DISPLAYS REMARKABLE IMMUNITY TO COLD
The Hsinhua News Agency reported from Peking November 26 that Chairman Mao Tsetung, "the most respected and beloved leader of the Chinese people," had reviewed a total of 11,000,000 Red Guards since August 18. In the final review before the shows are resumed next spring, Chairman Mao displayed his remarkable powers of resistance to icy weather. Despite "seven degrees of frost," Mao appeared on the gate of Tienanmen "in green uniform without an overcoat." "Disregarding the biting wind," Chairman Mao walked to both ends of the gate and "kept waving his cap to the cheering crowds."
To those who may have believed that the great cultural revolution was the result of spontaneous initiative from below, the same dispatch puts the record straight. It was "personally initiated and led by Chairman Mao."
The official title now used in the captions of photographs of the great man is "Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the great teacher, great leader, great supreme commander and great helmsman of the Chinese people."
This is probably still inadequate to properly describe Mao's greatness, since it but faintly reflects the love felt for Mao, as shown for instance at the final fall review of the Red Guard. "The entire spacious Tienanmen Square and the broad thoroughfare to the east," reports Hsinhua, "were a sea of cheering people who, turning to Chairman Mao, leaped for joy at seeing him and shouted at the tops of their voices, "Long live Chairman Mao! Long, long life to Chairman Mao!"
THE INTERNAL CRISIS IN CHINA
(The following is the text of a statement issued by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International on November 6.]
* * *
(1) The crisis that has shaken the Chinese Communist party during recent months is undoubtedly the gravest since the Mao Tse-tung group assumed leadership of the party. It has been marked by profound divisions at all levels, including the Political Bureau; by battles among tendencies in all the main fields, by an extremely violent type of struggle; by the intervention of certain sectors of the masses stimulated by the ruling group and by various efforts to curb this intervention.
It is difficult to delineate exactly the actual development of the crisis, its origin and the composition of the groups opposing each other yesterday and today. It is likewise difficult to establish whether the Mao group began with an overall tactical and strategic plan from the first or whether the leaders were largely taken by surprise in the events that ensued and made successive adaptations corresponding to the vicissitudes of the crisis.
In a general way, the following phases can be distinguished:
(a) A first phase extending from November 1965 to the end of April 1966 in which the ruling group seemed to be feeling out the ground, provoking seemingly secondary polemics but at the same time putting across without fanfare a reorientation or rectification in certain basic sectors (army, industry).
(b) A phase extending from May to the end of July 1966, marked by an offensive against the Peking group and some eminent intellectuals; and by the first wave of the "cultural revolution."
(c) A phase opened by the August plenum of the Central Committee involving new conflicts at the top, the second wave of the "cultural revolution" and the formation of the so-called Red Guards.
The third phase does not yet seem to have ended and the situation remains charged with possible brusk new flare-ups and changes.
(2) In the first two phases of the crisis, the dominant theme advanced by the ruling group was affirmation of the primacy of politics in all domains. Beyond the sloganeering and ritualistic references to Mao's thought, the real content lay in the determination of the party and state bureaucracy to defend and consolidate its hegemony in relation to other sectors of the bureaucracy and to any actual or potential centrifugal tendency. The conflict became concretized in a confrontation of different specific positions on problems dealing with perspective, partly immediate , partly intermediate or long range.
In the military domain an important group -- whose spokesman was quite likely the chief of staff himself, Lo Jui Ching -- sought to secure relative autonomy, stress-— ing the decisive significance of technique in a modern war. This group very likely also emphasized the necessity of reestablishing the alliance with the Soviet Union, the military support of which was considered irreplaceable in the event of imperialist aggression against China. The Mao-Lin Piao group upholds the idea of the primacy of politics over technique in military matters. They emphasize concretely a conception of the army more linked to the traditions and experiences of the-civil war and the anti- Japanese struggle. These traditions and experiences were considered the only valuable ones in the event of a conventional type of war by imperialism on the Asian continent.
In the domain of industry, two conferences held last spring reaffirmed in the most emphatic way the idea that the guiding role in the plants must be played by the party, that any technocratic tendency must be extirpated; and, in general, anyone must be fought who sought to give primacy to the specialists and to introduce in economic management criteria like those spread during recent years in the Soviet Union and in the other European workers states.
In the field of culture, the ruling group was still more obviously intent on blocking any centrifugal tendency, any "autonomist" tendency whose success, even if only partial, could have serious implications extending to the entire political arena. In reviving arguments advanced among others by Khrushchev at the time of his last confrontation with the intellectuals, Mao's partisans continuously pointed to the danger
that critical, oppositionist movements in the cultural sphere could become the vehicle of a political opposition. It was not by accident that the adversaries of the ruling group were accused of operating like a potential opposition party and of wanting to provoke a repetition in China of the Hungarian experience with the Petofi circle.
If the importance which such polemics have in the eyes of the Mao group is to be understood, its interpretation of Soviet developments since Stalin's death and the Twentieth Congress have to be borne in mind. According to the Maoists, the victory. of revisionism dates from that time, and the breaches were opened step by step by the promulgation of a whole new series of criteria and concepts, and by the sudden appearance of multiple centrifugal tendencies within the bureaucracy itself. The ending of uncontested and absolute control by the political bureaucracy represented one of the major causes of an unfolding process which, it must be remembered, to the Chinese represents the progressive restoration of capitalism.
According to the official