COMMUNIST CHINA The New Revolution: III EDITORS' NOTE: The articles offered in the following pages continue the effort of this journal to probe into the meaning and significance of Communist China's "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” currently entering perhaps its climactic phase. Mr. Baum's analysis pictures the Cultural Revolution as part of a broader movement of "ideological revivalism" representing the Maoist leadership's answer to the dilemma of a revolutionary ideology already beginning to erode under the impact of modernization. Dr. Michael sees the current convulsion in China as the culmination of a losing, two-sided struggle by Mao to impose his radical, utopian brand of communism at home and assert his claim to world Communist leadership abroad. Ideology Redivivus By Richard D. Baum ideological revivalism. flame of China's revolution and to immunize the Chinese people against the pernicious virus of Khrushchev's apostate "revisionism." At first limited in scope and cautious in tempo, the movement gradually gathered momentum until today the entire nation appears to be caught up in a frenzy of ideological revivalism unprecedented in both scale and intensity. This article proposes to consider the origins of China's ideological revival, to chart its contours and convolutions, and to develop a theoretical framework which will relate the revivalist movement to certain generic processes and problems that characterize a modernizing MarxistLeninist society. The situation in 1963, on the eve of China's ideological revival, can be summed up briefly: domestically, a partial recovery from the severe economic dislocations of the "three hard years" of 1959-61 was coupled with a potential threat to the political hegemony of the CCP in the form of the rise of an incipient "new class" of bureaucrats and technicians. Internationally, a severe deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations was linked with increasing Chinese restiveness over the progressive embourgeoisement of the Soviet Union and over the decreasing international militancy of the Soviet Communist Party. From Rationality to Revisionism and by the resurgence of vestigial "rural capitalism." i A second major feature of the domestic scene in 1963 was the growing apprehension of the CCP leadership over the trend toward bureaucratization within the party itself. Many party cadres had assertedly become "divorced from the masses"that is, they had become immersed in paperwork and formalistic office routines and had neglected their duties as opinion leaders and propagandists among the masses. Moreover, it was acknowledged that many officials and cadres had been guilty of pen-wei chu-yi (literally, "departmentalism"), a catch-all term of derogation referring to such unorthodox practices as the establishment of protective interpersonal relationships among mutually vulnerable officials and the promotion of private ("vested") interests in disregard of the interests of the state or of the masses.2 Worried lest these manifestations of increasing The more rational economic policies adopted by the CCP in 1961-62, in the aftermath of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, had in effect granted broad decision-making autonomy to local produc-bureaucratism lead to a “routinization" of the revotion units. This meant that industrial, commercial, and agricultural "experts"-managers, administrators, and technicians were given a relatively wide zone of discretion in meeting their contractual obligations to the state. Moreover, the reinstitution of private plots and trade fairs in the agricultural sector served to remove a certain segment of the nation's economic activity from direct supervision by organs of the state and party. Finally, renewed emphasis in this period on piece-rate systems of remuneration and on material incentives in general meant that the egalitarian-collectivist ideals of the party were being diluted for considerations of expediency. Understandably, such economic concessions to "bourgeois individualism" had a beneficial effect on the morale—and hence on the productivity of workers and administrators alike, since prior to 1961 ultimate authority for production-related decisions had been vested in local and regional party committees, most of which were long on manipulative skills but woefully lacking in managerial and technological competence. But if the "liberalization" of 1961-62 was thus conducive to economic rationality, the reduced authority of the party committees soon led to the emergence of an incipient "instrumentalism"-the substitution of a largely apolitical production and managerial ethic for the consummatory ethic of the "command economy." As a result, the party's control over the economic life of the country came to be increasingly challenged by the rise of a "new class" of semi-auton>mous managers, administrators, and technocrats, lutionary functions of the party-and consequently to a weakening of political controls-the CCP in the spring of 1963 launched an all-out attack on those cadres who "indulge in idleness and hate work, eat too much and own too much, strive for status, act like officials, put on bureaucratic airs, pay no heed to the plight of the people, and care nothing about the interests of the state." In conjunction with this verbal attack, the party initiated a campaign to dislodge cadres and officials from their offices and send them out to live and work among the masses. The rationale behind this hsiafang (literally, "downward transfer") was Mao Tsetung's doctrine of "revolutionary practice”—i.e., that only by taking active part in class struggle, could a cadre or official truly learn to “love the production struggle, and scientific experimentation masses and put collective interests above selfish interests.' 994 1 The contradiction between "instrumentalism" and ide ologism" lies at the heart of many of the policy controversies which have occurred in China since 1957. On the liberalization measures of 1961-62, see Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1966, pp. 163-67 and passim; also Schurmann, "China's New Economic Policy-Transition or Beginning," The China Quarterly (London), January-March 1964, pp. 65-91. 2 These deviations bear a close resemblance to the phenomenon of semeistvennost ("familyness") which has frequently been noted in connection with the "erosion of ideology" in the Soviet Union. See, e.g., Joseph Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR, Harvard University Press, 1957. 3 Hung Ch'i (Red Flag: Peking), No. 13-14, 1963, p. 11. 4 For further documentation of China's cadre problem in 1963, see The China Quarterly, October-December 1963, pp. 169-70. Concurrently with these disturbing domestic trends in the direction of instrumentalism in the economy and bureaucratism in the party, the dominant feature on the international scene in 1963 was the marked deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations. Once "comradely" and "fraternal," these relations reached a new low in July following the acrimonious dissolution of high-level CCP-CPSU negotiations held in Moscow. Beginning in late July, the Chinese Communists stepped up their verbal attacks on Khrushchev, calling him a "stooge of imperialism" and an "enemy of the people of the world." The fact that the intensification of the CCP's attack on revisionism abroad coincided with its attack on bureaucratism and instrumentalism at home is suggestive of a certain functional connection between these phenomena. We shall examine the implications of this connection more closely in a subsequent section of this inquiry. Having sketched with broad-and admittedly oversimplified-strokes the major topographical features of the Chinese politico-economic map of 1963 on the eve of the ideological revival, let us turn next to a descriptive account of the revival itself. Following this, we shall be in a position to assess the significance of the revival and evaluate its impact on Chinese society. The Anatomy of a Revival Communist China's ideological revival was presaged in the fall of 1963 by a philosophical debate over what constituted the "proper" Marxist-Leninist viewpoint in interpreting observed "contradictions" both within China and between China and the outside world. On one side of this debate were those who stressed the possibility of resolving such contradictions through the "open exchange of different opinions," i.e., through emphasizing the word "unity" in the dialectic of the "unity of opposites." On the other side were those militants who stressed the need for continuing "struggle" between the contending aspects of contradictions-particularly those of an "antagonistic" nature. They feared that excessive reliance on dialectical unity (read: peaceful coexistence) would tend to undermine China's revolutionary spirit and weaken her vigilance 5 See, for example, Peking Review, No. 31, Aug. 2, 1963. For a capsule summary of important developments in the SinoSoviet dispute in 1963, see H. Arthur Steiner, “China to the Left of Russia," Asian Survey, Vol. IV, No. 1 (January 1964), pp. 625-37. That this diatribe, though ostensibly directed at the Soviet leadership, was actually aimed as much at heretics on the home front as at apostates abroad was clear from the fact that as early as the spring of 1963 the CCP had recognized the seriousness of the tendency toward ideological degeneration among its own cadres and officials. Indeed, there is precious little difference between the assertion that some party cadres "eat too much, own too much, and care nothing about the interests of the state" and Chou Yang's charge that the modern revisionists had become infatuated with material incentives and bourgeois individualism. But final proof of the double-edged nature of the anti-revi sionist sword was provided by the fact that the campaign against Soviet apostasy was rapidly turned inward in the winter of 1963-64 in the form of a sweeping program of "socialist education" set in motion throughout China. Aimed at "re-educating the Chinese people in proletarian, socialist ideology," the socialist education movement called upon everyone to "arm them 6 The former, conciliatory outlook was referred to by the term ho erh erh i ("two combine into one"), while the opposing militant outlook was designated i fen-wei erh ("one divides into two"). On the "struggle" between these contradictory formulas and the philosophies they represent, see Hung Ch'i, No. 4, 1964, pp. 29-33. Ibid., No. 24, 1963, p. 18. The text of Chou's speech is translated in Peking Review, No. 1, January 3, 1964, pp. 10-28. For secondary analysis of the philosophical debate of 1963-64, see Donald J. Munro, "The Yang Hsien-chen Affair," The China Quarterly, No. 22, April-June, 1965, pp. 75-82; and John W. Lewis, "Revolutionary Struggle and the Second Generation in Communist China," ibid., No. 21, January-March, 1965, pp. 140. selves with the thought of Mao Tse-tung" and to apply the lessons derived therefrom to the "three great revolutionary movements" of class struggle, production struggle, and scientific experimentation. In the communiqué of the fourth session of the Second National People's Congress, issued on December 3, 1963, the goals of the movement were further spelled out in terms which strongly recalled Chou Yang's indictment against revisionism: Throughout the historical period of transition between capitalism and communism, there is a class struggle between the socialist road and the capitalist road Class struggle must not be ignored during the struggle for production and scientific experimentation. It is essential to educate and arm the working people continuously with proletarian ideology and, on the political and economic fronts and in literature, art, and all ideological spheres, to overcome and guard against erosion by capitalist ideologies.9 Through the twin instrumentalities of the socialist education movement and the continuing hsia-fang, an increasingly radicalized atmosphere pervaded the Chinese countryside in the initial months of 1964. This radicalism was given still further impetus by the initiation of a mass campaign to "learn from the People's Liberation Army" (PLA). Emulation campaigns had long been an important part of the CCP's arsenal of revolutionary weaponry. The principle underlying such campaigns was simple: the party would select an "advanced" or "heroic" industrial, agricultural, military, or cultural unit (or individual) and hold it (or him) up as a model for others to strive to emulate.10 Obviously, the unit or individual selected as the model for a particular emulation campaign was considered to epitomize the qualities, virtues or skills which the regime was most concerned with cultivating at the moment. In the case of the "learn from PLA" campaign, a Jen-min Jih-pao editorial of February 1, 1964, singled out the army for special praise because of its "high proletarian and combat character." More specifically, the PLA was credited with having "gained a firm grasp of political and ideological work," and with having "raised high the red flag of Mao Tse-tung's thought and put his thought in 8 Jen-min Jih-pao (Peking), Jan. 1, 1964. 9 Peking Review, No. 49, December 6, 1963, p. 8. 10 There is a certain similarity between the CCP's use of "model workers" and "model units" and Stalin's use of Stakhanovites (shock workers) after 1928, but with the important difference that whereas Soviet Stakhanovites were encouraged by sizable material incentives, the more egalitarian Chinese have relied largely upon "spiritual" incentives such as peergroup recognition and public commendation. The moral of the PLA's success story was inescapable: no socialism without revolutionary spirit; no revolutionary spirit without proletarian class consciousness; and no proletarian class consciousness without politico-ideological education and indoctrination. Hence the need for politics (read: the thought of Mao Tse-tung) to "take command" in every endeavor and in every walk of life. Failure to let politics take command would ultimately undermine China's revolutionary spirit and lead her down the path of modern revisionism— this was the "universal lesson" of the emulation campaign of 1964.1 Following closely on the heels of the learn-fromthe-PLA movement came the initiation, in the summer of 1964, of a campaign to "cultivate revolutionary successors." Worried lest the mantle of leadership of the Chinese revolution pass to a generation of younger leaders who, because they lacked direct experience in the revolutionary struggles of the 1930's and 1940's, might be expected to relax their vigilance against "class enemies" at home and abroad, the CCP launched the cultivationof-successors campaign with the following warning: 11 See also Ralph L. Powell, "Commissars in the Economy: 'Learn from the PLA' Movement in China," Asian Survey, Vol. V, No. 3 (March 1965), pp. 125-38; and John Gittings, "The Learn from the Army' Campaign,” “The China Quarterly, No. 18, April-June, 1964, pp. 153-59. On the increased use of the military metaphor during 1964, see James R. Townsend, "Communist China: The New Protracted War," Asian Survey, Vol. V, No. 1 (January 1965), pp. 1-11. 12 The "three-eight work style" was a slogan calling for correct political orientation, hard work, austere living, tactical and strategic flexibility, unity, vigor, seriousness of purpose, and liveliness. The "four firsts" referred to the primacy of the human factor over weapons, political work over all other work, ideological work over routine work, and practical learning over book learning. 13 Although these claims were undoubtedly exaggerated for propaganda purposes, the fact that they could be made at all must be treated as prima facie evidence that by early 1964 the PLA had succeeded in overcoming the crisis in military discipline which it had experienced during the "three hard years" of 1959-61. On this crisis, see the special survey of Chinese military affairs in The China Quarterly, No. 18, April-June, 1964; and J. Chester Cheng, Ed., The Politics of the Chinese Red Army, Stanford, Cal., Stanford University Press, 1965. 14 E.g., see Survey of the China Mainland Press (U.S. Consulate General, Hong Kong; hereafter cited as SCMP), Nos. 3154, 3164, 3183, and 3247 (1964); and Powell, op. cit., p. 129. If, through our neglect of education and cultivation, we were to allow those young people who have been influenced and corrupted by bourgeois ideology or revisionist ideology to succeed us, then this would mean abandoning the revolution in midstream and would cause socialism to "evolve peacefully" into capitalism 15 The drive to cultivate revolutionary successors was the elitist counterpart of the mass-oriented socialist education movement. It was above all directed at those party cadres and members who had joined the revolution after 1949-a group which comprised upwards of 80 percent of the total membership of the party. A second objective of the "cultivation" movement was to impress upon senior party cadres the necessity of "actively fostering and promoting newborn forces." Many veteran cadres had assertedly become "bureaucratic," "conservative," and formalistic" in the discharge of their duties. They had ignored the abilities of their younger comrades and had failed to promote outstanding young activists to positions of leadership and responsibility. Consequently, a generational gap had arisen between the "long-tested old hard-cores" and the "newborn forces." It was in order to heal this breach that the party called upon its veteran cadres to take the lead in cultivating revolutionary successors.18 Throughout the remainder of 1964 and down to the end of 1965, the doctrinal themes of the preceding eighteen months were constantly reiterated and expanded upon. The attack on revisionism was intensified, as was the campaign to prevent the bureaucratic ossification of the party apparatus; politics continued to "take command;" and the cult of Maoism was systematically propagated in all sectors of Chinese society. This was but a small sample of what was yet to come. Cult and Culture By the end of 1965, Communist China's crusade against revisionism, bureaucratism, instrumentalism, and a whole host of other ideologically noxious "isms" was already in high gear, but in the first half of 1966 it reached truly monumental proportions. The theme of spiritual regeneration_virtually dominated the life of the country; doctrinal hallelu 15 Hung Ch'i, No. 14, 1964, p. 35. 16 See Jen-min Jih-pao, May 20, 1964; see also SCMP No. 3235. jahism, heresy-hunting, and evangelistic faith-healing flourished in a frenzied climate of affirmation and inquisition; and the myth of Maoist infallibility was elevated, amidst the blare of Red Guards' trumpets, to the status of canonical law. In this latest, most militant phase of Communist China's ideological revival, two notable developments occurred. First, workers, peasants, soldiers, and "people in all walks of life" were exhorted to creatively study and apply the thought of Mao Tse-tung and to write testimonials on the subject of "how Chairman Mao's thinking inspired me to overcome difficulties in my work." In one such testimonial, a woman table-tennis player described, in allegorical fashion, how she and her fellow team members utilized Mao's thought in devising a winning strategy for winning strategy for a major international tourna ment: In meeting difficulties the correct approach is both to despise them and take full account of them... To defeat a strong rival, we have to learn how to return the strokes which are his specialty. . Dialectics is no mystery, and we can find plenty of it in playing table-tennis. In studying Chairman Mao's works, we must concretely analyze our actual problems and solve them in a scientific way [by using the method of "one divides into two"]. This will enable us to continue to make progress.1 17 In another extreme instance, it was claimed that all the patients in a certain municipal hospital had miraculously recovered from their illnesses as a result of the hospital staff's having "gained a firm grasp of Chairman Mao's thinking and put politics in command." 18 Testimonials of this sort proliferated rapidly and were given widespread publicity in the mass media.19 Everyone, from the lowliest "night-soil" collector to the most distinguished scientist, was exhorted to bear witness to the "material force" of Mao Tse-tung's thinking. In seeking to demonstrate the relevance of ideology and politics to the solution of problems encountered in everyday life, the CCP hoped to combat the_growing tendency toward "alienation from politics." What was sought was 17 Peking Review, No. 10, March 4, 1966, pp. 12-14. 18 Kuang-ming Jih-pao (Peking), April 4, 1966. See also China News Analysis (Hong Kong), No. 610, May 6, 1966. 19 See, e.g., Che-hsueh Yen-chiu (Philosophical Studies), No. 2, 1966; and Peking Review, Nos. 21 through 25, MayJune, 1966. |