservative Red Guard factions across the country to defend their parent’s positions in the party and bureaucracy. Whenever there was a call to class struggle, these hereditary revolutionaries interpreted that to mean struggle against largely defunct landlord and bourgeois elements from pre-1949 China and their children.

             During the Cultural Revolution the hope of the Trotskyists was to divert youth from their alienation with the Stalinist bureaucracy to make a Trotskyist revolution and to side with the purest of workers’ struggles. Since the internal struggles of the CCP since 1930 “were all caused by tactical differences or even on account of personal interests,” youth should stop wasting their time on the “internal struggle between the bureaucrats” that was called the Cultural Revolution.

             So in less than two sentences, the Trotskyists expunge the class struggle within the CCP since 1930. To the Trotskyists like the anarchists, everything can be explained by the desire for power and personal interests. This is silly as long as there has to be a state. Nothing is accomplished with an analysis that merely says that the state exists and that people are trying to run it (struggling for power). Even worse, the struggle between Liu and Mao over agricultural collectivization, the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution are written off as a matter of mere tactical differences. By saying the party is a “Red Capitalist Class” or just a bunch of bourgeois bureaucrats, the Trotskyists remove class struggle as a factor in the Chinese civil war and the liberation from imperialism.

             This is not surprising because Trotsky criticized liberation struggles involving the peasantry and guerrilla warfare. He considered that “calculations based on guerrilla adventure correspond entirely to the general nature of Stalinist policy.” Thus, he disapproved of struggles such as Mao’s. Before he was killed in 1940, Trotsky said that the “revolutionary centre of gravity has shifted definitely to the West,” the only place Trotsky could see revolution as possible.

             The Trotskyists are so hateful of Mao that Wang says that Mao’s attempt to be “Pope” involved more absolutism than the Western governments of Stalin and Hitler. Typically, Harris denigrates the Chinese innovations like the revolutionary committees as a “rebaptism of the old order.”

             The Trotskyists are left- sounding critics of Mao and socialism in general who superficially seek to advance the cause of industrial workers. This is demonstrated by the Trotskyists’ ahistorical approach, but it is also shown by their lack of concern for the division between city and country. Leslie Evans criticizes the freeze and relative lowering of urban wages that occurred while Mao was alive without ever explaining that urban/rural differences have to be narrowed to eliminate classes. On the one hand, the Trotskyists seem so concerned about bureaucratic exploitation of workers and peasants, but on the other hand, their apparent concern for urban workers would contribute to urban/rural inequality and hence classes and bureaucracy, if given a chance in policy implementation.

             Harris goes so far as to call the Red Guards scabs for breaking up the general strike in Shanghai during the January Storm. For her part, Evans supports the Tiananmen Incident as part of the expression of rights that all the Trotskyists uphold.

             Also, as one would expect, Evans criticizes Maoism for condemning China to low growth and slow development. Likewise, Harris says that only superabundance can bring socialism. As a common theme of bourgeois economists, Dengists and Trotskyists, the Theory of the Productive Forces or focus on the positive benefits caused by economic growth has been criticized by Maoists for negating politics by subordinating class struggle to a supposedly neutral objective of achieving gains in production.

             The Chinese ultraleft critique has both new and old aspects. The ultraleftists must be applauded for trying to understand how the Cultural Revolution could have been improved. They look at the government, military, intellectuals and the party for sources of reversals and the new bourgeoisie.

             The ultraleft was also first in criticizing Zhou and Hua, not that being first is important but that it is by no means a simple issue to assess whether Mao advanced his cause best through his alliance with Zhou. The book on the Cultural Revolution by the now-defunct U.S. Committee for a Proletarian Party (CPP) claims that “the fall of Lin Piao was decisive for the eventual defeat of the Cultural Revolution.” The question arises as to what would have happened had Mao managed the Lin/Zhou split differently or what would have happened if Mao had abandoned the party altogether to resume guerrilla warfare from the countryside as he once threatened the party.

               In retrospect, Lin’s fall was decisive, but could Mao have done anything less damaging to the Left Alliance if Lin were truly set on grabbing power in a military coup? There was considerable delay in the CCP’s public pronouncement on Lin. When Lin’s fall was finally explained, detailed plans for a military coup were revealed. If Lin was the real problem for Mao’s Cultural Revolution alliance, then one must conclude that the many criticisms of Mao for the ultimate “failure” of the Cultural Revolution are off target.

             Still, it was the ultraleft that attempted to “drag out” capitalist-roaders in the military. Perhaps if this movement had succeeded, there would have been no counterrevolution, the ultraleft could argue.

             Mao tried to impress on the Chinese people that the Maoists and the proletariat are not guaranteed automatic victory in the class struggle even if a correct political line is followed. Perhaps if Mao had put his weight behind the movement to overthrow capitalist-roaders in the military, there would have been a violent military coup or perhaps the Left Alliance would have fractured even earlier than it did. That these are not easy questions to resolve is a tribute to the ultraleft inquiry. It also makes it easier to see why an ultraleft did develop during the Cultural Revolution.

             In conclusion, the ultraleft typifies some of the struggles that mark the post-revolutionary political spectrum in China. Some ultraleftists bear no relationship to Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Trotskyists in particular are harsher on Mao than they are on the bourgeoisie, Stalin or Hitler. Anarchists believe that the state is the problem. Many ultraleft libertarians say much the same thing. Others on both the bourgeois right and on the ultraleft reduce all of history to a struggle for power by individual politicians. Within China, Trotskyism, libertarianism and anarchism had their proponents, but little influence, except perhaps for anarchism in a general sense.

             On the other hand, the ultra-left Leninist Sheng-Wu-Lien attacked the broad masses of people and demanded the overthrow of the party or at least 90% of it. With such a large target—the “red capitalist class” and the intellectuals—the Leninist ultraleft literally sought to persecute (or overthrow depending on one’s point of view) millions of people. In Hunan alone, the Sheng-Wu-Lien claimed two or three million people. Moreover, according to the Progressive Labor Party (U.S.A.), “the consensus of Red Guard sources and western scholars who have studied the question is that somewhere from 30-40 million people followed these [ultraleft] organizations.” Hence the Leninist ultraleft was in a real position to do damage to the Cultural Revolution.

             The ultraleft has been a sticky question for Maoists because of its support amongst the masses during the Cultural Revolution. While the right is a ready target of class struggle, the ultraleft represented a major split within the proletariat itself. Such a split within the ruling class is a major condition of revolution or counterrevolution.

             The fact that some rightists pose as ultraleftists does not make the issue any easier. Liu saw a majority of cadres as corrupt during the Socialist Education Movement just as the ultraleftists did. The Dengists pay lip service to Mao without taking the ultraleft position. Attacking Mao with Mao’s words has been a political necessity for the right.

             While the ultraleft stressed ideological purity by just about everyone and attacked any and all bourgeois behaviors whether by power-holders or not, the Maoists stressed the struggle between two lines and structural change, which of course required a certain amount of political education and ideological self-criticism on the part of the masses. With its loose definition of the enemy classes, the ultraleft caused much of the alienation and violence engendered by the Cultural Revolution.

             An interesting and important question is what sustained the Leninist ultraleft; what was its material basis? This question deserves further examination elsewhere, but for now there are some tentative answers.

               First, some analysts have noted that many ultraleft leaders had bases in ideological organs such as Red Flag. Fully 22 out of 44 people arrested as leaders of 516 were members of the news media. Since it is literally the job of such people to be sharp in all matters of ideology, it is perhaps easy to become caught up in criticizing every ideological deviation whether by power-holders or not. Without power to administer the government or economy, journalists may have an institutional interest in criticizing all sorts of social phenomena in order to expand their sphere of influence.

              Secondly, in a political system that necessarily rewards correct political behavior in terms of careers and educational opportunities, ultraleftism is an easy way to demonstrate one’s ideological purity at all times. Those who behave correctly all the time can expect to be noticed at least some of the time. Ultraleftism also offers the opportunity to attack others competing for career rewards, since by ultraleft standards 90% of the cadres (and the masses in practice) are the class enemy. Thus if those who distribute political rewards have incomplete information, they may reward ultraleftists.

               Thirdly, as an elitist ideology, ultraleftism enjoys all the material bases of other elitist ideologies—namely the existence of classes. According to Hong Yung Lee, Lin Biao sought to replace Liu within the party bureaucracy by attacking Liu and then aiming the conflict away from the party bureaucracy through campaigns to study Mao and wipe out the four olds. Both conservative Red Guards and ultraleftists had this sort of interest in stressing ideology over class conflict.

             Finally, to the extent that ultraleftism embodies a certain amount of truth, it is a result of the continued existence of the state, the distinction between leaders and led and the corruption and bourgeois influences within the party. In short, ultraleftism has a material basis in ideological organs, careerism, class society and the truth about the state and party.

             If Western readers can begin to see beneath a monolithic Cultural Revolution and start to see that there was all kinds of opposition to Mao which could make a counterrevolution possible, then the objective of this section has been accomplished. In the section on the ups and downs of the capitalist-roaders, we will look at how the contending political lines were embodied in groups of people with political power. For now, we turn to how the dictatorship of the proletariat approaches the question of democracy for people with these different lines and how proletarian democracy was seen as essential to seizing power from and exercising dictatorship over the counterrevolutionary class.

  

  PROLETARIAN DEMOCRACY IN ACTION

         

             In his essay the “Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Karl Kautsky,” Lenin argued that proletarian democracy is one thousand times more democratic than bourgeois democracy.

  

the Soviets are really organizations of the oppressed and not of social-imperialists and social-pacifists who have sold themselves to the bourgeoisie. The fact that the Soviets have disenfranchised the exploiters shows that they are not organs of parliamentary chatter (on the part of the Kautskys, the Longuets and the MacDonalds), but organs of the genuinely revolutionary proletariat which is waging a life and death struggle against the exploiters.

                        

In the Marxist-Leninist tradition, it is not enough, as in Western bourgeois democracies, that everyone has the formal right to pull a lever behind closed curtains every few years. Dictatorship must be exercised over the exploiters, who prevent the great majority from running their economic and political lives.

             To even speak of “democracy” is to risk confusion. Samuel P. Huntington and the Trilateral Commission openly advocate broad apathy in a democracy necessarily run by a coherent elite of necessarily limited capabilities. The “demands” of democracy can become greater than the supply of goods, services and rights that can be guaranteed by “democracy” in this view. Perhaps in a future article, the author will treat various deep-rooted Western conceptions of democracy as they relate to the economy, mass participation in politics and the Cultural Revolution.

             For democracy to work, Mao saw more clearly than any previous Marxist-Leninist that the masses must learn to run the government and economic administration. “‘You must concern yourselves with state affairs and carry the cultural revolution through to the end!’” Furthermore, “To protect or to suppress the broad masses of the people—this is a fundamental distinction between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” (June 1968) As for the minority of exploiters,

  

            

We must pay attention to policy in dealing with counterrevolutionaries and those who have made mistakes. The scope of attack must be narrow and more people must be helped through education. The stress must be on the weight of evidence and on investigation and study. It is strictly forbidden to extort confessions. As for good people who have made mistakes, we must give them more help through education. When they are awakened, we must liberate them without delay. (December 1968)

  

             With Mao the emphasis is on proletarian rule in a revolutionary and dramatic fashion. Those who can not handle the challenge or disagree receive the treatment of “cure the illness to save the patient.”

             Still, there are those who do not agree with Mao’s analysis of democracy and dictatorship and propose a different solution to the problems of bourgeois democracy. Andrew Walder cites Alec Nove to say that “markets and profits” are “the only possible mechanisms” “through which genuine decentralization can be effected and worker control exercised in a socialist economy.” Furthermore, “the only way for participating workers to evaluate alternatives, is to use markets and market prices as the basis of decisions.” Like the Huntington approach, this approach is heavily influenced by mainstream Western economics because it explicitly links exchange and political democracy. To Walder and proponents of the Yugoslavia example, participation occurs through worker consumption. Workers who want one thing or another can obtain their desires through exchange. Since exchange is unanimous, it appears voluntary and democratic. Pluralism and participation is enforced through purchase power. By this reasoning, candidates for office might also be commodities in the marketplace of ideas. In short, there is a strong link between Western conceptions of democracy and exchange.

             In contrast, Marxists do not stress the exchange of things for things. “Bourgeois economists always study social economy as a relationship between things, and use this to cover up the relations of capitalist exploitation. What Marxist political economy studies is not the relationship between things but the relationship between. . . one class and another.” Apparent democracy in exchange conceals the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie underneath.

             Underestimating undemocratic influences in capitalist economies, Walder holds that mere decentralization and marketization hold the keys to democracy. He attacks the Maoists for trying to instill revolutionary values in people in the central government instead of pushing for decentralization. In fact he points to the perversity of the patronage system created by the reward of political activists loyal to the party and shopfloor managers in industry. The first argument is a very common criticism of communist economic systems generally. However, whether or not Maoists hold power or persuade those in power is important. Until the state is finally abolished, the question remains of who and what line will rule, whether power is centralized or decentralized. The same is true of economic power.

             Defenders of Western economic and political systems, such as Milton Friedman, rebut this line of thinking by saying that the separation of economic and political power and the relative decentralization of both allow for cross-cutting coalitions to form political and economic policies. When economic and political power is concentrated in the hands of the same people, as in communist governments, pluralism is undercut. In Marxist terminology, one might say there is a material basis for dictatorship instead of democracy where economic and political power directly coincide.

             On the other hand, the Maoist reply is that the working classes must run both the political and economic spheres of their lives. Instead of the free-for-all pluralism that allows for the domination of the bourgeoisie, the Maoists advocated the use of political campaigns/mass mobilization to ensure that both economic and political power are in the hands of the masses. Such a view of democracy especially stands in contrast with Huntington’s economic model of democracy.

             Like most Western scholars, Walder says that political campaigns ultimately result in cynicism and alienation. In China, he claims that material incentives were more necessary than recognized during the GPCR to achieve objectives. Political study wasted the time of people who only became more cynical. Absenteeism and loafing resulted.

             Walder’s approach is crude and ahistorical. In the first place, productivity grew 2.5% between 1966 and 1970. Between 1971 and 1975, labor productivity grew 1.8%. Walder’s evidence about declining worker motivation comes from Chinese who went to Hong Kong. Of course, these people would not have left the Mainland if everything were rosy for them in China. Secondly, there will always be people who take advantage of the chance to be lazy or cynical, but the question is whether the social transformation is worth the campaign. Mao posited that by raising the level of the broad masses scientifically and otherwise, an explosion in production would take place. This explosion hinges on mass education in academia, factories and fields. Organized and given the chance, the workers would raise their own productivity by learning through practice. Thirdly, a slower work pace and a chance to relax is not inherently evil, especially if the alternative is mass unemployment! If workers are overworked, they do not have time for politics and education and will be in a poor position against the managers. Also, a little looseness helps blur the division of labor by eradicating the role of the slave-driving manager. Walder failed to take into account the overall trends in labor productivity, the causes of rising labor productivity and the actual potential for unemployment.

             By far the most serious error that Walder makes is to extrapolate from industrial conditions to a plan of market democracy for the whole society. His criticism of Chinese economic organization failed to take into account the overall situation in post-1949 society.

              Moral incentives are not just important in making workers get over the need for material incentives for the ultimate drive to communism. Nor do they merely serve to boost production in a country that can not afford to offer swimming pools for material incentives. Moral incentives are essential to the relationship between the city and country. Walder and many others completely miss the fact that China’s peasantry can not leave the countryside and take up urban industrial jobs. An increase in urban wages would necessitate more state coercion to keep the peasants out of the cities. (Unfortunately, as long as there is a state, the Maoists must admit that there is some coercion of the masses—the contradiction between leaders and lead, rulers and ruled. Only the eradication of the conflicts that make states necessary will mean the complete end of coercion.) Walder talks about “collective incentive schedules,” “preferences” and other neoclassical pets, but he forgot about the peasants’ preferences for high-paying jobs in the cities —preferences encouraged by Walder’s anti-politics view.

             The Cultural Revolution approach was more thoroughly democratic and less coercive than Walder’s. Rather than increase industrial wages with the surplus extracted from the countryside and the urban workers, the Maoists keep industrial wages fixed and expand industry and the mechanization of agriculture throughout the countryside. This is in order to make peasants and women industrial workers. In contrast, Walder wants to boost industrial productivity by jacking up the urban wage. This he thinks will be the fastest way to expand the industrial base and thereby give industrial jobs to the peasantry. He argues that worker productivity declined because of a decline in the industrial workers’ real wages, a decline in the urban housing stock (probably a point that should be conceded to Walder as a real oversight), the conditions of younger workers, the use of moral incentives instead of performance-tied material incentives, the lack of disciplinary will on the part of managers and the patron-client relations established by a structure that rewarded political activism. Later it will be shown that the post-Mao leaders, who have followed much of Walder’s advice, have presided over an expanding absolute income gap between the city and countryside, rising unemployment in the cities and a weakening proletarian class position— institutional problems that result from Walder’s distributional approach that favors the urban workers in the short run.

             In addition to these problems, according to his own figures, Walder should recognize the value of Maoist policy. First, even by making the most unfavorable comparison of years—1957 and 1977, the per capita income of wage-earning families still rose in real terms from 166 yuan/month to 218 yuan/month. This was a result of the increase in number of people per family employed. His demographic argument about certain age groups’ getting squeezed is undercut by this fact and certainly proves to be exceptional, not the average. Secondly, while Walder’s figures show a real decline in urban wages per worker at the same time that there is a rise in per capita income, Walder also shows that women took an increasingly important role in the labor force. In his writings on industry, he does not consider the adverse effects that reversing Maoist policy might have on society and the economy as a whole. The Maoists were not interested in expanding urban/rural and male/female inequalities.

             Walder’s implicit economic assumptions amount to that faster-paced work is better; exchange between the countryside and urban areas is founded on an uncoerced and democratic social division of labor and that the race for GNP does not entail institutional change— class polarization. In contrast, the Maoist model is supposed to have failed in achieving its own goals and amounted to “a Chinese offshoot of primeval Stalinism” in Walder’s view.

             Although Mao evaluated Stalin as 70% correct, he disagreed with Stalin as to the nature of class struggle under socialism. Stalin essentially thought of problems under socialism as resolvable through purges and executions and struggled against what he saw as impurities in socialism. Mao, on the other hand said, “never forget class struggle” in 1962. When Walder calls Mao a “primeval Stalinist,” he does not mention any of Mao’s discussions of Stalin’s incorrect side (See for example “Critique of Stalin’s ‘Economic Problems of Socialism in the Soviet Union,’” Miscellany of Mao Tse-tung Thought, vol. 1) or the whole reason for the Cultural Revolution—the persistence and continuous formation of classes under socialism. As for a discussion of democracy, Mao also pointed out that Stalin killed too many people because of an incorrect view of class struggle and that Stalin demobilized the masses with his slogan “cadres decide everything.”

             While Walder successfully establishes that individual party and shopfloor leaders become patrons of workers, who “kiss ass” to obtain housing, bonuses and promotions from patron leaders, “principled particularism” is a concept of dubious comparative value. That China in the 1960s and 1970s had this type of industrial organization seems factually accurate. Yet, one must ask: what are comparable phenomena in other societies and is there a theory here that makes meaningful distinctions?

             For instance, Walder points out that individual cadres are subject to bribery of a sort because of a shortage of consumer goods. Yet, he also points out that in Japan and the United States there is a shortage of money. So in one society bribery takes the form of goods, and in another, in the form of money. Now that China is opening to the West, Hong Kong businesspeople can be found all over the Chinese coast making bribes and influencing Mainland cadres to take up the same practice. Is it important to notice that bribery takes different forms in different countries? Is it not more important to understand structural variables that explain both forms of bribery?

             There is also the phenomena of the activist, perceived as a bootlicker trying to advance in the CCP to become an office-holder. True, the rewards for political activism and loyalty are not as great in the United States. Nonetheless, the United States has its share of resume-padders, careerists and even rate-busters where there is piece-work. The United States also has the phenomena of the professional politician, who is usually most successful when not saying anything of substance and hence alienating to some sector of the population. Is it true that performance-oriented opportunism (meritocracy) is better than political virtue-ocracy style opportunism when it comes to the economy?

             The issue boils down to one of what to compare. Certainly there are different forms of corruption in political and economic organization. It would seem that the real question, however, is whether or not their are different levels of corruption in an ultimate sense. If one gives an official the money to buy an opera ticket or an opera ticket itself, the level of bribery is the same.

             The author would argue that the level of corruption is determined by the degree of economic and political hierarchy in society, and for the most part, since no society has abolished classes or states, the level of corruption in different societies is quite comparable at this stage in history. Power corrupts in both its economic and political forms. Too often this truism is not properly appreciated. Political scientists and sociologists are apt to discover a form of alienation, corruption or inefficiency in one society that is rooted in an institution with its equivalent in all power-stratified societies.

             It is especially questionable that the overall level of informal networking and relations is higher in China than elsewhere by virtue of its “principled particularism” of the 1960s and 1970s or its “paternalism” in the 1980s. By his focus on Maoism and the Cultural Revolution as asceticism and a return to revolutionary values, Walder leaves out the substantial economic policy disputes. Whereas these disputes were carried into broad daylight by different factions of the CCP in the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, economic policy issues in the West are solved in the mist of the market and behind closed doors in corporate boardrooms. Where political and economic power coincide in a formal governing body like the CCP, it is easier to spot the actors involved and hold them responsible.

             In a sense, the CCP is an easier target than the impersonal market. The Cultural Revolution demonstrated that bureaucrats have no where to hide compared with the “invisible hand.” For this reason, the author would argue that the possibilities for democracy are greater in societies where economic power is readily observable.

             In order to deflect a Walder-style criticism, it is necessary to show how Mao saw the class struggle as involving the masses of people and not merely the purification of the ranks. The creation of the Red Guard Dispatch during the Cultural Revolution was a crucial case in point.

             The Shanghai Liberation Daily was the official paper of the CCP’s East China Bureau. In November 1966 the Red Guards asked to publish their own newspaper on the Liberation Daily press and have the two papers distributed together. The Liberation Daily refused. The Red Guards occupied the Liberation Daily thus embroiling Shanghai in debate. Thousands of workers organized the Scarlet Guards and tried to force the rebels out. At the same time, the Red Guards called in some workers from the Workers General Headquarters. Five or six thousand people held the building. Tens of thousands stood outside clogging up the streets. There was some broken glass, “but in the main the struggle was ideological. Leaflets, wall newspapers, declarations and statements by loudspeaker and by voice sought to win adherents for each side.” Significantly, the opposition to the take-over had 16 loudspeakers, including ten new ones from the party. The Red Guards had only three. Their supporters in the streets had their wires cut and van seized. Such methods are mildly coercive, but in general the confrontation was a model of discussion over an issue of great concrete importance. After they failed to convince the Liberation Daily, the Red Guards did not try to convince some central government bureaucrats as Walder claims they did. The Red Guards exposed the Shanghai party for suppressing their politics and then seized power.

             With the two main Shanghai papers in their hands, the Red Guards proceeded to beat back the party’s economist counteroffensive. Defeated over the issue of the newspapers by broad public opinion created by discussion of the take-over, the party took to handing out large bonuses and calling strikes in the name of the Cultural Revolution in order to discredit the Cultural Revolution by crippling the economy—including an important part of foreign trade at the Shanghai docks. Once again, the Red Guards created public opinion and seized power. On January 20th, 1967, two weeks after their victory at Liberation Daily, the Red Guards issued an “Urgent Notice.” They called for an immediate return to work and a return of bonus money and travel allowances given out by the party bosses. Thousands of posters went up around the city denouncing the attempt to buy the workers off in order to discredit the Cultural Revolution. The posters targeted Liu and Deng in particular by depicting them as trying to derail the revolution with sacks of bank notes. The party was depicted behind a fortress of gold. The Red Guards ran the factories and docks until the workers returned to work. The success in running the economy guaranteed the victory of the Red Guards.

             On February 5th, the Shanghai Commune formed to run Shanghai with the support of the party center in Beijing. With Beijing and Shanghai in rebel hands, much of the rest of the country followed suit. Problems of economism broke out in other provinces and in some places the revisionists in the party instigated power seizures in the name of the Cultural Revolution in order to protect their own positions. In time, these party officials had the currency they handed out thrown at their feet. The January Revolution of 1967 in Shanghai made Western politics look pallid in comparison.

             In his book Cultural Revolution and Industrial Organization in China, Charles Bettelheim explained how workers took over political and economic administration in China. In the first place, the two participations—political cadres in production and workers in management—became implemented for the first time. In the Beijing General Knitwear Factory this lead to the workers’ discussing regulations. They abolished many and pruned the bureaucracy which implemented them. Workers’ management teams were set up to watch over managers. This meant that large numbers of workers in addition to party committees, party cells and revolutionary committee members would keep an eye on the managers. In general the cadres and functionaries could be publicly criticized while the workers could not be. Ultimately, the chairman of the revolutionary committee had responsibility for things like commitments for the plan, but the slogan was “multiple initiative, individual responsibility.”

             Just how strong the trend against bureaucratism and formalism was is demonstrated by the abolition of the party committee at the General Knitwear Factory from 1966 to 1969. “Politics in command” meant getting rid of the old party. The revolutionary committees took in what were determined to be good party members. A rough measure of Shanghai factories showed that 49% of revolutionary committee members were party members. 70% of party members made it onto the revolutionary committees. Cadres who wanted to boost their prestige applied to May 7th Schools. At these schools they engaged in manual labor and ideological reeducation. Admittance could only be gained by application. Still, despite these measures towards workers’ management, party rectification and criticism of cadres, “the Chinese reject as illusory the belief that there are magic organizational formulas guaranteed to prevent any regression in a bourgeois direction.” This rejection extended to the party itself.

             On the technical front greater receptiveness to workers’ suggestions was the order of the day. Whatever the workers knew would improve their working conditions was tried even if it did not fit the textbook learning of technicians. Technical teams were established that combined groups “three-in-one.” Workers, technicians and cadres participated. If some innovation worked in practice, then it was accepted whether or not it fit the textbook theory. In the chapter on science and technology, the author will explain more about the knowledge and desire for knowledge on the part of workers.

             The Maoists saw that to exercise democracy it was necessary to exercise dictatorship. Concretely, this meant winning over the people, taking power and using it. With all the means at their disposal, they discredited the revisionists. Then they replaced the revisionists in power.

             Ultimately, the Maoists changed the name of the Shanghai Commune to the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee. They did this because Mao pointed out that China was not quite ready for Paris-style communes while there were foreign enemies (the United States in Vietnam for instance) and counterrevolutionaries to deal with.

             Democratic centralism combined thoroughgoing democracy with unity of action and centralization of information. It put no premium on formal voting procedures, but it did put one on going all out to mobilize public opinion. The proletariat was not to purchase democracy as Walder would have liked but instead seized it.

  

   TWISTS AND TURNS FOR THE CAPITALIST-ROADERS

         

             Many political histories and interpretations of the Cultural Revolution have been written. Daubier has already written a complete if uncritical political history of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1969. Jean Esmein also has written an excellent book on the same period. There is no need to go through a blow by blow account of how it is that the head of state Liu Shaoqi fell during the Cultural Revolution. On a small scale, what happened to Liu Shaoqi was the same thing that happened to the President of Beijing University. People put up some posters exposing the crimes or revisionism of their leaders. This served as a basis for people to force the fall of leaders in the superstructure, whether they be in the universities, operas, party or government. At the level of government, posters are supplemented by newspapers and journals and the attackers must be capable of offering an alternative. The section on proletarian democracy hopefully showed that once there was a political opportunity, the mobilization of public opinion was key to the seizure of power and dictatorship over the new bourgeoisie.

             In this section, the author hopes to demonstrate what political alignments looked like during the Cultural Revolution and how the balance of power between the Maoists and capitalist-roaders changed over time. Overall, the author will focus on the fact that the Cultural Revolution had what only seemed to be easy victories. With the understanding attained from the section on the political spectrum, the reader is ready to see that the class struggle is very complex in appearance and that this compounded the difficulties of the Cultural Revolution. Furthermore, in this section some analyses of the material basis for the fall of Mao and the Four will be evaluated in terms of the military and agriculture.

             The capitalist-roaders started to fall with the publication of Yao’s “On the New Historical Play The Dismissal of Hai Jui,” which criticized Wu Han for writing a play that attacked Mao in between the lines. Also, Jiang Qing led a PLA forum that upheld Mao’s line in literature and art in February, 1966. By May of 1966, in an enlarged Politburo Peng Zhen was dismissed along with the rest of his “gang” that had made it impossible for Mao to even publish an article in Beijing.

             Another early setback for the revisionists was the removal of the army chief of staff Lo Jui-ching. Officially, an investigation of Lo had found that Lo did not support the propagation of Mao Zedong Thought; he had defied directives of Mao and Lin Biao; he reported to the Party Secretariat without consulting Lin; he had attempted to replace Lin. Although these charges essentially concern party discipline, they had an ideological content as well since Lo was resisting directives within the few institutions that Mao still formally controlled and where a movement to study Mao’s thought was afoot. Furthermore, Lo had supported unity with what was by then considered a revisionist Soviet Union. Mao had already polemicized against the Soviets for not supporting armed struggle in the Third World, advocating a “peaceful road” to proletarian state power and for restoring capitalism at home. Lo, in contrast, supported conventional war strategy and a tightly united party against U.S. imperialism in Vietnam. Apparently, there was also some concern that Lo was in collusion with Liu to stage an armed coup d’etat. However, Liu and Deng could not defend Lo because his ideas of military cooperation with the Soviet Union in the war against U.S. imperialism smacked of a breech of national integrity and an alliance with class enemies.

             After initial victories, Mao dropped out of sight during “the fifty days” in which the Cultural Revolutionaries were attacked by work-teams sent by Liu and Deng. Mao succeeded in getting the revisionists to expose themselves in their attacks on the masses. While he was gone, he swam what is reputed to be nine miles in the Yangtze river and clearly demonstrated his strength despite old age. When Mao returned, he defended students against attacks and said, “youth is the great army of the Great Cultural Revolution! It must be mobilized to the full. . . . It is anti-Marxist for communists to fear the student movement.” Just as the PLA was a base for Mao in the Socialist Education Movement, youth became a base for Mao’s line. Mao even described this base in the “revolutionary intellectuals and the young students” who “were the first to achieve consciousness, which is in accordance with the laws of revolutionary development.” Only the January Storm of 1967 brought the urban workers to the fore.

             Quick and easy gains by the Maoists at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution ceased with the ultraleftist offensive. Tao Chou of the Propaganda Department stopped protecting Deng and Liu from attacks but he opened up the range of targets of the Cultural Revolution. Others at the forefront of attacking Liu and Deng or without necessarily a history of defending Liu and Deng—Chen Boda, Wang Li, Kuan Feng, Chi Pen-yu, Lin Chieh and Mu Hsin were all purged in 1968 and 1970 for attacking too broadly and letting the real capitalist-roaders off the hook.

             The ultraleft attacked Zhou Enlai in early 1967 through his ministers in the State Council which he led—Nie Rongzhen (strategic industry and Academy of Sciences), Chen Yi (foreign affairs), Tan Zhenlin (agriculture), Hsieh Fu-chih (public security) and Li Xiannian (finance). It seems likely that Mao considered the attacks on Zhou as tactically incorrect or premature at a time when Mao was targeting other more important and clear-cut enemies. Undoubtedly Zhou saw to it himself that 516 was labelled counterrevolutionary and not merely tactically incorrect, so it is impossible to say for sure whether Mao was in genuine agreement with Zhou at the time that 516 was labelled counterrevolutionary. Perhaps Zhou forced Mao’s hand, as Lin had once done before.

               In 1976, Mao did not attend funeral services for Zhou; although, he received foreign observers. The press also did not play up Zhou’s achievements and the official mourning period seemed short to Zhou supporters.

             As for Zhou’s ministers and their post-1976 fates, Li Xiannian became one of the top six of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau; although, he was sometimes linked to the “whatever faction” along with Ye Jianying. Nie Rongzhen was a member of the Politburo. Tan Zhenlin became a vice-chair of the Central Advisory Commission headed by Deng and meant for retiring leaders. Tan had lost his Politburo post in the Cultural Revolution and was connected with the rightist February Countercurrent of 1967. Hsieh Fu-chih, who died in 1972 was replaced by Hua Guofeng, who arrested the Gang of Four after Mao’s death. Colorful Chen Yi was an important general in the Liberation and died before Mao.

             Nonetheless, during the Cultural Revolution, Yao Teng-shan actually managed to take over the Foreign Ministry from Chen Yi. During this short ultraleftist rule, the Cultural Revolution gained much of its reputation in Western circles. The ministry put out calls for armed insurrection in several countries; cut relations with Burma; stopped Soviet shipments to Vietnam as a way of combatting revisionism; engaged shipping workers in physical fights with Italian longshoremen, burned down the British Embassy and criticized Ho Chi Minh for ideological betrayal of the Vietnamese Revolution. Of course, the spirit of these and other generally combative acts was not condemned and the ultraleft was not usually attacked with the ferocity that the right was attacked, but according to Mao “Wang Li [one of the leaders of the seizure of the Foreign Ministry] has made more mistakes in the last forty days than Chen Yi in forty years.” Soon after, the Beijing supporters of Chen Boda were purged from the Group in Charge of the Cultural Revolution.

             Mao also supported some of the old generals that were being threatened with an extension of the campaign to drag out the capitalist-roaders. Most notably he stood for pictures on National Day, October 1st, 1967 with Ye Jianying who later turned the tables on the Gang of Four. In short, there were limitations to how far Mao felt he could go in sweeping out the old. The ultraleft made it difficult to merely target a handful of capitalist-roaders. Mao may have made mistakes tactically and strategically in his various Cultural Revolution alliances. Unfortunately, the ultraleftists who attacked everybody, no matter with how much honesty and principle, only made it more difficult to find and defeat capitalist-roaders. “I [Mao] said that we ought to make a program aimed at the biggest of the power holders in the Party taking the capitalist road. At present this contradiction is not concentrated; it is widely dissipated.” The anarchist tendency to attack everyone and everything was on Mao’s mind in July 1967, a time of Leftist counteroffensive but also a time of the deepest schisms in the Cultural Revolution.

             Overall though, the Cultural Revolution managed to get through the February Countercurrent after the January Storm and various ultraleft offensives. Revolutionary committees were set up to see to worker dictatorship in the factories. These committees were not uniformly and automatically dominated by the Maoist line. The process was uneven as would be expected from organizations that could not be set up by mere bureaucratic fiat. The median establishment of revolutionary committees was late 1967 or early 1968. However, the range was from January 1967 to December 1968 and some were probably even longer in forming.

             Contrary to Walder’s interpretation, Andors says that the revolutionary committees were not merely exercises in the persuasion of central authorities. They were “power seizures.” Where genuine seizures of power were not possible, the PLA stepped in and provided an alternative source of legitimacy for takeovers. The PLA took the job of mediating political disputes, so a PLA seizure of power was not necessarily indicative of a less thorough-going politicization. In fact, where the PLA stepped in perhaps too much politicization had left bitter personal wounds and irreconcilable factions.

             Party leadership of the formation of revolutionary committees was successful in some places, but in general the party was suspect and not a source of automatic legitimacy. Furthermore, the PLA itself was not an iron pillar with one political line. The Committee for a Proletarian Party, Charles Bettelheim and the ultraleft have criticized the Cultural Revolution for not applying to the PLA. According to the CPP, Mao’s unwillingness to attack the PLA leaders on the capitalist-road was “one of the chief reasons for the reversal of the Cultural Revolution.”

             On the right, Mao faced those in the party and government who opposed the Cultural Revolution. Then there were the those in the army who did not want their institution to become the focus of radical attack. On the left, the ultraleftists insisted in dragging out the capitalist-roaders in the army. The ultraleftists apparently had the support of the radicals within the party, most notably Jiang Qing and Chen Boda. Jiang and Chen criticized Hsiao Hua, the director of the General Political Department of the PLA in January, 1967. When word of Jiang’s and Chen’s criticism leaked outside the party, Zhou Enlai publicly criticized both.

             In 1968, the radical Red Guards, particularly the Earth faction in Beijing, took to implying that Lin Biao was in fact another Khruschev, who should not be named a successor to Mao. Other charges included that Lin conducted espionage against Mao and that he was behind a recently purged underling, who had been insubordinate to Jiang Qing.

             Actually, while it is true that many of the generals were later criticized in 1976 as bourgeois democrats or people who were stuck in the New Democratic period, the PLA as a whole did not escape politicization. Mao pointed out that

  

                         the great advantage of the army supporting the

                         left is that it makes the army itself get

                         educated. They understand this question

                         through actual struggles. In supporting the

                         revolutionary masses and the left-wing

                         organizations not only do they see the

                         struggles between the two lines that exist in

                         all aspects of society and the class struggle;

                         they also see that the struggles between the

                         two lines and class struggles exist in the

                         army as well. When the army supports the left

                         this problem is similarly exposed, with the

                         result that the army is strengthened and the

                         ideological level of our troops is raised.

                          

As China’s highest military leader, Mao put his weight behind letting the army politicize itself. He also made sure that no one tried to impose a certain point of view by saying “it is bad to shoot at any time.” Jiang Qing praised the PLA’s patience as demonstrated by its being beaten up by Red Guards without complaint or shooting. In short, Mao’s call for the army to “support the Left” was a brilliant ploy at a time when the army was getting itchy to take part in the factional struggles anyway. True, the army did not always support the real Left, but the politicization was genuine and tended to limit the possibilities of one general or set of generals’ spoiling the whole process.

             In fact, the criticism of Lin Biao’s coup attempt itself was extremely political. It was in the army that the cult of Mao Zedong went furthest because Lin Biao put together the Little Red Book and repeatedly emphasized how Mao was a “genius” worthy of absolute obedience. Mao roundly criticized the theory of genius as subjectivist and favorable to Lin himself who was seeking to create precedents for the day he succeeded Mao at China’s helm. Lin’s “genius” theory and May 16 attacks on the masses instead of the handful of power-holders on the capitalist road, earned them the epithet of “elitist.” One analyst concluded that “the movement against the ultra-leftists sought to prevent the rise of a military based elite.”

            In addition to its argument concerning the lack of politicization in the military, the now defunct Committee for a Proletarian Party in the United States also criticized the Gang of Four and Mao for undermining the Cultural Revolution by taking a less radical line than Lin and Chen Boda on the question of the countryside. Lin and Chen Boda pushed the Dazhai model in agriculture, but were attacked by regional military commanders. General Wei, Chairman of the Kuangsi Revolutionary Committee, and Vice-Minister of Defense, Hsu Shih-yu attacked Lin Biao and Chen Boda. Hsu said,

  

                         it is not necessary to make the rich and the

                                  poor equal in order to make a revolution.

                         There are people who condemn private holdings

                         and part-time earnings (of individual peasants)

                         as hangovers of capitalism. . . This type of

                         thinking may be leftist in appearance, but its

                         content is Right-wing. (Early 1971)

    

             The Dazhai model featured self-reliance, absence of private plots and brigade level organization. Dazhai served to encourage poor peasants to raise themselves up materially and politically. Furthermore, Dazhai served as an attack on material incentives and inequality. However, “Liu’s Sixty Articles stood unreformed and the agricultural property structure remained unchanged throughout the Cultural Revolution. . . . The proletarian dictatorship rested on weak class foundations.”

             Yet, the CPP acknowledges that the period preceding the GPCR was a period of retrenchment in agriculture. According to the CPP, private plots reached 15 or 20%; Liu circulated his policy of the “four freedoms” for study—“freedom to buy and sell land, to hire tenants, to select crops to plant, free markets and pricing”—and private tilling in Kweichow and Szechwan exceeded collective tilling. Therefore the Committee for a Proletarian Party’s charge is ahistorical because the GPCR did result in a correction of these rightist deviations. With time, the Dazhai campaign also stepped up.

             Still, the Cultural Revolution was not smooth sailing for the Maoists. The CPP is correct that “In the country as a whole, the revolutionary left had been reduced to a minority faction by 1970-1971, and with the fall of the Lin Piao grouping, the process of retrenchment grew apace. By 1971-1972, the dismantling of the radical reforms in China’s factories had already begun.” By that time, the Cultural Revolution Group had been decimated. The student movement had been shut down. The Vietnam War seemed to necessitate national unity and a program of departmental war preparedness.

             Nonetheless, the Left’s strength was evident in Lin Biao and Shanghai. For his part, Zhou Enlai succeeded in removing his ultraleftist enemies, but he also gave his support to the Cultural Revolution, even if that support was tempered by the desire for a smoothly run state and economy. When Lin Biao fell, Zhou was the primary beneficent. Although the Left managed to keep the discussion of Lin Biao confined to the party for over a year, eventually Zhou gave his speech to explain what happened. Mao apparently had to make deals to wipe out the rest of Lin’s regional commanders and party supporters. Thirty-two key generals were dismissed or arrested. Twenty-five regional and district commanders fell in early 1973. By the 10th Party Congress, Deng was put back in the Politburo and named Vice-Chairman of the Military Affairs Commission. By January 1975, Deng was further promoted to vice-chairman of the Central Committee, member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, First Vice-Premier and chief-of-staff. Lo Jui-ching and Yang Cheng-wu were also rehabilitated.

             Next to Liu Shaoqi, Deng was the highest capitalist-roader who was bounced out of the government and party during the Cultural Revolution. His ascent to leadership after Mao’s death has meant a major rewriting of history.

             Perhaps the most telling revision of history is the re-labelling of the counterrevolutionary Tiananmen incident in 1976 as revolutionary. This event was a riot by mourners of Zhou Enlai who objected to the government’s treatment of Zhou’s death. Groomed as Zhou’s successor, Deng stood to gain the most from the riot. As a result of the riot, Deng lost his posts in the government and a campaign was focussed up on Deng and the “right deviationist wind.” In addition, Zhou was obliquely attacked, even before he died, in the “Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius” campaign. When Mao died, Hua continued the campaign to criticize Deng for two months, but then dropped it. When Deng returned in April, 1977, it was just a matter of time before the lesser figures criticized and knocked down during the Cultural Revolution came back.

             This section has been included in the essay as a corrective of some mistaken impressions about the dynamics of the struggle for state power during the Cultural Revolution. In the first place, the Cultural Revolution went beyond a simple removal of certain capitalist-roaders from power. That was accomplished early on despite rightist currents and ultraleft offensives. The Liuist faction was announced as officially and decisively beaten in September, 1967.

             Late in 1967 and to the chagrin of radicals and some ultraleftists, the official line changed from focussing on attacking capitalist-roaders to ideological self-criticism and criticism of revisionism. At the same time, the 516 was being purged from the leadership of the Cultural Revolution. Purges against the ultraleft left Jiang Qing and Chen Boda with almost no one in the Cultural Revolution Small Group. The Cultural Revolution became a struggle over industrial and agricultural organization, the ideology of the broad masses of people and how to move forward politically.

             Secondly, the Cultural Revolution did not mainly fail of its own accord. Contrary to ultraleft opinion, the army was politicized by the Cultural Revolution and the fact that it did not uniformly support the Left or the Right is proof that that politicization was genuine and not imposed. Moreover, as one would expect, the Cultural Revolution had some difficulties in reaching the countryside, but the right deviation of the early 60s was definitely corrected. In addition, the Red Guards were sent to the countryside partly as an effort to politicize the countryside. Jan Myrdal documented the politicization of a politically uninitiated village in his book China: The Revolution Continued: The Cultural Revolution at the Village Level. Models of socialist development were created at Dazhai and Daqing.

             Finally, although Zhou died before Mao, the Maoists were in such a minority position that they were not able to create public opinion broadly enough in a few months to be able to forestall Hua and Deng. In 1976 they only had clear-cut power in those sectors of the state absolutely necessary to reconsolidate the all-round dictatorship of the proletariat—arts, theoretical journals and the press. From these spheres of the dictatorship of the proletariat the Gang of Four could still hope to create public opinion and seize power. However, the deadlock in the government was broken by the revisionists before the Maoists could sway public opinion to the revolutionary left.

             The regional military commanders constrained the Maoists at every step without being able to form a coherent plan to overthrow the Maoists. Deng could not have achieved power without the base and protection of the regional military commanders.

             After the Lin Biao crisis and the ultraleft attack on Chen Yi, Deng and Zhou gained control of foreign affairs. In particular, when Deng returned to power the famous Three Worlds Theory was promulgated by Deng at the UN in April 1974.

             The current regime claims the Gang of Four did not support the Three Worlds Theory or the making of the Soviet Union the “main danger.” This may be correct. The edition of the Fundamentals of Political Economy published in Shanghai by the Gang of Four that came out in May 1974 only tacked on the analysis of the Three Worlds on the last two pages. It makes the distinction amongst the Three Worlds, but it does not call for alliances amongst Third World governments. Instead, the Shanghai authors speak of the unity of the “people,” which in Leninist parlance is a word less specific than proletariat and unconnected to any particular organization or government. Moreover, no where in the text are “imperialism” and “hegemonism” paired together as in Deng’s speech. In Deng’s speech, the two words refer to the United States and the Soviet Union respectively and imply that the Soviets are more dangerous because they want and are capable of total domination. Deng refers to the Soviet Union “particularly” and “especially” as threats, but the Shanghai authors do not. They use the phrase “colonialism, imperialism and especially the superpowers.” Instead of pairing “imperialism” and “hegemonism,” the Shanghai group uses “hegemonism” more generally in “colonialism, imperialism and hegemonism.” Admittedly, this kind of speculative analysis is befitting of a “China-watcher.” One problem is that while the Shanghai text refers to U.S. imperialism and social- imperialism equally throughout the book, the fact remains that the text does briefly set up the distinctions that justify Deng’s analysis. Still, in the one place where the Shanghai text does call the Soviets “more malicious” it weakens Deng’s formulation and implies that it is only more malicious because it seeks to cover itself with the signboard of “socialism,” not because it is fundamentally different than U.S. imperialism as Deng would imply.

             Deng’s speech is also conducive to speculation. At the end, Deng pays lip-service to the Cultural Revolution. He is obliged to point out that if a “big socialist country” like China suffers a “capitalist restoration,” it becomes a “superpower” and a “social-imperialism.” Furthermore, the section of the speech where Deng expounds what “we” hold is different than the rest. “Imperialism” and “hegemonism” are paired once, but the Soviets are not mentioned as a “particular” threat. Nor is there talk of revolution led by an alliance of Third World governments. However, for the most part, the class collaborationist view of the speech does stand out. Deng says Third World countries like Pakistan, Uganda, Zaire, Nicaragua and Argentina can unite for the destruction of imperialism and social-imperialism regardless of their governments’ class nature. Bhutto, Idi Amin, Mobutu, Somoza and Argentinian fascism became allies of the international proletariat by Deng’s view. The Three Worlds Theory even called for a partial alliance with Second World countries like France and Britain. Later as the theory developed, U.S. imperialism was depicted as defeated at the hands of the Vietnamese and less and less to be taken seriously. No longer would China be a model to those peoples liberating themselves from imperialism, particularly U.S. imperialism.

             It is possible that Mao supported the Three Worlds Theory as a tactical statement. While Lin and the ultraleftists who seized the Foreign Ministry had a harsh line against all imperialist, revisionist and reactionary governments, Mao had favored making use of inter-imperialist rivalries since 1965. As far back as 1937, he also put forward his view on why all enemies could not be lumped together on a tactical level: “you are asking if you can kick the tiger from the front door and the wolf from the back door...This is a conclusion drawn only by Trotskyists that we must fight all imperialists at once...It would be making a net to catch yourself!”

             With favorable condition internationally and militarily, Deng also benefitted from the recentralization of the economy overseen by Zhou in the early 1970s. When the Right finally took decisive control of the government, mass-mobilization was already uneven and even spotty except in base areas like Shanghai. In short, the capitalist-roaders were ready to come into power in their own right.

  

                                                                                                                                     

   TRIUMPH OF THE CAPITALIST-ROADERS

         

             On October 6th, 1976, less than a month after Mao’s death on September 9th, Wang Dongxing, commander of the elite unit 8431 that guarded Party leaders, arrested the Gang of Four. The bigger figures behind Wang included Chen Xilian, the PLA commander in Beijing, Deng, Hua and Ye Jianying. In fact, according to Lotta, Hua was something of a figurehead from the start because with or without Hua, rightists in the military like Ye Jianying would have arrested the Gang of Four. One general protected Deng by escorting him to Deng’s home base in the South where he would hide during the anti-Deng campaign of 1976 until Mao’s death. This same general Xu Shiyu went to Beijing during the funeral for Mao and “thumped the table at a meeting of high-level leaders, threatening ‘If you don’t arrest that woman [Jiang Qing], I shall march north!’” In addition, Deng himself was agitating as best he could in the South.

  

                         Either we accept the fate of being slaughtered

                         and let the Party and the country degenerate,

                         let the country which was founded with the

                         heart and soul of our proletarian revolutionaries

                         of the old generation be destroyed by those four

                         people, and let history retrogress one hundred

                         years, or we should struggle against them as long

                         as there is still any life in our body. If we

                         win, everything can be solved. If we lose, we can

                         take to the mountains for as long as we live or we

                         can find a shield in other countries, to wait for

                         another opportunity. At present, we can use at

                         least the strength of the Canton Military Region,

                         the Fuzhou Military Region, and the Nanjing

                         Military Region to fight against them. Any

                         procrastination and we will risk losing this,

                         our only capital.

   

             Deng’s statement is quite revealing in indicating that the coup’s base of power was largely in veteran party and military leaders. Also, his allusion to other countries is interesting and possibly indicates a liaison with the Soviet Union, which has described the Gao Gang clique and Peng Dehuai and his followers as “healthy forces” in the CCP. The Soviets also defended Liu and described the Cultural Revolution “‘as one of the darkest periods of Chinese history.’” Certainly Soviet pressure on the borders strengthened the rightist hand by making stability and modernization of the military urgent. In his typically aggressive style, Deng calls military office “capital” that can not be wasted. Undoubtedly Hua’s value as capital was that he gave the coup some semblance of continuity as well as representing the heavy industry state capitalists and pro-concentration of state capital forces.

             The rewards for the leaders of the coup were great but ephemeral. Wang Dongxing was initially made a vice-chairman of the party; although, he subsequently came under attack in 1978 as part of the “whatever faction.” Elderly and retired Ye Jianying became something of a head of state for a period. Chen Xilian lasted on the Central Committee until 1980 when along with Wang Dongxing he resigned under fire. Hua will always be remembered for leading the arrest of the Gang of Four despite his resignation as party head. In short, the Hua style “centrists” received the highest positions in the party and government for their work before they were discarded as no longer necessary and replaced by Dengists who worked for the coup all along. Wang Dongxing, Wu De, Chen Xilian and Ji Dengkui were demoted together as a “New Gang of Four.” On September 10th, Hua resigned as premier. Earlier he had been demoted to vice-chairman of the party. In 1982, the posts of chairman and vice-chairman were abolished. This left Hua with only his position on the Central Committee.

             Upon the arrest of the “old Gang of Four,” Shanghai did mobilize its militia and even prepared a statement to the world as to why it would engage in armed struggle, but on October 13th, Shanghai’s leaders subordinate to the Gang of Four returned from Beijing and announced their surrender. It was a classic capitulation. Beyond blocking the rightist media for a few days, there was never any final decision to resist. As the leading economic center with the largest and most advanced working class, Shanghai changed the course of history by not engaging in armed struggle.

             Contrary to most accounts, however, the affair was not settled without a shot being fired. According to Time Magazine, the Hua Guofeng regime arrested a nephew of Mao's, “Mao Yuan-hsin, put him in prison some years and eventually released him to work in an obscure factory. Other reports say Mao Yuan-hsin was killed, as was Ma Hsiao-liu, head of the Peking workers’ militia.” (Some accounts have Mao’s nephew arrested and suiciding in prison as a “sworn follower” of the Gang of Four.) Furthermore, the Chinese spoke of a “‘civil war,’” in some provinces, but so as not to encourage opposition, did not report too many details. In Wuhan, broadcasts said the area had been “‘thrown into chaos’” by the Gang of Four, who “‘created white terror, split the ranks of the working class, incited armed struggles, (and) killed and wounded class brothers.’” Honan province reported that rebels “‘stormed organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the provincial and lower-level party committees’” in a December 7th broadcast. A similar broadcast occurred in Yunnan December 9th.

             In Szechwan province it was reported that “because of sabotage by the gang of four, civil war and factionalism did not cease in our province. Many class brothers. . . were sacrificed in all-round civil war. Armed struggle was protracted and large in scale, and people’s lives and property suffered serious loss.” Perhaps the most well known incidents occurred at Paoting, a city with an important railroad junction south of Beijing. Thousands of troops sided with the rebels. The Central Committee condemned the uprising in October, 1976 and apparently there was a great deal of gun seizing by the peasants and some killings and explosions. The situation was not under control until March 1977. Despite the military force of the old military leaders, the insurrection reported was probably only the tip of the iceberg. The victory of capitalism was accompanied by armed violence as well as capitalism’s usual institutional violence and coercion.

             Some of the resistance was non-violent. One man was executed for defacing a poster of Hua. Others were executed for forming so-called counterrevolutionary groups and distributing literature. By November 1977, there were at least 200 executions. Of course, there were executions under Mao, but the point here is that resistance to the counterrevolution faced repression. Trotskyists and others who think that a real counterrevolution has to have overt violence are wrong, but they will not be disappointed in China’s case.

             In Wuhan, the reimposition of pre-1966 rules resulted in massive worker absenteeism. Also some railways did not work until March 1977. Resistance in the countryside has continued to this day. Many of the wealthier peasant collectives have not been swayed by economistic promises of decollectivization. One official responsible for water conservation work in a successful area said:

  

                         the upper levels are pushing this policy hard

                         now but it doesn’t sit well here (chi bu xia)

                         You can’t do water conservation projects. How

                         will you use the sprinklers and the machinery?

                         They are really going back. After so many

                         years of building the collective system they

                         are taking it all apart. There is strength in

                         the collective system because the numbers are

                         big. In Anhui the policy they are using now is

                         not good for us. We do not want it here.

                          

             Another official in a rich area of Jiangsu said,

    

                         presently, output in our commune is very high

                         for the country. Our technical level is also

                         high. Our rice output is especially high. So

                         on this basis we recently began to say that if

                         the masses want production quotas to the

                         household or the labor power it could affect

                         per capita output. But the masses in the whole

                         commune are not willing to have production

                         quotas to the household or the laborer for wet

                         fields. They do not have this desire. They

                         still want to do it on the same basis and in

                         this way increase production and mechanization.

                          

             One team leader summed up this sentiment.

   

                         Most prefer to work on the collective fields.

                         This year our income from sidelines increased

                         by 7000 yuan, mostly because we sent more

                         people to the brigade enterprises. Last year

                         we had 21 people in the factories and now we have

                         16 more. The collective income will increase

                         and the peasants know this. They can

                         calculate. They know the collective income

                         will increase.

   

             It is no small contradiction for the pragmatists that collectivization works so well sometimes. They are put in the position of coercing localities to adopt policies that do not offer much materially speaking. Brigade officials in Xiamen’s suburbs promised to resist any such policies.

             Other peasants resisted the changes for overtly political reasons. Guangming Daily admitted on September 25th, 1982 that “‘some people think that the responsibility system has enlarged the gap between the wealthy and poor. They even confuse the situation with polarization.’” In the spring of 1981,

the poorest team in the wealthiest brigade south of Nanjing turned down the chance to establish household quotas in the spring of 1981. They even rejected group quotas because they feared that once the first division took place, it was just a question of time until private farming returned in China.

   

             A peasant from a nearby team said it best.

   

                         Before we were so poor and now the economic

                         work is done well. The new policy is a

                         backward retreat. If you divide the land you

                         will have polarization. Landlords and

                         capitalists will return. Collective socialism

                         is good. Chairman Mao is good. We do not want

                         to move off Chairman Mao’s road.

            Even within the trend to household quotas, at least one intellectual admitted that “household quotas with total responsibility” is basically private farming and encourages the hiring of labor. A letter to the People’s Daily dated April 4, 1981 “complained about the resurrection of hired labor in the countryside.”

             Hua too presents a problem in agricultural policy. He is associated with the moral incentives of Dazhai and apparently never spoke one way or another on the new “responsibility” system. The Dengists’ “legitimacy depends on fulfilling the goals of the ‘four modernizations’ and raising living standards. Thus they had to increase agricultural production, but this increase could not come from financial investment.” If Deng can not deliver the goods since investment is out of control anyway and because there is not enough money for material incentives, the “reforms” will be undermined. After all, a Hua could promise to restore the economic benefits of Mao’s day without changing the essential tributary system to be discussed later. Hua can find a base among peasants who want “‘fertilizer, insecticide, and 35 points for managing the fields, all from the team.’” Someone like Hua might some day call for mergers of land to form U.S. style agribusiness and do so under the guise of collectivization. Some teams still provide grain rations, money to borrow and sickness insurance. As in the Soviet Union, there will always be a conflict between local and central interests and Hua stands for more concentrated economic power.

  

  CONSOLIDATION AND ADVANCEMENT OF STATE CAPITALIST CLASS POWER

         

   “In respecting talented people, we must not be restrained by outdated ideas and conventions. This includes the idea of thinking that ‘businessmen’ (those who are good at doing business) only know about earning money, but they are not politically reliable.” (“Are ‘Those Who Are Good at Doing Business’ Not Politically Reliable?—Fifth Discourse on Respect for Talent,” Guangming Ribao 12/19/84, p. 1, FBIS, 1/2/85, K19)

             Although there has been armed resistance and non-violent resistance to the counterrevolution, Deng’s success should not be seen as too ephemeral. The Four were overthrown over twelve years ago. With a strong state behind them, the revisionists will not be easily overthrown. By the 1978 Constitution, they had removed the four measures of democracy guaranteed to the people in the 1975 Constitution: “Speaking out freely, airing views fully, holding great debates and writing big character posters are new forms of carrying on socialist revolution created by the masses of the people. The state shall ensure to the masses the right to use these forms.” In 1984, a female worker in Shenyang received a one year jail sentence for putting up a big character poster criticizing her boss.

             China has for the last century and a quarter had a tradition of turbulence and reports of riots still trickle out of China, but overall, the position of the counterrevolution is well consolidated. The high-level conflicts within the CCP are conflicts within the state capitalist class. The conflicts do not involve the struggle against imperialism, decollectivization, material incentives or fundamental questions of class. The two major questions are how fast to undo socialism and how much economic power should be concentrated at the central government level as opposed to the local government level.

             As for conflicts within the state capitalist class, there is no doubt that the die-hard rightists are in control for the immediate future. By the end of 1978, a pragmatist wind trounced the “whatever faction.” The “whatever faction” received its name from supposedly supporting whatever Mao said. In actuality though, the “whatever faction”’s support goes as far as volume five of Mao’s works published by Hua. This volume of works is devoted entirely to Mao’s thoughts before the Cultural Revolution. It is largely about modernization and can be interpreted pragmatically and ahistorically, since the works come from the 1950s. Bettelheim sees through this approach. He quotes Mao near the end of Mao’s life on his two great purposes: “‘Driving Japanese imperialism out of China and overthrowing Chiang Kai-shek, on the one hand, and on the other, carrying through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.’” Bettelheim points out that to quote Mao before the Leap is to leave out his more advanced work and is a way of undermining the Cultural Revolution. By April 1977, the press was making a point of attacking the Gang of Four for criticizing accomplishments before 1966 and of stating that Mao’s line was always in command from 1949-1966. Perhaps a better name for the “whatever faction” is the “whatever Mao said about modernization during the 1950s faction” or the “whatever Mao said that can be interpreted pragmatically faction.” Mao himself recognized the ambiguity of some of his past work by 1966. “The right in power could utilise my words to become mighty for a while. But then the left will be able to utilise others of my words and organise itself to overthrow the right.”

             Chen Yun, party vice-chair stated the grounds of unity between the “whatever” approach and his own more aggressive pragmatism.

  

                         Had Chairman Mao died in 1956, there would

                         have been no doubt that he was a great leader

                         of the Chinese people. . . . Had he died

                         in 1966, his meritorious achievements would

                         have been somewhat tarnished, but his

                         overall record still very good. Since he

                         actually died in 1976, there is nothing we

                         can do about it.

   

             For his part, Deng never had patience with pussyfooting bureaucrats. Even under Mao, Deng was always a full-speed ahead character and frankly expressed himself when he was among allies.

  

                         You must go ahead boldly. As long as

                         people say you are restoring capitalism, you

                         have done your work well. . . . Be afraid of

                         nothing. Don’t be afraid of opposition or

                         of being struck down. We have already been

                         struck down once; why should we be afraid of

                         being struck down a second time?

    

             Bourgeois scholarship tends to emphasize the differences between Deng and Hua. Westerners tend to side with Deng against what is seen as Hua’s protection of old Maoist bureaucrats. (For an exaggerated account of the differences between Hua and Deng, see Parris H. Chang, Politics in China Since Mao’s Death.) If anything, Westerners only wish Deng would move faster toward a market and competitive capitalism, but in reality Hua had no fundamental differences with Deng. In his self-criticism, Hua agreed to criticize Mao and “seek truth from facts.” Furthermore, he admitted his error in the treatment of the Tiananmen demonstrations, which he now sees as “entirely revolutionary.” By July 26th, 1980, Hua had adopted the basic points of the current appraisal of the Cultural Revolution. According to Hua, “In the decade of the Cultural Revolution, from the second half of 1966 to that of 1976, our Party committed grievous and serious mistakes.” Furthermore, “as chairman of the party, Chairman Mao Tse-tung of course bore responsibility for these mistakes.” He even argued that Mao’s old age and illness accounted for his being hoodwinked by the Gang of Four. Hua’s position can change to any pragmatic degree necessary.

             Hua rose to prominence with Zhou Enlai in 1973 by making it onto the Politburo. Just before Zhou died, Hua was made Minister of Public Security and a vice-premier. Jiang Qing never trusted Hua and the Gang of Four criticized Hua indirectly by criticizing the “Three Poisonous Weeds” and more directly just before they were arrested. Indeed, according to Roger Garside, Hua became “Number Two in the Hunan hierarchy in 1967, with the backing of Zhou Enlai and in the face of disapproval by Jiang Qing.” In 1970, he gained the seat of chief of the Staff Office in the State Council under Zhou.

             By the Eleventh Party Congress, the first such congress after the coup, Deng was a vice-chairman of the party and gave the closing speech. Besides the speech of Hua, there was the speech of Ye Jianying, another die-hard rightist, who was nonetheless too orthodox for Western tastes. Of the four vice-chairs, Deng, Ye and Li Xiannian have lasted in positions of power (even as retired office-holders). Wang Dongxing came to be labelled “centrist.” Wang was the last of the four to place his vote for the Eleventh Central Committee and was pictured as such. (See The Eleventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China (Documents), Foreign Language Press, Peking, 1977) However, he was listed as the party’s secretary-general, an important post in communist history. Furthermore, there were more centrists on the Politburo.

             At the end of 1977, Hua was still nominally in command. Beijing Review published a New Year’s editorial called “A Bright China,” which summed up Hua’s accomplishments in smashing the Gang of Four, bringing about unity and overseeing the increase in production. Hua was called the “wise leader and supreme commander,” while no other Chinese leader except for Mao and Zhou was mentioned favorably.

             Then, towards the end of 1978, a pragmatist wind swept the country and established the criterion of truth as practical experience instead of the principles based on the ideological vision, theory and historical summations of the communist movement. This was fairly important in giving a fillip to the implementation of social revolution in the relations of production. The first sentence of a book about China’s economic reforms by Chinese economists starts “THE ARREST OF THE GANG OF FOUR in October 1976.” However, by the second page, Zhang is talking about “the shadow of the Cultural Revolution”—a reference that includes the struggle against the “whatever faction.” The defeat of the “whatever faction” coincided with economic experiments with capitalist industrial organization in Sichuan. By December 1978, a pragmatist orientation in the study of economics was approved at the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CCP. Readjustment— attention to dislocations, “reform”—“changing the economic setup, or the system of management, both nationally and within each enterprise,” consolidation— the establishment of central command and the end of mass-mobilization— productivity measures—were all adopted.

             Later the difference between readjustment and reform became the center of some tension in the party leadership. Apparently, a faction of the party led by Chen Yun argued that reform would fail if the economy went out of whack because of inadequate attention paid to the balance in various key proportions in the economy. Later Li Peng was able to say that the population would not support reform if inflation went too far. These type of arguments amounted to saying that further restructuring of the relations of production would have to be delicately managed and not rushed into.

             As will be seen, 1979 was a big year for the implementation of counterrevolution in the economy; although, the theory of the productive forces, elitist education, labor discipline and “experts in command” were well established by 1979. The destruction of collectivist agriculture, the campaign for marketization and “profit in command,” mass firings, “socialist competition” and urban unemployment were still to come.

             By 1981, even Liu Shaoqi was posthumously rehabilitated, as was Peng Dehuai. The old guard came into firm control. Deng protege Hu Yaobang took the office of General Secretary of the party. Dengist Zhao Ziyang became premier. Chen Yun, the economist of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, was also enjoying the height of his prestige and power in the early to mid-eighties. Politically, he confronted Hua by saying to the effect that Hua should not be proud for arresting the Gang of Four because that was the duty of any communist. That left Li Xiannian, who was the remaining member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo. Ye Jianying was still important, but retired. None of the top leaders were “centrists.”

             Liu Shaoqi has been lionized in typical Dengist fashion. Strategically, Deng wants to achieve the objective of rehabilitating Liu’s politics. Still, he does not openly reject Mao Zedong Thought unless he is among like minded people. Instead he says that Liu’s views “‘were a component of the scientific system of Mao Tsetung Thought.’” Deng’s hypocrisy necessitates articles in Beijing Review denying that “de-Maoification” is taking place. Indeed, China celebrated Mao’s 90th birthday with great fanfare.

             A furor erupted in the West when People’s Daily editorials in December 1984 raised the issue of the obsolescence of Marx’s writings and how to evaluate Marx and Lenin. Although the regime still upholds Marxism-Leninism in words, there is an internal struggle in the CCP over how far to go in upholding Marxism-Leninism. Also, eight years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, some provincial commanders in the PLA came under fire for their role in the Cultural Revolution and for their supposed leftist recalcitrance. Mao’s 91st birthday received only one-sentence from the official press. At the time these were hopeful signs that China was going to stop the charade and drop Mao altogether.

             In the last two or three years, the leadership has undergone further changes. Hu Yaobang suffered a demotion, apparently for letting pro-Western student demonstrations go too far. Zhao Ziyang took Hu’s job and Zhou Enlai’s adopted son, Premier Li Peng, ended up with Zhao Ziyang’s. Deng Xiaoping officially retired from his posts except the chair of the Military Affairs Commission. Other older leaders went with him. Now when Western observers fret over possible recrudescent Maoism, hard-liners or orthodoxy, they talk about Peng Zhen, Chen Yun, Hu Qiaomu, Deng Liqun, Bo Yibo and Li Xiannian and their influence from the sidelines as they all retired from or lost their Central Committee seats in the 1987 Thirteenth Party Congress. Already the Western press is looking for new targets—baiting Li Peng about his Soviet education for example.

             While it is still possible that China will dump Marxism in the not-too-distant future, if only because of pressures generated by the ever-larger free market economy, it appears that retention of Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought in name has certain long-term advantages. First, there is the difficulty of criticizing Mao too much given his much revered status among parts of the population. Secondly, at least one Western observer argues that the CCP has institutionalized Mao’s charisma for the purpose of keeping China from becoming too rashly Westernized both culturally and politically. In a sense the legitimacy of the CCP itself is subject to attack without Mao. By adopting a veneer of Maoism, the CCP can preserve political stability. Finally, according to Gilbert Rozman, the new supposed hard-liners (so-called moderate reformers)—e.g. Peng Zhen, Chen Yun and Prime Minister Li Peng—favor a new political orthodoxy similar to the one in the Soviet Union. However, even according to Rozman, the economy in China is characterized by so-called reform despite the winds of supposed orthodoxy in politics. While Western observers are naturally preoccupied with China’s foreign policy and issues of democracy and human rights, this book now turns to other matters—science, technology and economics.