IS THE
STRUGGLE SHARPENING INSIDE CHINA?
By Dick Roberts
"It is a singular paradox of our time that in the epoch of radio, of television, of communication satellites, one can be so badly informed about what is really happening in the most populated country in the world: People's China."
The author of this pointed remark, Frangois Honti, did not raise the question in idle speculation. Writing for the September issue of Le Monde Diplomatique, Honti warned that the lack of information about the concrete realities of the political developments in China could lead to a disastrous misjudgment in Washington.
"Step by step, [Washington] has come to bombing a few kilometers from the Chinese border, convinced that the Chinese are too engaged in their quarrel to be able to envisage an action of military importance, and that Hanoi does not want to see the penetration of the Chinese army in Vietnam. But will these hypotheses, perhaps valid for a certain moment, apply under all circumstances?
",..an error of calculation on (Washington's] part could have disastrous consequences for the entire world."
Honti's fears about the implications of Johnson's precipitous escalation in Vietnam and the deepening crisis in China are by no means relieved by the current assessments of Chinese developments in the pages of New York newspapers.
"The once-unthinkable has become the possible," Wall Street Journal Hong Kong correspondent Robert Keatley wrote August 31. "China's ‘cultural revolution' seems to be slipping still further out of control, and the world's most populous land rolls ever faster toward what could be major civil war or even total chaos."
And Keatley went on to describe a number of reported clashes in major Chinese cities which have led Hong Kong correspondents to label the past month "bloody August."
Least of all are Honti's warnings relieved by the pages of the official Peking press. August and September have seen an escalation of the Mao-Lin propaganda assault against "top persons in authority taking the capitalist road."
There has been a new intensity of propaganda aimed at taking the "Cultural Revolution" into the army.
But details explaining the events which have filled dispatches from Peking and Hong Kong have been totally lacking. "Bloody August" has neither been confirmed nor denied.
Hong Kong correspondents paid closest attention in mid-August to alleged fighting in Canton, Kwangtung province, only 100 miles from Hong Kong itself. Summarizing these reports, Agence France- Presse noted in the August 31 Le Monde:
"Life returns little by little to Canton, which in recent weeks produced violent combats to the point of machinegun fire between rival red guard factions, according to travelers arriving in Hong ong.
"These travelers say that many of the streets of the big Chinese port are barricaded with sandbags and zigzag brick walls. These barricades seem to have been raised because of the troops' fear of the possibility of military intervention in the city.
"According to the travelers, the combats between red guards took place between August 16 and 20, but ceased with the departure of the leaders of the rival factions for Peking, where they held a ‘peace conference,’ attended by first minister Chou En-lai."
Wall Street Journal reporter Keatley had a more lurid version: "Red guards, peasants, workers and apparently even soldiers are battling indiscriminately; mobs have raided police stations and stolen weapons, and the sounds of rifle and machine-gun fire sometimes can be heard in the streets.
"Reliable witnesses have seen bodies hanging from lampposts, and about 100 people are thought to have died in rioting at a July 23 funeral."
Le Monde reported September 4 that a Canton radio had proclaimed the forma~ tion of a Maoist "revolutionary committee" August 31. According to the Canton radio, the committee sent the following telegram to Peking:
"The class struggle in Canton has been ferocious and difficult. Hundreds of thousands of Canton workers have joined together in a struggle to take command of the cultural revolution. Together with the proletarian revolutionaries, we have carried the campaign of criticism to new summits, and we have removed from the party, administration and treasury the agents of the Chinese Khrushchev in the province of Kwangtung."
Other centers of turmoil according
to similar reports include the provinces of Szechwan and Kweichow. An dispatch in the August 21 New York Times stated:
"Several hundred Red Guards marched in silent procession through the center of Peking today in memory of 'revolutionary rebels massacred in Szechwan.'
"The procession came after posters here had reported serious clashes in the vast southwestern province, which borders on Tibet.
"Banner slogans carried by the marchers announced that 'the revolutionary rebels of Szechwan are sw in blood' and called on the Communist party's Central Committee to 'settle the urgent Szechwan problen.'
"¢*TJe small handful of Szechwan leaders who follow the capitalist line are making progress in all domains, ' another banner said."
Tillman Durdin, the New York Times correspondent in Hong Kong, reported September 10 that "Kweichow, in southwestern China, has experienced particularly violent disarray...
"A Kweichow radio broadcast Aug. 24 reported that ‘misled masses' organized by the anti-Maoist faction had indulged in 'beating, smashing, looting, arson, killing, deliberately instigating struggle by violence and general sabotage of revolutionary aims.'
"The Kweichow radio also reported Aug. 23 that 'the handful of party officeholders taking the capitalist road' had spread rumors that worsened relations between the army and the people and ‘in broad daylight slandered, beat up and even cruelly suppressed and persecuted heroic People's Liberation Army fighters.'"
While there have been constant references in the Hong Kong dispatches to fighting between Red Guard factions, Peking remained totally silent about such a possibility until the beginning of September.
September 8, Agence France-Presse in Peking reported that a Red Guard organization, demonstrating in the center of Peking, had been declared "counterrevolutionary and outside the law" by Chiang Ching, Mao's wife, and a leading figure in the "Cultural Revolution."
Chiang Ching declared that the group "was playing the bourgeois game" under the pretext of ultraleftist slogans.
The Agence France-Presse correspondent was surprised that the "outlaw" faction, which calls itself the "516th Regiment," was allowed to demonstrate in its own name after this denunciation. Other Red Guard organizations have been criticized, he reports, but this is the first time one has been allowed to remain active.
Turning to the Peking press, two themes predominated in August: a heightened attack on Liu Shao-chi and Peng Tehhuai; and a new exaltation of Lin Piao.
The attack on Peng Teh-huai is noteworthy because it included the first public printing of the "Resolution of the Eighth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China Concerning the Anti-Party Clique Headed by Peng Teh-huai." This meeting was held in Iwshan in 1959.
If the document is authentic, it is interesting because of what it indicates about the nature of the struggle in the Communist party hierarchy between 1959 and the launching of the "Cultural Revolution" more than five years later.
Key themes of the document, issued in Mao's name, include the following (from Peking Review, August 25):
"This struggle at Iushan is a class struggle, a continuation of the life-anddeath struggle between the two major antagonistic classes -- the bourgeoisie and the proletariat -- which has gone on all through the socialist revolution in the last ten years....
"Peng Teh-huai's anti-Party activ-— ity at the Lushan meeting was by no means accidental, nor was it an isolated incident. It was a wild, desperate onslaught by the dying bourgeoisie against the flourishing socialist cause of the proletariat....
"The long-standing anti-Party activities of the Right opportunist anti- Party clique headed by Peng Teh—huai constitute a grave danger to the socialist cause of the Party and the people....
"This kind of struggle, it seems, will continue in China and in our Party for at least 20 years and possibly half a century. In short, the struggle will cease only when classes die out completely.
Apparently this is supposed to explain why Red Guard factions, eight years later, are still having so much trouble with the "“anti-Party clique." It's not just "a handful of top persons in authority," it's a vast residue of "bourgeois" forces.
But these implications are never spelled out. The organizational institutions of "China's Khrushchev" -- if they exist -- are never mentioned. One is
always left with the impression that masses of "proletarian revolutionaries" are pitted against a few "demons and monsters."
Official adulation of Lin Piao is being carried to new heights. On August 9 Lin addressed what Peking described as a mass congress of the "Peking Garrison Activists."
Lin's message, according to pages and pages of Hsinhua dispatches, was carried from one section of the army to the next, from one side of China to the other. It provoked serious and deep-going discussion and it raised the army to new levels of understanding and ability.
That message, in its entirety, was “Hold high the great red banner of Mao Tse-tung's thought and create new merits in the movement of the great proletarian cultural revolution."
Some insight into the specific character of the "Cultural Revolution," however, was provided by Hsinhua's coverage of one event in early August. This was the reported formation of a "revolutionary committee" in Sining, Chinghai province, August 12.
"This victory," according to Hsinhua, August 14, "was won by the local proletarian revolutionaries in the course of seizing power from the handful of top party persons in authority taking the capitalist road."
Hsinhua explained that "an extremely acute and complicated struggle took place in Chinghai between two classes, two roads and two lines. Party government power in the province has been usurped by the handful of top party persons in authority taking the capitalist road....
"The 'August 18' and other proletarian revolutionary organisations fought
back courageously and defended Chairman
Mao, the party central committee and
Chairman Mao's revolutionary line with
their blood and their lives."
Hsinhua does not give any further
details on the nature of the "August 18"
movement. But if these words are to be
taken seriously, they support the con-
tentions of Hong Kong journalists that
the factional struggle is massive and
sometimes bloody.
Furthermore, its end is nowhere
in sight. This theme is paramount in the
concept of "20 years" to “a half century"
of "class struggle." But it is also ex-
plicit in other references to the Chinghai
"victory."
August 15, Hsinhua reported the
reception of this news in other provinces.
"Proletarian revolutionaries in Hupeh,
Hunan, Honan, Kiangsi, Szechwan and Inner
Mongolia, who have been growing ever
stronger in the fierce struggle between
the two classes, the two roads and the
two lines, are overjoyed at the good
news."
Of the six provinces mentioned,
five of them were listed by Tillman
Durdin as scenes of sharp clashes in
August, the single exception being Hupeh
rovince. "Revolutionary committees"
coalitions of municipal, Red Guard and
army "cadres") have been established only
in six provinces all told according to
the Maoist press. And this drive has been
under way since January.
Will Johnson seize the occasion
of China's internal conflict to escalate
the Vietnam war into an attack on China
herself? The danger appears to be real.
That is why the nature of the fragmentary
news coming out of China provokes serious
concern.
"MING PAO"