to set up the commune system.1 Mao's plans, however, immediately encountered opposition, the most outspoken objections coming, we are told, from the top military leaders. Marshal P'eng Teh-huai, a leading military member of the Politburo and Minister of Defense, supported by Huang K'o-cheng, Chief of Staff of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), are understood to have strongly resisted Mao's proposals with the argument that they were economically unfeasible and contrary to established Communist concepts of staged development. Other party leaders, however, did not openly voice their opposition, and Mao went ahead with his program without seeking any formal endorsement by the official party organs. Only in August 1958 was the new policy officially adopted by an enlarged Politburo meeting at Peitaho, by which time the commune movement was already spreading over the country.

Rise of the Opposition

Mao's "Great Leap Forward" and the commune system proved catastrophic failures, causing famine and economic disaster in China. This disaster in turn led the more rational of China's leaders to come to the fore in order to salvage the situation. Thus, what had started as Mao's challenge to the Soviet leaders resulted in the reluctant emergence of an internal opposition to Mao.

The conflict began with a serious defeat for Mao. The failure of the "Great Leap" and the communes quickly became apparent, and the reaction set in at the end of 1958. On December 10 a Central Committee meeting decided on an initial retreat from the commune system. The exorbitant claims of the summer were abandoned. No longer were the communes said to be ushering in the first stage of communism. Payment was to be, in the main, according to work and in cash instead of according to need and in kind; some of the peasants' private property was restored; and families were again permitted to live together.

1 This résumé of developments within the CCP in 1957-58 is based, mainly on an article written by Ting Wang, a former CCP official now living in Hong Kong, and published in the independent Hong Kong Chinese-language newspaper Ming Pao (Oct. 23-24, 1966) under the title "I-chiu-liu-i nien ti chung kung tang-nei chan cheng" (The Communist Internal Party Struggle of 1961). The author, who had personal knowledge of the events described, corroborated the substance of his published account in a personal interview with the present writer. The account is also consistent with what was officially reported at the time concerning Mao's whereabouts and activities.

At the same time, however, another, even more crucial decision was officially announced: Mao Tsetung the author of the utopian "Great Leap"-communes program-was stepping down from his post as Chairman of the Republic. As Mao had held this highest government position since the founding of the Communist regime in 1949, his resignation inevitably raised questions. The official explanation given was that Mao wished to relinquish his duties as chief of state in order that he might devote all his time to leadership of the party, of which he remained Chairman. Nevertheless, it was widely suspected abroad even then that Mao's surrender of the chairmanship of the Republic was not voluntary, that it represented a demotion, and that it occurred as a result of strong pressures from within the party leadership.2

Disclosures recently made by Mao's supporters in the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" tend to confirm these suppositions and to show that Mao did in fact suffer a drastic loss of personal power in December 1958. Red Guard "wall posters" put on display in Peking in early January 1967 quoted Mao as having told the party Central Committee in October 1966 with regard to his 1958 removal as Chairman of the Republic: "I was dissatisfied with the decision, but I could do nothing about it." The posters further quoted Mao as stating that on this occasion the opposition, headed by the newly-designated Chairman of the Republic, Liu Shao-ch'i, and party Secretary-General Teng Hsiao-p'ing, "treated me as if I were their dead parent at a funeral" and thereafter "never bothered to consult me on vital matters."

It may well be that Mao's colleagues, in engineering his demotion, were influenced by more than just their concern for the stability of Chinese development. There is no reason to exclude the possibility that Khrushchev, who had reacted strongly to the challenge to Soviet primacy implied in the "Great Leap" and commune programs, may have exerted pressure in China on the side of the opposition. Indeed, the events that followed provide at least circumstantial evidence that Khrushchev was involved. In January 1959, immediately after Mao had been eased out as head of state, Chou En-lai hastened to Moscow and obtained another

2 See Franz Michael, "Khrushchev's Disloyal Opposition: Structural Change and Power Struggle in the Communist Bloc," Orbis (Philadelphia), Spring 1963, pp. 64-65.

3 Tokyo dispatches published in The New York Times, Jan. 6, 1967 (pp. 1-2), based on Japanese press correspondents' reports from Peking.

May 1961, Liu issued a number of regulations that signified a general retreat from Mao's 1958 policies. Sixty articles provided for a drastic decentralization of the communes, restoring production authority to the smaller-size collectives; and seventy dealt with the reestablishment of normal procedures in industry.8

Mao's fanciful internal program, with its short cut to communism, was thus abandoned-and with it the claim to overtake and pass the Soviet Union on the way to the ultimate Communist society. But Mao's challenge to the Soviet leadership was not given up; rather, it took on a new form. In 1961, the very year of the final retreat from the commune system, Moscow attempted to give new doctrinal expression to the leading role of the Soviet Union in the advance toward communism, and at the 22nd Soviet Party Congress the conflict between Moscow and Peking entered a new phase. On the surface it was Khrushchev's renewed attack against Albania which precipitated the open protest and premature departure of the Chinese representative, Chou En-lai. But the basic conflict went deeper. Khrushchev's new party program, with its blueprint for early Soviet entry into the final stage of communism, was clearly intended to reemphasize the Soviet lead. This was supplemented by an additional doctrinal construct— also intended to place distance between the USSR's advanced position and that of its struggling Chinese competitor-which claimed that in the Soviet Union classes had already disappeared and that consequently the CPSU, founded as the party of one class, the “vanguard of the proletariat," had become the "party of the entire people." Communist China, which continued to maintain the fiction of four classes participating, through a multi-party system, in the government of the "New Democracy" established in 1949, was thus by implication in a less advanced stage of development. The fury of the Chinese reaction to this Soviet ideological claim proved that it had hit home."

The new Chinese argument against the Soviet leadership consisted in denying altogether that the USSR, under Khrushchev, was any longer on the road to communism. Far from leading the advance along that road, the Soviet leaders had strayed from it and become "revisionists" who were

leading the USSR down the primrose path back to capitalism. Indeed, the label of "revisionism," which the Chinese first applied to Tito, then implicitly to the Soviets, and now directly and openly to the Khrushchev leadership, became Mao's new chief weapon in his battle with Moscow for ideological leadership of the Communist world. If the Soviets could be counted out, then Mao could claim himself to be the only true leader of MarxismLeninism for the whole Communist bloc and movement- -as indeed he did.10

"Revisionism" has, however, been used by Mao and his supporters as a label for condemning all those opposed to his program, whether at home or abroad. The curtailment of his political power at home after 1958 prevented him from continuing to press the radical program of communization which he hoped would justify his claim to supreme leadership of the Marxist-Leninist world movement. If, in Mao's view, his domestic program was related to his claim for world leadership, the question urgently arises as to the connection, if any, between Mao's external and internal opposition, all indiscriminately denounced as "revisionists” by Mao and his followers.

Moscow and the Chinese Opposition

What contact or cooperation has there been between the Soviets and Mao's domestic opposition? That there was some connection at the beginning of the internal and external conflict has already been indicated. Mao's demotion in 1958 and P'eng Teh-huai's attack on Mao in 1959 were, at least in some ways, related to the Soviet opposition to Mao's line. But after Mao had survived P'eng's challenge to his position and continued in party control-though reduced in political power -the other party leaders seem to have closed ranks behind him, at least vis-à-vis Moscow. Of those Chinese leaders recently affected by Mao's purge, only a very few are on record as having opposed the conflict with Moscow. Aside from some minor figures, the only important victim of the current purge who can be regarded as having leaned toward Moscow is Lo Jui-ch'ing. (Although Lo became Army Chief of Staff after the purge of 1959 and was therefore presumably loyal to Mao, there are

8 Ting Wang, loc. cit.

9 See "Ninth Comment on the Open Letter of the Central Committee of the CPSU, July 14, 1964," in The Polemic on the General Line of the International Communist Movement, Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1965, pp. 415-17.

10 See Franz Michael, "Who is Ahead on the Way to Communism?", Communist Affairs (Los Angeles), Vol. IV, No. 6 (November-December 1966).

at least some indications that he may later have come to view the conflict with Moscow as prejudicial to the Chinese military.") Mao's principal opponents within the party leadership, Liu Shaoch'i and Teng Hsiao-p'ing, on the other hand, are certainly on record as having attacked Soviet "revisionism" as bitterly as Mao himself. If Liu and Teng, on the one hand, and the Soviet leaders, on the other, were on common ground in opposing Mao's utopianism, why has there been no sign of cooperation between them, but rather hostility?

12

Two explanations seem possible. One is that even if Liu and Teng and their followers were opposed to the recklessness of Mao's domestic policies, their organizational solidarity and patriotism impelled them to support him once he was under fire from Moscow. Khrushchev's highhandedness in dealing with the Chinese may well have helped to solidify the Peking leadership and nullify Soviet efforts to gain the support of Mao's opposition. A willingness to share power rather than to dominate might have served Khrushchev better than his stubborn claim to exclusive world Communist leadership based on the USSR's vaunted head start on the way to communism. If so, it appears all the more significant that, at the 23rd Soviet Party Congress of March 1966, Khrushchev's successors quietly dropped his 1961 doctrinal innovation designed to emphasize the Soviet lead over China in the advance to communism, thereby opening the door to a reconciliation with those Chinese leaders who might be willing to accept a partnership.13

Another possible explanation of the absence of any overt rapport between Mao's Chinese opponents and Moscow could be that, if such collusion did exist, it would obviously have been foolhardy and dangerous to let it become known publicly; rather, it would have been all the more necessary for the Chinese oppositionists to pay lip service to the doctrinal attacks against their actual or potential supporters in Moscow. The problem at hand was to keep Mao from rocking the boat at home. An open division within China would endanger not only Mao's opponents but also the very stability of

11 See article by Lo Jui-ch'ing, "Carry the Struggle Against the US Imperialists Through to the End in Memory of the Victory over the German Fascists," in Hung Ch'i (Peking), May 10, 1965; also, Lo's statement at the Chinese People's Republic anniversary celebrations on October 1, 1965.

12 It should be noted, however, that Liu, at a Peking rally on July 22, 1966, in support of the Vietnamese Communists, made a speech in which, unlike all the other speakers, he omitted any attack on Soviet "revisionism." See Jen-min Jihpao, July 22, 1966; Peking Review, July 29, 1966, p. 6. 13 See Franz Michael, loc. cit. (footnote 6).

party rule, as indeed it has in the present struggle. The absence of any known collusion between Mao's chief opponents and Moscow has not, however, deterred Mao's supporters in the current internal struggle from voicing such accusations against the opposition. Recent Red Guard wall posters have accused by name General Yang Shangk'un, a member of the central party Secretarist; Lu Ting-yi, purged chief of the party's Propaganda Department; P'eng Chen, purged Politburo member and Peking party first secretary; Lo Jui-ch'ing, purged Army Chief of Staff; and finally the son of Liu Shao-ch'i, of having conspired with the Soviet Ambassador in Peking. Yang Shang-k’un was even accused of "placing listening devices behind Chairman Mao's back and handing secret information to the Soviet Ambassador." 1* True or not, this accusation probably reflects Mao's conviction that his battle against "revisionism" both in Moscow and at home is one and the same.

The deterioration of Mao's position in his basically interrelated struggles against Moscow and against the opposition at home was aggravated by the setbacks sustained in recent years by his adventurous policies abroad. While Mao's propagation of Communist revolutionary aggressiveness and of "wars of national liberation" in the Afro-Asian world was no theoretical deviation from the established Communist line as maintained by Moscow, the special emphasis and priority given by him to this theater of operations and his promise of quick results made him highly vulnerable to the reverses which these tactics suffered in India, in Vietnam, in Indonesia, and on the African continent. These reverses weakened Mao's position among the world's Communist parties and helped Moscow to regain the upper hand. They may well have been the decisive factor that moved Mao to stake all his remaining sources of support and the symbolism of his leadership on an attempt to reconquer, against all odds, the power he had lost in China, and from there to reestablish his position in world communism, before it was too late for him.

Mao's Counterattack

After weathering the attack from P'eng Teh-huai and his associates at the Central Committee meeting in the summer of 1959, Mao began his come

14 See story in The Washington Post, Jan. 20, 1967 (p. 1), citing Reuters and Yugoslav news agency reports.