The Suppression of the Left in China
(Part II)October 18, 1976
There can no longer be any doubt about it whatsoever. The assault against the revolutionary left wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has succeeded. The suppression of the leading cadres -- Chiang Ching, Chang Chun-chiao, Wang Hung-wen, and Yao Wen-yuan -- is all but confirmed.The failure of the Shanghai working class to rally to their defense has allowed the attack against the left-wing to become a rout. Shanghai was the revolutionary citadel of the Mao grouping. The fact that the Hua Kuo-feng forces could carry out an officially inspired counter-demonstration against the left with impunity showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were in control of the situation and that the masses were either tired, confused, or apathetic -- a classical situation made to order for the triumph of a Thermidorian reaction.
How deep and abiding the reaction will be cannot be gauged now. A rapid political reversal is now out of the question. If and when it comes, it will be on a new basis and most certainly with new leaders.
IMPORTANCE OF RECOGNIZING A DEFEAT
The most important thing is to recognize the defeat for what it is. It is important to call things by their right name in the interests of the world movement.
What's involved here is not the crushing of a small, accidental grouping. It is the wiping out of the representatives of the revolutionary wing of the CCP, of those most closely representing the proletarian class interests of the Chinese masses, and those who figured in and were most closely associated with continuing the struggle to retain, if not advance, the tremendous gains of the Cultural Revolution -- the highpoint of the Chinese Revolution.
This is not to say that the leading cadre were infallible revolutionary Marxists. It's not to say that enormous errors, in both tactics and principles, were not made. But taken as a whole and measured against the right-wing, revisionist, and Thermidorian grouping, which represented hostile class interests, there could be no doubt whom the class-conscious workers and genuine communists all over should support.
The defeat of the left is a major setback for the proletarian revolution and for socialism as a whole. It will have worldwide repercussions and will certainly reinforce the conservative trend now current in the world working class movement. It is also likely to affect the course of the national liberation struggle in some measure. It will certainly strengthen the regressive tendencies in the social fabric of the USSR and push the revisionist tendencies in the bureaucracy there further to the right.
RELATIONS WITH USSR
Paradoxically, it does not exclude a softening of relations between the USSR and China. If and when that takes place, it will not necessarily be on the basis on which we had counted in our years of continually urging an end to the debilitating internecine struggle and a normalization of relations according to the Leninist norms that should govern socialist states.
All of this must be said as part and parcel of a renewed effort at both theoretical and political rearmament of the working class in the coming period. It is particularly in a period of reaction that the ruling class exercises its greatest ideological sway. The bourgeoisie all over the world has never neglected to present its class point of view on developments in China, particularly over the last few years. Finance capital has not been blind to the "two lines of struggle" in China. While most bourgeois publicists have been most careful not to denigrate Mao ever since the rapprochement with Nixon, they have nevertheless been most hostile to the essence of the Cultural Revolution and began to praise some aspects of it only at a time when it was already in decline. All this was cunningly calculated as part of their overall imperialist strategy to ally People's China with American finance capital against the USSR.
Now that the core of Mao's party has been crushed, they have let out a sigh of relief. Indeed, they have all but shouted out three cheers for Hua Kuo-feng.
BOURGEOIS GLEE
"The fall of Chiang Ching and her three Shanghai associates removes the most poisonous elements in Peking affecting Sino-American relations." Who speaks in such harsh terms? It's the voice of Kissinger through one of his surrogates in the person of Allen S. Whiting, his former consultant during the Nixon administration and now, a professor at the University of Michigan (Sunday New York Times, News of the Week Section, Oct. 17,1976.
However, this isn't just Kissinger's position, it's the unofficial position of the ruling class. It's echoed by others such as the Washington Post of the same day in a long article by another professor and advisor to the U.S. government, Ross Terrill, who makes virtually the same point by reviling Chiang Ching.
"The willful former actress who wielded a big stick," he says, "over China's long-suffering cultural life has left the stage of politics, a stage she probably should never have mounted."
This professor, of course, is not known for having condemned the cultural life of the masses under the thousands-year-old domination of the feudal landlords, later the compradore bourgeoisie, and then the hangman Chiang Kai-shek, but he is quick to condemn Chiang Ching for the "drumbeat of 'uninterrupted revolution' " and blames her for dragging the three Shanghai leaders down with her.
"Intellectuals," he says, "were aghast at her militant policies in art and literature. Ordinary folks," he now tells us after taking a Gallup Poll of Chinese "ordinary folks" in the offices of the Washington Post, "disliked her barbs against former Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-ping and Chou." indeed, a real criminal, that Chiang Ching!
"Above all, she was seen to have entered the halls of power through the back door of marriage rather than the front door of merit." Spoken like a real male chauvinist pig-professor!
With slight variations, this is the general approach of the bourgeoisie. Revolutionists can argue about Chiang's approach to art and literature, but the larger truth was that she was in the front ranks of those in China who made remarkable efforts to bring revolutionary culture to the masses. She and others made the workers and peasants look strong, heroic, confident. That's her real sin. And she made the "beautiful people" look like what they really are and have been through all of history -- ruthless exploiters, arrogant, brutal, and disdainful of the masses, ever viewing themselves as the subject of history and, needless to say, the masses as the objects of history.
LOSS OF REVOLUTIONARY INFLUENCE IN THE WORLD
Alas, China as a workers' state, as a People's Republic, has now lost stature in the eyes of revolutionary public opinion with the suppression of the left. When the PRC was voted in at the UN over the objections of the U.S., representatives of delegations from Third World nations, particularly Africans, were seen on television literally jumping with joy as the electronic screen flashed the victorious vote for seating China.
Such applause for the People's Republic is not likely to occur again for a period of time.
SCHLESINGER AND TAIWAN
Symptomatic of the shift in ruling class attitudes vis-a-vis China is the virtual embrace of former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger by both wings of the capitalist establishment after his return from China. Schlesinger seemed happy as a lark as he appeared on ABC television on Oct. 17 to give his version of the struggle in China. He had high praise for Hua Kuo-feng and nothing but hatred and contempt for the left. Hua is "shrewd," "self-assured," and a "moderate," Schlesinger intoned. The left is "small," its influence "negligible."
Naturally, he blamed the left for attempting a coup. The left was "foolish and quixotic for believing it could overpower the moderates."
The New York Times, which on the day following Schlesinger's ouster from the Ford cabinet had condemned him for favoring the retention of an option for the use of nuclear weapons against the USSR, now seems to be enlightened and even delighted by his unofficial visit to China, which it had virtually ignored until his return from Peking. This organ of high finance and the Sulzberger dynasty is now urging that "significant weight be given to the testimony of former Defense Secretary Schlesinger" (Oct. 18, 1976).
Earlier Schlesinger had hinted that it would be necessary to restore Taiwan to People's China in order to keep the PRC on a collision course with the USSR. Now Schlesinger's conclusion is that "the question of Taiwan is lower on the Chinese priority list than the question of the strength and posture of the U.S. with regard to the Soviet Union."
"Events," says the Times, meaning the suppression of the left, "have disproved the argument that unless the U.S. abandons the people of Taiwan and quickly establishes diplomatic relations with Peking, the radical left will take over in China. The moderates, so far, seem in control."
What the Times is really saying here is that those in the ruling class who have been urging the restoration of Taiwan to People's China were really doing so only because they feared that the continued U.S. strangulation of Taiwan would help the revolutionary left in China's internal struggle. They now think it's no longer necessary.
But it is not so much the "lowering of Taiwan as a priority by the Hua forces" that has made the ruling class circles so happy. It is what they believe to be a new course of the Hua regime in both domestic and foreign policies as a whole that has raised the optimism of the ruling class.
Only time will tell whether the Hua regime is a coalition of the right-wing and centrist elements, what the relationship of forces really is, and the degree of stability it can achieve on the basis of political reaction and repression.
CHINA'S EVOLUTION AND THE WORLD SITUATION
It is vitally important in evaluating the significance of the defeat of the left that we first of all take into account the objective conditions surrounding the Chinese Revolution in the years immediately preceding the Cultural Revolution to the present day.
"An appraisal of the Russian Revolution," said Lenin, "is possible only on the basis of taking into account the entire international situation." It is the international situation, of course, which in the final analysis is decisive.
China is a vast country with a vast population, a quarter of the human race. But it is nevertheless profoundly affected by the other three-quarters of humanity and the social and political conditions of the rest of the planet. Revolutionary China, in turn, of course, has been a great and profound factor in altering the character of the international situation ever since the victory of the Revolution a quarter of a century ago.
Both China and Russia achieved their world historic victories over capitalism and imperialism during imperialist wars. They were able to thrust back the forces of counter-revolution at a time when these forces were weakened by the magnitude of the imperialist holocaust and the consequent economic, industrial, and political chaos.
Both People's China and the Soviet Union were forced to retreat and suffer political reaction as a result of the stabilization of the world imperialist system during post-imperialist war eras.
Capitalist stabilization following the First World War marked the beginning of the USSR's turn inward. Capitalist stabilization -- in fact the very vigorous and protracted period of capitalist economic upsurge during the 1950s and 1960s -- objectively, although unobtrusively, affected very vitally the course of the Chinese Revolution and the long drawn-out character of the Vietnam War.
Political reaction rose to formidable proportions in China in the early 1960s. To halt the trend, which came in the form of a revisionist assault unleashed by the Khrushchev report and the denunciation of Stalin, the CCP under the guidance and initiative of Mao opened a revolutionary polemic against the leadership of the Soviet CP. This was both an attempt to discredit the rightist trend in the USSR, which was deepened by Khrushchev's elevation to power, and at the same time was an assault against the incipient right in China.
As the polemics against Khrushchev and his supporters deepened and sharpened, they crystallized the rightist trend in China. The ouster of Khrushchev in 1964 seemed for a moment to be a victory for the Maoist struggle to revive revolutionary Marxism -- but this soon proved to be an illusion. The polemics, which in a general way were a reassertion of basic Marxist-Leninist principles, had come too late. The psychological moment for the attack against the Khrushchev grouping in the USSR -- that is, when the report was first published in June 1956 -- had long passed and moreover the report had been approved by the CCP leadership.
The confusion in the international communist movement after a period of inner struggle soon gave way to a revisionist and reformist policy, especially in Europe, although most of the CPs had broken political solidarity with the Khrushchev leadership.
KHRUSHCHEV'S OUSTER NO HELP TO CHINA
The ouster of Khrushchev in the context of the failure of the revolutionary onslaught against Soviet revisionism was the first setback, and a very important one from an ideological point of view, for the revolutionary leadership of the CCP.
For a while it had looked as though the revolutionary prestige of the CCP and the terrible mistakes of the Khrushchev leadership, especially in Eastern Europe where things had been brought to the brink of counter-revolutionary disaster, would suffice to topple the Khrushchev grouping and aid the Soviet Union in restoring a more or less revolutionary regime in solidarity with the political conceptions of the Mao leadership. But that was not to be.
While the Brezhnev-Kosygin leadership soon restored economic measures necessary to halt the regressive tendencies toward a "free market" and bourgeois decentralization of the socialized economy, the Soviet bureaucracy was by no means friendly to the idea of restoring revolutionary Marxist conceptions governing political and economic intercourse between socialist states. Restoring Leninist proletarian diplomacy was not on their agenda; least of all did they intend to abandon their dogmatic approach to peaceful coexistence. Nor were they thinking of promoting a revival of the revolutionary class struggle abroad.
In the meantime, at China's very doorstep, the U.S. was conducting and enlarging a virtual war of destruction against Southeast Asia in general and Vietnam in particular. This could not but influence and strengthen the so-called moderate element that stood for so-called peaceful coexistence and was represented by Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Kosygin (and by Stalin much earlier).
U.S. PRESSURE IN VIETNAM
The fact that U.S. imperialism was clearly moving ever closer to the doorstep of China with its military operations in Southeast Asia could not but raise the question as to the advisability of the revolutionary polemic against Khrushchev and his revisionist positions. Was it not more practical to do like the Soviet leadership and seek accommodation with imperialism? Was that not an easier and more practical approach for China to gain greater world diplomatic leverage, diplomatic recognition from the U.S., and, at long last, to regain China's rightful place in the UN?
This must be understood as one of the underlying elements in the struggle of factions in China so far as foreign policy was concerned. In particular, the issue was peaceful coexistence, for which the CCP and particularly Mao had excoriated the revisionists.
In a way this was the Chinese version of promoting the world revolution, in the same way that Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the Communist International in the early days after the victory of the October Revolution tried to promote the world revolution. At that time it was the unfavorable change in the international situation and the stabilization of capitalist Europe that halted the revolutionary approach to the world proletariat and the oppressed. Under the aegis of Stalin, the Soviet Union turned inward.
The failure of the revolutionary polemics by the Mao leadership against the revisionists was a tremendous factor in aiding the rightist surge in China. The growing aggressiveness of U.S. imperialism on China's borders was another factor aiding the ascendency of the right. Along with that were accumulating economic difficulties and a series of crop failures.
INDONESIAN COUNTER-REVOLUTION
Another factor which is taken little note of in the struggle "between the two lines" in China was the horrible tragedy of the Indonesian proletariat and the destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party at the hands of a CIA-instigated counter-revolution in 1965. More than 500,000 lives were lost inside of a couple of months, breaking the back of the revolutionary movement in a country with 100 million people at that time. This was a tremendous setback not only for the Indonesian masses, but for China too, where the success of the Indonesian revolution would have tremendously strengthened the revolutionary forces led by Mao and set back the rightists.
The victory of the counter-revolution in Indonesia, however, emboldened the revisionists everywhere and most significantly in China. It was really then, following upon the heels of the Indonesian counter-revolution, that the Mao leadership in 1966 launched the Cultural Revolution. This was basically an attempt to set back what certainly appeared to be a real bourgeois restorationist move in China -- one encouraged by the Soviet leadership and loudly cheered on by the world imperialist press.
It is impossible to understand the present political regime and the ascendency of Hua Kuo-feng unless one takes into consideration the course of all these antecedent events and views them historically. Thus the failure of the revolutionary polemics, the ouster of Khrushchev, the succession of the Brezhnev leadership -- which revitalized the economy to some extent and certainly halted Khrushchev's adventures into the "new politics in economics," but doggedly continued the revisionist and reformist policies on the international arena (and particularly in relation to China) -- the escalation of the Vietnam War, the tragedy of the Indonesian revolution, all of this aided the rise of the neo-bourgeois elements in the rightist faction in the government and in the party.
To this should also be added that the profoundly class-conscious proletariat of Japan, which ordinarily would have served as a tremendous revolutionary ally to revolutionary China, became somewhat neutralized as a result of the confusion arising out of the ideological split and the denunciation of Stalin. Its leaders, while pursuing a reformist line, did not, however, adopt a hostile attitude to the CCP.
The rightists in China opportunistically identified themselves with the great gains made by the Chinese Revolution and it successes in agriculture and industry and blamed all the failures upon the Mao leadership. The bourgeois intelligentsia in China, remnants of the dispossessed ruling classes, and all the forces which sought to limit the proletarian gains of the revolution and to whittle down the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaned almost instinctively in the direction of the "Soviet model."
The Cultural Revolution, therefore, of necessity had to be a struggle primarily against Khrushchevite revisionism, even though, as it had originally developed in China, it was part and parcel of the struggle against internal reaction and against imperialism, at that time considered the main enemy.
But as the Cultural Revolution progressed and the struggle between the factions deepened, the struggle against revisionism became more and more identified with the struggle against the USSR as a whole. The transition from a struggle against an ideological tendency into a struggle against "social imperialism" was a crossing of class lines. It did much harm to People's China and helped to isolate it. The error became more and more compounded as the invective against Soviet revisionism became sharper, until the Soviet Union was actually characterized as a fascist state.
It's important to understand that the origins of this transformation arose from an over-extension of the struggle against the domestic right. The characterization of the USSR as social-imperialist was not the result of an independent investigation of the social system in the USSR nor of a dispassionate analysis of the social character of the Soviet regime.
All the harsh invective used against Brezhnev, and earlier against Khrushchev, was in reality meant more for the likes of Liu Shao-chi, Teng Hsiao-ping, and their ilk, than for Brezhnev, Kosygin, or Khrushchev. The latter are conservative bureaucrats and not much else.
The struggle against the rightists in China, especially when it became so acute in the late 1960s, posed a difficult problem for Mao and his supporters: how to conduct a relentless, unyielding struggle against the restorationists and the "bourgeoisie in the party," while maintaining a balanced view of the USSR as a workers' state dominated by a revisionist bureaucracy.
Such a problem is not wholly uncommon. One sees in everyday life how political factions and social groupings, in the course of an acute struggle, lose perspective and even lose sight of their objective.
In the course of trying to annihilate the domestic rightists in China, the Mao leadership over-extended itself and carried the struggle against the Soviet bureaucracy much further than was warranted, going to the extent of equating it with imperialism and even further to characterizing the real imperialists as a lesser evil.
FALSE THEORIES WEAKENED CHINA INTERNATIONALLY
This, however, compounded China's foreign affairs problems. By pursuing the false super-power theory, China first of all weakened its international position because it isolated itself. Had the Chinese leadership adopted the super-power theory purely from the point of view of bourgeois, narrow-minded, national interests, it would have been more logical to try to befriend both "super-powers" rather than to attack them simultaneously, which isolated China. (Witness the attempt by France, Yugoslavia, India, and earlier Egypt, to utilize the social antagonism between the USSR and imperialism to their advantage by befriending, on occasion, both "super-powers.")
It was inevitable, therefore, that such a policy could not last long and that China would have to lean on one or the other of the so-called super-powers in order to avoid isolation. In the context of the struggle so fiercely fought against the rightists in China, any conciliatory move to the USSR would inevitably be regarded as a boon to the rightists. The course of leaning on U.S. imperialism became more or less inevitable, without it ever really having been a consistently thought-out policy based upon objective reality.
These are the ideological and political roots for what turned out to be and continues to be a disastrous foreign policy for China -- one that never had a material basis.
It goes without saying that the policy of the Soviet bureaucracy was of course the main factor leading to the early days of the struggle, and the subsequent errors by the Chinese leadership do not raise the Soviet bureaucracy to heroic revolutionary stature in spite of its great contributions to the victories of the Cuban, Vietnamese, and Angolan revolutions.
Just as any conciliatory gesture to the USSR would have seemed to raise the hopes of the rightists in China, still in another way any attempt at accommodation with the U.S. would not necessarily have sat well with the revolutionary left. Such an accommodation took the steam out of the revolutionary program followed during the entire previous decade in which the U.S. was correctly depicted as the fundamental enemy of the world's oppressed, the working class, and most of all, the enemy of China.
RIGHTISTS BENEFIT FROM ACCOMMODATION WITH U.S.
The accommodation with Nixon would only have redounded to the benefit of the left if the U.S., had promptly returned Taiwan to the PRC, extended full diplomatic relations, and voluntarily withdrawn from Southeast Asia. Nothing of the sort, of course, happened and this could not help but benefit the rightists who could use it as factional ammunition to discredit the inconsistencies of the Mao leadership.
Finally, the rightists could exploit the fact that China was in reality isolated, that it had lost ground with its socialist allies. For instance, in the Oct. 5, 1976 speech by Chiao Kuan-hua at the UN, where he dealt with a considerable number of world issues, it is to be noted that he had nothing whatever to say about Laos, just recently liberated from imperialism. He does not even mention Cambodia and has only one perfunctory sentence about the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
There is a paragraph on Korea, a paragraph which could equally be part of Gromyko's speech, but what is most significant about the paragraph is what it leaves out rather than what it includes. It fails to roundly denounce the most recent U.S. aggression against Korea and to squarely put the blame for the military crisis last August on the Pentagon, as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea did.
It is ironic that just as Chiao was saying in his UN speech that "the current international situation is ... excellent," a bloody counterrevolution on China's doorstep in Thailand was taking place. This certainly could not have reinforced the revolutionary left and was a grim reminder that imperialism -- real imperialism -- was the main danger.
These are some of the objective factors which account for the ascendency of the current Hua Kuo-feng regime.