CHINA AFTER THE EVENTS AT Tien-an-men An earlier article in INPRECOR (see No. 46, March 18, 1976) dealt with the early phase of the recent political campaign in China against Teng Hsiao-ping. Since that article appeared, dramatic new events have taken place in Peking, confirming our earlier conclusions and indicating important new developments in the struggle. Before discussing the most recent turn in the Chinese crisis, it is useful to give a short background account of the course of the factional struggle in the Chinese Communist party (CCP) over the last decade. At the most apparent level, the cultural revolution of 1966-68 was a confrontation at the pinnacle of power between two rival cliques, one headed by Mao Tsetung and Lin Piao, defense minister and high priest of the "Mao cult, " and the other by Liu Shao-chi and Teng Hsiao-ping, both former general secretaries of the party who, like Stalin in the Soviet Union, had built up a strong political base in the party establishment. The political program of the Liu-Teng clique broadly reflected the dissatisfaction of the hard-headed "realists" in the bureaucracy with the voluntaristic and egal¡tarian policies pursued by the "romanticist" Mao in the late 1950s. It is well known that these policies plunged China into economic chaos. Cadres at all levels of the party undoubtedly shared Liu and Teng's concern that these policies might be repeated. The Liu-Teng group also opposed Mao on certain foreign policy issues. While they shared Mao's basic criticisms of Soviet "revisionism, " unlike him, they favored a certain measure of cooperation with the Russians against American imperialism. Whereas the constituency of the Liu-Teng group was in the bureaucratic elite, Mao and his faction (among by GREG BENTON them his wife, Chiang Ching, up to then a political outsider, and Chen Po-ta, his long-time personal secretary) set out to create a new base among sectors of Chinese society whose voice had long been silenced by the bureaucracy, particularly youth. By mobilizing them in struggle, Mao hoped both to swamp his enemies in the leadership and to "guarantee the succession" by revolutionizing new levies of future cadres. With characteristic impetuousness, Mao was banking on the fact that his immense authority among the masses would keep the movement more or less within the guidelines he had laid down for it. But the striking feature of the cultural revolution was the constant tendency of the forces mobilized in the struggle to escape central control. Not only did huge strikes break out in January 1967, but many organizations advanced independent political programs calling for socialist democracy in the spirit of the Paris Commune. With his alliance crumbling at the base, Mao was forced to call in the military to restore order. This intervenfion involved the central military leadership around Lin Piao and the more conservative regional commanders, whose loyalties generally lay with their counterparts in the party. At the same time, Mao was forced to call off his purge of the party cadres. The disintegration of the Maoist base in the mass movement and the increased army involvement were to have far-reaching consequences for the future evolution of the factional struggle at the top. The ninth congress of the CCP in 1969 institutionalized the balance of forces that had emerged from the cultural revolution, formally drumming Liu Shao-chi out of the leodership and ushering in the period of reconstruction of the party organizations destroyed during the mass as-
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CHINA In 1970 Chen Po-ta was purged from the leadership to prepare the way for a further rapprochement with the representatives of the central bureaucracy. Later, Mao's "close comrode-in-arms, * Lin Piao, died in an airplane crash while fleeing to the Soviet Union after an alleged coup attempt. The details of the "Lin Piao affair" are obscure and need not concern us here, but objectively this episode marked the first stage in the whittling down of the newly-acquired power of the army in Chinese political life. Soon after Lin's death, other military leaders were also purged in the course of a campaign to reassert "parfy control over the gun. " But rather than take on the whole of the army in one stroke, Mao applied his usual "salami tactics" to the problem. Before 1966 the People's Liberation Army (PLA) was traditionally subordinate to a unified political leadership, its use in the factional struggle during the cultural revolution inevitably produced serious internal factional divisions. The relative speed with which the PLA leadership was forced or persuaded to back down from political power after 1969 demonstrated once again that the role of the army in China is in no way analogous to that in capitalist countries or even in the Soviet Union. But it is also clear that the identification of the military with the goals of the central political leadership is no longer absolute or automatic. Although he ousted the central Lin Piao clique, Mao was careful to do nothing that might antagonize the conservative regional commanders and made a number of political concessions to them. The «radicals» in retreat The period between 1970 and early 1973 represented the nadir of "radical" influence in the leadership. The downfall of "radicals" Cher and Lin reflected and reinforced the trend set in motion by the collapse of Mao's base in the mass movement. The "Lin Piao affair" also seriously undermined the credibility of the Maoists. In an attempt to restore his reputation for "infallibility," Mao produced a letter to Chiang Ching, allegedly written in 1966, which suggested that he had distrusted Lin all along. He then launched a "philosophical" campaign stressing the fact that it is an iron law of the universe that "one divides into two." With the "radical" forces in temporary decline, a massive rehabilitation (or "liberation") of cadres who had been attacked during the cultural revolution got under way. This "liberation" was part of a general drift toward a restoration of the bureaucratic status quo, which was hastened by the shortage of administrative talent among Mao's "radical" entourage and by the need to _convince the powerful regional commanders that the political power they had relinquished would pass into hands acceptable to them. These "liberated" cadres provided the basis for reconstituting the "moderate" or "conservative" faction in the burecucracy. As recent events have revealed, Chou En-lai and the rehabilitated "No, 2 capitalist roader," 8
Teng Hsiao-ping, were at the center of this regroupment. Why was Mao prepared to "liberate" Teng? The main reasons would appear to be that Teng was considered vital to the success of Chou's new "smiling face" diplomacy and economic construction and that his rehabilitation was intended as a gesture of good faith to the rest of the bureaucracy. Even though the "radicals" were in retreat, thuy retained the trump card of the political backing of Mao himself. At the same time they had a power base in sections of the party (notably Shanghai), and they controlled the press and the urban militia, which was intended as a counterweight to the conservative military men. The first major political test of strength after 1969 was the renth congress of the CCP in August 1973. It was at this point that the "rodicals" unexpectedly launched the "oppose the tide" and "oppose Confucius" campaigns in order to strengthen their position in the leadership struggle. The two factions appeared to emerge from the tenth congress equal in strength, but since the "moderates" were returning to posts they had already occupied before the 1966 upheaval, they were in fact in a better position to consolidate their power. The "oppose the tide" campaign was dropped shortly after the tenth congress, and the "criticize Confucius" campaign was given a sharp anti-cultural-revolution bias by the addition of the "criticize Lin Piao" aspect. By the time Chou En-lai fell ill in May 1974, the "moderates" were strongly enough entrenched to be able to block the appointment of "radical" Wang Hungwen, nominated No. 3 in the hierarchy at the tenth congress, as Chou's stand-in and to ensure that this role want to Teng Hsiao-ping. In an unsuccessful attempt to reverse this defeat, the "radicals" launched an offensive in mid-1974 against "suspect" plays and operas, as well as a short-lived wall-poster campaign, which Western journalists revealed was suppressed, often violently, by local bureaucrats.
The Fourth National People's Congress (NPC) in January 1975 marked another important victory for the "moderates, " increasing Teng's power and reducing "radical" representation to a minimum. Mao was conspicuously absent from the NPC, signaling his opposition to its decisions. In his speech to the NPC Chou En-lai, who made only the slightest reference to "economic development" at the tenth congress in 1973, was able to spell out economic targets for the next twenty-five years. Still unwilling to concede defeat, the Maoists raised more and more explosive issues in the course of their 1975 campaign to "restrict bourgeois rights, bureaucratic privilege and corruption and urging workers to oust "bourgeois power-holders" from the leadership. But the strike wave in the summer of 1975 alarmed all sections of the bureaucracy, giving Teng a chance to raise slogans more in keeping with his own conservative style of government. The «anti-Teng» campaign Since the issues involved in the anti-Teng campaign were dealt with extensively in the earlier INPRECOR article, it is necessary only to briefly summarize them here. In the context of the struggles of the 1960s, there is little new in Teng's political program, which stresses the need for stability, professionalism, and a slight widening of differentials to cushion bureaucratic rule through the creation of a narrow privileged social stratum. In foreign policy Teng appears to favor the normalization of relations with the Soviet Union, although the evidence for this is flimsy. He also favors a certain liberalization of political and cultural life, and was recently accused (Hsinhua, April 8) of "wanting bourgeois libertarianism" and of denouncing Chiang Ching's theatrical works as "letting a single flower bloom." While the "radicals" share Teng's basic aim of modernizing China's economy before the end of the century, they insist on the need to reduce inequality to a minimum through a downward compression of wage scales and favor permanent political mobilization to stamp out symptoms of bureaucratic degeneration. Their proposals for "all-round dictatorship" amount in practice to the extinction of all elements of proletarian democracy. Even though the issues at stake in the recent dispute are similar in essence to those that arose in 1966, the differences between the two periods are crucial to an understanding of how the crisis has developed: 1. In 1966 the army, steeped for seven years in the spirit of "Mao thought" by Lin Piao, was firmly on the side of the Chairman. In 1976 the military hierarchy supports the "moderates" in the leadership, if only because of the traumatic memories of the cultural revolution, and resents the politically-motivated reshuffling
HID QUARDS DE TRATING IN 1966 DURING CULTURAL REVOLUTION of their commands. Needless to say, the lack of positive support from the military severely reduces the options open to the "radicals. 2. In 1966 the Liu-Teng clique was united by no more than an ill-defined opposition to Mao's more "extreme" policies and could not yet be said to constitute an alternative pole in the leadership. On the contrary, they collapsed almost as soon as pressure was brought to bear on them. In 1976, with the experience of the last ten years behind them, the "moderates" are apparently better organized, more united, and more prepared to advance an alternative program than ever before, as evidenced by Teng's obstinate refusal to make the slightest gesture of "repentance" for his "crimes. " 3. The sheer numerical weight of "liberated" cadres in the administration gives "moderate" leaders a measure of immunity, since threatening moves against them would run the risk of alienating an entire layer of the bureaucracy. For example, it has been estimated that twelve of the vice-premiers and ministers, eighty-one officials of the state council, and over 500 central figures at the top level belong to the category of "liberated" cadres. 4. Another new and crucial feature of the recent period is the fact that although the social tensions dramatically highlighted by the cultural revolution are continuing to multiply, the masses are turning less and less to any section of the bureaucratic leadership for solutions and are relying more and more on their own independent actions. This is demonstrated, among other things, by the Hangchow strike wave of 1975 and by the fact that those Red Guards mobilized and then suppressed by the "rodical" leaders in 1966, together with large numbers of jobless youth in the towns and villages, are now ready to fight against the Mao-Chiang Ching group. The emergence of powerful underground revolutionary currents among Chinese youth is best exemplified by the famous "Li I-che wall-poster" put up in Canton in late 1974, the importance of which will be discussed in a future article.
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CHINA These important changes are the main reason why the Maoists insisted on the strict regulation of the anti-Teng campaign, and absolutely forbade the formation of mass organizations. Behind the Tien-an-men events Now let us consider the most recent phase in the present political crisis, particularly the riots in Tien-an-men Square in Peking, when more than 100 militiamen were wounded, twelve of them seriously, by a crowd incensed over the removal of wreaths laid in memory of Chou En-lai. Did the Tien-an-men events represent a demonstration of mass support for Teng's political program? Was the "counterrevolutionary" violence that flared up in the square stoged by Teng and his backers, as the Maoists claimed? The answer to both questions would appear to be no. The Peking correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review, who spent several hours in the square, "did not hear or see Teng's name once." On the contrary, all reports indicate that if any one name was resporsible for drawing the crowds, it was Chou En-lai's, For Teng to have stage-managed the incident that gave his enemies precisely the excuse they needed to strip him of all his powers would, in fact, have been an uncharacteristically inept move on the part of this master of the bureaucratic maneuver. In this context, it should be remembered that it was the voice of Teng's ally Wu Teh that boomed out from the public address system during the riots, warning against "class enemies and counterrevolutionaries." The evidence available both in the remarkably full and frank People's Daily report of the incidents and in accounts provided by Western journalists present during the events shows clearly that the theory of an "organized, premeditated counterrevolutionary plot" has absolutely no substance. A main theme of the demonstrators - who sang the International, gave the clenched-fist salute, and repeatedly stressed their allegiance to Marxism -was the call for democratic rights and opposition to the totalitarian implications of the "radical"-inspired cam10 paign to deepen the "all-round dictatorship. " (As the
Li I-che wall-poster in Canton pointed out, the main victim of this "dictatorship" is not the "privileged class"
but the "newly-emerged mass movement. ") This is seen clearly in the "decadent and reactionary" poem pasted up by "counterrevolutionaries" in the square and later reprinted in People's Daily:
Devils howl as we pour out our grief, we weep but the wolves laugh, we spill our blood in memory of the hero, raising our brows we unsheathe our swords.
China is no longer the China of the past, and the people are no longer wrapped in sheer ignorance, gone for good is Chin Shih Huang's feudal
We believe in Marxism-Leninism!
To hell with those scholars who emasculate it!
For the sake of genuine Marxism-Leninism we do not fear to lay down our lives or shed our blood, and the day that China's modernization is realized we will retur to offer libations and sacrifices.
The reference to Chin Shih Huang, despotic first unifier of the Chinese Empire, is in foct an attack on the "dicfatorship" campaign, since Chin Shih Huang and his totalitarian legalist philosophy were recently the object of "radical" glorification, It is interesting to note that after the poem was first published in the national press, an official directive was issued by Hsinhua forbidding
editors to print it "on separate lines, " presumably to make it less striking and aftractive to readers. The demonstrators also set up a "committee of the people of the capital to commemorate the premier." They raised a number of demands not specified in the People's Daily report and when the PLA soldiers marched into the square they shouted slogans such as "the people's army should stand on the side of the people" and "those beFuddled by others are innocent. In this context the clashes that took place with the police, army, and militia take on a different significance from the one given to them in the Maoist press, although it obviously cannot be ruled out that hooligans and "bad elements" also had a hand in the rioting. Wall-posters were also seen in the square attacking Chiang Ching as the modern "dowager empress." The fact that the authorities had to bring in tens of thousands of security forces, many of them from outside the capital judging by vehicle licence plates, shows that the demonstrators numbered more than the "tiny handful" mentioned in People's Daily. The significance of the Tien-an-men events was that supporters of the ChouTeng faction, either through recklessness or miscalculation, had created the opening for tensions to rise and express themselves in what the Maoists were quick to call a "Hungarian-type" incident. It is important to add that the unrest was not confined to Peking: in Honan an official was killed by a "counterrevolutionary" crowd, and in Nanking pro-Chou demonstrations were reportedly accompanied by strikes on the railways.
OR M Official references to "attempts to nominate Teng to play the role of Nagy, chieftain of the counterrevolutionary incident in Hungary, " may unintentionally be a not altogether unfair representation of the Peking "spring," since the recent history of East Europe shows that in such antibureaucratic upsurges it is not uncommon for sections of the masses to develop illusions in a "liberalizing" wing of the bureaucracy. But it is just as likely that genuinely antibureaucratic forces used the split in the leadership as a cover to advance their own demands for democratic rights.
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CHINA Factional struggle will intensify Teng's downfall cannot be said to represent a decisive turning point to the left in the factional struggle at the top. Today, with the Maoist mass base eroded and the impossibility of an operation of the sort by which Liu Shao-chi was toppled, the anti-Teng campaign would probably have bogged down like every other "radical" campaign in recent months if it had not been for the apparent recklessness of a group of Teng's own supporters. Even after the Tien-an-men events, the Maoists' fear of the mass movement prevented them from driving home their temporary advantage against the "moderates." The April 6 People's Daily warned rank-and-file supporters against "establishing inter-unit ties, organizing fighting groups, or ganging up in factions. "As if to underline the impotence of the "radical" offensive, the same day that Teng was stripped of his posts (but not, it should be noted, of his party membership) the "moderate" leader Li Hsien-nien, himself attacked during recent weeks, reappeared in public for the first time since Chou's funeral. The main beneficiary of the crisis was, in fact, a nebulous "centrist" grouping represented by the newly-confirmed premier Hua Kuo-feng, a provincial bureaucrat whose main qualifications for power appear to be his independence of the two main factions and his links with Mao's native county of Hsiangtan. The speed with which Hua's appointment was confirmed suggests panic and shock in the leadership at the recent upsurge of unrest. Subsequent attempts to lend the appointment an air of legitimacy by marshaling well-organized and totally unspontaneous mass demonstrations can hardly disguise Hua's complete lack of genuine rank-and-file support. As the Times correspondent reported: "The mosses of Peking people on the pavements showed a marked indifference to the parades of lorries and schoolchildren waving banners and posters. H There are numerous indications that the factional struggle is still far from resolved. The most recent of these is the April 18 People's Daily editorial calling for the elimination of other "bourgeois bigwigs" like Teng who are still active in the party and claiming that "class enemies" defeated at Tien-an-men are now staging a "frenzied" counterattack. But the absence of a new generation of popular leaders of the stature of Mao and Chou will make it extremely difficult for either faction to create a stable base of support in the country. As Mao's death draws near, the pressures for a quick resolution of the leadership struggle are bound to multiply, especially since the "radicals" are aware that Mao's powerful backing for their faction can last only as long as Mao does. This opens up the possibility of a power struggle confined exclusively to the bureaucratic apparatus, one that could increasingly assume the classical Stalinist form of police purges and show trials. In this light, the Shanghai calls for Teng's execution may be more than just a ritual observance. 12
Revolutionaries in China will support neither of the bureaucratic factions in the struggles that break out in future years, but will take the side of the independent workers movement. They will Fight for an independent program that embodies the aspirations and demands of all sections of the revolutionary masses and that incorporates those radical aspects expressed in a fragmentary and distorted form in the rival programs of the two factions — the egalitarianism of the Maoists, the timid liberalization calls of the "moderates. " Such a program would be axised around the following points (tentatively formulated by some Chinese Trotskyists at the height of the cultural revolution in February 1967):
1. Opposition to the cult of the personality.
2. Opposition to bureaucratic privileges, corruption, and degeneration.
3. Support for the principles of the Paris Commune, i.e., elections by secret ballot to factory committees, committees of peasants, and communes at all levels.
4. The guaranteeing in action as well as words of the constitutional rights inscribed in the third chapter of the constitution of the People's Republic of China: freedom of speech, publication, association, demonstration, and strike; freedom of religion; freedom from violation of one's person or one's residence.
5. Opposition to cuts in the welfare or living standards of the workers and peasants.
6. The guaranteeing to one's opponents of freedom. of political debate.
7. Support for a thoroughgoing assessment of the internal and external policies of the regime since 1949.
8. Freedom of artistic, literary, and cultural expression, but with the application of a clear-cut political standard.
9. Recognition that opposition to Russian "revisionism" should not stand in the way of a united front with Russia against the main enemy, U.S. imperialism.
10. Subordination in both theory and practice of the interests of the construction of socialism in China to the interests of the world revolution. April 18, 1976