The festivities in Peking on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the People’s Republic cannot cheer up the Chinese people. In spite of the development of a small nuclear armoury they cannot but view with dismay the present state of affairs in their country.
The Communist party, at once the architect and product of a great and unique revolution, has been decimated by the proletarian cultural revolution. The so-called three-way alliance of army men, Maoist red guards, and “reformed” party cadres has failed to fill the vacuum created by the disruption of the party machine at various levels. The members of the newly established revolutionary bodies are almost everywhere engaged in a struggle among themselves. The frantic appeals to unity that the Chinese press has carried in recent months show that all is not well with the regime in China.
It is doubtful whether the top leadership, which has led the cultural revolution against the allegedly bureaucratic, revisionist and Khrushchevite “capitalist roaders in authority” is itself united. Most observers of the Chinese scene believe that the issue of succession has not been settled, that Marshal Lin Piao, Mao’s heir-designate, cannot hope to unite the party behind him, that the administrators headed by Mr. Chou En-lai are far from reconciled to many of the present policies, specially in the economic field, and that they are only waiting for a suitable opportunity to change them.
Chaos
The disarray in the ruling party has seriously affected the administration. There have been reports of widespread chaos in Shensi, Honan, Kwantang and other provinces. The army is able to maintain a modicum of order. But this can at best be a stop-gap arrangement. Meanwhile there is little evidence to show that a serious effort is being made to revive the party.
China has had fairly good crops in the last two years. Even during the three years of the cultural revolution from 1966 to 1968 the authorities had taken care to prevent disruptions of production either on the farms or in the factories as far as possible. But the red guards could not be kept out of factories and they have undermined the authority of managers and trade union leaders. On all accounts the red guards are still not amenable to discipline and continue to clash with workers and old cadres.
In the international field, Peking has not been well placed for years. It now faces a particularly awkward situation. As border tensions have steadily mounted, the Soviet Union has deployed an impressive array of conventional and nuclear forces all along China’s 4,400-mile long frontier with it. Moscow has even dropped broad hints that it might undertake a pre-emptive strike against China’s nuclear installations. Peking cannot ignore these threats, particularly because Sinkiang with its vast natural resources, its nuclear installations and its non-Han majority is very vulnerable. Its communications with the rest of China are poor. The Chinese forces there cannot be reinforced easily. The Kazakhs, Uighars and other non-Han peoples there are restive and resent Chinese rule. It is not inconceivable therefore that Moscow may try to detach this vast region from China and set up a puppet regime there.
China’s attempt to split the communist parties all over the world, to set up a rival centre in Peking and to seize the leadership of Afro-Asia has not been successful. The same is true of its effort to promote the so-called wars of national liberation in various countries of Asia and Africa.
Distrust
Peking can take a more relaxed view of the American threat to its security. The United States has given up the ambition of establishing its military presence on the Asian mainland with a view to offsetting China’s power. It has taken the painful basic decision to withdraw from South Viet Nam and even from Thailand and it is a matter of time before the withdrawal is completed. But Washington has not repudiated and will not in the foreseeable future repudiate its alliance with the Chiang regime in Formosa. It patrols and will continue to patrol the South China Sea. Since the American withdrawal from Formosa and the Formosa Straits is Peking’s minimum condition for a dialogue with Washington, it is a safe inference that Sino-American relations will not improve much for a long time.
Many of China’s present difficulties and problems can be traced back to the Great Leap Forward programme which was launched under Mr. Mao Tse-tung’s personal direction in 1958. It set in motion a chain of developments which split the leadership of the party from top to bottom, aggravated the ideological conflict with the Soviet Union, dislocated the national economy so seriously that China is said to have lost a whole decade in terms of production, and vastly complicated the task of the Chinese foreign office which has found it necessary to indulge in a peculiar kind of adventurism.
The results of adventurism in foreign policy have been highly adverse for China – disruption of alliance with the Soviet Union, stoppage of Russia’s economic and military assistance, estrangement with India, split in the communist movement, decimation of the Indonesian Communist party, Asia’s most powerful communist organisation outside China, and a strong feeling of distrust against China in neighbouring countries like Burma, Thailand and Malaysia. All in all China’s standing in the world was far better in 1958 than it is today.
Any number of explanations have been offered in respect of developments in China since the Great Leap Forward. But central to them is the fact that Mr. Mao Tse-tung and his loyal band of supporters have been trying, valiantly but vainly, to fight against the social consequences of industrialisation and modernisation.
Unlike Stalin, Mao did not launch the communization drive in order to expropriate the surpluses of farmers and invest them in industries in urban centres. On the contrary the farmers were allowed to retain the surpluses of the previous decade – there was a 24 per cent rise in agricultural production in that period. His intention in establishing the communes was to reduce the gap between the cities and the countryside by promoting the development of industries in the latter and introducing peasants to modern techniques. Excessive enthusiasm and irrational haste in setting up the communes proved to be the undoing of the experiment. But it is equally pertinent that Mao was trying to circumvent the historical fact that the earlier phases of industrialisation and modernisation must unavoidably increase the gap between the urban centres and rural areas or alternatively the process of industrialisation must be greatly slowed down. Incidentally India has been facing a similar choice since independence.
Similarly, Mao has sought to maintain the spartanism and egalitarianism of the Yenan period though he knows that Stalin found it necessary to condemn equalitarianism as a bourgeois prejudice in order to be able to offer incentives to the new class of managers, scientists, technologists, technicians and skilled workers for the sake of rapid industrialisation. Mao has depended instead on political indoctrination, mass pressure and appeal to the moral sense of the people.
Contempt
Mao has maintained a continuous struggle against the bureaucratisation of the party apparatus and the administration in the face of the universal experience that such a development is, to a certain extent, unavoidable in industrialising and industrialised societies. He has nothing but contempt for all kinds of elites though he must know that no other modem society has been able to do away with these privileged groups. He has sent millions of educated youth to the countryside because he is determined to bridge the gulf between intellectual and manual work and to prevent the rise of a privileged intelligentsia.
As was only to be expected this effort to perpetuate the élan of the Yenan period, to dispose of the legacy of China’s past which favoured the literati, the bureaucrat and the city folk, and to eliminate the social consequences of industrialisation, has proved to be a costly failure. But Mao is not likely to give up the effort so long as he is in command.
There are so many imponderables in the Chinese situation and so little is known about that country that it is impossible to predict the future course of events there. But it is a reasonable assumption that the contradictions that are built into the very structure of Chinese communism – an agrarian movement wanting to build a powerful industrial State – will not disappear with Mao s death. Mao himself has avoided the choice. He has in fact sought to reconcile the irreconcilable – nuclear weapons and guerilla warfare, heavy industries and backyard furnaces, modern technology and the Chinese equivalent of basic education, democratic centralism and local initiative and so on. His successors will have to battle with these contradictions for decades and learn to live with them. The chances are that Chinese communism will remain quite distinct from Soviet, Yugoslav or other variants of European communism.
It can also be said with a measure of certainty that Chinese nationalism will not be satisfied with anything less than the status of a super-power. Peking’s progress towards that goal will be slow and painful but it will not abandon the course on which it is already set. The strategy and tactics will change from time to time but the objective will remain the same – to restore to China its central place in the world.
The Times of India 1 October 1969