The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has always had a siege mentality. Against the Kuomintang (KMT), against the Japanese, against the KMT again, and in 1950 against the United States and its allies in Korea it has had to combine the task of waging war with that of making revolution and building socialism. Naturally, the siege mentality has become the hallmark of Chinese Communist militancy. Many of the CCP's distinctive ideological positions have been hammered out in an atmosphere of siege. That on culture, for example, received its basic, and still valid, definition in 1942, as the war against Japan raged. Mao's important concept of "people's democratic dictatorship," sharply at variance with the traditional Marxist "dictatorship of the proletariat," owes its origin and significance to the battle against Western "imperialist encroachment."

Throughout the Cultural Revolution the siege mentality has been evoked, and even intensified. Lessons have constantly been drawn, and illustrations borrowed, from the military and cultural struggles of earlier years. Heroes from earlier struggles have been held up for emulation. Unreliable elements have been blackened by digging out from the record of past struggles evidence of their unsoundness or vacillation, or by comparing them with those who proved to be renegades in earlier struggles. Writings of Mao that were the product of earlier struggles have been singled out for special attention. It is asserted that a "life and death" struggle is now under way against the twin evils of "revisionism and imperialism." The threat is said to be nothing less than "a comeback by the enemy at home and abroad.” 2

The Dual Menace

One must speak tentatively when trying to fathom the Chinese Communist mind. But the relationship between "revisionism" and "imperialism" in Peking's scheme of things seems so important that an attempt must be made to clarify it. In its crudest form, it concerns spies and traitors. Chinese Communist literature from the period of the war against Japan is full of anxiety about spies, agents, and traitors. So, too, is that from the period leading up to the Korean War: the Public Security Forces, according to the New China News Agency

2 Chieh-fang Chün Pao (Liberation Army Daily), June 6,

1966.

(NCNA), "arrested 28,000 agents of the KMT and the US" between January 1949 and October 1950.3 Fear of collaboration with the enemy likewise runs through many key documents of the Cultural Revolution. The landlords and the reactionary bourgeoisie still have "international links," and are serving as "agents within our party and our country"; they have "interacted internationally with imperialism' imperialism" (weapons have reportedly been found in the homes of some of them). Warnings are given against the possible occurrence in China of an upheaval like the 1956 Hungarian revolt-a revolt described as "engineered by imperialism and started by a group of anti-Communist intellectuals of the Petöfi Club."

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A second relationship between "revisionism" and "imperialism" is the belief that corrosion by the former reduces the capacity of China to resist the latter. The new generation "must never be hothouse flowers that cannot stand the wind and rain, but must be sturdy mountain pines and dare to brave the challenge of the raging storm." Mao has clothed the point in another image: "Only heroes can quell leopards and tigers." This manner of thinking is based, of course, on the premise of a class theory of warfare. In "people's war" the decisive advantage over imperialism lies not in weapons, but in the "fact" that socialism is a higher stage than capitalism and must therefore win. The sense of righteousness and the assurance of history's mandate are inextricably blended in the Chinese Communist class theory of warfare.

Now it follows that, even in the heat of battle, the political struggle remains crucial. Only the "pure in class" will inherit the victory; and, more practically, only the unity that comes from class solidarity is able to ensure victory in protracted warfare. Jen-min Jih-pao, on August 25, 1966, gave a startlingly bold formulation of this theory: "Whether one fears imperialism and the reactionaries or not is essentially a question of whether one wants to and dares to make revolution or not." In other words, capitalists will fight war in capitalist fashion, and socialists must fight war in the socialist fashion-putting politics first. Only if they fight it this way will they be able to claim the victory promised by history.

3 NCNA Daily News Release, Oct. 11, 1950.

Hung Ch'i (Red Flag), tr. in Peking Review, June 17, 1966.

5 Chieh-fang Chün Pao, June 6, 1966.

6 Union Research Service (Hong Kong), Oct. 11, 1966, p. 40.

7 Hung Ch'i, loc. cit. supra (footnote 4).

8 Jen-min Jih-pao (People's Daily), Oct. 22, 1966.

9 Cited in Wen Hui Pao, May 10, 1966.