SHARPENING CONFLICT AT THE TOP IN CHINA
‘ By George Novack
Throughout 1966 the Chinese Communists were embroiled in two gigantic schisms. One is the Sino-Soviet split which has eventuated in a definitive rupture of relations with the Soviet leadership on both the state and party levels. The other is the deep division within the Chinese Communist hierarchy itself which came to a climactic point as the year ended.
There is a not implausible story in circulation about a man at a UN reception who was asked what he did. “I am an expert on Chinese affairs," he said. "Can you tell me what is going on there?"
Any interpretation of the political turmoil churning up China must be fragmentary and provisional. There are many nystifying aspects about these momentous developments; and, due to the censorship and gagging of the opposition, solid facts are hard to come by. Moreover, the struggles and shifts at the top are still unfolding and far from concluded. However, even if the full pattern remains obscure, some pieces of the Chinese puzzle can be fitted together.
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There appear to be three distinct groupings in the 10-man Political Bureau which governs China. The weightiest force is the team headed by Communist party Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Defense Minister Lin Piao. They are pitted against China's Chief of State Liu Shao-chi and Communist party Secretary General Teng Hsiao-ping. Between them stands a vacillating tendency represented by Premier Chou En-lai and Foreign Minister Chen Yi which is aligned with Mao but which, the evidence indicates, has reservations and misgivings about his measures. They seek to moderate the conflict between the contending factions and prevent it from ending in an irreconcilable break.
Mao.and Lin have initiated, directed and intensified the "great proletarian cultural revolution," organized the young Red Guards as its spearhead, and carried forward a remorseless campaign against the "bourgeois restorationists." This is an omnibus epithet applied to any and all recalcitrants in the party and the country who fail to accept the directives inspired by Mao's thought as holy writ.. .
After numerous hints in the press over the past months about "monsters" lurking
in the highest places, the head of the Chinese People's Republic and the chief executive of the CCP were publicly pilloried for the most heinous offenses at the year's. end. On December 27 some 100,000 Red Guards swarmed into the Peking Workers' Athletic Hall for "A pally for Thoroughly Criticizing Liu and Teng for Their Bourgeois Reactionary Lines.
The speakers denounced President Liu as "the Khrushchev of China" and "the boss of the capitalist class." His associate Teng was condemned in similar terms. These are the most contemptible and damaging accusations in the arsenal of Maoism.
Wall newspapers posted by Red Guards referred to self-criticisms made by the two leaders before a party meeting in October. The statements contained self-denunciations, pledges of loyalty to Mao and Lin Piao, promises to respect party discipline and expressed a determination to "do useful work for the party and people." Liu admitted "lack of understanding" and "miscalculation" of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and said, "I have decided to submit faithfully to the regulations of the party and not to be of two minds in party matters."
Teng is supposed to have said, "My present ideology and political level does not make me fit to be in charge of leadership work in the party central -committee. The two men were accused, among other misdemeanors, of opposing Mao's thought and the studying of Mao's books, favoring revival of capitalist enterprises and advocating in 1956 that private businesses be set up to complete with state enterprises, and opposing the Great Leap Forward.
While full texts of the recantations they made October 23 are not yet available, reports from Hong Kong have summarized a no less abject 3,000-word confessional written October 11 by the Premier's wife in which Mrs. Liu deciared: "I betrayed the Party and Chairman Mao's trust, solicitude and teachings. This has greatly troubled me." She avowed that she had "piled error upon error" in assisting “bourgeois reactionaries" to subvert Mao's doctrines.
She said that, in collaborating with Mao's foes, she had worked to promote the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, suppress democracy, create a reign of terror and repress the masses. She divulged how, as a member of the work team that went to purge the Peking Tsinghua University in June and July, she sabotaged her assignment in a right-wing opportunist manner. For example, her team had demanded "adequate preparation" before launching attacks upon alleged culprits and she had dismissed critics of her conduct as "troublesome Schemers" and "fake leftists."
Mrs. Idu disclosed that her mistakes "were personally discovered and reversed by our great leader, Chairman Mao" at the turbulent Central Committee plenum held early in August.
Regardless of their motivation, these admissions of guilt are unlikely to satisfy the powers that extorted them. Red Guard posters which carried Liu's statement denouneed it as inadequate, shallow and insincere. A Peking-based Yugoslav correspondent has predicted that Liu and Teng "do not have much time left. in liberty." Trucks with loudspeakers drove around the capital on December 26 announcing that the two men "were leaders of the so-called black or anti-Mao Tse-tung lines and that they have to be erushed."
Mao's wife, Chiang Ching, who has been giving many cues in the prosecution of the cultural revolution, has demanded the arrest of all opponents of her husband's teachings. She said that every real revolutionary had the right to arrest such people.
The fate of these major figures may be foreshadowed by the treatment of the Peking party leader and Politburo member Peng Chen who was deposed in disgrace earlier in the year along with hundreds of cultural and propaganda officials. At a mass meeting on December 12, addressed by the acting Mayor of Peking, Peng had to stand with bowed head while the crowds shouted accusations at him.
He was denounced as one of the three leaders of “a revisionist clique" which included Iu Ting-~yi, former Minister of Culture, and Lo Jui-ching, former army chief of staff. Peng and Lo are reported to have been arrested. The ex-Army head belonged to a circle of top officials close to the government chief Liu and Secretary General Teng.
Liu and Teng fell from grace when they attempted to curb the Red Guard movement and its attacks upon the party apparatus throughout the nation. This was confirmed in a secret speech made early in December by Tao Chu, fourth ranking member of the Politburo and the party's present propaganda director. He said that, after Mao had personally
ordered the cultural revolution last May, President Liu and Secretary General Teng violated his line and, during his absence from Peking in June and July, briefly succeeded in suppressing its development. Through work teams under their jurisdiction they tried to keep the youths from doing any real harm to the national party organization.
They issued orders in the party's name that almost strangled the cultural revolution during its first fifty days, Tao said. He declared that the “poisonous damage” they had done had spread widely in China and “they must bear the main responsibility." Even after the August plenum had called them to account and the work teams were dis-— panded, they kept up their resistance.
But now Tao Chu himself appears to be in disgrace if a report from Tokyo is to be believed. According to this source, Tao Chu was subjected January 6 to a curbside kangaroo court.
The Peking correspondents of Asahi and Yomiuri said that Chairman Mao's wife, Chiang Ching and a purge committee had called Tao a “bourgeois reactionary." Only four months ago when he took office as propaganda chief, he was considered to be one of the architects of the “Cultural Revolution."
The disarray created by the inner party conflicts can be gauged by what has happened with the Peking municipal party organization, the most important in the country. The old committee was headed by Peng Chen who was replaced in June by Li Hsuehfeng. The decision was hailed at. that time in a People's Daily editorial as “a new victory for Mao Tse-tung's thought...Now, all work in Peking is bound to be well done."
Six months later, on December 4, Mao's wife accused the new Peking committee of being "as rotten as ever...It is the same old stuff as the old committee." She said: "They are reactionary, two-faced, they insult Chairman Mao. They attack us. They must be wiped out once and for all. For if we do not wipe them out, how can we carry on the revolution?"
What kind of atmosphere prevails in the ruling circles, when members of the families of officials are dragged in and compelled to make the most degrading spectacle of themselves? .
According to a January 5 dispatch from Prague, the son and daughter of President Liu accused their father of “betraying the revolution." They repudiated him. A Red Guard leaflet in Peking said that they had learned about their father's “bourgeois and reactionary line" from their mother.
Three members of Foreign Minister Chen Yi's family -- husband, wife and ‘daughter -- were upbraided for their derelictions.
The fissures and frictions in the leadership have spread to the party, the intellectuals, the army high command, and even the Red Guards. On December 12 Hung Chi, the party's ideological. journal, acknowledged that armed clashes had broken out between rival factions of the Red Guard and that Red Guards, as well as party members, had been “duped" into opposing the regime by "the handful of persons within the party who take the wcapitalist road." Four days later, Red Flag:stated that the internal struggle is “extrenely fierce, acute and.profound" and that Mao's. opponents still. wield “relative superiority" in the cultural and ideological spheres.
Apparently the Red Guards, mobilized to ferret out and beat down "those in authority who have wormed their way into the Party and are taking the capitalist road", have encountered stiff resistance and failedto dislodge many of the provincial, regional and even central party and government leaders who have been selected for attack. These have fought back, as a December 13 editorial in Red Flag, the policy organ of the CP Central Committee, complains. "The one peculiar feature among those in authority inside the party who are taking the capitalist road and a. very few who adhere stubbornly to the bourgeois reactionary line is that they stay back of the screen and pull strings of mass organizations of students and workers who have been blinded by them, sow discord, create factions, instigate struggles by force and even resort to all kinds of illegal means to deal with the revolutionary. masses while they themselves sit on the mountain to watch the tigers among themselves.”
If the Mao-Lin faction has not yet broken the opposition's hold-upon the party machinery, neither has it been able to keep the Red Guard movement under strict control. Thirteen million young people, taken out of school and encouraged to-assail the constituted authorities, could hardly be expected to abide by the directives communi-. cated by the officials in charge. Some segments of this volatile, zealous and militant
mass would tend to acquire a will and a way of their own which deviated from the intentions of their elders. Further, each of the contending factions has tried to steer the hectic movement in a direction most suited to its interests.
This would account for the repeated calls for restraint during the summer and fall activities of the Red Guard as well as for denunciations of high personages beyond those clearly marked for disgrace by Mao and Lin.
Thus, Tao Chu, the newly installed party propaganda chief, has recently been several times stigmatized as "a new bourgeois element." Red Guards have denounced Foreign Minister Chen Yi, his wife and son, for interfering with the mass actions. And a few posters have even been put up criticizing Mao and his "close comrade-in-arms, " in Piao.
Are these developments less bewildering to the Communist party ranks, the functionaries on every rung of the party and state hierarchy,.and the workers and peasants than they seem to most supporters of revolutionary China abroad? Judging from what is published in the Chinese press, it is doubtful that they are more adequately informed about the issues at stake, the real views of the antagonists and the true meaning of the convulsions or that they are better prepared for the surprising twists and turns of "the cultural revolution." -
Looking back over the past year, they cannot help but ask: who will next be enrolled among the “counter-revolutionaries," "the open and hidden representatives of the bourgeoisie," "double-dealers" and "restorers of capitalism?" These are questions the new year will have to answer as the gravest political struggle since the Chinese Communist party took power is fought to a finish.
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