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p M. Sladkovsky

p The Chinese people’s real friends are noting the ruinous effects of Mao Tse-tung’s anti-socialist policies on China’s socio-economic development with growing anxiety. During the past year, as at the 9th National Congress of the CPC, held in Peking on April 1-24, 1969, the Maoist leadership had not put forward a positive programme for China’s further development. Attention continues to be riveted to the assault on the general line and decisions of the 8th National Congress of the CPC (September 1956), in which it was underscored that Marxism-Leninism is the ideological foundation of the Party and its guide in the practical work of building socialism in China. Not venturing to tell the truth to the people openly, the Maoists attack the Party’s former decisions with the claim that they are fighting a " capitulationist and revisionist line”.

p Nobody today doubts that the CPC’s programme decisions envisaging socialist transformations and China’s conversion from a backward agrarian country into a leading industrialagrarian socialist state had been cancelled by Mao Tse-tung long ago. Any demand that these decisions be implemented is branded as sedition.

p With Lin Piao as their spokesman, the Maoists repeated anti-socialist, Trotskyite theories at the 9th Congress and in effect abandoned the building of socialism in China, making the building of the new society dependent on the "world revolution”, on the "liberation of all mankind”. The Maoists contend that China plays the main role in the fulfilment of this "great mission”, and that war is the only means of achieving this goal.

p The preparations for war in order to attain their hegemonistic Great-Power ambitions are the pivot of the "thought of Mao" and the foundation of all the Maoist policies. The Peking leaders are gearing China’s domestic and foreign policy to their external expansionist aims and conformably adapting the entire system of state power and the economic structure.

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p With the aid of the army and through open terror and violence the Maoists have disorganised the Party, demolished the constitutional system of power and established "revolutionary committees" as organs of the militarybureaucratic dictatorship and obedient militarised tools of the "great helmsman”. The principal aims and functions of the Maoist organs of the military-bureaucratic dictatorship are to suppress democracy, maintain a "military camp" regime and consolidate the “thought” and personal power of Mao Tse-tung. As Lin Piao put it, the military-bureaucratic dictatorship will clamp down on "anybody who ventures to oppose Chairman Mao Tse-tung and the thought of Mao Tsetung at any time and under any circumstances”. This dictatorship has nothing in common, of course, with the dictatorship of the proletariat, which, as Lenin pointed out, is the first-ever system "to create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority”.  [164•* 

p Militarisation has now become universal in China, embracing not only the economy and absorbing over 40 per cent of the state budget, but all other aspects of public life. The scale of militarisation far exceeds the level needed to ensure the country’s defence. The Maoists are whipping up a war psychosis in order to secure the maximum mobilisation of material resources and foster an expansionist, chauvinistic spirit among the people.

p In this situation the socialisation of the means of production ceases to serve the interests of the people. It does not develop in accordance with a state plan, with the aim of boosting the people’s standard of living and cultural level, while the economy founded on it is subordinated to the attainment of external, expansionist goals. Although state and cooperative ownership remains the economic foundation of Chinese society, it has been placed in danger of being deformed and losing its socialist character. The economic policy pursued by Peking conflicts with Lenin’s injunction that "the aim (and essence) of socialism—the transfer of the land, factories, etc., in general, of all the means of production, to the ownership of the whole of society and the replacement of the capitalist mode of production by 165 production according to a common plan in the interests of all members of society".  [165•* 

p There are two distinct spheres in China’s present-day economy. The first embraces a small group of industries linked with war production and controlled by the central military authority. These industries are abundantly financed by the state, have better equipment and more fully enjoy state services and benefits. During the "cultural revolution" military production was safeguarded against the excesses of the hungweipings and continued to expand with special emphasis on the development of nuclear weapons, which swallowed at least half of the country’s military allocations. Civilian industries are in a different position. In recent years they have not had a common state plan, their management has been decentralised and they have been placed on a selfsufficing basis. They are required to "rely on their own resources”, i.e., to do without centralised investments and credits, independently find sources of raw materials and give priority to the requirements of the army and war production, leaving steadily dwindling resources for the satisfaction of the most urgent requirements of the population.

p There are a number of deep-rooted reasons for this stagnation of industrial production for civilian needs. These reasons spring from the political and economic upheavals precipitated by the "big leap" and the "cultural revolution”. One of them is that the Chinese working class has been removed from political leadership in the centre and in the localities, and another is that material incentives for developing production no longer exist. The purpose of the struggle against "bourgeois economism”, as the Maoists have christened material incentives for boosting labour productivity, is to disorganise the working class and bring the young, unskilled workers into conflict with the skilled contingent of the proletariat. The Peking authorities have closed a number of factories and resettled the “surplus” urban population in the countryside. Besides, workers and intellectuals are made to go to the countryside not in order to consolidate proletarian leadership in agriculture and bring urban culture to the peasants. On the contrary, they are required to learn 166 from the peasants and accustom themselves to farm labour and the peasant way of life. They are becoming dependents of the peasants, in other words, redundant in the countryside. This is by no means helping to "throw a bridge between town and countryside”. It is leading to alienation, to a rift between urban dwellers and the peasants, to surplus and unproductive migration. The Chinese newspapers are almost daily filled with reports about "unauthorised remigration from the countryside”, the "discontent of urban youth with their lot in the countryside" and so on.

p The general state of the civilian industries is characterised by their orientation solely on current production, and by the limited resources for investment, particularly in the extracting industry.

p The fact that industrial production was in danger of being dislocated made the "headquarters of the cultural revolution" take urgent steps to intensify military control in industry.

p In mid-1968, under the guise of achieving "greater unity under the leadership of the army”, a nation-wide drive was started to set up military control at all factories producing consumer goods. Military control was accompanied with the institution of army discipline at the factories and the formation of storm detachments and various punitive organs. With the aid of the army and the tsaofan paramilitary detachments, the Mao group managed to achieve some measure of stabilisation, stop further disorganisation in industrial management and restore a more or less normal rhythm of work at factories and offices. But military-administrative measures have never been the means of creating a stable foundation for the development of industrial production. In the long run they can only lead to a further dislocation of the economy. This is borne out by the following table.

p These figures show that had China continued to develop on the scientific basis of socialist planning, i.e., in line with Lenin’s teaching on the need for planned state organisation requiring tens of millions of people to observe uniform norms in production and distribution, the output of the basic industrial products would have been at least 150 or 250 per cent above the present level. It must be borne in mind that the low level of industrial output does not influence the
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167 OUTPUT OF KEY INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTS IN 1949-69 Targets Actual output of the 2nd (estimate) 1949 1958 and 3rd hve- year plans 1967 1969 1967 1969 Steel (’000,000 tons) 0.16 8.0 30.0 43.0 10 12 Pig iron " " 0.25 9.5 30.0 43.0 12 14 Coal 32 270 400 525 170 210 Electric power (’000,000,000 kwh) 4.3 27.5 120 180 55 60
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development of war industries, which receive most of the state’s material resources.

p The militarisation of the economy is having a particularly adverse effect on agriculture, the principal branch of the Chinese economy. It will be remembered that in China agriculture is the occupation of nearly 80 per cent of the population and accounts for roughly 50 per cent of the national product in terms of cost. Back in the years of the "big leap" the Peking leaders cancelled the 12-year general plan of agricultural development, which called for the building of large irrigation systems, the expansion of the irrigated area, the development of virgin land and other projects in order to increase grain production from 185 million tons in 1956- 57 to 320-350 million tons in 1967.

p With the militarisation of the economy in full swing, the Mao group is popularising the example of the large Tachai brigade, which has relinquished state assistance and gone over to self-sufficiency. In other words, they are demanding that the state financing of agriculture should stop and that peasants should remain content with their own local resources. It is not hard to see that in a situation where the peasant households use extremely backward implements, the peasants are unable to tackle the problems confronting agriculture with their own means, without state assistance and without land improvement on a national scale. As a result, even under favourable weather conditions agriculture cannot exceed the 1956-57 level of production to any appreciable extent.

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p The total output of grain, which is the staple food of the Chinese population, has fluctuated within the approximate limit of 180-190 million tons during the past three years. In view of the population increment the per capita supply of grain has diminished by at least 15 per cent during the past 12 years.

p As in industry, the disruption of socialist methods of economic management and the cancellation of plans for large-scale capital building have held up agricultural development for 10-12 years.

p Peking propaganda cannot hide the fact that the state has had to have recourse to violent measures involving the army in order to obtain foodstuffs from the peasants. Army control has spread not only to the distribution of food but also to agricultural production. In Chinese agriculture a situation is arising in which the work of the peasant is becoming a kind of forced labour and the peasant collectives are deprived of the right to dispose of the products of their labour. In the countryside collective ownership is being increasingly separated from the peasants, while the armycontrolled "people’s commune" has become an organ of the military-bureaucratic dictatorship, an organ of compulsion relative to the peasants.

p In foreign economic policy the Peking leaders are curtailing relations with socialist countries, justifying this by a policy of "reliance on own resources”. This sort of justification has no leg to stand on. It is artificial and its sole purpose is to veil their anti-socialist foreign policy.

p All the socialist countries are building socialism mainly with their own national resources. Moreover, they combine this with co-operation and mutual assistance, which serve as a powerful accelerator of socialist construction. Thus, " reliance on own resources" is augmented with reliance on the economic might of the socialist community as a whole.

p During the first decade after 1949, when economic development in the PRC proceeded on the basis of the general line and decisions of the 8th Congress of the CPC, the economy was financed chiefly from the country’s own resources. Assistance from the Soviet Union and other socialist countries was a decisive contribution towards the development of modern industry, transport and communications, particularly new industries such as aircraft-building, automobile, 169 instrument-making and so on, and also towards raising the general scientific and technological level of production. Consequently, the slogan "reliance on own resources" now adopted by the Maoists is not new or unusual for the socialist countries, China included, the only innovation being that in the early 1960s it was given a new political slant not so much to mobilise China’s own resources as to isolate her from the world socialist system.

p Throughout the past decade the Peking leadership has reduced the share of the socialist countries in China’s foreign trade from 68-70 per cent in 1956-59 to 24-25 per cent in 1968-69. In Peking they no longer venture to blame this rupture of economic relations on these countries as used to be the case in the early 1960s.

p The whole world knows that the Soviet Union and other socialist countries have time and again offered to expand trade and scientific, technological and cultural co-operation with the People’s Republic of China.

p Touching on the Soviet Union’s relations with China, L. I. Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, noted: "The CPSU and the Soviet Government have been unchangeably following a policy aimed at restoring and furthering friendly relations with the People’s Republic of China. It is not our fault that these relations have been spoilt and greatly aggravated. While waging a principled struggle against divisive activity in the international communist movement and against the propagation of anti-Leninist views, we have always been, and still are, trying to prevent ideological differences spreading to inter-state relations. At the International Meeting in Moscow the Communist and Workers’ Parties have reiterated their support for this policy.”

p But Peking persists in its anti-socialist course. Having subordinated foreign economic relations to its anti-socialist policy the Maoist leadership is violating international agreements and bilateral treaties with socialist countries.

p In its foreign trade Peking is currently orienting itself more and more on the capitalist world. Also to be noted is the fact that the ruling circles of capitalist countries are also taking energetic steps to find the ways and means of expanding economic and political relations with China. Japanese policy is extremely indicative in this respect.

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p At the close of 1969 the ruling Liberal-Democratic Party of Japan adopted a fundamentally different attitude towards China. Formerly the Japanese Government refused to recognise the People’s Republic of China and allowed Japanese firms to trade with China only on a non-governmental, private-legal basis (Japanese firms trading with China were denied the use of government banks and other facilities usually accorded in Japanese foreign trade), but now Prime Minister Eisaku Sato has announced that Japan is prepared to negotiate with the PRC Government and that the Japanese Foreign Office has been given the pertinent instructions. Japanese ruling circles are making no secret of the fact that their drive to expand relations with China is based on the surmise that the PRC Government "will adopt a more co-ordinated and constructive stand in foreign relations”, in other words, that it would consent to some compromise.

p The Great-Power chauvinistic concepts of the Maoists, as the “thought” of Mao, are flagrantly at variance with proletarian internationalism and Marxism-Leninism. In opposition to scientific communism and the Leninist teaching of socialist construction, Mao Tse-tung and his group have adopted a "special line”, which has nothing in common with Marxism-Leninism. That is why the Maoists are directing their attacks chiefly at the international communist movement, the socialist community and, above all, the Soviet Union, regarding it as the principal force standing in the way of their anti-socialist line and their hegemonistic, GreatPower ambitions.

p Mao’s "special line" runs counter to the basic aims proclaimed in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China and to the interests of the Chinese people, and therefore has no future in China.

p However, it must be borne in mind that in view of China’s backwardness, territorial disunity and huge population, the present socio-economic processes may be drawn out and follow a zigzag course. The consolidation of the socialist road in China will depend on whether the CPC is able to strengthen its leading role on a Marxist-Leninist foundation, overcome the ruinous effects of the "special line" and win the support of the Chinese people. During the difficult early years of Soviet power, Lenin warned the Communists: 171 “Either we subordinate the petty bourgeoisie to our control and accounting (we can do this if we organise the poor, that is, the majority of the population or semi-proletarians, around the politically conscious proletarian vanguard), or they will overthrow our workers’ power as surely and as inevitably as the revolution was overthrown by the Napoleons and Cavaignacs who sprang from this very soil of petty proprietorship.”  [171•* 

p The anti-Leninist, anti-socialist policy of the present Peking leaders is hitting the vital interests of the Chinese working people and encountering increasing resistance from various strata of Chinese society. This gives the Chinese people’s true friends the hope that in China healthy forces will come forward and bring the People’s Republic of China back into the socialist community.

Izvestia, April 27, 1970