29

Abandonment of the Transition Period General Line
and the Eighth Congress Decisions

p The first five-year period had only served to lay the initial groundwork for a socialist economic foundation. The bulk of the national product was still being produced with the use of primitive, outdated implements, particularly in farming and the farmers’ domestic trades, which in 1957 30 accounted for 54.1 per cent of the gross national product. In industry the share of manufactories based on sheer manual labour (without any mechanical drives in the main production process) fell in 1956 to 13.2 per cent of the gross industrial product, but in the number of workers and production units manual production was still far more extensive than machine production, whereas in most of the inland provinces it also yielded the larger share of the gross industrial product. Official Chinese data for 1952-56 show that in growth rate manual production kept almost abreast of machine production: over that period, the latter increased its output from 22,049 million to 50,340 million yuans, that is, 2.35-fold, and the former—from 4,965 million to 8,321 million yuans, that is, 1.67-fold.^^30^^ Since the means of production amounted to more than half the output of the machine industry, it follows that consumer goods came mostly from the manufactory and handicraft industry, particularly in the countryside and hinterland towns.

p The weak industrial base and its limited impact on the countryside and many areas away from the industrial centres made it hard to consolidate the working class’s leading role in society and effect the CPC general line. The difficulties arising from the low level of the productive forces and the fact that millions of people were engaged in useful social activity only partially or not at all could not be eliminated in the course of the second five-year period (1958-62) and were largely to be resolved only by the end of the third five-year period (1967). The objective state of affairs in the country did not rule out the possibility of antisocialist moves by bourgeois-nationalist elements, who still had a strong foothold in society. In its political assessment of the situation, the Eighth Congress said: “Our national bourgeoisie, including big, middle and small capitalists and bourgeois intellectuals, constitutes a class which ... has been the smallest in our society.... However, both now and in the past, it has always had a considerable influence and played an important role in our society."^^31^^

p Mao Tse-tung himself took advantage of the country’s difficulties. After his defeat at the Eighth Congress of the CPC, which had condemned his adventurist experiments in stepping up industrial development in 1956 (he had urged 31 an increase in industrial growth rate targets from 15 to 30-50 per cent), Mao launched another offensive against the general line.

p At an enlarged meeting of the Supreme State Conference in February 1957, he directed veiled and allegorical criticism against all the basic decisions of the Eighth Congress, offering up in their stead old bourgeois-nationalist concepts from his new-democracy doctrine. Under the general line, socialist ownership of the means of production was to be made “the sole economic basis" and gradually, over something like three five-year periods, socialist industrialisation was to turn China into “an essentially great socialist state”, whereas Mao declared that to turn China into a socialist state would take “several decades"^^32^^ and that, consequently, some other, non-socialist tasks, differing from those of the general line, had to be advanced for the following few years. He continued to attribute some kind of special patriotic feelings to the Chinese national bourgeoisie and said: “In our country, the contradiction between the working class and the national bourgeoisie is a contradiction among the people (that is, non-antagonistic—Ed.}. The class struggle waged between the two is, by and large, a class struggle within the ranks of the people. This is because of the dual character of the national bourgeoisie in our country.” Unwilling flatly to renounce the doctrine of scientific socialism—Lenin’s doctrine of socialist revolution —Mao Tse-tung used Marxist terminology to cover up the bourgeois-nationalist essence of the “new democracy" doctrine and sought to impute capitalist contradictions to the socialist system. He said: “The basic contradictions in socialist society are still those between the relations of production and the productive forces, and between the superstructure and the economic base.” He also came out against one of the crucial economic laws of socialism, that of its proportional and balanced development. Here, too, he pretended to leave intact the essence of the law, although he took a very explicit stand against planning on a national scale, seeking to confine centralised planning in material production to grain alone and leave social organisations and the masses themselves “to work out ways and means" to take care of the rest.

32

p In urging the possibility of China’s rapid development, Mao Tse-tung said that “the decisive factor, apart from leadership by the Party, is our six hundred million people".^^33^^ Hence the need for instant involvement in production of the whole of China’s population, its 500-million-strong peasantry above all, which was to become society’s economic and political mainstay.

p He proposed enhancing the role of farming in the country’s economy and of the peasantry in politics through a hasty completion of socialist reform and reorganisation of farming co-operatives into “people’s communes" rather than through a rapid development of the material and technical basis of agriculture.

p In contrast to the members of higher-type co-operatives, who had small personal plots, small livestock, pigs and poultry, and were paid according to their work, the members of “people’s communes" would have to hand over all their belongings, including household utensils and personal effects, to be used as public property and, instead of being paid according to their work, would be. provided for under an egalitarian per capita scheme.^^34^^ The “people’s communes" were to engage in industry as well as farming, taking part in a “great leap forward" to build up a mass of primitive, pocket-size industrial outfits, small blast-furnaces and steelsmelting units above all. The practice of combining farming and industry within a single commune was also extended to large industrial enterprises of national importance.

p An enlarged sitting of the CC Politburo, called by Mao Tse-tung at Peitaiho in August 1958, decided that the “people’s communes" would be “the best organisational form of socialist construction and gradual transition to communism”, and would “develop into the primary unit of a future communist society".^^35^^ In Mao Tse-tung’s opinion, it was the Chinese farmers and not the workers who had the necessary qualities to become society’s leading force. He saw the farmers’ poverty, illiteracy and lack of scientific and technical knowledge as ideal human qualities and a criterion of their receptivity to revolutionary ideas and their social vigour.

p The countryside was proclaimed to be a re-education school for intellectuals, workers and young people. “33 Tempering by work" in the countryside was essential for the “correct re-education" of town dwellers in the spirit of “Mao Tse-tung thought”. In industry farmers were also to come to the fore. The “great leap forward" in backyard metallurgy diverted over 50 million farmers from agriculture proper, which was more than three times the number of regular workers. Mao Tse-tung meant the “great leap forward" to subordinate town to country and help him implement his old doctrine of the “village-encircled town”.

p The farmers’ lack of organisation and patchy class structure could, in Mao Tse-tung’s opinion, be overcome by introducing strict military discipline in the “people’s communes" and turning them into military units held together by the nationalist idea of building up a Great-Han China.

p Mao Tse-tung’s “new line" for China’s development undermined the essence of the CPC general line for the transition period, scrapping the policy-making decisions of the First Session of the Eighth Congress of the CPC on the need to strengthen the leading role of the working class as the main condition for socialist construction, to carry out a balanced and progressive economic development on the basis of modern science and technology, and to strengthen the fraternal alliance with the socialist countries on the principles of proletarian internationalism. Mao Tse-tung wanted a militarist nationalist state, where the peasantry, a class “epitomising” Chinese nationalism, would be the leading political force. Paramilitary “people’s communes" were to be the primary cells of Mao Tse-tung’s society, working conditions in these communes being established by military discipline instead of material incentive, as in socialist-type farming co-operatives. To enhance the nationalist trend in the state’s development, all things Chinese were to be eulogised, whereas all things foreign—past experience, science and technology, including those of the socialist countries—were to be denigrated.

p Mao Tse-tung promised the people that three years of effort would “change the basic appearance of most of the country’s areas”,^^36^^ that is, make it possible to realise the chief goals of the new line. Hence the charge that the general line for the transition period and the decisions of the First Session of the Eighth Congress (1956) were opportunist and 34 consigned the country to backwardness. But far from boosting the country’s development rate, Mao Tse-tung’s experiments led to a drop in production and threw the economy into disarray. The irrational use of resources and the scattering of equipment and construction projects upset the country’s planned administration. By 1961, many industrial enterprises built during the “great leap forward" had been put in cold storage or closed down altogether.

p As material incentives in agriculture were given up, the farmers’ personal plots taken away and egalitarian food distribution introduced, there was a sharp drop in production. Mao Tse-tung’s experiments, known as the “three red banners" policy (the “great leap forward”, the “people’s communes”, and the “general line”) did nothing to resolve the employment problem or to increase output by switching masses of people to industry and simplifying production technologies (through “abolition of foreign standards and stereotypes”), but worsened the economic difficulties to an extreme.

p A very grave situation followed upon the failure of the “great leap forward" in industry and farming. At the Central Committee’s Eighth Plenary Session in August 1959, a group of CC members headed by Marshal Peng Te-huai, member of the CC Politburo, Deputy Premier and Minister of Defence, came out against the “great leap forward" policy and described it as petty-bourgeois day-dreaming for which the Chinese people were having to pay dearly.

p On the eve of the Plenary Session, Peng Te-huai said in a letter to Mao Tse-tung: “Because of our petty-bourgeois ardour we have easily made ‘Leftist’ mistakes... . We have paid little or no attention to analysing the concrete situation of the day ... and have been too hasty in renouncing the law of equivalence and in providing free food in the belief that we had grain in abundance; in some areas we have abandoned the policy of centralised marketing, and worked to have people eat their fill; moreover, some types of machines have been rashly introduced without expert opinion, and some economic laws and scientific regularities have been heedlessly denied".^^37^^

p Mao Tse-tung managed to brand Peng Te-huai as a “Right-wing deviationist" and remove him from Party 35 leadership, together with Politburo Candidate Chang Wentien and many other CC members and provincial committee secretaries who had come out against him. Still, the Plenary Session had to reckon with the obvious failures of the “great leap forward" and so to reduce the plan for 1959 and modify its attitude to the “people’s communes”. The plan was cut back as follows: the steel target was down from 18 to 12 million tons, coal—from 380 to 335 million tons, grain—from 525 to 275 million tons, and cotton fibre—from 5 to 2.3 million tons. In respect of the “people’s communes" its decision recommended, among other things, consistent implementation of the principle of “higher pay for more work”, that is, a return to the earlier socialist principles of distribution. The decision said it was advisable to switch from the “people’s communes" as the basis of agriculture to large producer brigades roughly equal in size to the former producer co-operatives.

p Still, the overall political tenor of the Eighth Plenary Session’s decisions remained the same. Like those of the Sixth Plenary Session, these extolled the “great leap forward" and called on the Party and the people “under the leadership of the Central Committee of the Party and Comrade Mao Tse-tung, ... to overcome the Right opportunist sentiments among some unstable elements, ... and strive to fulfil ahead of schedule within these two years (1958-59) the major targets of the Second Five-Year Plan".^^38^^

p The “three red banners" policy had its effect both on the state of affairs within the CPC itself and on its foreign policy. Mao Tse-tung’s step-down from the post of PRC Chairman and Liu Shao-chi’s election in his stead were not merely a token reshuffle or, as the communique of the Sixth Plenary Session put it, a result of the Central Committee’s desire to enable Mao Tse-tung “to concentrate his energies all the better on dealing with questions of the course, policy and line of the Party and the state"^^39^^ and to give him more time for working on the Marxist-Leninist doctrine. The reshuffle, undoubtedly, had a deeper cause, stemming from the struggle that had flared up within the Party, the clash between the two opposite political lines, which was making itself felt in China’s contradictory and inconsistent policy at home and abroad.

36

Upon Mao Tse-tung’s departure from the post of PRC Chairman, some measures were taken to get the country’s domestic affairs back into agreement with CPC general line and the decisions of the First Session of its Eighth Congress. Throughout 1959 and 1960, however, these measures were no more than half-hearted and could not offset all the unhealthy effects of Mao’s “special” line.

The Economic “Ordering” Line

p In January 1961, the CPC Central Committee at its Ninth Plenary Session proclaimed the line for economic “ordering, replenishment and enhancement”, which meant suspending all unfinished projects, cancelling new schemes and closing down all understaffed and undersupplied enterprises. Mao Tse-tung’s line in economic policy—priority development in agriculture—was on the whole to be maintained, partly in view of the sharp difficulties in food supply at that period, although Mao Tse-tung himself was not moved by temporary considerations of this kind, presenting his line as an alternative to Lenin’s programme of socialist industrialisation. Industry was geared to agriculture, its main task being to provide for the latter’s needs, something that entailed reconstruction of many enterprises. The second task was to provide for the needs of the population, that is, to build up the light industry, whereas the development of the heavy industry was ranked only third.

p The “ordering” measures led to a marked cut-back in industrial production, but undoubtedly helped to introduce some order into the economy and laid the groundwork for a subsequent build-up.

p At the CC’s Tenth Plenary Session (September 1962) the intra-Party struggle broke out afresh. Opposition to Mao Tse-tung’s line on domestic policy was clearly mounting. The demand for a return to socialist forms of economic management met with wide support among the people and was written into some decisions of the Central Committee and the NPC.

p To add stimulus to agriculture, 5 per cent of the communes’ land was given back to the farmers in the form of house-and-garden plots; they were exempted from the tax 37 on the use of newly worked or long unused land (like waysides, hillsides and ditches); they were also encouraged to breed pigs and poultry on their personal farms and to engage in domestic trades. Farmers’ markets were reopened.

p Even these partial corrections of Mao Tse-tung’s domestic policy had a beneficial effect on the economy. Crop yields and marketable output increased as a result of personal farming (vegetable growing in particular) combined with a rise in production on collective lands in the “large producer brigades”. This helped to improve urban food supplies. The cancelling of new industrial schemes and the close-down of undersupplied and non-paying enterprises helped to improve quality and regulate industrial production, albeit on a narrower basis. Trade was also becoming much livelier.

p Various articles on matters of long-term economic planning were once again appearing in the press. It carried a decision by the Central Committee to enlarge and strengthen the PRC’s State Planning Committee. There were also other signs that sound, socialist forces were gaining influence within the Party. A government report, delivered by Chou En-lai at the First Session of the Third NPC in December 1964, was the first document from 1959 onwards to report some facts on the state of the economy. It pointed out that in 1962-64, agricultural production had reached the level of some “relatively productive previous years”, and that in 1964 “the gross output of grain, cotton, tobacco and sugar cane, and also the pig and small-cattle population, that is, the output of the staple crops and the main types of animal produce will top the level of 1957, the final year of the first five-year period".^^40^^ The report said that “in 1964 the country’s gross industrial production would go up by more than 15 per cent as compared with 1963 to exceed the 1957 level”. For the first time in five years mention was made of a draft national-economic plan (for 1965), which provided for an annual increase of about 5 per cent in gross agricultural output and about 11 per cent in gross industrial output. The draft laid down the task of “solving the remaining problems in the regulation of the national economy, and getting ready to carry out the Third Five-Year Plan, which is to be launched in 1966”. The draft proposed the management of 38 the national economy through a “combination of centralised administration with a broad mass movement”, and recognised the need to “adopt and apply the best of foreign experience and technology”.

p These recommendations meant that within the PRC leadership there were sound, socialist forces aware of the pernicious effect of Mao Tse-tung’s untenable line which sought to put the country back onto the socialist path which proved true by the first eight years of the People’s Republic.

p After the Central Committee’s Ninth and Tenth Plenary sessions, which brought to light some forceful opposition to Mao Tse-tung, the atmosphere within the CPC was such as to make it harder for him to implement his “ideas” even on the ideological and foreign-policy front, where he appeared to be unchallenged. His first move to tighten his hold on the country was in effect the elimination of the CPC Central Committee as a collective Party organ from Party leadership in state and Party policy inside the country. After the CC’s Tenth Plenary Session, Plenary sessions, Party meetings and conferences were held no longer, and the emphasis in ideological propaganda was shifted from the leading role of the CPC to that of the army. “To learn from the army”, “to follow Lei Feng’s example of loyalty to Mao Tse-tung"^^41^^, “to lay down one’s life for Mao" and other similar slogans gave the whole of ideological propaganda a Great-Han, nationalist and militarist bias.

p Having strengthened his personal power, and relying on the army, Mao Tse-tung put forward three tasks: 1) to cancel out the decisions of the CPC’s Eighth Congress; 2) to work towards making China a leading world centre for Asia, Africa and Latin America above all; and 3) to work towards militarising the national economy and turning the country into a solid military camp headed by the army rather than the CPC. This policy was bound to aggravate China’s relations first of all with the socialist countries and the MarxistLeninist Communist Parties, and then with the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, especially those bordering on China.

p The Maoists centred fire on the world socialist system and its leading and guiding role in the world revolutionary process.

39

p Mao’s group sought to cover up the cut-back in economic, scientific and technical ties with the socialist countries by the widely advertised “self-reliance” line, which was said to involve a reduction in foreign trade and other forms of economic ties with foreign states and to ensure the country’s development on a national basis. The only economic ties to be reduced, however, were those with the socialist countries: China’s trade with these went down from $2,550 million in 1959 to $1,108 million in 1965, whereas its trade with capitalist countries increased from year to year, going up from $1,207 million in 1959 to $2,494 million in 1965. Mao’s “self-reliance” policy artificially insulated China from the world socialist system, nullified the decisions of the Eighth Congress and the provisions of China’s Constitution bearing on its economic relations with the outside world and deprived China of the advanced socialist countries’ internationalist assistance, the main factor ensuring successful socialist construction in an economically backward China.

By the end of 1965, China’s domestic and foreign situation was not shaping in Mao Tse-tung’s favour. Wherever the advocates of the Eighth Congress overcame Mao Tse-tung’s “special” nationalist line and returned to at least some of the socialist methods of management in town and country, definite successes were being scored, the wounds inflicted by Mao Tse-tung’s experiments were being healed, and things were beginning to move forward. But wherever Mao Tse-tung’s line had full sway (as in foreign affairs, which were under his personal control and direction), the Party and government were losing their international prestige, normal relations with the socialist countries and Communist Parties were being disrupted and the country and the Party were sliding into isolation.

The “Cultural Revolution” and Its Effects

p China’s foreign-policy failures, the mounting internal difficulties and renunciation of the basic principles written into the CPC’s Rules and Programme and China’s Constitution were giving rise to concern for the future of socialism in China and dissatisfaction with Mao Tse-tung’s adventurist 40 line among the Chinese Communists, intellectuals and the working people. This mood was expressed in writings in defence of scientific socialism and the alliance with the socialist countries, and in historical plays which ridiculed in allegorical form Mao Tse-tung’s ignorance and duplicity. Open protest was also mounting against the personal dictatorship Mao Tse-tung was seeking to establish, and the GreatHan policy in Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Sinkiang and other areas.

p Realisation of the decisions of the First Session of the Third NPC in December 1964 on long-term (five-year) economic planning would have brought the country back to socialist economic methods, so confirming the flimsiness of Mao Tse-tung’s special line.

p That being so, Mao Tse-tung launched a hard drive against his adversaries, who were supporting the Eighth Congress decisions. He set off the “cultural revolution”, whose main aim was to do away with any political opposition to his line, to force the spread of his untenable “ideas”, to assert his undisputed authority, and on that basis to entrench the “leader’s" personal dictatorship.

p In form and method of struggle, the “cultural revolution" was very much different from Mao Tse-tung’s drive during the “great leap forward”. He did not dare rely on the Party cadres and the working masses and so addressed his call to “make revolution" first to the youth and then to the army, focussing their attention on ideological, rather than economic, goals. The “cultural revolution" was to stamp out the Marxist-Leninist outlook among the people and implant “Mao Tse-tung thought”, so that the attack was spearheaded against any vehicles of Marxist-Leninist ideas: the CPC, the Young Communist League and workers’ organisations. The Central Committee’s Eleventh Plenary Session in August 1966, held in the absence of many CC members, was followed by an outright Maoist assault against the Party organs, Party and state leaders (upon Mao Tse-tung’s call to “open fire at the headquarters”), and the constitutional organs of the people’s power. But the attempt to do away with the CPC as collective leader and organiser of the People’s Republic and with the national-democratic system of government based on the constitutional principles of electivity and 41 accountability to the people, met with resolute opposition on the part of the Communists, the progressive intelligentsia and the workers, who were up in open struggle (strikes and uprisings), and it took the Maoists nearly three years to carry out their designs.

p The so-called Ninth Congress of the CPC in March 1969 annulled the CPC Rules, adopted by the Eighth Congress in 1956 and based on the principles of democratic centralism, proclaimed the unconstitutional “revolutionary councils”, established with the aid of the army to include army men and Mao Tse-tung’s trusty adherents, to be the supreme triumph of the “cultural revolution”.

p The Party, which was in effect being established anew, on the principles of personal loyalty and blind obedience to Mao Tse-tung, as well as the new military-administrative organs of power, had no links with the working people and did not voice their interests. The working people were barred from taking part in state administration and economic management through their mass organisations. The administrative system was being supplanted by personal military dictatorship.

p During the “cultural revolution”, in contrast to the “great leap forward”, Mao Tse-tung did not put forward any immediate tasks to change society’s material basis: state ownership of the means of production was maintained in the towns and collective property predominantly in the countryside, both playing the leading part in the national economy. The petty-property and state-private sectors were still of secondary importance.

p Social production, however, was geared to other, nonsocialist goals. The Central Committee’s Twelfth Plenary Session in October 1968 proclaimed the people’s main task to be that of “preparing for war against the US imperialists and the modern revisionists”. For that purpose, Mao’s group laid down the task of “arming the whole people and turning the country into a solid military camp”. Social production was no longer aimed to raise the people’s material and cultural level or to carry out socialist and communist ideals, but “to build up a strong and powerful China”, to spread “Mao Tse-tung thought" throughout the world and assure it of absolute authority. Mao Tse-tung declared that the 42 main distribution principle under socialism—“to each according to his work"—was “bourgeois” and that it tended to give rise to “bourgeois” attitudes among the workers and other urban sections. The struggle against “bourgeois economism”, that is, against the requirement of material incentives in production, was dubbed a class struggle, with the Maoists seeking to stamp out the working people’s “economism”.

p Military control over production, which the Maoists substituted for the system of planned socialist administration of the national economy involving the working people’s organisations, enabled them to freeze or even to reduce the people’s consumption and to channel the bulk of the social product into the military sector.

p The “self-reliance” principle for the civilian industries and farming was regarded as the standard of relations between the state and the working people in town and country. The call to follow the example of the Tachai producer brigade and the Taching oilfields^^42^^ meant that industry and farming were to make do with their own local resources and to manage without any state assistance. By withdrawing most of the product through taxes and compulsory deliveries, the state kept industrial wages very low and eliminated the progressive and piece-rate pay schemes. A wage of 50-60 yuans a month for a family of five or six persons went to pay only for the rationed foodstuffs and consumer goods, namely, three metres of cotton print and a few pieces of knitted goods a year.

p The government also suspended the legislation, limited as it was, on the social security of workers and employees introduced during the PRC’s first decade (holidays, pensions, and so on), and on the pretext of “preparing for war" kept down the people’s maintenance level and enforced a barracks regime.

p The Second Plenary Session of the Central Committee, held from August 23 to September 6, 1970, put before the NPC’s Standing Committee “a proposal to carry on the necessary preparatory work for convening the Fourth NPC in due course”. The Plenary Session was not followed up with any official announcements on the course of the preparatory work to convene the NPC. At the same time and 43 not without the knowledge of the PRC leaders, the foreign press carried a draft of China’s new Constitution. Basically, it reflected the decisions of the Ninth Congress. Like the CPC Rules, adopted by that Congress, the draft Constitution legitimised Mao Tse-tung’s authoritarian regime, proclaiming him to be “the great leader of all the country’s nations and nationalities, the head of our state of proletarian dictatorship and the supreme commander-in-chief of the country’s Armed Forces”.

p The draft was a radical review of the 1954 Constitution, which had maintained China’s alliance with the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries to be a fundamental principle. The draft not only ruled out any alliance of this kind but, on the false pretext of fighting “social imperialism”, sought to inject the Chinese people with feelings of hostility for the socialist countries.

p The draft showed a clear-cut tendency to purge China’s state system of all its underlying democratic principles and to curtail the powers of the collegiate organs for the benefit of Mao Tse-tung’s personal power. Despite repeated mention of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, “people’s democracy”, and so on, the draft did not provide any real rights for fulfilling these slogans.

To attain their ideal of a “nationwide military camp" the Maoists adopted the non-class nationalist principle in assessing social phenomena and laying down policy lines.

Status of the Main Classes and Social Sections

p The working class. The “cultural revolution" has done much to weaken the working class’s position in Chinese society. Following the destruction of the Party and the disbandment of the trade unions and other mass organisations, the working class has been denied any part in the country’s administration or any influence in state and economic affairs, to say nothing of playing the leading role which belongs to it in socialist-type states.

p A point to note is that, having seized power, the Maoists have sought to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of the international communist and working-class movement by parading a desire to strengthen the dictatorship of the 44 proletariat, enhance the working-class’s leading role, and so on. In the three years since the Ninth Congress, however, no significant changes have taken place in the position of the working class. Trade unions and other mass organisations have not been restored, whereas on the new “revolutionary councils" the working class has virtually no organised representation of any kind. Military control groups at the enterprises and the local Party organisations, whose reestablishment these groups have been directing, aim to channel the workers’ social initiative into the study and glorification of “Mao Tse-tung thought”, to foster nationalist feelings among them, and to alienate them from the international working-class movement. The Maoists have been trying to erase from the workers’ minds the most powerful and important working-class traits: proletarian solidarity and the class approach to political phenomena at home and abroad. In practice the Maoist leadership has rejected every form of international proletarian co-operation. All these factors operating together threaten to reshape China’s entire state system. They are also a major source of instability for the emerging regime of military dictatorship and are bound to cause many more social conflicts. The future of socialism in China depends on the role and position of the working class and the ideological strength and maturity of its vanguard, the Communist Party.

p The working peasantry. Mao Tse-tung has always drawn on the petty-bourgeois peasant element in trying to establish his nationalist, Great-Han ideas, and to build a bourgeoisnationalist state of “the new democracy" in contrast to the dictatorship of the proletariat. His policy here is essentially an attempt to deprive the working class of its leading role and turn the peasantry into the chief political and ideological force of Chinese society.

p It will be recalled that this tendency in Mao Tse-tung’s policy was most pronounced during the “great leap forward”, when the “people’s communes" were being introduced as the embryos of a future “communist society”. Mao Tse-tung had meant to militarise the whole country and turn it into a “military camp" by militarising the communes and moulding them into military units, but during the “cultural revolution" he had to adjust his policy in respect of the farmers 45 and to change his tactics; he had not dared start the country’s militarisation through the peasant “people’s communes”.

p Mao Tse-tung’s new attitude to the peasantry is that the “people’s communes" are not being “put in order" and militarised by the farmers themselves but by the army, through the establishment of rigid military control over every aspect of the farmers’ life. “Military groups" and “revolutionary committees" headed by the military are being substituted for the communes’ boards. Thus, Jenmin jihpao and Guanming jihpao for January 21, 1971 carried local reports about the vigorous involvement of the paramilitary “revolutionary committees" in the communes’ affairs. In the course of struggle against the “rehabilitation movement”, that is, against the reinstatement of the “compromised” leaders of the “people’s communes”, the “revolutionary committee" of Huahsian District, Shenhsi Province, to quote one report, had “brought out the class enemies engaged in rehabilitation and helped to carry on Party ordering and construction in the Tatung Commune”.

p Apart from tightening its control over the “people’s communes”, the army, in possession of the best technical facilities and the most fertile lands, has influenced agricultural production by extending its own sowing area. Hsinhua reported on January 20, 1971, that “in 1970, the gross grain crop grown by the army was up by more than 40 per cent as compared with 1969; the pig population increased by 50 per cent; and the vegetable crop was markedly bigger”.

p The Maoists could eventually use the army for day-to-day regulation of production in the “people’s communes”, something that would inevitably further aggravate the contradictions in the countryside. It is the peasantry, which makes up most of the population and which accounts for the bulk of the country’s national income, that will eventually decide whether the Maoisits will be able to complete China’s militarisation and turn the country into a “solid military camp”.

p The intelligentsia. In the PRC’s first decade, many people from the working sections of the population came to join the ranks of the intelligentsia to become workers in culture, 46 science, technology and every other branch of the national economy. A group of Chinese scientists and other specialists trained in the Soviet Union (more than 10,000) and other socialist countries played a prominent role in the creative activity of the new intelligentsia, a vehicle of advanced science and culture and the CPC’s reliable aide in socialist construction.

p During the “cultural revolution”, intellectuals, especially those who took the stand of scientific socialism and played a vigorous part in carrying out the CPC’s general line and the decisions of the Party’s Eighth Congress, were subjected to the worst harassment. Most of the leading men in science, technology and culture at every rung of the ladder, except scientists and specialists in the atomic and other arms industries, were removed from their posts. The intelligentsia’s creative effort, including that in research and educational institutions, was subjected to military control exercised by special “working groups" located in scientific institutions; from 1966 to 1968, studies at secondary and higher educational establishments were virtually at a standstill.

p In the general atmosphere of chaos and anarchy during the “cultural revolution”, the arms sectors of science and technology were protected from the hungweipings, the tsaofans, and other extremists. At the Ninth Congress of the CPC, Tsiang Hsueh-sen, a leading atomic scientist, who had returned from the USA in 1955, was made a member of the Central Committee.

p Over the past two or three years, the Maoists have been stepping up the formation of an intelligentsia that would be loyal to the “leader”. This intelligentsia, drawing on the army and the politically immature young, has now come to play an important part in politics and ideology. Its power and sway lie in the status assigned to it by the Mao group, rather than its numbers, or theoretical or practical training. It has taken hold of all government propaganda media, educational establishments, theatres, cinemas, the radio, television, and the like. It is being guided in its activity by Mao Tse-tung’s closest associates (the make up of this ruling élite is, let us note, highly fluid). In terms of quality, the “new intelligentsia" is well beneath that which had emerged in the course of socialist construction; still, it has done 47 something to rectify the damage inflicted on the intelligentsia by the “cultural revolution”.

p The inferior status of the main body of intellectuals tends to range them against the Maoist regime, so that eventually they could well come to play an active political role and to help improve the atmosphere in the country and strengthen the people’s democratic system.

p The national bourgeoisie. As socialist construction was carried on, the national bourgeoisie gradually lost its importance in the country, although it retained some influence in every sphere of social life. The class has its material basis in state-private enterprise in industry and commerce. Under a scheme worked out in accordance with the CPC’s general line for the transition period, the state was to have bought out the share of private capital in industry and commerce by paying the owners 5 per cent interest on their overall capital, a scheme that was to have been completed in 1962. But under a decision of the Third Session of the Second NPC (April 1962), the term was extended first for another three years and then indefinitely. In material terms the bourgeoisie is much better off than the working intelligentsia: it receives unearned income in the form of interest on their capital, and its salaries are much higher than those of the scientific and technical intelligentsia in the highest brackets. They also enjoy administrative powers at the enterprises (serving as deputy directors, chief engineers, and so on), are elected and appointed to higher state organs (like the NPC’s Standing Committee or the State Council), thereby being enabled to exert some influence on the country’s social life.

p The national bourgeoisie was not affected by the “cultural revolution”, and their representatives in state organs were spared the criticism and repressions of the bellicose hungweipings. As prominent revolutionary leaders were being harassed and removed from state and army posts, one-time Kuomintang members, Fu Tso-yeh, Chiang Chi-chung (died in 1969) and others, continued to be members of the Supreme Military Council and enjoyed the patronage of the “Cultural Revolution Headquarters”. What is more, Li Tsun-jen, Chiang Kai-shek’s most energetic partner during the civil war (in 1948, the CPC ranked him among the major counterrevolutionary criminals), who had returned from the USA 48 in 1965, was free to range across the country, delivering nationalist, anti-Soviet speeches. When he died in 1969, he was given an official funeral with great pomp and ceremony.

p Bourgeois-nationalist ideology in the PRC is vested not only in the bourgeoisie that has stayed on in mainland China, but also in Chinese bourgeois emigres to South-East Asian countries, who have maintained close political and economic links with the PRC. Their influence on China’s affairs is largely due to the many millions they remit to their relatives on the mainland, who are thus enabled to buy short-supply goods in special closed shops and to maintain a higher living standard than the rest of the population. Then there are also the Kuomintang elements in Taiwan, who, undoubtedly, have a ramified network of secret agents in mainland China.

p An interesting point to note is that the above-mentioned draft Constitution makes no direct statement on the future of the national bourgeoisie. Whereas Article 6 of the 1954 Constitution said that “the state sector shall be a socialist one”, the new draft does not define the socio-economic nature of the state sector, merely saying that it “shall be the leading force of the national economy”. This formula gives the Maoists ground to extend the participation of the national bourgeoisie in the state sector on the present terms.

p As Party influence wanes and China’s socialist system is deprived of its advantages, a setting is created for more vigorous political and economic activity among the Chinese bourgeoisie, whose efforts are unlikely to be aimed at an alliance with the working classes, as Mao Tse-tung’s “new democracy" doctrine claims, but at an alliance with the foreign bourgeoisie and restoration of capitalism in China.

p The status of the various classes and social groups in China tends to reflect the shifting political pattern and the unsettled state of relations between the various classes, between the proletariat and the peasantry, the two major toiling classes above all. This is because the people have no clear-cut common programme for the country’s development. The calls to get ready for war, against the Soviet Union in the first place, and the consequent funnelling of a big share of the national product into non-productive military purposes can only have a limited, short-term effect on the people and only provided there is an actual threat 49 from outside, in face of which the people have to put up with some limitations for the sake of the national interest. But because China does not face any real external danger and because the Maoist leaders have had to resort to provocations against and border conflicts with China’s neighbours, the line for draining the backward economy of all its resources to achieve military goals for the sake of the “leader’s" Great-Han hegemonistic aspirations, which are alien to the working people, cannot be popular for long. It is bound to lose support among the people and even among Mao Tse-tung’s once closest adherents.

The substitution of a military-bureaucratic regime for the constitutional people’s power tends to undermine the foundations of China’s social system. Without offering any realistic programme in place of the discarded long-term plans for socialist construction, the Maoists have continued to use the socialist foundations of the economy built up during the first decade, distorting these and actually hampering their development. This distorted state of affairs can, of course, be no more than temporary: in the long run, the social system must settle into some definite socio-economic shape.

The Economy and Foreign Trade

p Despite some industrial advances, China is still largely an agrarian country with an extremely low level of labour productivity. Although its population is one-fifth of the world’s, it accounts for only about 3 per cent of the world’s industrial output. In national income per head of population (about $100 in 1971), it is well down on the world list.

p Its national income is still mainly derived from the farming sector—a state of affairs that is likely to continue over the next decade. A rough estimate based on the actual figures for 1952-57 and the drafts of the various versions of the Second and Third Five-Year plans for economic development shows that about 40 per cent of the national income comes from agriculture, 35 per cent—from industry and 25 per cent—from construction, transport, communications, trade, etc.

p The growing volume of the national income has done little to raise the people’s material standards in view of the 50 structural changes in its distribution: the consumption fund tends to shrink, and the accumulation fund to grow. Thus, in 1952, the consumption fund amounted to 80 per cent of the national income, in 1957—to 78 per cent and in 1971—to only 75 per cent.

p What is more, a much bigger share of the consumption fund now goes to maintain the army, so that in the three years from 1968 to 1970 average consumption per head of population was roughly down from $62.7 to $60.4.

p As for the accumulation fund, a sizable part of it is being directly or indirectly channelled into the expansion of military-industrial construction.

p Industry. Under the current militarisation drive, the growth rate differs widely from one industry to another and the overall growth in the main industries is insignificant. This is chiefly due to the fact that a large part of the state budget is being set aside for military purposes, whereas investment in the civilian sectors is obviously inadequate.

p The civilian industries are still without a single national plan, their administration being decentralised. They still have to abide by the “self-reliance” slogan and to develop on their own, without any state credits or investments, while the whole of industry is centred on building up a military complex.

p In the heavy industries variously connected with the country’s militarisation there is a continued effort to rehabilitate production, which was undermined during the “cultural revolution”. Imports from major capitalist countries are an important source of supply for the arms industry: in five years (1966-70), these totalled about $5,500 million, with about $2,000 million worth coming from Western Europe, China’s main supplier of strategic military goods.

p In 1971, production in the heavy industries was up by 7-10 per cent on 1970.

p The increase in heavy industry output was brought about by the running in of fresh productive capacities at large enterprises, and a build-up of the raw material basis through the construction of big and small mining enterprises.

p The consumer industries have advanced at a much slower pace, for there has been no significant capital construction in that area.

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p In 1970 and 1971, the overall state of affairs in China’s industry somewhat improved. Over the next few years, provided the internal situation is further stabilised, the growth rate could well increase, but not to any marked degree, because production possibilities are limited by industry’s backward technical plant, the grave disproportions within and between various branches, and other factors.

p In 1969 and 1970, and especially in 1971, there was fairly extensive construction of small and handicraft enterprises. These will, of course, help to provide the population with more of the prime necessities and, to some extent, to compensate for the lag in the development of large-scale industry. What with China’s surplus manpower, small-scale and handicraft industries, though less productive than largescale industries, could play an important role in the development of production. This trend is, naturally, bound to slow down technical progress as a whole and consign China to remaining backward as compared with the advanced industrial countries, but under the present conditions smallscale and handicraft industry could well prove to be an effective way to increase the volume of production and quicken investment returns.

p Agriculture. The “cultural revolution" did less harm to agriculture than to industry and transport. The state of China’s farming can be judged from these estimates: from 1957 to 1971, its gross output was up from 60,300 million to 66,500 million yuans, grain production—from 185 million to 215 million tons, and the pig population—from 145.9 million to 173 million head.

p With population growth over the past few years outpacing the development of agriculture, there has been a decline in the per head output of farm produce and the consumption of foodstuffs and manufactured goods made of agricultural raw materials. In 1971, for instance, the output of grain per head of population amounted to 270 kilogrammes, which was marginally more than in 1965 (253 kilogrammes), but still less than in 1957.

p Farming continues to be largely extensive and labour intensive, being based for the most part on manual labour. Only 10 to 15 per cent of the country’s sowing area is being 52 worked by machines. The tractor pool has no more than 130,000 tractors (in 15 hp units), whereas agriculture needs at least 1.0-1.2 million. A good deal of the machinery is badly worn out and in need of repairs, or cannot be used for lack of spare parts. The use of mineral fertilisers is also at a low level, totalling about 10 million tons a year, or 30 per cent of the required minimum.

p Farming machinery and mineral fertilisers mostly go to individual large communes or to military farms in the border areas (Hsinkiang, Inner Mongolia and Heilungkiang). Irrigated areas amount to about 36 million hectares instead of the 60 million hectares provided for under the 12-year plan (to have been completed in 1967). The irrigation network for the most part consists of small and mediumsize installations, built by producer brigades or “people’s communes" at their own expense. Most of the earlier major schemes for irrigation have been shelved.

p The low level of the productive forces in the countryside makes farming heavily dependent on weather conditions. Some increase in production has only been due to the extremely favourable weather conditions of the past few years. Natural disasters like droughts, floods, pest attacks and plant diseases continue to inflict heavy damage on agriculture. Irrigation and farming techniques in China are such that they cannot protect agriculutre from natural disasters of this kind.

p The country’s farmland, far from being increased, has recently been reduced: from 112 million hectares in 1957 to about 110 million hectares, pushing the already low per head figure down from 0.17 hectares in 1957 to 0.14 hectares in 1969.

p Meanwhile, the country has more than 100 million hectares of virgin land fit for ploughing, and large areas in the south could yield two or three grain or other crops a year.

p Past experience shows that agriculture can only be advanced through balanced and comprehensive measures in land organisation and farming techniques. Measures of this kind, elaborated by the best Chinese specialists, were once included in the 12-year plan for the development of agriculture (1956-67), but have never been carried out.

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p Foreign Trade. The Maoist leaders have erred in the belief that losses resulting fron; the cut-back in economic ties with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries could be compensated through broader trade with the major capitalist countries. The facts show that although overall trade with non-socialist countries (3,140 million rubles in 1970) has topped the highest figure for that with the socialist countries (2,574 rubles in 1959), China has plainly been losing out on the import and export commodity structure. In the 1950s, that is, prior to the winding down of co-operation with the socialist countries, China was able to import from the latter any industrial materials and equipment it chose (its industrial imports at the time amounted to about 90 per cent of the total), to receive from them massive scientific and technical assistance and to settle its accounts not only in raw materials, but also in industrial, that is, more effective, goods (up to 60 per cent of its exports). China’s trade with the capitalist countries has a different basis. Many of these have placed stringent restrictions on the range of exports to China. This applies, in the first place, to Japan, China’s chief trading partner over the past few years. The Japanese Government does not allow its exporters to supply China with sophisticated equipment and devices, high-quality metals, alloys, and other vital goods, while insisting on China’s supplying it with coal, iron ore, salt, soya beans and other raw materials and foodstuffs. Here, the FRG is something of an exception. Largely with anti-Soviet aims in view, West German monopolies have been eager to help the Chinese leaders build up the country’s nuclear-missile potential by supplying them with equipment, copper, nickel and high-quality steel. They have even acted as agents by re-exporting to China various equipment, materials and appliances from other West European countries. In the five years, from 1966 to 1970, China’s imports from the FRG totalled $753 million, but China has had to pay the FRG mostly in foreign currency, rather than in goods, an arrangement China cannot find advantageous.

So, China’s trade with the capitalist countries cannot compensate its national economy for the cut-back in its trade with the socialist countries.

54

Growing Crisis of the Maoist Line for
a Militarist, Nationalist State

p Despite the propaganda noise over the “cultural revolution" even Mao Tse-tung’s closest associates had to realise that all the major political and economic propositions of Mao Tse-tung’s line were proving to be failures and consigning the country to backwardness.

p Departure from socialist methods of management and violation of the objective social laws of the period of transition to socialism have retarded the country’s development for at least a decade. The figures carried by the Chinese press in early 1972, even if taken at face value, show that grain output at the time (240 million tons) was actually below the 1962 target, whereas steel production (21 million tons) had only reached the draft target for the second fiveyear period (1958-62).

p The Ninth Congress of the CPC proved unable to come up with any positive programme for China’s further socioeconomic development; its decisions did not even mention industrial, agricultural, transport, or cultural construction. Thus, in proclaiming the neo-Trotskyite doctrine of “permanent revolution”, the Maoists were in fact giving up the task of socialist construction in China.

p But as political and economic difficulties continue to mount, the Maoists, who have removed all opposition and assumed full responsibility for the country’s economy, have faced the task of taking urgent steps to break the deadlock and stimulate production.

p That is why, contrary to their policy-making slogans and propositions, the Maoists have stopped attaching the label of bourgeois degeneration to material incentives, the allotment of personal plots to farmers and their engagement in auxiliary trades. While continuing to pump the bulk of the resources into the military sector, they have begun to encourage small-scale, handicraft industry, holding out personal incentives for small tradesmen and handicraftsmen.

p Mao Tse-tung’s “army” slogans—“learn from the army" and “the army is the main political force"—which have always been at the root of his domestic and foreign policy, have turned out to be utterly unfit for peacetime construction, 55 for their implementation has merely aggravated the state of affairs in the country. Having used the army to destroy the Party, the constitutional organs of the people’s power and various mass organisations, and to impose coercive and voluntarist methods of economic administration, which have enabled them to achieve some measure of success in eliminating the destructive effects of the “cultural revolution”, the Maoists could not escape the fact that the army is incapable of managing China’s vast and diversified economy. Hence these recent slogans in the Chinese press: “The army must learn from the people”, “the Party must become the guiding political force”, and so on. In actual fact, however, the Maoist leaders are still unwilling to restore the constitutional organs of the people’s power or the leading role of Party organisations.

p The political instability inside the country shows that the Maoist line is in deep crisis and cannot serve as a basis for administering the socialised national economy and maintaining the people’s democratic system in China.

p In foreign policy the situation has developed along similar lines. The Maoist provocative line of aggravating the international situation and sparking off and fomenting conflicts, which the Maoists would have liked to whip up into a war between the USSR and the imperialist world, a war they could “watch from the mountain top”, has merely served to isolate the PRC and undermine its international positions. Since their international practices have shown that their “self-reliance” line was utterly ineffectual, the Maoists have in fact come to rely on the major capitalist countries.

p The increasingly acute political crisis of the Maoist leadership developed into the 1971 “September events”, giving the world a glimpse of the regime’s actual “unity and stability”, which Chinese propaganda had so noisily advertised after the Ninth Congress of the CPC. A large group of the highest-ranking Maoist leaders, headed by “Mao’s successor" Lin Piao, faded from the political scene.

Despite the fact that in their manoeuvres and retreats (which are, undoubtedly, to a certain extent of purely tactical importance) the Maoists are guided by subjective considerations, the return to some forms of socialist economic administration tends to precipitate the utter failure of Mao’s 56 “special” line aimed to set up a nationalist and militarist state on the basis of socialised production, and helps to return China to the socialist road with the use of scientific socialist methods in running the country. There is, however, the possibility of another, negative prospect for socialism in China. Now that the proletarian Party and the people’s democratic organs of power have been removed from government, and the trade unions eliminated, while China’s contacts with and dependence upon the capitalist world are on the increase, bourgeois-nationalist tendencies in China, the role of the remaining bourgeoisie and bourgeois organisations and the influence of Chinese bourgeois emigres could increase accordingly.

_ - _ - _

p ^^1^^ Sun Yat-sen, “To Achieve Successes Not Only Through the Efforts of the Army But Also Those of Party Members”, Selected Writings, Moscow, 1964, p. 366 (in Russian).

p ^^2^^ Sun Yat-sen, “Manifesto of the First National Congress of the Kuomintang”, Selected Writings, p. 407.

p ^^3^^ Manifesto of the First National Congress, January 30, 1924.

p ^^4^^ Sun Yat-sen, “Final Speech at the First National Congress”, Selected Writings, p. 421 (in Russian).

p ^^5^^ Ibid., “How Chinese Workers Suffer from Unequal Treaties”, pp. 432, 433.

p ^^6^^ Ibid., “The Responsibility for Saving the Country and the People Rests with the Revolutionary Army”, p. 462.

p ^^7^^ Ibid., p. 463.

p ^^8^^ “Chiang Kai-shek’s Speech on Soviet-Chinese Relations at the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee on July 15, 1929”, Foreign Policy of the USSR, Vol. 3 (1925-34), Moscow, 1945, p. 349 (in Russian).

p ^^9^^ Chin Pen-li, History of the Economic Aggression of US Imperialism in China, Moscow, 1951, p. 103 (in Russian).

p ^^10^^ V. I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution”, Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 413.

p fi Mao Tse-tung, “On New Democracy”, Selected Works, Harbin, 1948, p. 244.

p ^^12^^ V. I. Lenin, “The Second Congress of the Communist International”, Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 244.

p ^^13^^ Mao Tse-tung, op. cit., p. 244.

p ^^14^^ K. Marx, F. Engels, “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 331.

p ^^15^^ Ibid.

p ^^16^^ Mao Tse-tung, op. cit., p. 333.

p ^^17^^ Mao Tse-tung, op. cit., p. 255.

p ^^18^^ Theses for the Study and Propaganda of the Party’s General

57

The implementation of Mao Tse-tung’s line has put the social superstructure out of line and even in contradiction with the material basis of socialised production, so causing political instability in the country and a crisis within the Maoist leadership, which is to blame for the wrecking of the constitutional organs of the people’s democratic power.

_ - _ - _ Line for the Transition Period, elaborated and published by the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the CPC Central Committee in December 1953, Peking, 1954, p. 1.

p ^^19^^ Ibid., p. 19.

p ^^20^^ V. I. Lenin, “Draft Programme of the RCP(B)”, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 114.

p ^^21^^ Theses for the Study and Propaganda of the Party’s General Line. . . , p. 34.

p ^^22^^ The Common Programme and Other Documents of the First Plenary Session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Peking, 1949, p. 10.

p ^^23^^ Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. 1954. Preamble, Foreign Languages Press, 1954, Peking, p. 4.

p ^^24^^ Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Documents, Vol. 1, Peking, 1956, p. 271.

p ^^25^^ Ibid., p. 37.

p ^^26^^ Ibid., pp. 67-68.

p ^^27^^ Theses for the Study and Propaganda of the Party’s General Line..., p. 20.

p ^^28^^ Pravda, October 26, 1955.

p ^^29^^ Eighth National Congress of the CPC, Documents, Vol. 1, pp. 51-52.

p ^^30^^ Report of the PRC State Statistical Board on the Fulfilment of the 1956 State Plan for the National Economy, Moscow, 1958 (in Russian).

p ^^31^^ Eighth National Congress of the CPC, Documents, Vol. 1, p. 71.

p ^^32^^ Mao Tse-tung, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”, Supplement to People’s China, No. 1, July 1, 1957, p. 25.

p ^^33^^ Ten Glorious Years, Peking, 1960, p. 141.

p ^^34^^ Thus, the Model Rules of the Wei Hsing People’s Commune said that it would introduce “a system of food crop supply under which all members of the commune, irrespective of the number of working hands in their family, will be getting food crops free of charge, to be distributed according to the number of members in a family in accordance with the supply rations established by the state”. (Movement to Establish People’s Communes in China, Peking, 1958, p. 79).

p ^^35^^ Ibid., p. 10.

p ^^36^^ Second Session of the Eighth National Congress of the CPC, Peking, 1958, p. 25.

p ^^37^^ Tsukuo, 1968, No. 48.

p ^^38^^ Eighth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the CPC, Documents, Peking, 1959, p. 24.

58

L. I. Brezhnev told the 1969 Moscow Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties: “We do not identify the declarations and actions of the present Chinese leadership with the aspirations, wishes and true interests of the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people. We are deeply convinced that China’s genuine national renascence, and its socialist development, will be best served not by struggle against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, against the whole communist movement, but by alliance and fraternal co-operation with them."^^43^^

_ - _ - _

p ^^39^^ “Communiqué of the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China”, Special Supplement, China Reconstructs, February 1959, p. 1.

p ^^40^^ “Report on the Work of the PRC Government delivered by Chou En-lai at the First Session of the Third NPC held in Peking on December 21-22, 1964”, Hsinhua News Bulletin, January 1, 1965, p. 2.

p ^^41^^ Lei Feng was a young soldier accidentally run over by a car. Official propaganda set him up as a model of devotion to Mao Tsetung, giving wide publicity to his diary (possibly a fake one), which hailed asceticism and self-denial and expressed his urge to become a “cog” and a loyal servant to the “leader”.

p ^^42^^ The Tachai large brigade (part of a “people’s commune”) and the Taching oilfield, which use no state investment, have been presented as a model of economic independence and “self-reliance”.

^^43^^ International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties, Moscow, 1969, p. 160.