CONFESSION OF LIU SHAO-CHI
The principal adversaries in the conflict that is tearing asunder the leadership of Chinese Communism are Chairman Mao and President Liu Shao-chi. The two men are reported to have had a showdown at the Central Committee meeting early last August which was followed by a confession of errors from the chief of state in October.
Only fragments of this confession have appeared in the Western press. Now the full text of this revealing document has been published in the April 1967 issue of Atlas magazine. It was translated into English from Tokyo's Mainichi Shimbun.
Liu begins his self-criticism by promising to obey the instructions of Mao and his closest associates, Lin Piao and Chen Po-ta. He expresses "deep agony" about the mistakes he committed in guiding the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution during its first fifty days from June 1 to July 18, 1966, when Mao was not in Peking.
Liu at that time headed the daily activities of the party's Central Committee. The work teams dispatched under his direction in Peking suppressed rather than encouraged the mass of students, he says. "For example, they banned the masses from going out
in the streets to demonstrate and to put up wall newspapers; they also demanded a clear distinction between external and internal affairs.
Liu goes on to say that these errors are not accidental but similar to “some basic mistakes in policy line" he made over the past twenty years. He cites a series of cases from 1946 to 1964 in which he was guilty of leaning toward right opportunism, although he sometimes appeared to be "left on the surface." All these errors are connected, he says, with "the policy line mistakes I committed in the course of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Fortunately, most of them were caught and corrected in time "personally by the great Chairman Mao of our party and the people." Mao made an equally salutary intervention at the eleventh Central Committee plenum in August.
"In the second half of the plenum," says Liu, “the question of our mistakes were discussed, and an election of the members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau was held. The plenum unanimously recommended Comrade Lin Piao as Chairman Mao's first assistant and his successor. Comrade Lin Piao is superior to me in every way, and other comrades in the Party are also far superior to me. I resolved to uphold the rules which should be observed strictly by all members of the Party, and never to engage in any two-faced maneuvers."
Liu gives four reasons for his mistakes. First, he did not trust the masses. "I feared confusion and extensive democracy. I feared the rising up of the masses and rebelling against us. I feared the appearance of counterrevolution on the stage."
"2. I made a mistake in judging the situation of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution at the time. I regarded the normal and inevitable defects of mass movements as the reverse upsurge of anti-Party, anti-Socialist and antiproletarian trends...This led me to stand on a bourgeois reactionary position and to engage in bourgeois dictatorship."
"3. With respect to ideology my bourgeois world outlook had not yet been conpletely reformed, and there still existed many idealistic and metaphysical viewpoints... At times, I adopted the standpoint of the bourgeois class. In carrying out my work, I also took an arrogant and teacher-like attitude.
"4. The most basic reason was that I did not learn from Chairman Mao's thought, nor grasp it. For this reason, I was unable to apply the Chairman's thought correctly in the struggle. I also failed to go among the masses and learn from them. I also did not report very much to Chairman Mao.
He concludes by admitting that this understanding of his mistakes "may still be insufficient." But "I have determined to study Chairman Mao's thought, learn from Comrade Lin Piao, and learn from the thought of Mao Tse~-tung."
This abject verbal rectification was obviously inadequate, since two months later Liu became the target of the most violent Red Guard attacks. According to recent reports, the head of state has been placed under house arrest. Whatever his situation at the moment, he still tops the list of "those in authority who have wormed their way into the party and are taking the capitalist road."
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