(i) The State

The new government of China faced many problems. For decades, the weakness of the central authority had led to the neglect of vital elements in China’s economy; war, foreign occupation, and civil war had further exacerbated the situation. Industry was paralysed by hyper-inflation and the disorganization of trade and marketing. Agriculture had stagnated, and was now afflicted by drought, flood and typhoon. Most of the country outside the old Liberated Areas was still in the hands of landlords, petty gangsters and warlords. Finally, there was the threat of foreign intervention: the United States blocked the passage of the PLA to the last unconquered province, Taiwan, war threatened in Korea, and the French fought to recover Vietnam on China’s southern border.

In 1920, the Soviet Union had faced comparable problems of devastation and disorganization, but with a much more advanced economy. The availability of foodgrains per head in China in 1952 (after post-war restoration of production) was only thirty-eight per cent of Tsarist Russia’s in 1913 and forty-six per cent of the USSR of 1928. Soviet income per head in 1928 was between three and four times higher than that of China in 1952.

There was another important difference. China’s small cultivated acreage (sixteen per cent of the land surface) was intensively farmed by millions of peasant households, cultivating tiny patches of soil as they had done for hundreds of years. The Soviet Union’s land supply was much larger, including what only recently had been enormous estates which contributed the major part of Russia’s marketable surplus of grain. Much of the land to the east had only recently been cultivated, and there was a vast acreage available for cultivation at low cost. Severe though the losses were as a result of collectivization in Russia, extensive agriculture made State direction infinitely more practicable than would have been the case with an agriculture dependent on a mass of small cultivators. Any efforts to impose detailed control in China involved a vast network of supervisory cadres (themselves consuming a significant share of the surplus appropriated), and could only be brief since increased appropriations directly sapped peasant incentives, producing either a decline in output, or increased concealment. The new government of China accordingly made no sustained attempt to emulate Stalin’s programme of collectivization. Yet neglect was not enough. For the more the State tolerated the leakage of the surplus into consumption, the more pressure on food supplies to the cities (themselves expanding rapidly as a result of industrialization), the stronger the stratum of relatively well-off farmers and accordingly the greater the danger of a political and social challenge from China’s “kulaks”, expressed through demands for greater district and provincial autonomy. The State was thus obliged to intervene, even if briefly, to curb such processes on the countryside, only to draw back rapidly when output or appropriations seemed threatened. It was the problem of intensive agriculture which gave policy the appearance of zigzags and irresolution. The issue was never settled, nor could it be until an adequate flow of investment reached rural China and the supply of jobs outside agriculture expanded rapidly enough to employ a large part of the rural labour force. By contrast, Stalin was not obliged to draw back; once committed to collectivization, he was able to persist. What was a loss to the Chinese State was of considerable value to the Chinese peasants; Stalin’s devastation of the Russian peasantry was not repeated.

Conditions in China were rendered more severe by the care with which the party had avoided or prevented the mobilization of those class forces which could have accelerated the achievement of power and the rehabilitation of China’s economy. Without the spontaneous initiative of the masses – of poor peasants to settle the question of landlordism, of workers to seize factories and start production again under their own control – the régime was dependent on its own administrative capacities, on its followers and those that joined it. All changes were necessarily slow, and dependent on the restoration and expansion of production.

In Russia in 1917, Lenin continually stressed the need to destroy completely the old Tsarist State and those that then directed it, the provisional government. A new workers’ State had to be constructed, a State appropriate to a new order of class power: “The proletariat ... if it wants to uphold the gains of the present revolution and proceed further to win peace, bread and freedom, must ‘smash’, to use Marx’s expression, the “ready made state machine and substitute a new one for it by merging the police force, the army and the bureaucracy with the entire armed people ... the proletariat must organize and arm all the poor, exploited sections of the population in order that they themselves should take the organs of State power directly into their own hands.” [1]

Lenin spoke of the the proletariat, not the Bolshevik party; of a class assuming social power, not a group taking over the old administrative apparatus. It was this which distinguished the socialist revolution – “all previous revolutions perfected the State machine, whereas it must be broken, smashed.” [2]

However, the Chinese Communist party adhered to a united front, a class coalition. The New Democratic State was not to be the instrument of one, exploited, class over the rest. Far from “smashing” the old Kuomintang State machine, the party aimed to absorb it. In 1952, three years after the assumption of power, the régime repeated that “the People’s government has adopted a policy of taking over all the personnel in the former Kuomintang government offices and educational institutions when the reactionary rule of the Kuomintang collapsed.” [3] It followed that there was no question of arming “all the poor, exploited sections of the population” lest they turn their weapons upon the other participants in the United Front.

One cause for optimism was the overwhelming military power at the party’s command. Another was that the Kuomintang government had already appropriated such a large part of the industrial economy – for example, ninety per cent of the metallurgical industries, eighty-nine per cent of power generation and electrical equipment, seventy-three per cent of machine building, and seventy-five per cent of chemicals; indeed, Chiang Kai-shek had had the aim of the State taking over all private capital. [4] Furthermore, the State now acquired the massive share of Japanese industry (eighty-three per cent of all foreign capital in China). With this as the basic economic lever, it was felt industrialization would follow rapidly. A carefully administered land reform would both secure the régime in the loyalties of the rural majority and break the power of the landlords. Beyond that, only industrialization would permit the expropriation of land: “Without the socialization of agriculture there will be no completion and consolidation of socialism. And to carry out socialization of agriculture, a powerful industry with State-owned enterprises as the main components must be developed. The State of People’s Democracy must step by step solve this problem of the industrialization of the country.” [5]

All efforts must therefore be bent to building industry. The Soviet Union provided the model of how this was to be achieved. It included the use of the most exacting mechanisms for raising worker output. As early as 1942, Mao proposed what ought to be done: “Next, there is the implementation of a ten-hour day and progressive piece-rate wage systems – using wages to increase production and raise labour consciousness ... the egalitarian supply wage system obliterates the distinctions between skilled and unskilled labour and between industriousness and indolence – thereby lowering worker activism; we must replace the supply system with a progressive piece-rate system to stimulate worker activism and increase the quantity and quality of output.” [6]

The First Plan

During the period up to 1952, the régime consolidated its power in the countryside. It introduced an agrarian reform to eliminate the old landlord class, and established control of China’s borders. In October 1950, the government despatched “volunteers” to defend areas beyond its borders in Korea. The Korean war imposed an increased degree of centralization on the country and was an important factor in obliging the State to extend the public sector of industry; the State’s share of national industrial output increased from thirty-seven to sixty-one per cent between 1949 and 1952. On the official figures, defence spending took between fifteen and eighteen per cent of the national income even after 1952, and twenty per cent of the national budget in 1956. [7] Defence deterred invaders, but did not prevent a noose of US bases round China’s coastal waters – Korea, Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, Guam, Philippines and Thailand. The effort took scarce resources out of civil investment, and skilled labour from the civil workforce.

Despite these heavy burdens. China, like many countries, experienced a remarkable expansion in output in the immediate post-war period. By 1952, output in many sectors had been restored to its pre-1949 peak, and the government began to undertake planned growth. The first five year plan (1953-8) embodied the promise of the revolution. Chou En-lai, citing Mao, put it in this form: “The fundamental aim of this great people’s revolution of ours is to set free the productive forces of our country from the oppression of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism and, eventually, from the shackles of capitalism and the limitations of small-scale production.” [8]

The core of the plan was the building of heavy industry in public hands to accelerate industrialization. Fifty-eight per cent of the planned investment went to industry, eighty-nine per cent of it in the State sector. Much of the rest went to communications, transport and defence, with seven to eight per cent for agriculture. Such a plan imposed some hardship on the people, as Chou En-lai admitted: “It is of course true that heavy industry needs more capital, takes longer to build and yield profit, and that most of its products are not for direct consumption by the people. Consequently, in the period when the State concentrates its efforts on developing heavy industry, the people have to bear some temporary hardships and inconveniences, notwithstanding the corresponding development of light industry and agriculture.” Such “temporary hardships” would be alleviated by foreign aid. But this was the period of the Cold War, and assistance could be expected only from the Soviet Union and its allies. However, Russia was itself under pressure in its military competition with the United States and, for what assistance it gave, imposed fairly tough terms. Nonetheless, between 1949 and 1958, Russia and its East European allies made available 12,300 technical experts to work on a number of projects, the costs of which were advanced by Moscow and repaid out of China’s agricultural exports to Russia (thus reducing China’s already meagre domestic supply of foodstuffs). In addition, Russia took some 14,000 Chinese students and 38,000 apprentices for training. By early 1960, there were still some 7,500 Russian experts in China before the unilateral withdrawal of Soviet aid.

The government undertook the first plan without having fully centralized the economy under the State. In 1952, a third of modern industry, two-thirds of trade, and almost all of agriculture was still in private hands. The government tried to direct the economy through its control of the supply of raw materials for industry, government purchases and procurements of grain to feed the city population, tax policy and price controls. In the first Russian plan, control grew as a function of the need to plan, to secure adequate resources in the hands of the State. In China, although the régime had assured private business and trade that it would continue for many years and that collectivization of agriculture depended upon the prior existence of a powerful industrial sector, the logic of State accumulation now forced it to seek control of all activities. It did so hesitantly, pragmatically, preoccupied at every stage with the need not to disturb production. It was this – despite retreats and excessively rapid advances – of which the régime was later proud: “The transformation of national capitalism in our country went through three stages [Mao said]. Each step was carried out by degrees. This kind of method made it possible to suffer no disruption and to develop during the course of improvement.”

Private business

The party had regularly stressed its promise to encourage the growth of private capitalism and, initially, the government was as good as its word. A prominent Hong Kong business journal concluded early in 1950 that: “The new régime has so far brought prosperous living conditions to all and sundry; the bankers and traders have no reason to complain, and, in fact, no substantial complaints are ever heard. Private trade is doing well and profits are high.” [9]

The number of businessmen in eight major cities had increased by twenty-seven per cent by the end of 1951, and the average rate of profit was a remarkable twenty-nine per cent in 1951 and thirty-one per cent in 1953. [10] There were said to be sixty-eight millionaires operating, and the owner of the Sing Sing Spinning and Weaving Company was reputed to be worth JMP 60 million (or nine million pounds sterling) in late 1956. Mao himself acknowledged that “Mr Jung I-jen’s capital is worth half of Peking.” [11]

The prosperity did not lack public approval. In 1952, Vice-premier Chen Yun assured the government-sponsored All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce that “Private factories will be guaranteed a profit of around 10, 20, or even up to 30 per cent on their capital, under conditions of normal and rational operation.” [12] The People’s Daily in like spirit forecast that: “Our economic situation will continue to improve. Private industry and commerce will also have a more glorious future.” [13]

There were warning signs, however, which indicated where the power lay. From the end of 1951 to mid-1952, the “Wu fan” campaign against five business errors (including bribery, tax evasion, theft of State property, fraud) led to the investigation of some 450,000 private businesses in nine major cities, producing some JMP 50,000 million in illegal profits. It also produced, however, a drop in private production, by possibly a third up to February 1952. The government relented by cutting the fines imposed, offering businessmen financial help and increasing the volume of State purchases.

The problem could not be left there as the first five year plan began to expand the economy. Private business tended to expand more rapidly, buying its way into a larger share of scarce raw materials (and so jeopardizing the supply to the State sector), whether this was done officially or through the black market. Skilled labour was scarce, and private firms with high profits were able to attract workers from the State sector. In boom conditions, the government controls collapsed, and public investment was threatened. Control was made particularly difficult by the mass of small private firms, outside State supervision. It needs no “ideological” explanation to understand why the government needed to reverse its former policies and absorb the private sector. It was inhibited only by the wish to prevent a drop in production.

From 1953 onwards, business was rendered dependent through the provision of State finance (culminating in the creation of joint State- private enterprises) and State purchases. Both processes culminated in voluntary – or at least, painless – nationalization. The private share of industrial output declined from thirty-nine per cent in 1952 to sixteen per cent in 1955. By the end of 1955, eighty-two per cent of private output was purchased by the State. By 1956, all private industry had been absorbed into joint enterprises, and some fifteen per cent of shops.

The régime remained sympathetic to private businessmen. It paid compensation, guaranteed interest payments on the private capital appropriated, and it employed the former private businessmen at relatively high salaries as managers of the new joint or State enterprises. Initially, interest on capital was promised up to the end of the second plan (1963), but when many businessmen protested in the spring of 1957, the government relented and promised that interest payments would continue indefinitely. Mao was similarly sympathetic when he addressed China’s leading businessmen in late 1956: “We have reformed all capitalist industrialists and businessmen, eliminating them as a class and taking them all into our fold as individuals ... we cannot say the bourgeoisie is useless to us; it is useful, very useful. The workers do not understand this because in the past, they have had conflicts with the capitalists in the factory. We should therefore explain the situation to the workers. Especially in view of the high tide of learning of the industrial and commercial circles and in view of your desire for learning, the workers would change their attitude towards you.” [14]

Their children were needed in new China. “About 70 per cent of our college students are the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie and the landlords. We need to rally them and educate them.” Big business was much more important than small, which had “no decisive effect upon the nation’s life”. But would not people say, “the Chairman takes special care of the big capitalists but not the small capitalists. Is this Right opportunism?” Paying interest to big business on its capital would help to keep up output: “The small enterprises and workers will object. The workers will say we are making it too advantageous for the capitalists. In their opinion, the interest payments should be cancelled immediately.” The workers would have to be convinced that “we should not do anything detrimental to the interests of the large capitalists for they are beneficial to the State ... Are we becoming a capitalist party? We have to explain to them that what we are doing is beneficial to the entire nation, to the workers, the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and the medium and small enterprises. They may not understand what ‘beneficial’ is at the moment.” [15]

The Cultural Revolution myth that Mao was prevented at this time by Liu Shao-ch’i from liquidating interest payments to private capital seems to have little basis in fact.

Mao’s “fear” was clearly absurd. No doubt his audience laughed politely at his humour. There was as little truth in the proposition that the Chinese State or party was controlled by private capitalists as there was in the idea that workers directed it. If it were the first, private capitalists would not have been slowly eliminated. If it was the second, as Mao admits, there would have been no interest payments, and no delay in expropriation in the immediate aftermath of 1949. Nor was the State balancing’ between these rival claims simply in order to survive, It had another and separate interest, rapid expansion; it made or withdrew concessions entirely in the light of this central aim.

(ii) Agriculture and Employment

The party’s approach to agriculture, to the movement from low-level traditional peasant assistance (Mutual Aid Teams) to State-guided co-operatives, was governed by similar considerations. In this case, it was the urgent need to secure control of industrial raw materials and foodstuffs for the urban population which forced the moves to co-operativization and State monopoly trading in agricultural commodities. By early 1956, a quarter of China’s peasant households were in co-operatives, and by May of that year, ninety-one per cent. The government began to assume control of the grain trade in 1953, and then moved on to establish a monopoly of trade in cotton and cotton cloth, oil-bearing crops and the urban rationing of grain. In August 1953, the first steps in rural grain rationing began.

The first year of real peace was 1954 and, in 1955, industrial output was accelerated, a speed-up that continued through to 1956. By the standards of a poor country, the effort involved was very great. Up to 1957, the level of investment approximated to that of Japan in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (but below that of the Soviet Union in the first five year plan period). The acceleration of 1958-9 carried it up to the Soviet level of eighteen to nineteen per cent of national income, roughly comparable to that of Japan after the Second World War (when Japan was a much richer country). Over the period 1949-57, industrial output grew by roughly a fifth to a quarter on average each year, and industrial employment by 12.6 per cent.

The expansion was curbed by the inadequacy of basic inputs – power, raw materials, transport, foodstuffs – and the increasing disparity in the growth of different sectors. The growth in industrial employment and the flight of peasants from agriculture as a result of co-operativization led to a massive increase in the city population, all needing to be fed from the public granaries. The 1949 city population of 49 million nearly doubled by 1956 and reached 130 million in 1961. [16] The supervisory bureaucracy swelled rapidly. The expansion of higher education produced a stream of educated labour beyond the supply of jobs. Unemployment became severe.

The State’s compulsory procurement of agricultural goods weighed heavily on the peasantry without providing sufficient food for the cities. In the winter of 1955-6 the peasants in certain areas rebelled; as Mao put it: “Old women blocked the way and wouldn’t let the food be taken.” [17] Grain was burned and livestock slaughtered to prevent the government taking it. This added a meat shortage to the grain shortage in the cities. Neither the black market nor early morning queuing resolved the problem, and workers and students took protest action. At the time, Mao warned the cadres to be careful: “Trouble-making by the people is worth looking into. This is a new problem ... In the past, we stood side by side with the people to struggle against the enemy ... The people are staring at us with hostile eyes. We should prepare for constant trouble-making by a small group of people.” [18]

The leadership recognized the problem but kept up the pace. Minister of Finance Li Hsien-nien boasted that “the profit derived from State industries in 1955 was over ten per cent in excess of the target set”; and that labour productivity should increase by seventeen per cent in 1956. [19] But the chairman of the State Planning Council acknowledged that there had been too much pressure on the peasants, and “In 1955, in particular, the adjustment of wages and the construction of living quarters were ignored to some extent, thereby preventing the workers and staff showing enthusiasm for work.” The party congress briefly relaxed controls on small private traders and free markets in 1956, but the basic drive remained the same. Mao urged the cadres: “We should pay attention to foodgrain production. It will be disastrous if we don’t. When we have food, we have everything ... food to eat, raw materials for industry, a rural market for industrial goods, and agricultural exports to purchase imports for the development of heavy industry.” [20]

In November 1957, Mao flew to Moscow, officially for the world conference of Communist parties, but perhaps also to plead for Russian aid to sustain China’s industrialization. Otherwise, there seemed no alternative but retreat. In 1957, the pace was slackened, heavy industry curbed and the output of consumer goods increased. A succession of revolts in Eastern Europe, Poland, East Germany and Hungary in 1956, were danger signals. Mao introduced the “One Hundred Flowers” campaign to allow public expression of grievances. As he put it: “There is advantage in having ‘a hundred schools contending’, for then all the evil elements will be exposed.” [21] Later he claimed “over four hundred thousand rightists had to be purged.”

Between 1955 and 1958, the government developed a set of policies to deal with immediate obstacles to building heavy industry, policies which came to be seen as a distinctive “Chinese model of development”. There were three immediate problems – the growth in consumption by city-dwellers, the growth in their numbers, and rural unemployment. All three were related – rural unemployment produced peasant migration to the cities which strained food supplies. Unemployment – the incapacity of the productive base to provide work for all the available manpower – was particularly pressing. In January 1956 Chou En-lai estimated that agricultural production required 30,000 millions eight- hour labour days, but 45,000 millions were available in the rural areas. [22] The government planned to increase the number of labour days by 15,000 millions, so that all adult males would work 250 days per year, females 120, still a high level of underemployment.

To limit the growth in the city population, the régime introduced: the use of ration cards, residence permits and movement passes to{ prevent newcomers entering the cities illegally; controls over managers to prevent them hiring labour, with occasional bans on hiring rural workers for city work. The government also fixed the volume of output of firms, the number of workers, and the total wage bill, while banks were instructed to exercise tighter controls over firms’ finances; and a new form of “sending down” labour from the cities to the rural areas, hsia fang, helped to thin “non-productive” labour, and strengthened the cadres on the rural “production front”.

These measures limited urban consumption. But in addition, the government tried to achieve overall control of wages through its major wage reform of 1956. With this reform – impossible without State control of all industry – the régime also adopted a policy of keeping the lowest rate of city wages close to rural earnings. However, controls on entry to the cities created an artificial labour scarcity which sooner or later would have produced wage pressure. The government escaped this by diluting the relatively high-cost permanent city workers with much lower cost temporary and contract workers who numbered some 12 millions by 1958. [23]

To tackle urban educated unemployment, the government reformed the educational system to reduce the numbers and relate education more directly to production needs. Mao issued instructions that middle and primary schools should contract with rural co-operatives to supply them with labour; universities and urban middle schools should start their own factories, workshops and farms.

To tackle rural unemployment, efforts were made to create jobs without calling on central funds, through the “decentralization” of 1957, which increased local decision-making powers at the provincial level, but retained central control of heavy industry and accumulation; as Mao put it in 1958: “Concentrate important powers in one hand/diffuse less important ones”; through the dispersal to rural areas of some light industrial, warehousing and storage activities; and through campaigns to reduce rural hoarding so that funds would be available for local investment.

Many of the items will be discussed later. It should be stressed that the measures were not part of any general “model” or plan; they were pragmatic responses to particular obstacles in China’s industrialization programme. Only in retrospect do they form a whole: the maintenance of the drive to build industry in conditions of great backwardness.

Notes

1. CW23, pp.325-6, stress in the original

2. State and Revolution, CW25, p.406

3. Decisions on Employment, GAC of the Central People’s Government, 25 July 1952, in Labour Laws and Regulations of the People’s Republic of China, Peking, 1956, p.65

4. China’s Destiny, London, 1947, p.173

5. On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, 1 July 1949, SWIV, p.419

6. Economic and financial problems, Ching chi wen t’i yü ts’ai cheng wen t’i, Hong Kong, 1949, cited Christopher Howe, Wage patterns and policy in Modern China, 1919-1972, Cambridge, 1973, p.59

7. Report of Li Hsien-nien, Minister of Finance, 3rd session, 1st National People’s Congress, 1956, in New China Advances to Socialism, Peking, 1956, p.65

8. Report on the work of the government, 1st session, National People’s Congress, 23 September 1954, Peking, 1954, p.1

9. Far Eastern Economic Review, 26 January 1950

10. Development of State capitalism in China’s industry, Statistical Work Bulletin, Peking, 29 Oct. 1956, cited Gluckstein, op.cit., p.198

11. Address to the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, 8 December 1956, Miscellany I, pp.43-4

12. NCNA; Peking, 24 June 1952

13. JMJP, 1 July 1952, in CB, 1952, p.199

14. Address, op.cit., Miscellany I, p.38

15. Ibid., p.43

16. For 1949 and 1956, see Data on China’s population from 1949 to 1956, Statistical Bulletin, No.11, 14 June 1957, ECMM 1957, pp.22-5, and Table I, John S. Aird, Population growth and distribution in Mainland China, in An Economic Profile of Mainland China, Washington, February 1967, 2, p.353; 1961 from Po I-po, Chairman State Planning Council, in Anne Louise Strong, Letter from China, Peking, 1964

17. Symposium, 21 February 1959, in Miscellany I, p.160

18. January 1957, in Miscellany I, p.47

19. New China Advances, op.cit., p.40

20. January 1957, Miscellany I, pp.51, 61

21. January 1957, Miscellany I, p.57

22. Edgar Snow, Red China Today: the other side of the river, London, 1963, p.426

23. Note 31 (with official sources), in John Wilson Lewis, (ed.), The City in Communist China, Stanford, 1971, p.404

China’s economy is backward and China is materially weak. This is why we have been unable to take much initiative; we are spiritually restricted. We are not yet liberated in this sense. We must make a spurt [forward in production]. We may have more initiative in five years and more still in ten. After fifteen years, when our foodstuffs and iron and steel become plentiful, we shall take a much greater initiative. [24]

(i) The Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward of 1958 was a spectacular attempt to break through the limitations of backwardness, to ward off the pressing demands of the mass of the population for some improvement in their living standards, and to accelerate vastly the growth of all sectors of industry. It was 1929-31 in the Soviet Union all over again; except in a much more backward country that could not tolerate the extremities of forced growth. Intensive agriculture and the albeit modest incentives of millions of peasant households provided no long-term basis for a “War Communist” supply system, with all subordinated to serving the State. As a result, whereas the Russian régime was able to persist in the acceleration, China was forced very rapidly to retreat.

Up to mid-1957, the régime was officially committed to a temporary relaxation in the final phase of the first five year plan, and to the commencement of the second, which would carry the country through to 1963. By September, however, there was a certain reorientation. The demands, that the supply of consumer goods be increased and living standards improved, continued. The 8th party Congress (1958) noted the “need to increase consumption, otherwise there would be a serious contradiction between the Party and the masses which would lead to unforgivable errors”. [25] But at the same time, Mao was preparing a complete reversal of any such trend. He dismissed the complaints of the rural party cadres with: “What kind of people were these cadres? They are well-to-do peasants, or formerly poor and lower middle peasants who had become well-to-do.” [26]

He attacked the politburo of the party itself for conservatism and lack of boldness, complaining that his orders were diluted and the committee just a voting machine; as a result, he was on strike: “For two years, I have not read your documents and I do not expect to read them this year either.” [27]

What alternative was Mao proposing? It is not clear that he had any coherent plan, only the belief that the campaigning spirit could break through bottlenecks and beat back the demands for increased consumption. Nor is it clear how he managed to sweep away the anxieties of the party leadership. Certainly, they must have agreed when he formulated the slogan, “Catch up and surpass Britain in the output of major industrial goods within fifteen years.” Shortly afterwards, he reckoned this slogan had itself become conservative- “It looks as if in three more years we can overtake and surpass Great Britain.” As the cadres strained their muscles – or rather, strained the population’s muscles – the ambitions soared: “With eleven million tons of steel next year, and seventeen million the year after, the world will be shaken. If we can reach forty million tons in five years, we may possibly catch up with Great Britain in seven years.” [28]

That was in May, but by December he was speaking of fifty to sixty million tons of steel by 1962. He later confessed that he had hoped for 100 to 120 million tons. [29] By the mid-1970s, China’s steel output had reached the very creditable level of some 25 million tons.

The party Congress in February 1958 was persuaded to demand a “Great Leap Forward”. The targets were all to be raised – steel by nineteen per cent, to 6.2 million tons; and in August, to 10.7 million tons (or double the 1957 level); electricity generation by eighteen per cent. The cadres were instructed to ensure that workers surpassed all previous records. The provincial party secretaries competed to outdo each other. Some promised to meet 1967’s targets in 1958. The 14.6 per cent target for overall industrial output ratified at the February Congress was in March raised to thirty-three per cent. By the end of 1958, some half million “small factories and workshops” had been set up in Hopei province. By October, 600,000 small blast furnaces, many in rural areas, were at work.

To achieve the expansion, all rules had to be scrapped. Management in urban industry was pushed into the background in order that cadres could press workers to “exceed all records”. The safety, rest and recreation of workers were inevitable casualties. Quality collapsed as output rose – the mines met their impossible targets by loading rubble.

The rural areas were mobilized in even more radical fashion. The logic of industrial expansion in backward rural areas (without central financial help), and the need for vast labour-intensive schemes (major irrigation, land reclamation and flood control works) already made the new co-operatives obsolete. The Honan provincial party drew the lesson in April, merging the co-operatives. Liaoning province announced in June that 9,200 co-operatives were being merged into 1,500 (each containing an average of 2,000 households). In July, Mao confessed that no one in the central leadership had foreseen this beginning of the commune movement. [30] By August, Honan claimed to be setting up “People’s Public Associations” or Communes, and by November 26,000 had been created, covering ninety-eight per cent of the farm population (each including thirty co-operatives, between forty and one hundred villages, and an average of 25,000 people).

The communes enabled the cadres to be effective over much larger areas than before. The party leadership understood this: “Why do we say that with the setting up of People’s Communes, the Party leadership will be strengthened?.., a large-scale, highly-centralized organization is naturally easier to lead than a small-scale, scattered organization.” [31]

It was possible to hunt out the hoarder, to end rural markets, to expropriate a bigger share of the equipment and animals still privately owned and to impose a much stricter rationing system. Monthly pay was reduced and controlled, and free services substituted in the form of foodstuffs, through communal canteens. Enormous labour-intensive schemes on the land were organized by the commune authorities. To run the new rural industries, men were taken off the fields – sixty millions to iron smelting and steel refining alone producing a labour shortage during the excellent harvest of 1958.

It was not enough that this vast effort to break out of backwardness should be made. An heroic ideology was required. Its flavour was captured by the party’s resolution at the end of 1958: “In 1958, a new social organization appeared, fresh as the morning sun above the broad horizon of East Asia. This was the large-scale people’s commune in the rural areas of our country which combines industry, agriculture, trade, education and military affairs ... the gradual transition from collective ownership to ownership by the whole people in agriculture, the way to the gradual transition from the socialist principle of ‘to each according to his work’ to the Communist principle of ‘to each according to his needs’, the way to the gradual diminution and final elimination of the differences between rural and urban areas, between worker and peasant and between mental and manual labour, and the way to the gradual diminution and final elimination of the domestic functions of the State.” [32]

According to the People’s Daily, China could make the transition to “property of the whole people” in three to six years, and the transition to communism a few years later. [33] Backwardness was just a bad dream. Free supply of rations instead of cash was not the introduction of a form of national military service in which the troops were fed directly, but the very goal itself, communism.

(ii) The retreat

The moment of heroism was brief. Backwardness proved a more obdurate master, no “paper tiger”. The party leadership were lulled by the harvest of 1958; Mao’s gamble had been favoured by wind and water. But by the end of the year it was clear something was wrong – a spectacular harvest coexisted with food shortages and queues in the cities. Who was to blame? The national leadership for setting such absurd targets and harrying the cadres to achieve them? No, the cadres must be blamed. The press began to criticize their arbitrary and ruthless behaviour – “commandism”. Even in the spring, Mao attacked the “very bad work style” of some cadres who used force rather than persuasion to achieve their targets, and proposed a “Big Character” poster campaign as a method of checking them. The party launched a rectification campaign, instructed the cadres not to overwork commune members, to allow them time to sleep and rest. Some restrictions were relaxed, and the right to private property reaffirmed (indicating that the cadres had been trying to meet targets by expropriations). Mao insisted: “If we ‘blow a communist wind’, and seize the property of the production brigades and work teams, helping ourselves to their fat pigs and big white cabbages, this is quite wrong.” [34] How else were the cadres to meet Mao’s targets? There was no magic method of conjuring plenty from poverty.

The targets began to be dropped. The local claims which had made up the national output total were now seen to have been designed to win praise rather than reflect performance. The figure for the 1958 harvest, originally put at 375 million tons of grain, was cut to 250 millions, and the 1959 target cut from 525 to 275 millions. [35] Severe shortages persisted however, and, in the south, there was a campaign to eke out the flour supply by mixing it with vegetable stalks and roots, and to collect wild plants for consumption.

The peasants themselves were going on strike. Mao tried to reassure them by proposing a rate of rural accumulation which would guard against the arbitrary depredations of the cadres (but which made no allowance for the enormous differences between rural communes). By May 1959, he had decided the government could not persist in the expansion of heavy industry without some improvement in consumption, the conclusion of 1957. The retreat had begun: “We have to restore the primary market in rural areas.” [36]

The supposed “communist achievements” of the Great Leap Forward now came under attack. The party inspection teams despatched in 1959 to implement the rectification campaign were instructed to combat egalitarianism; as Mao put it: “it would be unreasonable to use equalization on the poor and rich brigades and the poor and rich villages; it would be banditry, piracy.” [37] Authority must be centralized once more, removed from the commune leadership, for: “there is now semi-anarchism. We have granted too much of the ‘four powers’ and too soon, causing the present confusion. We should now emphasize unified leadership and centralization of powers. Powers granted should be properly retracted. There should be proper control over the lower level.” [38]

The communes in their original form were scrapped. The name continued to disguise the defeat but now referred to little more than the lowest level of the administrative structure, covering a much reduced area and with drastically curtailed powers. Mao indicated the failure was not unexpected: “We were prepared for the collapse of half of them, and if seventy per cent collapse, there would still be thirty per cent left. If they must collapse, let them.” [39] Henceforth, the production brigades – and in some cases, the production teams – corresponding to the old cooperatives, became the basic accounting unit, the locus of rural power and economy; as Mao summarized the change, the commune became no more than a federation of brigades, far from the old “sprouts of communism”. [40]

There was a similar retreat in industry. Vast increases in production were claimed – at the end of 1958, a sixty-five per cent increase in total industrial output over 1957. But severe disproportions between sectors had arisen – the stream of capital goods could not be used because of the lack of complementary inputs. The growth of local metal refining led to a lack of transport throughout the economy, curbing the modern industries. Mao put it vividly: “Coal and iron cannot walk by themselves; they need vehicles to transport them. This I did not foresee. I and XX and the Premier did not concern ourselves with this point ... I am a complete outsider when it comes to economic construction.” [41]

Quality had suffered severely. In August 1959, it was officially admitted that the three million tons of iron output from “backyard furnaces” – a quarter of national production – was too poor in quality to be refined further. [42] The lack of investment in the small plants, of proper engineering design and skilled metallurgical workers could not be made up simply by cadre enthusiasm. The 1959 steel target was successively dropped from thirty to thirteen million tons. By the end of the year, the government was rationalizing all “backyard furnaces” – from 600,000 claimed at the height of the Great Leap Forward to 1,300 by April 1960.

Central control, managerial authority (as opposed to the cadres), the restoration of 1957 incentive payment systems, and the restoration of factory rules, were now at a premium. Instead of stressing the potential of enthusiasm, the party leadership now complained: “It is intolerable to find in production and basic construction that no one takes up any responsibility, and that all necessary rules and regulations are being violated.” [43] Up to 1961, these changes slowly restored financial control to managers and the restriction of party factory committees to education and welfare matters. The stress now was not on a production offensive, but on protecting what there was, on economies, profits, costs, labour productivity.

The disagreements in the party leadership over these two sharp turns must have been severe. Did the disagreements lead to the removal of Mao as head of State in 1959? It does not seem so, since Mao himself raised the question before the Great Leap Forward developed. He wanted, he said, to “step down” to “save a great deal of time in order to meet the demands of the Party”. In December, he said he was already working only half-time, without responsibility for daily work, and he would soon resign. It seems that, although there were inevitably disagreements, they were not with Mao personally nor sufficient to enforce his removal. Indeed, it would be difficult to see how the Great Leap Forward could have been implemented in the face of the opposition of the central leadership who were responsible for the day-to-day work and the actual implementation of policy. Those who did disagree with it – Defence Minister P’eng Te-huai and Chief of Staff General Huang K’o-ch’ing – were not promoted as a result of its failure; they were dropped from the leadership. [44]

Mao volunteered – or was induced to volunteer – to be the scapegoat for the disasters, perhaps because he was already resigning or his prestige was so great, it could engulf any opposition. At the Lushan Plenum in July 1959 he made his confession of errors: “I understand nothing about industrial planning ... But comrades, in 1958 and 1959, the main responsibility was mine, and you should take me to task ... Who was responsible for the idea of the mass smelting of steel? I say it was me ... With this, we rushed into a great catastrophe, and ninety million people went into battle ... The chaos caused was on a grand scale, and I take responsibility. Comrades, you must all analyse your own responsibility. If you have to shit, shit! If you have to fart, fart! You will all feel much better for it.” [45]

The excellent harvest of 1958 had blinded the leadership to the dangers. But the harvest in 1959 was poor, and in the two following years, disastrous. In 1960, the government still persisted in trying to keep up the growth of industrial output despite the evidence of famine in some parts of the country. But industry’s efforts disintegrated before the shortage of raw materials and foodstuffs. The value of 1960’s agricultural output was considerably less than 1957’s. [46] In the middle of the year, the sudden withdrawal of Soviet assistance – including the technicians manning Soviet-sponsored projects – exacerbated the downturn in the heavy industrial sector. Retreat became a rout, recession a slump. At long last, four years too late, the government curbed the expansion of heavy industry, and increased its assistance to light industry, handicrafts, family sidelines and suburban agriculture in a general policy of “readjustment, reinforcement and improvement”. Without special permission, all basic construction work was suspended, loss-making industrial units closed and managers forbidden to hire rural labour for three years. In March, 1962, Chou En-lai urged a further contraction in basic construction work and a cut of 20 millions in the size of the urban population. [47] Private handicrafts would, it was now said, continue for a long time to come; private markets and private cultivation were fully restored. The party duly produced an obscure phrase to suggest that the changes were all part of the plan, “agriculture as the foundation of the national economy, with industry as the leading factor”, and “walking on two legs”, as if walking on one leg had ever had much sense! Stalin was never obliged to formulate such obscure phrases; once collectivization was launched, although the pace might be varied, there was no reversal. The Russian peasantry never had such power to oblige the general secretary to retrace his steps, to use “both legs”.

Reality had caught up. Now, instead of breaking the grain bottleneck, China was compelled to import grain in massive quantities from Canada and Australia – sixteen million tons between 1960 and 1963. The time horizons lengthened dramatically. In 1955, Mao had proposed that ten years would be required to “build socialism”, and fifty to seventy years “to catch up with, or overtake the United States”. [48] But by 1962, the prospects were less sanguine: “As for the construction of a strong socialist economy in China, fifty years won’t be enough; it may take one hundred years or even longer ... China has a large population, resources are meagre, and our economy backward, so that in my opinion it will be impossible to develop our productive powers so rapidly as to catch up with and overtake the most advanced capitalist countries in less than one hundred years.” [49] No more was said of making the “transition to communism” only “a few years” after the communes had established “property of the whole people”. Even by the spring of 1959, Mao was advising the cadres: “At the moment, too much activity should be avoided.”

The “three hard years” tested the party severely. There was rebellion on the western border province. [50] Peasant grievances in 1960-61 spread into armed rebellion in at least two provinces, Honan and Shantung (and possibly a third, Kansu), involving mutinous members of the rural militia. [51] In 1962, there was a massive flight of refugees from China to Hong Kong, encouraged or tolerated by the desperate local authorities of neighbouring Kwantung province.

The drop in farm production paralysed the whole economy. A foreign estimate put the cost high; the Great Leap Forward “may have cost a decade of economic growth, for the gross national product in 1965 does not seem to have been above the 1958 level”. [52] Yet party control survived intact and the strategy remained the same, even if pursuing it now demanded a diversion. Mao described what the strategy was: “Our method is, on condition that priority is given to the development of heavy industry, to enforce the simultaneous development of industry and agriculture... If agriculture does not turn up, many problems cannot be solved ... If we want heavy industry to develop rapidly, we must make everybody happy and enthusiastic in his work. And if we want this to happen, we must promote industry and agriculture, and light and heavy industry simultaneously.” [53]

(iii) The Socialist Education Campaign

Material backwardness and intensive patterns of cultivation in national isolation are constantly tending to recreate the social formations of a small producer economy. In China, the process was variously described in the 1950s as the revival of a “rich peasant economy” on the one hand, and the corruption and decay of the rural party on the other (it was often the same process since the cadres behaved as, or in close collaboration with, rich peasants). Campaigns and the high rate of expansion in the first plan did something to curb both trends, and the Great Leap Forward was a sustained assault on the imperatives of peasant agriculture. But the forced retreat of 1959-62 either permitted the open expression of what had existed covertly before or created a situation in which the power of the party in the rural areas appeared threatened.

The power of the party leadership to curb, let alone eliminate, the trends was limited, which is why it so frequently relied on moral exhortation. Too severe a threat to the rural cadres could destroy or demoralize party authority in the rural areas altogether, thus endangering the supply of foodstuffs and raw materials to the cities, and raising the possibility of peasant rebellion. Alternatively, the cadres might unite with the rich peasantry to defend local autonomy, a situation which, when matched by the resistance of provincial leaders to central control, raised the hydra of what were attacked during the Cultural Revolution as “independent kingdoms”, warlordism in the party itself. On the other hand, toleration of rural decay would sooner or later threaten the national power of the party and the strategic aim of State accumulation.

A set of party documents from a county in Fukien province [54] gives some idea of the problem. The commune was densely populated (in two brigades there was only one mou – about a sixth of an acre – of land per head), and employment in the public sector yielded an inadequate income. As a result, there was much absenteeism among the peasants, many turning to private work during the day and making up on public work at night. The range of private jobs was wide – sewing, knitting, bee-keeping, peddling, odd labouring jobs, stone mason work, money-lending. Legally, peasants were entitled to cultivate privately between five and seven per cent of the total cultivated acreage, but the average was nearer 9.5 per cent. Reclaimed land and the area for fodder growing were excluded from these calculations and were wholly in private hands. In all, some thirty per cent of the total crop area was privately cultivated, and for some teams, over fifty per cent. Other sources make even larger claims – for example, that in 1962 Yunnan’s private grain harvest was larger than the collectives’, and privately cultivated land in the province was half the total; that as late as 1964, in Kweichow and Szechuan provinces there was more private than collective cultivated acreage. [55]

The income received from these activities was put at RMB 88 (just over £18 sterling) per year per head for the peasants, and RMB 130-53 for party cadres. However, cadre real income was increased by a number of malpractices: the usurpation of public property (cutting down State woodlands – 500 cedar trees are mentioned – for private building work or sale), use of public funds and foodstuffs for private celebrations (e.g. weddings, births), participation in, or favouring, private enterprise, speculation, peddling, gambling, illicit brewing, and slaughter of livestock. In sum, traditional practices of Chinese rural clan rule were threatening to re-establish themselves, complete with appropriate ideological forms among the cadres – religious festivals, paying bride prices, spiritualism and witchcraft.

The socialist education movement, launched in September 1962, included a number of elements – a propaganda campaign, a rectification movement among rural cadres, and a purge. The propaganda repeated familiar themes, attacking 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, care nothing about the interests of the State”. [56]

From the beginning, Mao assessed the threat as affecting the balance of power. Contrary to the decision Mao formulated in 1957 – that the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie had been fundamentally resolved – there was now a danger that the dictatorship of the proletariat could be turned into “a bourgeois dictatorship, into a reactionary fascist type of dictatorship”. [57] “In our state at present, approximately one-third of the power is in the hands of the enemy, or the enemy’s sympathizers. We have been going fifteen years, and we now control two-thirds of its realm. At present, you can buy a Party secretary for a few packs of cigarettes, not to mention marrying a daughter to him.” [58] And again: “Middle and low-ranking Kuomintang officers, secretaries of hsien [county] party offices etc., have all crept in. No matter what guise they have been transformed into, we must now clean them all out. Everywhere there is class struggle, everywhere there are counter-revolutionary elements. [59]

It will be recalled that it was party policy in 1949 to “absorb” the former Kuomintang officials. The statistics were wrong, for now it could not be taken for granted that the social classification of the rural population had been reliable: “In the past, there have been instances in which some upper-middle peasants, petty merchants, and even landlords and rich peasants were mistakenly classified as poor or lower middle peasants.” [60]

Given this assessment, the reaction of the party leadership was strangely mild. Liu Shao-ch’i favoured a thorough purge of the rural party. But Mao was for moderation – as he explained: “I am somewhat on the right. There are so many.., that they might constitute twenty per cent of the people.” [61] The cadres should be treated leniently, even in cases of large-scale corruption (“several thousand yuan”, or thirty to forty times the average annual income of the peasants in Lieng-chiang county). The money should in part or whole be repaid, but “We need not talk about ‘thoroughness’.” [62] There were large sums at stake – a Central Work Conference in 1964 recorded that in one area in two months, RMB 20,000 of illicit cash and 100,000 catties of grain were recovered.

In 1962 Mao was firm that violence was ruled out: “It isn’t good to kill people. We should arrest and execute as few people as possible. If we arrest and execute people at the drop of a hat, the end result would be that everybody would fear for themselves and nobody dare to speak.” [63] But by 1964 he is less sure: “It is impossible for us not to kill, but we must not kill too many. Kill a few to shock them ... the one killed by mistake won’t resurrect.” [64]

The work teams sent to investigate were apparently not effective. The poor and middle peasant associations that had been set up to supervise the cadres were selected by the cadres themselves.

Liu Shao-ch’i and his wife, Wang Kuang-mei, stepped up the disciplinary element in the campaign. In mid-1964, Wang addressed 3,000 cadres in Shanghai on her “Taiyuan experience” after staying six months in a Hopei production brigade. [65] She concluded that forty of the forty-seven brigade and team leaders were corrupt and needed to be replaced by handpicked cadres through a process of mass struggle rallies, public accusation meetings and forced confessions. In July, Liu and Wang travelled in the south-central region, and concluded that possibly a third of the cadres were corrupt, and a much longer period of reform was required (five to six, rather than two to three, years). Unless the central work team returned to an area to check its earlier recommendations had been implemented, the peasants would remain intimidated; higher level cadres would ignore them in order to protect the lower cadres upon whom the administration depended. The purge began in September, and one estimate suggests seventy to eighty per cent of sub-village level cadres were removed – a powerful source of hatred towards Liu and Wang.

The revelations of corruption, bribery and extortion mounted. [66] There were cases of physical assault by the peasants on the cadres, and of cadre suicide. Wang’s work teams had disturbed a hornet’s nest. They discovered, for example, that Ch’en Hua, party secretary in Shengshi, Kwantung, a “five good” cadre and national labour hero who had been received by Mao, was a brutal petty dictator; he was caught attempting to escape to Hong Kong in his launch (a remarkable symbol of wealth) and killed. In October, the work teams collided with another “national model Party secretary”, Ch’en Yung-kuei of the famous Tachai production brigade. But Ch’en was shrewd and had powerful friends. He gained an audience with Mao, and was nominated, perhaps as a result, to the praesidium of the third National People’s Congress. Tachai was praised publicly in Chou’s report to the Congress; Ch’en was permitted to make a speech, and a photograph of him with Mao appeared on the front page of the People’s Daily. [67]

In late 1964, Mao endeavoured to restrain the movement, but without criticizing Liu and Wang. Now the cadres needed to be educated, and more importantly, at the level of the province rather than the village; it was here that there were “powerholders within the Party who take the capitalist road”. By contrast with his earlier assessment, the “normal good and relatively good” cadres constituted “the absolute majority”, and the work teams should rely on them rather than attack them. The mood was mild and conciliatory; as usual, Liu was praised as Mao’s “closest comrade in arms”.

Notes

24. Sixty Points on Working Methods, 19 February 1958, No. 21, in Mao Papers, p.63

25. Cited Jan Deleyne, The Chinese Economy, London, 1973, pp.185-6

26. Speech, 8th Party Congress, 2nd session, 17 May 1958, in Miscellany I, p.102

27. Talks, Nanning Conference, 11-12 January 1958, in Miscellany I, p.80

28. Speech, 8th Party Congress, 2nd session, 18 May 1958, Miscellany I, p.122

29. Sixth Plenum, 8th Central Committee, 19 December. 1958, Miscellany I, p.144

30. Ibid., pp.138-9

31. Che Hsueh Yen Chiu, Philosophical Studies, No.5, 10 September 1958, ECMM, 149

32. Central Committee resolution, 10 December 1958, NCNA Peking, 18 December 1958, in CB542, pp.7-22, and SCMM 138, p.16

33. People’s Communes in China, Peking, 1958, p.8, and JMJP, 3 October 1958

34. 23 July 1959, Lushan Plenum, in Mao Unrehearsed, p.135; see also 21 February 1959, Miscellany I, p.162

35. JMJP, 27 August 1959

36. May 1959, Miscellany I, p.183

37. 21 February 1959, Miscellany I, p.159

38. Mao, Miscellany I, p.184

39. Lushan Plenum, 23 July 1959, in Mao Unrehearsed, p.142

40. 21 February 1959, in Miscellany I, p.160

41. Lushan Plenum, 23 July 1959, in Mao Unrehearsed, pp.42-3. XX is not identified in the text available

42. JMJP, 27 August 1959

43. JMJP, 19 April 1959; see also: Tsai T’i-chiu, Mass movement and centralized leadership in industry, JMJP, 24 October 1959; see also Hsu Hsin-hsueh, in Hung-ch’i, 16 October 1961

44. 19 September 1959; cf. Mao’s warm reply to P’eng’s acknowledgement of error: “We should take this two-sided attitude to help an old comrade who has been with us for thirty-one years.” Miscellany I, p.187

45. Lushan, in Mao Unrehearsed, pp.142-3, 146

46. Snow, Red China Today, op.cit., p.188

47. Po I-po, to Anna Louise Strong, Letter from China, op. cit.

48. Sixth Plenum, Seventh Central Committee, September 1955, in Miscellany I, p.25

49. Mao, Enlarged Work Conference, 30 January 1962, in Mao Unrehearsed, pp.174-5

50. “In 1962, under the instigation and direction of external forces, a group of the most reactionary protagonists of local nationalism staged a traitorious counter-revolutionary armed rebellion in Ining, Sinkiang, and incited and organized the flight to foreign territory of a large number of people near the frontier.” – Chou En-lai, Third NPC, 21-2 December 1964, cited by William Maiden, A new class structure emerging in China?, CQ22, April-June 1960, pp.84-5; an edited version of his report is translated and published, ibid, pp.70-74

51. Bulletin of Activities (Kung-tso T’ung-hsun), PLA confidential documents, No.1, 1 January 1961, pp.29-32, and No.5, 17 January 1961, pp.5-15, cited by John Wilson Lewis in discussion of these papers, CQ18, April-June 1964, p.76; Mao refers to serious problems’ in three provinces due to food shortages and errors of leadership, in speech, Ninth Plenum, Eighth Central Committee, 18 January 1961, in Miscellany II, p.240

52. Alexander Eckstein, in Alexander Eckstein, Walter Gaienson and Tachung Liu (eds.); Economic Trends in Communist China, Chicago, 1968, p.7

53. Notes on Soviet Union’s “Political Economy”, 1961-2, in Miscellany II, p.277: stress added

54. Rural communes in Lien-chiang, documents concerning communes in Lienchiang county Fukien province, 1962-3, translated and edited by C.S. Chen, Stanford, 1969

55. E. L. Wheelwright and Bruce McFarlane, The Chinese Road to Socialism, London, 1973, p.70, citing R. Wilson, The China after next, Far Eastern Economic Review, 1 February 1968, p.193

56. Hung-ch’i, Nos.13-14, 1963, p.11

57. Enlarged Work Conference, 30 January 1962, in Mao Unrehearsed, p.167

58. 18 August 1964, in Mao Unrehearsed, p.217

59. 5 July 1964, in Mao Unrehearsed, p.244

60. Revised Second Ten Points, Article IV, translated by Richard Baum and F.C. Tiewes, Ssü-Ch’ing: The Socialist Education Movement of 1962-66, Center for Chinese Studies Research Monograph, Berkeley, 1968, Appendix E

61. Talks on the four clean-ups movement, 3 January 1965, Miscellany II, p.414

62. December 1964, Miscellany II, p.416

63. Enlarged Work Conference, 30 January 1962, Mao Unrehearsed, p.185

64. 20 December 1964, in Misellany II, p.426

65. This account is derived from Richard Baum, Prelude to revolution: Mao, the Party and the Peasant Question, 1962-66, New York, 1975, for which see Chinese sources, p.84 passim

66. For example, Nan-fang JP, Canton, 11 October 1964

67. cf. SCMM, 578, p.28 and CB 824, and Baum, op.cit.

It seemed Chinese society had not been fundamentally changed. A new political order had been grafted on to the basic rural society. China was still not equipped to undertake sustained capital accumulation. The “three bad years” revealed a social structure hidden in the pre-1959 years of growth. Yet to tackle the problem head-on with a purge of the party was to risk the collapse of party rule itself, to destroy the basis of the power of Mao and the central leadership. Mao instinctively opted for a classical reformist strategy – the transformation of education, not the distribution of power. By this means, the “superstructure” would be brought into conformity with the needs of the “material base”.

What were the symptoms that the educational system needed reform? Young people were unaware of the barbarities of Kuomintang rule; they had grown up in the People’s Republic and were not grateful for its achievements. They were urged to listen to the old people tell of the past. The educational and cultural institutions would have to be reformed to accord with the need for accumulation. The present educational system imposed too many years of study, the content of which was irrelevant to the drive for output; it was also too expensive – 120 yuan per ordinary middle school student, in comparison to 6.80 yuan per agricultural middle school student. [68]

The educational curriculum must be changed, shortened and lightened not in order to eliminate expert technical knowledge but to oppose the cult of the expert, the demand for special privileges and consumption on the basis of formal qualifications. But, on the other hand: “Those who have no practical knowledge are pseudo-red, empty headed politicos.” [69]

Culture must be purged of diversity. The reality of life in China – such of it as was still reflected in literature, opera, film and radio – must be eliminated to create simple sagas of moral heroes totally devoted to the interests of the State. The changes in Chinese opera were only one form of this “aligning of the superstructure”. Pre-1949 writers, including some, like Confucius [70], much-praised by Mao himself, were banned. Yang Heng-sheng, former vice-chairman of the Federation of Literary and Art Circles, was condemned for praising Shakespeare, Molière and Ibsen, and Chao Feng for playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a work much appreciated by Lenin. The highest achievements of bourgeois culture were not to be absorbed into socialism, but eliminated lest they impede the effort to extort sacrifices.

We can only surmise at the motives which led Mao to take his case outside the party. All his life, he had endeavoured to protect and build the party. The disputes inside the party were not broadcast to the world at large until after they had been settled, when ignominy would be publicly heaped upon the defeated. But in the winter of 1965-6, Mao went far beyond this procedure to appeal to an audience outside the party to settle the dispute within it. Even the arguments within the party are not clear – we have only Mao’s side of the case. His closest followers for many years remained loyal to his own record; they attempted to defend the party against radical change lest it destroy the party and so the very basis for Mao’s own influence. Did Mao hope to create a new party from the youth, a body of cadres completely devoted to the cause of accumulation, or did he hope to do no more than scourge the provincial and national leadership as the basis for establishing a stronger loyalty to them and so the stability of the régime after his death (as he himself once suggested)? How far was the Cultural Revolution not planned at all, but merely the result of a sequence of events in which Mao felt himself increasingly hampered in the effort to reshape the party? Without access to the inner party discussions, the answers cannot be verified.

The recorded pretext was slight.

Mao’s wife, Chiang Ch’ing, claimed that in the autumn of 1965, a number of articles in literary criticism by Mao were refused publication in Peking. Mao was obliged to have them published in Shanghai. [71] Possibly on the basis of this experience, he concluded: “The central Ministry of Propaganda is the palace of the Prince of Hell.”

A “cultural revolution” was required: that is, a purge and rectification in the fields of propaganda, education and cultural work. The resistance of the Peking party was another problem, affecting directly the senior party leader concerned, P’eng Chen, deputy general secretary. The national centre, the Politburo, agreed to establish a Cultural Revolution Group, backed by the PLA, to supervise work teams to implement the programme.

However, as in the socialist education movement, the work teams compromised with leading officials. From April 1966 Mao publicly attacked particular individuals – P’eng Chen, Lu Ting-yi (Minister of Culture and chief of the Propaganda Department), and now Lo Jui-ch’ing, PLA Chief of Staff. In May, Mao secured from the Politburo dissolution of the Cultural Revolution Group, a revocation of its report, and the closure of all institutions of higher education for six months in order to reform the curricula. The students must be involved in the reform; and as an inducement, it was promised that students of worker or peasant origin would receive preference in higher education (although their share in higher education had already risen from thirty- six to sixty-seven per cent between 1957 and 1962).

(i) The revolution

There was another audience for these disputes within the party – the students themselves. Elements of what Mao had to say appealed directly to them, although for quite different reasons. The students were for “revolution”, but for the emancipation of people rather than productive forces. Indeed, many of them supported Mao in order to fight the social obsession with accumulation, the tyrannical work disciplines made necessary by that obsession. Some of them pursued aims the precise opposite to those of Mao – the desire for privilege without having to acquire technical competence. Now at last they were given an opportunity to torment their tormentors, the local instruments of the national plan, teachers, headmasters, professors. They were the tangible “persons in authority taking the capitalist road”, and any form of discipline must represent capitalism. From May, groups of students began seizing the schools and the dossiers upon which their future careers depended. [72] The work teams of the party attempted to defend a stable administration, and, as a result, were attacked both directly and through the Big Character posters that blossomed on the walls of the cities. The work teams likewise must be “those taking the capitalist road” inside the party. The work teams appealed to the party centre, which in turn attempted to defend the administration, without which the central production control system would break down. The “anti-party group” now came to include all or part of the central leadership of the party.

A Peking student – Nieh Yüan-tzu – in collaboration with Mao, provided the signal for an explosion of student militancy. Mao’s excitement was extreme. He had apparently found a brand new cadre force outside the old party: “Nieh Yüan-tzu’s big character poster of 25 May is the declaration of the Paris Commune of the Sixties of the Twentieth century; its significance far surpasses that of the Paris Commune.” [73] Suddenly, the rectification campaign began to recede in importance before the prospect of the transition to communism itself-just as the merging of the rural population in the Commune movement had in 1958 promoted the same utopian idea: “The present Cultural Revolution is a heaven-and-earth shaking event. Can we, dare we, cross the pass into socialism? This pass leads to the final destruction of classes and the reduction of the three great differences.” [74]

Mao and the students might raise the slogan, but workers and peasants still had to report for work each day. The maintenance of China’s output also required that the party continue its supervision, and if the party faltered under attack, the People’s Liberation Army was required to maintain elementary administration. The PLA, under Defence Minister Lin Piao, Mao’s strongest supporter at the centre, was not attacked. Indeed, military discipline – without talk of pay or reward – had become increasingly the ideal put forward by the party. Lin Piao and the PLA did not isolate Mao and, in return, Mao identified himself with the army. The main Cultural Revolution statements now appeared first in the leading army newspaper, Liberation Army Daily. Mao regularly appeared in army uniform (aped by the Red Guards), as did the other leading members of the reorganized Cultural Revolution group. The army was only three million strong, quite inadequate to change the cultural orientation of China. For that, a more widespread force was required, and one not tethered to the material interests of the majority, workers and peasants. If the majority were involved, they were liable to confuse cultural change with urgent material demands. If these were conceded, it would reduce accumulation. indeed, workers, peasants and soldiers reacted initially by opposing the student Red Guards, accusing them of being pampered children of the bourgeoisie. In the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, Mao instructed: “The workers, peasants and soldiers should not interfere with the students’ great Cultural Revolution” (23 August and 7 Sept. 1966). [75]

Throughout the first phase, there were hints by Mao of a party conspiracy to stifle the Cultural Revolution, based upon the link between the work teams and the party centre. The evidence for a conspiracy is little more than that the centre, like Mao, wished to protect production from being disturbed by student activities. But Mao was now responding to an audience whose expectations pushed and pulled him in other directions. The hints – such as dropping Liu Shao-ch’i’s name from its customary second rank to seventh at the first Red Guard rally – were still opaque, but became clearer in Mao’s first wallposter: “in the last fifty days or so, some leading comrades have enforced a bourgeois dictatorship and struck down the surging movement of the great People’s Cultural Revolution” and in the startling slogan, “Bombard the headquarters”. [76] There is a gap between the “comrades” criticized and the rhetoric of enforcing a “bourgeois dictatorship”, a gap of vagueness which permitted Mao complete freedom to manoeuvre, to speak the language of revolution while persisting in a programme of limited reforms.

The Eleventh Plenum of the party – when the central committee permitted admission to unelected Red Guards – sanctioned a sixteen point programme to guide the movement. The programme limited the Socialist Education Movement to basic production units, and the Cultural Revolution to cultural and educational bodies and leading party and government organizations in the cities. The Cultural Revolution should not be launched in basic production units, a point firmly repeated by Chou En-lai when he forbade Red Guards to enter factories and villages. [77]

Mao must have been already sensing the possible divergence of interests in the Red Guard movement and the potential for open warfare both between Red Guards and party and between different Red Guard factions. On the draft sixteen points he scribbled, “Do not beat people up.” [78]

(ii) Sound the retreat

By the autumn of 1966, with some eleven million students visiting Peking and others in other cities, with fighting between different Red Guard factions, with transport and food supplies strained to serve the students, Mao began to draw back, as quickly as he had done in 1947-8 when faced with the beginning of a peasant revolution: “I had no idea that one big character poster, the Red Guards and the big exchange of revolutionary experience would have stirred up such a big affair. Some of the students did not have a terribly good family background, but were our own family backgrounds all that good?” [79] As at the Lushan Plenum, to the senior leaders of the party he again confessed: “Since it was I who caused the havoc, it is understandable if you have some bitter words for me ... Perhaps the movement may last another five months, or even longer.” [80]

In fact, it was to last another two and a half years.

The Red Guards achieved another unexpected result. They forced a defensive reaction by the party leadership. Mao disingenuously complained: “I wanted to establish their prestige before I died. I never imagined that things might move in the opposite direction.” [81] Thus, on his own estimate, there had been no longer-term “capitalist road” conspiracy in the party, no permanent struggle between two lines; that was to be invented in later years, weaving past and current disagreements into a consistent historical record. Mao resented the defensive reaction of the provincial leaders, setting up “independent kingdoms”, like their warlord predecessors, and their failure to consult him: “It’s not so bad that I am not allowed to complete my work, but I don’t like being treated as a dead ancestor.” [82]

Nonetheless the irritations – despite the grandiose language which caught the imagination of the students – still did not mean that the “top persons” should be cast out: “Cliques and factions of whatever description should be strictly excluded. The essential thing is that they [the criticized leaders] should reform, that their ideas should conform, and that they should unite with us. Then things will be all right. We should allow Liu and Teng to make a revolution and to reform themselves.” [83] Or again: “We shouldn’t condemn Liu Shao-ch’i out of hand. If they have made mistakes they can change, can’t they? When they have changed, it will be all right. Let them pull themselves together, and throw themselves courageously into their work.” [84] The language of “bourgeois usurpation of the proletarian State” suddenly faded into “mistakes”; apparently, the potential capitalists could cease to perform their social role just by trying.

There were now many other forces and motives at work. Lin Piao and his supporters (the “Left”, led by the Cultural Revolution group) saw the chance to remove their main rivals within the party, Mao’s heir Liu Shao-ch’i and general secretary Teng Hsiao-p’ing. Lin Piao would then stand close to inheriting the supreme leadership on the retirement of Mao. Secondly, the party cadres disgraced by Liu and his wife during the socialist education movement now had a chance to destroy Liu, and secure their rehabilitation. Finally, the Red Guards, young and innocent, were prey to any ambitious leader prepared to speak in extreme terms. By October, the numerous Red Guard factions were involved in almost continuous warfare among themselves, manipulated by different party leaders. The one thing that could unite them was a common enemy, a scapegoat.

Thus, there were already powerful forces striving for Liu’s destruction. In October Mao decided that the sacrifice of Liu, Teng and the rest was required as the price of the survival of his own authority. Liu and Teng were obliged to make a public confession, accepting a version of the past that was clearly false – for example, that they alone were responsible for the changes introduced after the Great Leap Forward. The confession did them no good. Mao could no longer protect them. From December, Liu ceased to appear in public and retired to his State villa in Chung Nan Hai. Thus the head of State, central committee member, and heir to Mao, suddenly became a “capitalist roader”, the source of all ills for hundreds of millions of Chinese.

(iii) Workers intervene

From November 1966, the party centre made strenuous efforts to end the Red Guard movement. The students were directed to leave Peking, to “go on a Long March” to wherever they came from. To no avail. Having escaped from the dreary routine of school, the youth would not lightly return. Furthermore, their agitation was drawing in young workers, resentful that the new freedom to travel, discuss and avoid the tedium of work was restricted to those in full-time education. Once workers were involved, a mass of new demands appeared, no longer confined to the area of education. In somewhat desperate tones, the Cultural Revolution group repeated the instruction to “promote production” while “grasping revolution ... The production command system of the factories must not be interrupted.”

It was too late. Workers did leave production. Delegations flocked to Peking to present their demands, to show how they had been oppressed by Liu Shao-ch’i with poor wages and conditions. Many took strike action – in the Shanghai docks, on the railways, in transport, power stations, and elsewhere. [85] Free rail travel permitted thousands of those exiled to the rural areas to return to their cities legitimately, and to fuel the growing militancy on the streets.

The party centre denounced the agitation, blaming the strikes not on the objective conditions facing workers – the result of the State’s accumulation drive since 1949 – but on the “handful of party persons in authority taking the capitalist road”. “These capitalist roaders have been even fomenting strikes, instigating the masses who do not understand the actual situation to flock to the banks and withdraw their deposits by force.” [86] In the State where supposedly the self-conscious masses governed, it seemed absurdly easy to “mislead” them.
(iv) The army must save the country

The PLA endeavoured to hold the line. It was the only secure base of power for the leadership. But it was small, spread thinly, aware of the dangers lurking beyond China’s borders – Russian troops in the north and east, and a major US military operation in the south in Vietnam. Furthermore, some of the rebels attacked the soldiers, and possibly some of the soldiers were infected with the radical demands: they had their own persons in authority taking the capitalist road. The central authorities might urge that “no person or organization may attack the organs of the PLA”; that radio stations, prisons, warehouses, roads, bridges, banks and other important installations were out of bounds; they might forbid soldiers to participate in the Cultural Revolution. [87] But a real class struggle had broken out and it was not to be tamed by edict.

The PLA was instructed in January 1967 to intervene, not just to separate belligerents or protect installations, but to lead all legitimate organizations: “In all institutions where seizure of power has become necessary, from above to below, the participation of the PLA and militia delegates in the temporary organs of power of the revolutionary triple alliance is indispensable. Factories, villages, institutions of finance and commerce, of learning (including colleges, secondary and primary schools), party organs, administrative and mass organizations, must be led with the participation of the PLA ... Where there are not enough PLA representatives, these positions should better be left vacant temporarily.” [88] The task was to implement Mao’s latest thought: “Economize on consumption and carry on revolution. Protect the property of the country.” [89]

In the din, very little could be heard of what Mao actually proposed. So great was the “upsurge of bitterness” at the years of the party’s rule, it drowned all lesser questions. The press continued to divert all grievances towards one target – as one Shanghai newspaper urged its readers: “Concentrate the Greatest Animosity on ‘A Handful’ of Those at the Top”. [90] The effect on the youth was poignant. For example, one confessed: “Today I heard a class brother accuse counter-revolutionary revisionist Lo Jui-ch’ing of his crimes ... tears ran down my face and I was very angry. At that time, I looked at the Quotations of Chairman Mao in my hand, and thought that, but for Chairman Mao and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution led by him, how could we be able to accuse Lo Jui-ch’ing here? This deepened my reverence and adoration for Chairman Mao.” [91] Mao meanwhile was endeavouring to restore the position of the battered party cadre: “The old cadres before the power struggle and the new cadres after it should co-operate in working together and preserve the secret of the State.” [92] The method of winding down the “peasant war” of 1947-8 had been to admit middle and rich peasants and landlords into the poor peasant leagues. Now Mao attempted a similar tactic – to build a new organization with the old party and the new rebels, held together by the PLA: a “triple alliance” which subsequently became the revolutionary committees. The party held power and commanded the structures, so that it would inevitably master the incoherent and fluid rebelliousness of the “mass organizations”.

To help matters along, the press declared in March that many good cadres had been wrongly dismissed by Liu Shao-ch’i, but that now the revolution had triumphed, they could return. Furthermore, the press deplored “indiscriminate attacks on all persons in authority” since this “robs the nation of the mature political and organizational skills of experienced men”. [93] Petty corruption and even a bad work style were now small details in comparison to the threat to the State. Mao added his quotation to clinch the point: “We must believe that more than ninety per cent of our cadres are good or comparatively good.” [94] He drew the limits more sharply: “The method of simply rejecting everything and negating everything, of directing the struggle against cadres who shoulder most of the responsibilities and do most of the work or against the “heads [of departments] must be abandoned.” [95] In mid-1966 Mao had compared the movement to the Paris Commune. Now he rejected any idea of a Shanghai Commune.

(v) Sheng-wu-lien

In the upsurge of late 1966, the workers lacked any organization which could present their demands, whether trade union or independent political party. It was the strength of the State, with its monopoly of armed power and serried ranks of disciplined bureaucrats, which meant it would inevitably win unless alternative organizations were created.

The longer instability continued, the more likely some such organization would be created. Then the fears of the leadership would become a reality – there would exist, in their terms, a “counter-revolutionary” alternative. A number of organizations arose spontaneously which aspired to champion the revolt. One of the most interesting was Sheng-wu-lien, the Hunan Provincial Proletarian Revolutionary Great Alliance Committee.

This Hunan federation of organizations was attacked by most of the central leadership. Minister of Public Security K’ang Sheng expressed their indignation: “They describe the State and the party led by Chairman Mao as a privileged class, similar to Khrushchev’s party ... They say the Great Cultural Revolution has just begun, that the Great Cultural Revolution in the past was merely reformism, and that it has really begun only since the emergence of ‘Sheng-wu-lien’ ... They say that the provincial revolutionary committees and preparatory groups for these committees set up in the Great Cultural Revolution are all reformists ... In this way, isn’t Chairman Mao’s thought reformism too? In this way, they slander our great leader, Chairman Mao.” [96]

Sheng-wu-lien’s case was as follows. China was governed by a “bureaucratic bourgeoisie”, a decaying class of “Red” capitalists who were hindering the progress of history. A revolution, according to Lenin, was a change in the classes governing a country, yet in China the attack had been solely on particular individuals, not on the State itself: “As a result, the fruit of the revolution was in the final analysis taken by the capitalist class ... The revolution by dismissal of officials is only bourgeois reformism which changes in a zigzagging way the new bureaucratic rule before the Cultural Revolution into another kind of bourgeois rule of bourgeois bureaucrats.”

The triple alliance, the revolutionary committees, amounted “to a reinstatement of the bureaucrats already toppled in the January revolution. Inevitably, it will be the form of political power to be usurped by the bourgeoisie, in which the local and national bureaucrats are to play a leading role.” Of course, great claims were made by the party, but “The bourgeoisie always represent the form of political power of their rule as the most perfect flawless thing in the world that serves the whole people. The new bureaucratic bourgeoisie and the brutes of the Right-wing of the petty bourgeoisie who depend on them are doing exactly that.”

As a result of this analysis, “the real revolution, the revolution to negate the past seventeen years, has basically not yet begun.” Its task was not reform or the removal of selected individuals, but: “The rule of the new bureaucratic bourgeoisie must be overthrown by force in order to solve the problem of political power. Empty shouting about realizing the May 7th directive [Mao’s instruction on the rectification of the army] without any reference to the seizure of real power and the utter smashing of the old State machinery will of course be a ‘utopian’ dream.” The question therefore became one of armed struggle against the party. “Before the Cultural Revolution, the bureaucrats dared not really hand over arms to the people. The militia is only a façade behind which the bureaucrats control the armed strength of the people. It is certainly not an armed force of the working class, but a docile tool in the hands of the bureaucrats.” The aim was to destroy the bourgeois class, to create a “new society free from bureaucrats”, one People’s Commune of China. [97]

It is understandable that the party leadership were alarmed at this startling reappearance of Leninism after all the years of cultural control and social discipline. All efforts were now bent to root out this “counter-revolutionary Hotch Potch” as a leading Hunan newspaper described it.

(vi) The Long March back

The rebels became more violent and embittered. They had been promised a revolution, but were now faced with most of the old faces at the local level. The PLA could provide no guide as to what “Mao Tse-tung thought” meant. General Chen Tsai-tao, the Wuhan commander, backed the wrong group, the One Million Heroes Rebel Group for the “triple alliance”, and was said to have imprisoned Peking’s emissaries a (Minister of Public Security Hsieh Fu-chih, and Propaganda Chief Wang Li) who were sent to remonstrate with him. The Red Guards stayed in Peking, fighting, attacking foreigners, and in August sacked the office of the British chargé d’affaires, to the government’s embarrassment.

In the summer of 1967 Mao made a tour through China. He concluded: “it is said that there is no civil war in China, but I think there is ... This is an armed struggle.” [98]

Lin Piao reported that a thousand houses in Kwangsi had been razed to the ground because no one would let the fire-fighting equipment be used. Chiang Ch’ing said the siege of Kwangsi had lasted two months, and Mao reported that “in Szechuan, the fighting is real war. Each side has tens of thousands of men. They have rifles and cannon.” He deplored the way cadres were forced to kneel and wear dunce’s hats, for they were not the same as landlords; yet it was Mao who had identified bad cadres as an exploiting class, the bourgeoisie. There were even people, he said, who “instigated the soldiers to oppose their superiors, and saying that while you are making only six yuan [RMB] a month, the officers are making much more and enjoying the luxury of riding in automobiles”. [99]

A year later, he was again attempting to force the Red Guards back to their localities of origin. He summoned the four leading members to tell them firmly: “I am the black hand that suppressed the Red Guards.” [100] Lest they lied when they reported back to their followers, he had the reproof tape-recorded: “Otherwise you might just quote what you pleased on your return. If you do, I’ll just release the recording.” [101]

Progress was, for the leadership, agonizingly slow. Twenty-two revolutionary committees were to have been created by January 1968 but, in fact, only seven existed by then. The old cadres were not easily accepted by the mass organizations, and there were now many new rivals for power – both old cadres and new “rebels”. The civil war seemed to break out in new areas as soon as it had been mastered in one place. in June 1968, the forty-one corpses washed up in Hong Kong bore witness to continuing conflict. There was a conspiracy to seize the railways. In July, railwaymen were said to have attacked a station in Canton, stealing arms and calling the PLA a “royalist army”. [102]

If any faction in the leadership had considered persisting in attempts to unseat the national centre, the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 gave reason to hesitate. The Russian forces concentrated on China’s northern borders could be used for a similar exercise against China, and in 1969 armed clashes between Russian and Chinese troops on the Ussuri and Amur rivers made it urgent to restore order.

In April 1969, the Ninth Party Congress met to clear up the debris, to attempt to restore some of the decimated national leadership in the face of the Russian threat. The destruction had been, whether Mao intended it or not, severe. A Western account estimates that, of the ninety-three full members of the central committee elected at the Eighth Congress, fifty-four had been purged after 1966, including four of the six first secretaries of the regional bureaux of the central committee, and twenty-three of the twenty-nine provincial party secretaries. At least some of the Central Committee members must have recalled Khrushchev’s speech on Stalin’s rule to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party. But people had not been killed, and in the years following, many of those disgraced were allowed to return quietly to positions of authority.

The purge of the armed forces had been relatively light. At the Ninth Congress, the PLA was rewarded for having held the line. Of the 170 full members of the new central committee, exactly half came from the PLA, and only eighteen per cent from the “rebel mass organizations”. On the Politburo, there was again exactly half the members from the PLA (twelve), with nine from the party, and three from “mass organizations”.

The Cultural Revolution was important in revealing the reality of China. The twin bases of power, the PLA and the party, survived intact. It would have been impossible to sustain production if either had been seriously damaged. The economy did not go through the wild fluctuation that occurred during the Great Leap Forward – in the worst year for external trade, 1967, exports fell by twelve per cent. Other key institutions escaped disruption. Scientific research did not suffer; China made its sixth hydrogen bomb test in June 1967, and there were rumours of a seventh in December. A year later, a test was officially announced: “hundreds of millions of revolutionary people throughout the country are greatly inspired by the happy news that China has successfully conducted a new hydrogen bomb test.” [103]

We are left with a paradox – a reform movement described in revolutionary terms, moving into a popular revolution outside the control of the party, but eventually frustrated. The paradox promotes selfcontradiction as, for example, in the account of a French supporter of Mao (whose final chapter is headed, “The Victory of Moderation”): “It is no longer possible to dispute that the Cultural Revolution really was a revolution ... The movement called into being was so strong that it almost became another revolution, sweeping away the Communist Party.” [104]

The task, as he saw it, was to awaken “political consciousness” while “saving the revolutionaries from their besetting temptation to exploit the revolution for their own pleasure”; or “to give the Chinese the taste for peaches, and to keep all the fruit on the tree”.

Notes

68. 13 February 1964, in Mao Unrehearsed, p.206-7

69. Ibid., p.203: cf. also 5 July 1964, ibid., p.248

70. 13 February 1964 – Mao praises Confucius as a model of educational simplicity; in Mao Papers, p.93

71. The articles criticized the work of historian Wu Han, deputy mayor of Peking; Kuo Mo-jo, President of the Academy of Sciences; and later Teng T’o, former editor of JMJP; cf. Miscellany II, pp.456-7

72. cf. Interview with former Canton Red Guard by Tariq Ali, in International, 3, London, Summer 1974, pp.35-9

73. July 1966, in Mao Papers, p.24

74. July 1966, in Mao Unrehearsed, p.254

75. 23 August 1966, in Mao Papers, p.36; repeated, 7 September Directive of the central committee, ibid., p.130; repeated 11 September

76. In SCMP, 3997

77. 15 September 1966, SCMP 3785, pp.3-5

78. 31 July 1966, in Mao Papers, p.129

79. October 1966, in Mao Unrehearsed, p.268. See also ibid., p.271, and Mao Papers, p.43

80. Ibid., p.271

81. Ibid., p.270

82. Ibid., pp.266-7

83. Ibid., p. 267

84. Ibid., p.268; cf. also “Nor can we put all the blame on Comrade Shao-ch’i and Comrade Hsiao-p’ing”, ibid., p.274, and slightly different translation, Mao Papers, p.45

85. For details of some of the strikes, cf. on fortnight’s dock strikes, Hung-ch’i, 1 February 1967, SCMM 564; railway strikes, Shanghai to Hangchow and Nanking, 30 December-10 January 1967, NCNA, 9 February 1967; Yangshupu power station strike, NCNA, 16 January 1967; Nanking transport strike, NCNA, 14 January 1967; Taching oil field strike, NCNA, 15 January 1967; Shanghai No. 17 textile mill strike, NCNA, 9 January and 28 January 1967; Shanghai glassmaking machinery factory strike, NCNA, 15 January 1967; Shanghai No. 2 camera plant – because of strike, “only 9.2 per cent of the target was completed”, NCNA, 17 February 1967; Peking No.2 machine tool plant, JMJP, 2 February 1967, SCMP 3881

86. cf. Wen Hui Pao, 18 January 1967, SCMP, Supplement 164, 28 February 1967, p.24, stress added

87. Central Committee, Circular concerning prohibiting directing the spearhead struggle against the armed forces, 14 January 1967

88. Order of the Central Military Commission, 28 January 1967, and also Regulations of the Central Military Commission on the seizure of power in the armed forces, 16 February 1967; and also Document of the Central Committee, State Council and Central Military Commission, 19 January 1967 and 26 January 1967

89. JMJP, editorial, 26 January 1967, in Mao Papers, p.134

90. Chieh-fangJ P, 8 May 1967, SCMP 191, 14July 1967, p.28

91. Chan Pao (Battle News), 18 January 1967, SCMP 165,10 March 1967, p.25

92. 27 January 1967, in Mao Papers, p.48

93. Hung-ch’i, 22 February 1967

94. 13 May 1967, in Mao Papers, p.154

95. 12 June 1967, ibid., p.141

96. 24 January 1968, in SCMP 4136

97. All citations in this section from Whither China?, document of Sheng-wu-lien, SCMP 4190; extract republished in International Socialism 37, June-July 1969, pp.23-7

98. Dialogues during an inspection tour, July-September 1967, in Miscellany II, p.464: cf. also “A wind of armed struggle is developing in several regions”, JMJP, 19 August 1967

99. Ibid., p. 465

100. Capital Red Guard Congress, 28 July 1968, Miscellany II, p.480

101. Cited from Long Live Mao Tse-tung thought, by Roderick McFarquhar, The Times, 5 September 1973

102. San-chün Lun-wei Chan-pao 9, 7 September 1968, in SCMP 4338, 15 January 1969

103. NCNA, 29 December 1968, SCMP 4331, 6 January 1969

104. Jean Esmein, The Chinese Cultural Revolution (translated from French), New York, 1973, p.330

The history of the Chinese State after the Cultural Revolution falls into three phases, each punctuated by yet another upheaval in the central leadership. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao did not transform the basic institutional apparatus of State, party and PLA, but he did graft on a group of newcomers. The first phase consisted of an assault on the newcomers, leading to the downfall of their leader, Minister of Defence Lin Piao; the second ended in a minor victory for the newcomers by the removal of Teng Hsaio-p’ing; and the third, following the death of Mao, saw the removal of those newcomers remaining in the leadership. Each of the changes took place without any “popular participation”. The fall of Lin Piao was not publicly admitted until eighteen months afterwards; Teng’s removal was made by the party centre; and finally, the removal of the remainder of the newcomers, the “gang of four”, took place in cabal, and only after the event were the crowds mobilized to offer praise.

The changes in leadership did not reflect major differences in policy. Both sides agreed on the basic orientation, although they disagreed over certain symbolic, and sometimes obscure, issues – over works of literature like the novel The Water Margin and the writings of Confucius, or over the role of private plots in agriculture and overtime pay in factories. But the emphases the national government placed on each element did not vary with the leadership changes – broadly, policy was to the “Right” between 1969 and 1973, then moved to the “Left” between 1973 and 1975 (during Teng Hsaio-p’ing’s rise to office). The newcomers, the supposed “Left”, were more strongly in power during the “Right” phases, and the “Right” in the ascendant during the “Left” phases of policy.

The paradox only arises because the labels are misleading. The symbols of debate were of marginal significance for policy in comparison to the basic strategic agreement; and when in power, objective necessities guided policy in much the same direction, regardless of the personnel. Whether or not people read The Water Margin or farmed private plots was not a decisive question for the difference between “socialism” and “capitalism”, except in a demonological universe.

The newcomers and the apparat differed more in terms of an aspirant and an established leadership. The outsiders tried to secure a stronghold, utilizing originally forces outside the party, the youth of the Cultural Revolution; they won the mass media (press, radio, opera etc.) as opposed to the established mechanisms of power in party, government and armed forces. The apparat never lost control of China, and it was vital for Mao’s position that they did not do so; the newcomers never penetrated the real centres of authority except in Shanghai, and depended entirely for their influence on Mao’s continuing goodwill. The only alternative for the newcomers was to step outside the bureaucracy, and to appeal to the mass. But that demanded both a popular programme and a popular revolution, against just that power order the newcomers aspired to command.

The inheritance of the Cultural Revolution is as ambiguous as its meaning. Take for example, the “May 7th Schools”. They were created to provide party cadres working in government with the opportunity to “participate” in manual labour, but on an exclusive basis (that is, the schools were a retreat from the idea of participation in manual labour with the peasants). However, quite quickly the schools became simply cadre schools for political training, with an option for participants to do a little weekend gardening if they so chose. [105]

The period of education was for a time reduced from ten to seven years. Schools and universities continued, as urged by Mao in 1957-8, to run their own factories and farms, to supply students as contract labour to enterprises. The supervision of these activities by factory work teams continued, although the “working class” – as opposed to the party – no longer seemed to supervise educational institutions. Students were required to do three years’ manual labour before receiving higher education, a procedure which had the incidental advantage of reducing the numbers applying. The experience in manual labour earned potential students the title of “worker” or “peasant”, rather than that of their original family background. An English student who spent two years between 1973 and 1975 at two institutions of higher education in China reported that about a third of the student’s time was spent on labour projects outside the university. This work also involved participation in political education or “criticism” sessions: “The word criticism in China covers anything from the bitter struggles of the Cultural Revolution to the reading of a stereotyped article on Confucius; and I carry an indelible memory of one factory meeting I attended which resembled nothing so much as a non-conformist weekly religious meeting, not in content, but in the fact that it began and ended with a song in which all present more or less participated and the middle consisted of the reading of prepared texts on the theme, through which the majority of those present gently dozed. At the end, the Chairman said: ‘We have criticized very well – let’s wind up today’s criticism here’.” [106]

The work pace in Chinese factories is intense enough to explain the tendency to sleep. It was the same at harvest time on a commune – “many fell asleep, others chatted among themselves and others played with the ever-present babies. Chinese audiences in any case frequently give disconcerting evidence of inattention.” It seems that “politics” for much of the time is what the cadres choose to do, and patriotic citizens – or, at least, those without strong objections – tolerate their rituals. Another visitor makes a more general point: “People whose sole contact with China has been through articles in the press beginning ‘the Chinese people are advancing inexorably towards the conquest of Nature’, are surprised, when they get there, by the stability and tranquillity of the social climate.”

There was a sharp increase in hsia-fang (the sending down of urban dwellers to the countryside) in the years immediately after the Cultural Revolution, perhaps in order to break up what was left of the Red Guards, and expel those who had returned during the upheavals, and to reduce the urban population proper. Between 1968 and 1973, eight million school-leavers were sent out of the cities, and a further two million in the following two years. Shanghai sent fully one million (1968-73), and Wuhan 300,000 (1970-73). There was another sort of “sending down” in 1972, the highest year since 1962 for legal and illegal immigration to Hong Kong (an estimated 80,000 arrived, 20,000 by the dangerous method of swimming). Half of the immigrants were former Red Guards who had been “sent down” to rural Kwantung province.

As in earlier waves of hsia-fang, the press urged the young to embrace the task eagerly, to reject “Confucian” expectations of a white-collar job in the city. The press also urged peasants not to resent the arrival of these extra mouths with untrained hands: “People should not seize opportunities to laugh at them or mock them or to take an uncouth attitude to them.” [107] The government offered a public subsidy of RMB 200-240 (£46-55) per head per year to soften the impact.

(i) The Lin Piao affair

The Ninth Party Congress in April 1969 offered only modest rewards for most of the newcomers. Nonetheless, their main leader, a man originally of the old order, Defence Minister Lin Piao, formally secured the position of Mao’s heir. But for the rest, it was part of the old apparat, the PLA, which inherited the post-revolutionary order.

It took only a few months for a leading Cultural Revolutionary, Chen Po-ta, who had been Mao’s private secretary for thirty years and was nominated as fourth in the party hierarchy at the Ninth Congress, to become a “sham Marxist and political swindler”. And two and a half years after the Ninth Congress, Mao’s “close comrade in arms”, Lin Piao, a leading military figure in the party for forty years, became “that bourgeois careerist, conspirator, counter-revolutionary double dealer, renegade and traitor”; and his resolute defence of Mao’s proletarian line now became “trash [representing] the wishes not only of the toppled landlord and bourgeois classes for restoration but also of the new bourgeois elements in socialist society”. [108] Either this was libel, or Mao was guilty of criminal negligence in tolerating such a scoundrel for forty years and permitting him to be promoted to such a high position.

The party documents to some extent recognized the anomaly. Party history was rewritten – the triumph of Lin Piao’s civil war career, the victory against the Kuomintang on the Liaohsi-Shenyang front, was now abruptly attributed to Mao. It was also now claimed that Mao had secret suspicions of Lin, and a most opaque letter to Mao’s wife used in evidence. [109] Clearly politics was not of the kind for mass involvement, but the secret opinions of a cabal; had it been otherwise, Mao could scarcely have refrained from publicizing his doubts, rather than supporting Lin for promotion to the position of his heir. The credibility gap was not closed by the official account of the conspiracy to murder Mao [110], except to reveal something of the internal relationships of the leadership, and the fact that, despite all the claims for the Cultural Revolution, Lin Piao’s twenty-four-year-old son, Lin Li-kuo, was deputy director of the Chinese Air Force logistics department, a surprising piece of nepotism under the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The affair took place on the 11-12 September, and on the 30th, Moscow announced recovery of a bullet-riddled Trident aircraft from a site in Outer Mongolia. The corpses, it was suggested, were those of Lin Piao, his wife and Politburo member, Yeh Chün, and seven others, including those apparently involved in the plot, Air Force Chief of Staff Huang Yung-shang, PLA general (Chief of Logistics) Ch’iu Hui-tso, Chief Naval Political Commissar Li Tsu-p’eng, Air Force Chief General Wu Fa-hsien. Subsequently however, the Russians denied Lin was on the Trident.

Was this the first attempt by the old apparat to dislodge the newcomers? If so, it was only partly successful, because the main section of the newcomers, led by the “group of four” were able, with Mao’s protection, to dissociate themselves from their leadership. Mao apparently made no effort to defend Lin. He permitted – or at least made no public protest against – the dropping of a third of the politburo so recently elected at the Ninth Congress. Subsequently, efforts were made to reduce the PLA role in the party – in late 1973, eight of the eleven area military chiefs were posted and, in the process, disentangled from their party responsibilities; at the Tenth Party Congress in August 1973, the PLA share of party posts was radically reduced. The cadres of the party were not informed about the events of mid-September until November, and the Chinese masses not for eighteen months.

(ii) Domestic policy

The armed clash with Russia in 1969 had exposed the risks of domestic disunity. Perhaps that is the reason for the conciliatory policies pursued between 1969 and the Tenth Party Congress in August 1973. A minor wage increase for low-paid workers was allowed in 1971, and prices were cut for some consumer goods – television sets, transistor radios, silk, watches and bicycles. State purchasing prices for some agricultural commodities were increased – by fifteen per cent for sugar and seventeen per cent for oil seeds. In both cases, the main effects were on the better-off: workers able to buy consumer durables, and production teams with high marketable surpluses.

For the peasants, private plots became respectable again; in 1971 they were praised and cadres assured that their existence was nothing to do with any “capitalist road”; on the contrary, they damped down the black market that State procurements with scarcities inevitably tended to create. [111] The People’s Daily went so far as to deplore “time-wasting” meetings in rural areas. [112]

In 1969 the government radically cut central expenditure, making communes responsible for spending on social services, administration and education (expenditure on these items amounted to a quarter of government spending in the 1950s). This change obliged communes to finance their own expenditure and allowed the government to make a sharp increase in defence spending. It would also have increased the differences between rich and poor areas. In July 1971 the government resumed more central control, perhaps to offset this effect.

In the factories, much of the capacity constructed in the 1960s was now brought into production, and industrial output expanded rapidly, assisted by an unprecedented expansion in China’s imports of technically advanced goods.

Despite the hold of the newcomers on the mass media, there was a cultural relaxation which persisted until 1974 – the London Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and Philadelphia orchestras made visits to Peking to play the works of “capitalist composers”.

Simultaneously, the party was being restored. By March 1971, twelve of the twenty-nine provincial party committees had been re-established. The party slogan had shifted from “Bombard the headquarters” to “It is the party that exercises leadership in everything”. [113] Thousands of cadres now secured rehabilitation, including the most prominent “capitalist roaders” (Liu Shao-ch’i had already died). Teng Hsiaop’ing, second in command of the “bourgeois dictatorship”, appeared at a reception for Cambodia’s Sihanouk on 12 April 1973; in May he appeared in the position of honour with Mao at a reception for Bhutto of Pakistan. Lo Jui-ching appeared on the saluting stand at the Army Day celebrations in 1975. Chao Tzu-yang was appointed First Secretary of the Canton party. General Hsiao Hua reappeared in October 1974, and many more.

The former Cultural Revolutionaries suffered accordingly. Some of those accused of being “ultra-Left” were put on trial in a number of provinces in the spring of 1970 (Kwantung, Peking, Honan, Chekiang, Fukien), and there was a press campaign against those who “negate everything ... see only trivial facts of behaviour and not a person’s integrity, and see only the past and not the present”. [114] The “May 16th Group” came in for particularly harsh criticism, being accused of sacking the office of the British chargé d’affaires in 1967 (in June 1970, a foreign ministry official was gaoled for the same offence). No doubt, restored cadres settled other scores with their former tormentors with less publicity – consigning them to rural areas or factory labour instead of party office.

(iii) The Tenth Congress (August 1973)

Having effectively separated the newcomers who achieved prominence in the Cultural Revolution from their base (the Red Guards and Red Rebels), the Tenth Party Congress both recognized the rehabilitation of the old disgraced cadres – Teng became deputy Prime Minister and effectively Chou En-lai’s heir – and made room for a larger number of the newcomers. The military component in the central committee was reduced to thirty-two per cent of the total; the newcomers’ share rose to ten per cent, and forty per cent on the Politburo (where eight new members were added). Shanghai worker Wang Hung-wen, the most authentic of the “newcomers”, became officially third in the party hierarchy. The Congress also ended the “conciliatory” phase – there needed to be, once more, a “revolution in the superstructure ... Some unhealthy tendencies in State organs and defects in some links of the State system stand in contradiction to the economic base of socialism”; and some cadres still failed to perceive “the hindering effect of bourgeois ideology, idealism and metaphysics on the socialist revolution and construction”. [115] Whereas Lin Piao had hitherto been accused of being “ultra-Left”, he was now transformed into opposition from the Right.

The “four clean-ups” campaign – against embezzlement, speculation, profiteering and luxury consumption by the cadres – had been resumed early in 1970. Class enemies who sought “to corrupt and win over cadres ... now frequently employ such tactics as giving banquets, handing over gifts, enticing with money or women, or engineering nuptial relations or sworn friendships”. [116] Despite the Cultural Revolution, such people, “although they have lost their political power, still have money and vast social connections, and these have become the material foundation supplying them with commodities and money for corroding the proletariat”. [117] Particularly at risk were cadres and leading members of the party, some of whom “do everything to oppose the socialist revolution and protect their own interests. They have good houses, they have cars, their salaries are high and they have servants – they are worse than capitalists.” [118]

What sort of cases did the press present? Cadre Hsieh Ho-hsun was murdered in December 1974 for trying to stop the use of quarry vehicles to steal rocks for private house building. [119] A Peking hotel reported how its staff regularly refused invitations to dinner, the offer of tickets to the theatre or sporting events, special privileges in buying bicycles and other goods; at one point, some 300 catties of Tientsin pears arrived from a procurement clerk “for the obvious purpose of securing privileges should he stay at the hotel another time”. [120] A school in Anwhei province found “a small number of students who were influenced by bourgeois ideology, indulged in reading bad novels, telling bad stories and singing bad songs”. In Hopei, “there sprang up in society a gust of wind which claimed that when cadres give up their posts or retired, they could be succeeded by their own children.” [121] Finally, there were numerous cases of cadres openly expressing their superior power – “Instead of regarding themselves as part of the masses of the people, they put on pompous airs, follow a bureaucratic routine, reprimand the rank and file whenever they feel like it and are reluctant to treat people on equal terms ... Instances like these are too numerous to be cited.” [122]

Big character posters spluttered into life through 1974 and 1975, but were usually under close supervision by the authorities. However, some posters attacked unofficial targets – Generals Yang Cheng-wu, Yu Li-chih, Chen Hsi-lian (Shenyang), Hsi Chen-hua (Taiyuan First Secretary), and even General Li Teh-sheng (Politburo Standing Committee member and Vice-chairman of the party) and Hua Kuo-feng. Posters attacking leading party members were promptly torn down. Other posters criticized managers in Kunming (Yunnan); party cadres for black market trading in eggs and oil, for kidnapping, fraud in timber dealing; the police in Nanch’ang (Kiangsi) for arbitrary arrests and brutality; one even claimed that 2,000 had been killed in gang warfare in Juichin. In Peking, the “Golden Monkey” with his or her complaints that the city had been for eighteen years under revisionist control achieved international fame. [123]

There were posters which went well beyond these individual complaints. Li Yi-che – the pseudonym of three authors, Li Cheng-t’ien, Ch’en Yi-yang and Huang Hsi-che – indicted the régime in On socialist democracy and legality under socialism, a set of seventy-seven sheets posted on the Peking road, Canton, in early 1974.

The authors argued that the removal of Lin Piao had not changed the system which had created and sustained Lin Piao – a “social-fascist dictatorship of a feudal type”. As in the Soviet Union, a new bourgeoisie controlled the State, robbing the community and sustaining a quasi- hereditary rule of privilege based upon the arbitrary and brutal use of power. The brief first phase of the Cultural Revolution was the only time when the masses had secured certain minimum rights and liberties – of press, opinion, association and movement. Lin Piao’s usurpation of power in 1968 had ended this and restored the old clique to power. The writers appealed to the forthcoming National People’s Congress to establish popular control of the State, the right of popular recall of all party and government officers, and elementary civil liberties (to prevent arbitrary arrest, rigged trials, use of torture on prisoners, political arrests).

It was an echo of the old “ultra-Left” of 1968. Indeed, it is said that Li Cheng-t’ien spent a year in prison in that year for his beliefs. In 1976 and ’77, Hong Kong sources claimed the group behind the posters had been publicly attacked as proponents of “social feudalistic fascism”. Li Cheng-t’ien was said to have been sentenced to “indefinite imprisonment”, the others to long periods in labour reform camps.

(iv) Fourth National People’s Congress

In January 1975 some 2,864 representatives met at the Fourth National People’s Congress to ratify a new constitution for the State and endorse the government. Under the constitution, private farming plots were guaranteed, and the practice followed since the mid- 1 95’Os of permitting strikes was recognized. Chou En-lai, reviving a perspective outlined by Mao in 1965, proposed the building of an independent and relatively comprehensive industrial and economic system before 1980’, the doubling of national income between 1970 and 1980, and the mechanization of agriculture. Teng’s position was recognized as next in line of succession after Chou – he was now deputy premier, Vice-chairman of the party, member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, and Chief of Staff of the PLA. One of the newcomers, Chang Chun-chiao, advanced parallel with Teng – a deputy premier and head of the PLA Political Department.

However, when Chou En-lai died a year later, the press began a campaign against “China’s Second Khrushchev”. One month after Chou’s death, Hua Kuo-feng, himself a relative newcomer (from district party secretary in Hunan he had risen on the occasion of the Lin Piao affair to become Public Security Minister), became Acting Prime Minister. It seemed that, in the inner party centre, the newcomers (supported possibly by Mao) had had sufficient power to block Teng’s automatic inheritance, but insufficient to promote any of the “group of four”. The press dutifully harried Teng, but insisted that there be no movement of activists between cities, no special groups formed, and the cadres remain fully in control, lest the “Rightists ... use the sabotage of production to sabotage the revolution”. As in the past, the accused was given no opportunity to present his views, so the mass of the population could not judge the rights and wrongs of the case.

Teng had been blocked but not politically destroyed; he remained a candidate of the apparat. In the spring of 1976, his political destruction was achieved in the last coup of the newcomers. At the Ching Ming festival on 4 April, some 100,000 people gathered in Tienamin Square to mourn the death of Chou En-lai, far too many to represent a spontaneous demonstration (wreaths were said to have been sent by the headquarters of the second artillery section of the PLA and cadres in sections of the State Council), but there was no evidence of overt support for Teng. Nonetheless, some force removed the wreaths and posters overnight, as a result of which the largest riots seen in Peking since 1949 broke out. Vehicles were burned and a public security office sacked. On the 6th troops occupied the area, facing sullen crowds, when it was announced that Teng had been officially dismissed from all posts (but not expelled from the party). [124]

It was a Pyrrhic victory. We can presume that the entire apparat was outraged at the public display of arbitrariness, yet obliged to accept it while Mao insisted on protecting the newcomers. But in September, the Chairman died. Within one month, the central leadership had eliminated its tormentors, the “gang of four” (Mao’s wife, Chiang Ch’ing, and Chang Chun-chiao, Yao Wen-yuan, Wang Hung-wen). The Cultural Revolution had finally come to an end.

The purge of the opponents of the old leadership (whether they were supporters of the “gang of four” or not) continued through the following year. A larger number of people than normal seems to have been executed in this campaign; no doubt old scores were settled. Now all the standard accusations levelled at Liu, Teng and Lin were directed at the four, including charges of attempted murder, organizing civil war and high treason. Chairman Hua, like many before him, enthused: “genuine Marxism has triumphed over sham Marxism.”

Ten months later, the party sanctioned these changes at its Eleventh Congress. Teng became once more Vice-chairman of the party, as well as Vice-premier, chief of staff of the PLA and Vice-chairman of the Military Affairs Commission. Most of the newcomers who had achieved prominence at the 1973 Congress were removed from the new Politburo and Central Committee, and replaced by representatives of the old guard’, particularly those from the military high command. Shortly afterwards, the Fifth National People’s Congress was announced for 1978 to sanction the new hierarchy of the State.

Politically, the fitful swing to the “Right” of 1970-74 was resumed, but now with much greater determination. In industry, for example, the leadership made it explicit that profits were to be the key measure of performance, output should determine pay, and that foreign imports were a vital means of modernizing the economy. In higher education, examinations were restored as the primary method of entry, and entry from school, not from manual occupations in farm or factory. For the PLA, the improvement of weaponry became an important element in future planning. None of this was new in the history of China, and there were numerous speeches by Mao to support such policies from the years before the Great Leap Forward (now edited by Hua and published as the long-delayed fifth volume of Mao’s Selected Works) as well as from the period 1961-5. But mere restoration showed how shallow the commotion of the Cultural Revolution had been, how utopian the hopes of the youthful rebels of 1966.

The events following the death of Mao illustrated yet again the consistency of the history of the Chinese State since 1949. There were many detours, but the central authority never diverged for long from its purpose of building a powerful national State, weaving between the obstacles set by a hostile world order and the obdurate backwardness of China’s rural majority. The performance was remarkable, given the scale of obstacles and pitfalls on the way, and the fact that the party itself was not an unchanging entity.

The party claimed that the tasks it set itself were laid down and directed by the workers and peasants of China. It was said that, for this reason, although there were many diversions, the basic direction remained true to the original aim. What was the role of these two classes in the new society of the People’s Republic? We need now to examine in more detail the position of workers and peasants in order to appraise the legitimacy of the party’s claim.

Notes

105. Visitor’s observation – Gilbert Padoul, China 1974: Problems not Models, New Left Review 89, January-February 1975, p.73

106. Isabel Hilton, Sunday Times, London, 25 January 1976

107. Hung-ch’i, November 1973

108. JMJP, 22 April 1975, SCMP 5846, 6 May 1975

109. Published outside China, from spy sources in Taiwan; French translation in Le Monde, 2 December 1972; validity confirmed in Peking by Wilfred Burchett, cf. The Daily Yomiuri, Tokyo, 17 August 1973, and Far Eastern Economic Review, 81/33, 20 August 1973, pp.22-4

110. Burchett, ibid., claims his account was written in consultation with authoritative sources in Peking and in the light of the dossier prepared by the Central Committee for the Tenth Party Congress

111. JMJP, 22 October 1971

112. JMJP, 23 October 1971

113. JMJP, 1 July 1974

114. Hung-ch’i, 12 July 1970

115. Hung-ch’i, August 1973; cf. also Su Hsi, JMJP, 11 January 1974, SCMP 5547, 6 February 1974

116. Harbin radio, in SWB FE/4856, 3, BII/5, 18 Mar. 1975; cf. also Peking radio, 12 Mar. ibid., BII/II

117. Kuang-ming JP, 17 April 1975, SCMP 5834

118. Kuang-ming JP, 28 June 1975; see also JMJP, 21 March 1975, in SWB 4862/i, 24 March 1975; Hung-ch’i, August 1975, and Peking radio, 7 August 1975, ibid.

119. Hupeh provincial service, Wuhan radio, 30 June 1975, SWB 4947/BII/12

120. Advance in the struggle against corruption, Chingwenmen No.2 Hotel, Hung-ch’i 4, 1 April 1975, in SCMM (SPRCM) 819-20, 28 April-5 May 1975

121. JMJP, cited Far Eastern EconomicReview, 1 August 1975

122. Study and Criticism, Shanghai, ibid.

123. Peking correspondent, The Times, London, 26 June and 6 July 1974

124. NCNA Peking, 6 April 1976; cf. also Far Eastern Economic Review, report from Peking, 16 April 1976, and Hua Lin, Minus 8, Hong Kong, June-July 1976