p The struggle between reactionary bourgeois chauvinism and proletarian internationalism is not a new phenomenon. The struggle has been carried on ever since the bourgeoisie and the proletariat emerged in the arena of history, giving rise to the “two great class camps”, and to the emergence and development in irreconcilable struggle of the ideologies of these two camps. The Marxist-Leninist classics have shown that the victory of proletarian internationalism over reactionary bourgeois chauvinism depends on a fundamental change in proprietary relations. Marx wrote: “To be able to unite the peoples must have common interests. For the interests to be common, the existing relations of property must be destroyed because the existing property relations provide for the exploitation of some peoples by others. . .".  [62•1  In other words, bourgeois chauvinism is inseparable from the system dominated by capitalist property in the means of production and man’s exploitation of man, while proletarian internationalism is inherent in the society where private property in the means of production has been abolished and the very basis of the exploitation of man by man, and of one people by another has been eliminated.

p But bourgeois chauvinism and proletarian internationalism are determined not only by socio-economic conditions. They are closely connected with the historical development 63 of this or that nation, and are deeply rooted in its traditions, social mentality, and ideological and cultural life, apart from many other things. Let us add that in certain conditions, these circumstances, as events in China have shown, may acquire great importance. The elimination of the socioeconomic basis of bourgeois chauvinism and society’s adoption of the ideas of proletarian internationalism do not immediately lead to an overcoming of chauvinistic attitudes and preconceptions. The specially important point to stress here is the dependence of chauvinism on the social mentality of the petty producer and the conservative and stable character of socio-psychological phenomena in general. The experience of socialist construction in the USSR and other countries shows that the adoption of the new ideology does not require as much time as the remaking of the social mentality.

p In any country, the elimination of private property in the means of production does on the whole create the conditions for gradually doing away with bourgeois chauvinism and establishing proletarian internationalism. These conditions should sooner or later lead the people in the country to realise that they have common interests with the peoples of other countries, that is, to adopt the attitude of proletarian internationalism. However, experience has shown this process to be a long and complex one. The development of the socialist countries and the strengthening of their national independence and sovereignty has gone hand in hand with a growing national awareness, which is on the whole a positive phenomenon. However, the growth of national awareness, in the presence of strong nationalistic traditions in a country, may result in a temporary rise of bourgeois chauvinism. This largely depends on the social structure of society, and the specific features of its working class, in particular, its political maturity and integrity, and its capacity to withstand the influence of the surrounding petty-bourgeois element. Finally, another important thing is the nature of its leading party, the extent to which it has been tempered and theoretically prepared, and whether it has close ties with the international working-class and communist movement, and so on.

p Lenin said that even in those parties which called themselves Communist, internationalism may only be given lip 64 service, while philistine chauvinism is actually practised. He warned that “the urgency of the struggle against this evil, against the most deep-rooted petty-bourgeois national prejudices, looms ever larger with the mounting exigency of the task of converting the dictatorship of the proletariat from a national dictatorship (i.e., existing in a single country and incapable of determining world politics) into an international one (i.e., a dictatorship of the proletariat involving at least several advanced countries, and capable of exercising a decisive influence upon world politics as a whole)."  [64•1 

p It goes without saying that fulfilment by any proletarian party of its international duty is inseparable from its national tasks. The point is what these national tasks are. It is one thing when these are connected with the vital interests of the working people at home and in other countries. It is something quite different if the national tasks of the working people of one country are contrasted with the tasks of the working people of other countries.

p The Chinese leadership’s open switch to Great-Han hegemonism and the spread in China of bourgeois chauvinism and even of racism have their roots in various historical, social and ideological factors.

p China is a peasant country. Masses of peasants, fostered in the feudal and the patriarchal traditions and for centuries oppressed by local and foreign rulers, make up an absolute majority of the population. Fairly recently, a large part of the Chinese population consisted of petty artisans, traders and other non-proletarian elements. That is precisely the social medium which most vigorously breeds diverse nationalistic views and attitudes, which, in definite circumstances, easily grow into chauvinism and even racism. At the same time the spread of chauvinistic views in China is also due to an ideological factor like the country’s long domination by Confucianism and to such historical factors as China’s special role in the history of the Far East, foreign rule, first of the Mongols, and then of the Manchus, and in the last century, of the colonialists from the capitalist countries.

p In the history of China, Confucianism was connected with the Great-Han chauvinistic and Sinocentric idea of the 65 superiority of the Chinese (or of the “Han”, as they called themselves) over all the other peoples, whom Confucianism regarded as “savages” whose duty was to pay tribute to the Chinese emperor. The point is that from ancient times up until the mid-19th century China was the leading country in the Far East and in a sense a centre of culture and civilisation which exerted a great influence on the neighbouring peoples. No wonder China was known as the “Middle Kingdom" (“Chung Kuo”), whose historical documents invariably designated neighbouring and distant peoples as “ barbarians”. For centuries, this Sinocentrism was used by the ruling classes of feudal China, and in the first half of the 20th century by various feudal and compradore groups, notably the Chiang Kai-shek clique, to implant Great-Han chauvinistic ideas and feelings, to spread xenophobia, etc.

p All of this has undoubtedly left a deep mark on the minds of people from various sections of society in China and is expressed even today in Great-Han arrogance which had been fostered for centuries by the ruling circles of feudal China. They held all things foreign to be unworthy of attention, because China was the “summit of world civilisation”. Chinese civilisation was regarded as the highest achievement of the human spirit which had to be spread across the world. The idea of China’s superiority over other countries was put on record in the Confucian canons which commanded great authority in Chinese society. Thus, one finds in the book, Meng Tzu, the following: “I have heard men use the teachings of our great country in order to re- educate the barbarians, but never yet have I heard of anyone being re-educated by the barbarians.” This kind of chauvinistic view of spiritual culture has left a deep mark on the minds of men in different social sections of modern China, and undoubtedly created the conditions for the spread of Great-Han attitudes.

p The Chinese revolution tackled the tasks not only of the Chinese people’s social emancipation, but also of its national liberation, and that was one of its specific features. Over a period of two and a half centuries the Chinese people had fought against the Manchu yoke, and once that had been overthrown found itself facing the need to fight first against the European imperialist powers and then against Japan. This long and hard struggle for national liberation has 66 sharpened the Chinese people’s national feelings to an extreme, and has intensified the feelings of distaste for all things foreign. It has helped to put the national question in the foreground of the Chinese social mentality.

p Consequently, for definite historical reasons, nationalism in China has had two aspects since it emerged—the progressive and the reactionary. Its progressive aspect was connected with the Chinese people’s struggle against China’s oppression by the Manchu aristocracy and the Chinese feudal lords who sided with it, and then with the struggle against the imperialism of the Great Powers, who sought to turn China into a colony. It was the nationalism of an oppressed nation and it was aimed at transforming China into an independent democratic state, and helped to advance the Chinese bourgeois-democratic revolution. All progressives in Chinese society brimmed with patriotic feelings and yearned to drive the foreign invaders from their native soil. These aspirations were strikingly expressed in the revolutionary-democratic teaching of Sun Yat-sen of whom Lenin said: “Every line of Sun Yat-sen’s platform breathes a spirit of militant and sincere democracy."  [66•1  Sun Yat-sen’s teaching, the progressive trend of nationalism in China, played a great role in the Chinese people’s national liberation struggle.

p The reactionary aspect of Chinese nationalism consisted in the fact that since its emergence it has had the features of Great-Han chauvinism and contained the idea of the Chinese people’s national superiority over the other peoples, and an urge for racism and hegemonism. The Chinese bourgeoisie’s aspirations to see China great and dominating the international scene clashed with the country’s oppressed and semi-colonial status, and this served to sharpen its national pride to an extreme.

p The ideologists of the Chinese bourgeoisie held the yellow race to be a special and outstanding one, and believed the Han people to have a leading role in it, and to be destined in good time to establish their hegemony over the whole world. Thus, in a letter to Liang Chi-chao in October 1907, Kang Yu-wei said that if there was “no revolt" in China, it would become the “ruler of the world".  [66•2 

p This shows that the ideologists of the Chinese bourgeoisie saw their ultimate aim not in a prosperous and independent China, which would seek to establish equitable and just relations with other nations, but in raising China over and above the others and turning her into their ruler. This spirit of disdain for all things non-Chinese, this certainty of moral superiority over other nations was fostered by the Chinese bourgeoisie right up to 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek was totally routed.

p The victory of the People’s Revolution in 1949 and the early successes of socialist construction produced in China, on the one hand, a general patriotic elan, and on the other, revived Great-Han arrogance and hegemonistic aspirations. For a number of subjective and objective reasons these feelings increasingly developed into Great-Han chauvinism. Of course, this process would not have had such a fatal character, and could have been stopped and cut short, had a united Marxist-Leninist party, capable of overcoming any anti- popular, anti-socialist ideological and political trend, properly directed the people’s state. However, the CPC was not such a party and, as has been stressed above, carried within itself the struggle of two lines: the Marxist-Leninist and the chauvinist, bourgeois line. Moreover, the Marxist-Leninist, internationalist line fell victim to the anti-Marxist policy of the Mao group. We believe this was ultimately due to the fact that most of the members of the CPC were of peasant origin, while the working-class section made up an insignificant minority. The working class of China did not succeed in retaining its vanguard role at the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution and in firmly taking the leading position in the country at its socialist stage. Mao and his followers, far from seeking to strengthen the vanguard role of the Chinese working class, in fact did everything to reduce it. China’s working class proved to be unable to withstand the pressure of Great-Han chauvinistic ideas and feelings, and to put up adequate resistance to Mao and his followers. As a result, Mao and his followers were given an opportunity to hit out at the CPC and the working class of China, and to push the country on to the way of Great-Han chauvinism and hegemonism.

p The penetration of Marxism-Leninism into China, the making and development of the Communist Party of China 68 and the emergence of proletarian internationalism in the country proceeded in stubborn struggle against chauvinism, which was at the time opposed to the Comintern’s internationalist line. At the very end of the 1920s and in the early 1930s, the chauvinistic views within the CPC were expressed in the so-called Li Li-san line. This put China at the centre of all world developments and regarded the Chinese revolution as the “main pillar of the world revolution”, that is, took the Sinocentrist view of the world revolutionary process. To secure a victory for the revolution in China, Li Lisan and his followers were prepared to sacrifice everything, including the lives of millions of workers and peasants not only in China, but also in other countries, because they expected to start a world war in the interest of the Chinese revolution.

p We have recalled Li Li-san’s Sinocentrism and chauvinism at this point because, first, at the time his views largely coincided with those of Mao Tse-tung, and second, “Mao’s thought" on revolution and war today is reminiscent of Li’s views.

p This struggle between the internationalists and the chauvinists in the CPC in the 1930s was carried on, among other things, over the nature of contradictions of the epoch and the interpretation of internationalism. The chauvinists held that at the time the focal point of world contradictions did not involve the Soviet Union and the capitalist system, but China and Japan. Accordingly, they asserted that internationalism did not consist in helping the Soviet Union to fight the capitalist system but in helping the CPC to fight Japan and the Kuomintang. That is why Mao held the Canadian Doctor Bethune, who had come to China to help the Chinese people fight Japan, to be the model internationalist. There is obviously an interconnection between this early Sinocentrist conception and the Mao and his group’s present-day view of the basic contradiction of the epoch and their view of internationalism.

p In the late 1930s and the early 1940s, the ideological struggle between Marxism-Leninism and chauvinism in the CPC was also expressed in the form of somewhat abstract discussion concerning the relation between the specific and the general, the Chinese and the foreign (just as the struggle between Marxism-Leninism and chauvinism in China in the 69 1960s at one time assumed the form of a discussion on the dichotomy of unity), and then gave way to a broad campaign for “correction of style"—“cheng feng" (just as in the 1960s the discussion on the dichotomy of unity turned out to be connected with the movement for “socialist education”). It is now becoming increasingly clear, especially considering the nature of the “socialist education" campaign that the struggle for “correction of style" started on Mao’s initiative was essentially a chauvinistic drive against Marxism- Leninism and internationalism in the guise of the fight with dogmatism and alienation from Chinese reality. It was closely connected with the establishment of a “Sinified Marxism”, that is, a substitution of Maoism for Marxism-Leninism.

p The ideas which promoted the emergence of a “Sinified Marxism" began to appear in China back in the 1920s. Thus, at the time Kuo Mo-jo tried to show that Confucianism and Marxism had many points in common, and also to prove that Confucius was superior to Marx. At the time he published an allegory entitled “Marx’s Visit to the Temple of Confucius" (this article was subsequently included in a collection of Kuo Mo-jo’s articles, entitled “Laughter in the Underground" which was issued in a new edition in 1950). It shows Confucius as a noble-minded and true sage of antiquity and Marx as a “whiskered crab speaking a pidgin language”. After the talk between the two sages it turns out that Marx had not produced any new ideas: everything that he had said and written had been expressed by Confucius long before. Marx is made to say the following: “I had never expected to find such an esteemed fellow-thinker living in the distant Far East over 2,000 years ago. You and I hold exactly the same views."  [69•1 

p In the early 1940s, the danger of the spread of GreatHan views in China was pointed out by the journal Chungkuo wenhwa (organ of the CPC Central Committee), which was published in Yenan. It said: “All the reactionary views in modern China have one special tradition, and to give it its name one could perhaps say that it is ideological seclusion. As the people’s democratic revolution and the culture of modern China develop, this kind of backlash in ideology appears in different forms, and in accordance with the 70 different stages in the development of the revolution and the different objective conditions this kind of views in contrasted, in different forms, with progressive revolutionary views and the revolutionary forces. However, regardless of the numerous transformations these have undergone, their main content invariably consists in stressing the ’national features’ and ’specifics of China’, a denial of the general laws of human history, an assertion that the development of Chinese society can proceed only on the basis of specific Chinese regularities, that China can advance only along her own way which runs outside the general laws governing the development of human history. In China, this ideological tradition of seclusion ... is a specific feature of reactionary views."  [70•1 

p In the late 1930s and the early 1940s, Chinese Trotskyites, like Yeh Ching, propounded, under the pretext of “ mastering the specifics of China”, ideas which essentially amounted to an assertion of the superiority of “the Chinese spirit”, ideas borrowed from the arsenal of feudal and bourgeois Chinese chauvinism. They demanded that MarxismLeninism should be Sinified. The journal Shihtai chinshen wrote: “There is need to modify the form of MarxismLeninism, and to make it a thing that would be like a new, Chinese thing differing from the original one."  [70•2 

p These views were subjected to criticism in the CPC. The journal Chungkuo wenhwa said that those who insisted on the need to Sinify Marxism-Leninism “implied Sinification to mean a change of its form and by a change of its form a total rejection of original Marxism".  [70•3 

p However, this criticism of those who urged that MarxismLeninism should be Sinified did not mean that the CPC succeeded in overcoming the growing tendency towards chauvinism. The fact is that since the late 1930s, Mao himself was insisting on “Sinifying Marxism”. As we have already seen, the “correction of style" movement had a Great-Han character and was used to hit out at Marxism-Leninism and internationalism within the ranks of the CPC. The 7th Congress of the CPC in 1945 was told that Mao had produced 71 a “Sinified Marxism”. This congress reflected the emergence of Mao’s personality cult and a marked intensification of Sinocentrist attitudes within the ranks of the Party.

p The Soviet Union’s victory over nazi Germany and militarist Japan, the emergence of the socialist world system, the formation of the Chinese People’s Republic in 1949 and the establishment by the Soviet Union of friendly relations with her had a positive influence in fortifying the MarxistLeninist forces within the CPC. This process was reflected and consolidated in the decisions of the 8th Congress of the CPC in 1956.

p In 1958, Mao once again managed to increase his ideological influence in the CPC and to secure the adoption of the adventurist “Three Red Banners" line: the general line, the “Great Leap Forward" and the people’s communes. Since then there has been a noticeable increase in the Chinese leaders’ policy of Great-Han chauvinism and hegemonism.

p At the turn of the century, that is, the period in which the minds of the elder generation of the Chinese leaders were moulded, ideas of “pan-Asianism”, superiority of the yellow race, the idea that the peoples of Asia had a common future, the idea of a pan-Asian Sino-Japanese alliance, etc., appeared in China under the impact of Japanese theories. It is well known that in some historical conditions nationalism all too easily assumes the form of racism, the view that some nations are physically or spiritually superior to others.

p Of course, the Chinese leaders are well aware of the illfame of racism, which has been used by fascism and nazism. That is why they naturally seek to conceal their views which reek of racism. However, they are not always successful. There were already racist, pan-Asian elements in Mao’s idea of the “wind from the East" prevailing over the “wind from the West”. That is why this idea was duly rejected by the international communist movement.

p The Maoist pan-Asianism and racism is most pronounced in their political line with respect to Japan, which they regard as a possible temporary ally in their drive for domination in Asia and hegemony in the world. In a talk Mao had in the early 1950s with Japanese POW generals and officers, who were being allowed to return home from China, he said that China intended to take a dominant position in Asia, and that Japan should not wait too long. He said: 72 “China and Japan must join hands and forget the past.” In 1961, Mao met a Japanese delegation and suggested that China and Japan had a common future. He said: “We share the same destiny, which is why we are united. We must enlarge the framework of unity and gather together in a unity the peoples of the whole of Asia, Africa and Latin America and of the whole world.” In their talks with Japanese delegations, the Maoists keep stressing that the Chinese and the Japanese belong to one and the same race, that they have a common written language and other elements of culture.

This short look into the past shows that the Great-Han chauvinism and hegemonism in the views and political line of the Chinese leadership is not at all a casual development, but that both are rooted in China’s socio-economic and ideological development, and her Confucian traditions and history.