The Cultural Revolution

...It was a power struggle too between the advocates of advanced military technology, such as Lo Jui-ch'ing, who was early removed as Army Chief of Staff, and those like Lin Piao who advocated a psychological mobilization in the spirit of Mao's dictum that "men are more important than weapons," to recapture something of the guerrilla ethos of Yenan, and to prepare the country for what in 1965 seemed to be the real possibility of war with Russia or America or both...

...It is clear, however, that the policy of "pas d'ennemis 'h gauche" was not in favor in Peking in 1968, although one can get around it as Daubier (or William Hinton, who has written of the student warfare at Tsinghua) does, by following Peking's view of ultraleftism as being actually reactionary...

...Two more books, both in paperback, both written for the general reader, have recently appeared, and they are interesting, not only for what they say about those years, but because they were written by men who were in China at the time, and can thus serve to test bow far, if at all, an actual presence in Peking makes possible a more penetrating vision than can be achieved by those who can only "peep through the Hongkong keyhole...

...It is probably true that Americans in particular and foreigners in general are ill-informed about China...

...He makes quite clear the fact that the course of the Revolution veered several times from left to right and back again, but throughout these changes of direction, Mao's policy, in his view, remained firm and unswerving...

...We have been assured by at least two directors of that agency that it had nothing to do with Watergate, but we know that it had some part and we need to know completely what that part was...

...By the time Daubier left China in 1968, despite some sporadic violence, there was a clear trend towards pragmatism and moderation on the part of the Mao-Chou leadership, which included a curbing of the Red Guards and the radicals...

...Here is a man whose career in the Party goes back to the mid-twenties, who was a hero of the Long March and the anti-Japanese war, who had served as Minister of Defense since 1959, and who was designated by name ten years later as Mao's "close comrade-in-arms and successor...

...Yet the scope of these two books, both in terms of coverage and of questions raised, is far smaller than, for instance, Stanley Karnow's study, Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution (Viking Compass, paperback, $3.95, 1973), an account written from Hongkong and Harvard with all the paraphernalia 29 November 1974:210 of the outside China-watcher...

...Indeed, the book reflects the fact that at the time of its writing, the cult of Mao was still near its height...

...No judgment is made that is not in accordance with that of the Maoists, and no questions are raised that might embarrass the Maoists...

...Unfortunately Esmein's publishers did not prevail upon him also to update his book for the transatlantic edition, for his comments on the evolution of China since 1969 would be worth having...

...In Mao's view, after Stalin's death, the Soviet Union suffered from something more than simply a hardening of its revolutionary arteries...

...It may simply be that Daubier (and to a far lesser extent Esmein) allow politics to obscure their vision, and it is quite possible that men with a more detached view, had they been permitted to live in Peking at the time, would have written more widely ranging books...

...Yet I wonder whether it does full justice to another of the contradictions within Maoism itself...

...Presumably the work of a scholarly or a journalistic investigator must be judged in large part in terms of the kinds of questions he raises, whether or not he is able to answer them, and he must be faulted if he is unwilling to go beyond either the questions or the answers provided by the local political authorities...

...perhaps, anomalous though it may sound, they are questions which can be asked only by those who stand far enough away from Peking to see it clearly...

...The American relationship with Taiwan has been profitable as well, both as a training Commonweal: 207 ground for language students, and for the opportunities for Americans to use the archives which the Nationalists brought with them in 1949...

...The first book is Jean Daubier's A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Vintage, $2.45, 1974...

...The anomaly is that Daubier unwittingly confirms the quite inaccurate western view of Mao's China as a personal dictatorship of the kind familiar to Europe...

...Even if Haldeman and Ehrlichman go to prison, Watergate should not be put behind us...

...Esmein's most interesting interpretation of these years lies in his belief that the Party center, despite some close calls, never quite lost control of the Revolution...

...The kinds of privileges for foreigners to do archival research, for instance, which are commonplace in western countries, and which exist even in the Soviet Union, have been almost unknown in China, and despite Mr...

...the Great Helmsman was deflected from his course neither by the winds of ultraleftism nor the "adverse countercurrents" of rightism...

...Yet in the same paragraph he pointed out not only that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," but that "all things [presumably including the Party] grow out of the barrel of a gun...

...be difficult to find many scholars from, say, Britain or Switzerland or Scandinavia (all of whom recognized the People's Republic in 1950) who have fared better than their American counterparts...

...The result is to picture a Cultural Revolution run by Mao, in which the Chairman appears as supreme strategist, planning the attack on the historian Wu Han in 1965, which began things, giving his enemies in the Peking municipal government (like P'eng Chen) and in the national leadership (lik e Liu Shao-ch'i and T'ao Chu) enough rope to wind around their revisionist necks and hang themselves...

...Now there are some very real contradictions within Maoism, and Mao himself has in the past, with an honesty uncharacteristic of ordinary dictators, called attention to at least some of them...

...Felix Greene, for instance, talks of a "curtain of ignorance" erected to prevent us from learning the truth about China, and William Hinton writes of a "virtual boycott of news about China" in the years before the ping-pong visit of 1971...

...His Mao (who appears far less frequently than Daubier's) is a man who also remains steady through the twists and turns of the Revolution (although that is not true of his wife, Chiang Ch'ing, whom Esmein sees as having come under ultraleftist influence in 1967...

...One area that needs further investigation is the role of the CIA...

...These attacks seem to be part of the unfinished business of the Cultural Revolution, which was theoretically brought to an end by the 1969 Congress, but which, as the Lin Piao affair showed (and he was by no means the only high official to fall from grace) brought no longterm settlement to the questions which had been so furiously debated and fought over since 1965...

...Daubier's addendum, written in 1973, shows that he is clearly shocked by the Lin Piao affair, which he manfully tries to explain by suggesting a linking between Lin and the ultraleft May 16 Group...

...And yet some questions remain above debate...

...In some ways the agency's involvement in Watergate is more frightening than its murder of Salvador Allende, for it shows that the CIA, despite its charter, is perfectly prepared to do to Americans all the nasty Commonweal: 211...

...Some of the scholarship undoubtedly has been undertaken for reasons less than admirable, and reflects a cold-warrior outlook, but some has been remarkably friendly as well, showing a deep sympathy for a land and a people whom the authors have often never been allowed to see...

...And it was also what its name implied: a revolution in culture...

...It would be interesting to know what Daubier would make of this, and whether he would raise the question which cries out to be asked...

...Are we really to believe, as Peking now tells us, that he had always been a rightist...

...visas are extremely difficult to obtain, and for the few who are permitted to visit China, and the even fewer who are allowed more than the routine three- to six-week trip, the conditions for study are extremely difficult...

...But the fault does not lie with the American China scholars whom Professor Lattimore dismisses so cavalierly...

...And like the images which dictators build of themselves, Daubier's Mao has a monopoly on morality...

...What we might see as a swing to the center, Daubier dutifully records as the "victory of the left...

...Hence the official accounts made it sound as if it really did matter whether Mao or Liu emerged triumphant from the Central Committee infighting, and made the power struggle seem very important indeed...

...what really lies behind the disappearance of Lin Piao...

...His point, of course, is that it was not the real left, but only the "ultraleft," such as the Tsinghua student leader K'uai Ta-fu, and members of the Cultural Revolution Group such as Wang Li and Ch'i Pen-yu, who were responsible for the violence and subsequently fell...

...he is now characterized as an out-and-out rightist, a "revisionist" who sought to "restore capitalism," "reinstate the landlord and bourgeois classes," "institute a feudalcomprador-fascist dictatorship" (which suggests ties to the Kuomintang) and to "capitulate to Soviet revisionist social imperialism...

...Indeed, as anyone who has tried to visit China recently can attest, the country is far from being open...

...Or did life in Peking in those years tend to turn one towards the orthodox sources...

...And yet when all is said and done it is precisely this aspect on which they too concentrate...

...There is, for instance, a contradiction between the role of the leader, and the policy of reliance on the masses, and it comes out particularly in popular discussion and debate of political and ideological issues...

...The Cultural Revolution was an event of considerable importance in recent history, and can be interpreted in a variety of different ways...

...He points out that while the Party was forced to rely on Army intervention after January 1967, it was the party organization within the Army which provided an organizational coherence to the movement and which, with the leadership group in the Party center, acted as a nucleus around which the CCP could be rebuilt later...

...Finally, both these authors deprecate, quite correctly, the common western view of the Revolution as power struggle pure and simple...

...It is a relief to turn from this kind of writing (and Daubier's style is often like that of the Peking Review) to another work by another Frenchman, Jean Esmein's The Chinese Cultural Revolution (Anchor, $2.75, 1973...

...Hence despite the disabilities under which the China scholars work, both in America and elsewhere, we have seen nevertheless the appearance of enormously useful and understanding studies of modern China by men and women such as Benjamin Schwartz, Mary Wright, Stuart Schram, Franz Schurmann and others, and if we remain ignorant of the main outlines of the story, we can blame only ourselves, and not any illusory "curtain of ignorance...

...The chief trouble with his book is simple: Daubier was a China-watcher within China who did not keep his eyes open...

...For years the American ConsulateGeneral in Hongkong has published translations of Chinese press articles, and a number of American libraries have first-rate Chinese collections, all of which have compensated to some degree for the impossibility of visiting the mainland...

...It is of course impossible to defend a policy whereby for so many years the State Department insisted that Americans be forbidden to visit China...

...who in turn brought in even freakier subordinates until the chain included horrid little men like Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy...

...A year ago, that was all right...

...By the time of the Party Congress the following April, a surface harmony had been restored, a harmony marked by a significant increase in military participation in both Party and government, and the rebuilding could begin...

...Prevented by Ford from getting at the real criminal, the voters took out their wrath and disgust on the only available surrogates--another Nixonian idea that lives on in the new age...

...Perhaps the one major fault which the China scholars can be accused of is that, with a few notable exceptions (such as Schram's Penguin biography of Mao Tse-tung) there have not been enough "popular" studies of China published, books written with the scholar's knowledge, but for an audience wider than that of the university press monographs...

...Today party rebuilding continues, but it is by no means clear that in 1967 and 1968 the Party really did command the gun, and the Lin Piao affair probably is evidence of some of the severe tensions existing between Army and Party, for when that famous Trident jet went down in Mongolia in 1971, besides Lin Piao there seem to have been other top military leaders aboard...

...It was in part a power struggle between the Maoists and the followers of Liu Shao-ch'i, the so-called "capitalist roaders," who urged a more rationalized and carefully administered approach to the economic problems after the failures of the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950's...

...Since we have paid amounts still not fully calculated for the Watergate expereicne, we would be foolish to put it behind us without learning all we can from it...

...He was determined to prevent this in China, and a revolution in the superstructure would help (as he hinted to Edgar Snow in 1965) by mobilizing the youth who had grown up since 1949, giving them vicariously a sense of what their fathers had gone through during the heroic years of the Long March and the wars against Japan and the Kuomintang...

...He is less reticent than Daubier about admitting the outbreak of violence in 1967 and 1968, and unlike Daubier, is quite willing to admit that there were perfectly natural tensions between the student vanguards of the Revolution and the workers and peasants whom they sought to evangelize...

...Whether that is the case or not, however, putting Watergate behind us is the last thing in the world we ought to do with it...

...One could make the case, in fact, that in both quantitative and qualitative terms the United States leads the western world in serious study of modern China...

...last August, however, Chou En-lai anCommonweal: 209 nouneed that Lin was no longer considered to be "ultraleftist" or even "left in form but right in essence...

...But if this is true, and if the attacks against Liu Shaoch'i in the mid-sixties, or against Lin Piao today are to be taken at face value, if we really are to believe (as the Peking Review told us on February 8th) that Lin decorated his bedroom with maxims from Confucius, then we might as well stay home and get our news from the official journals...

...the talk of the "struggle between two roads" was put in terms of divergences between individual members among the leadership...

...It is conceivable that the widespread defeat of Republicans in the elections accomplished just that...

...Lattimore's implications, it would NICHOLAS R. CLIFFORD is an associate pro~essor o~ history at Middlebury College in Vermont...

...In 1938 Mao wrote that "the Party commands the gun and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party...

...The system as system was all geared up to try Hunt and Liddy and the Fritos banditos for a burglary committed out of thin air and for no particular reason except a taste for burglary...

...Foundation grants have been generous in supporting the work of scholars "ferreting about" the research libraries and archives outside China, and underwriting the publication by university presses of important works which would never earn a profit for their publishers...

...The reason, I think, is simple: Chinese propaganda at the time played up the rivalry between Mao Tse-tung and Liu Shao-ch'i, the personal aspect of the revolution...

...He did more than that, however, and on leaving Peking he read and used a number of Japanese and western studies of the movement, which give him a perspective Daubier lacks (Daubier seems to have restricted his outside reading to--besides Esmein--Edgar Snow and William Hinton, men who, despite their admirable qualities as reporters, were hardly likely to encourage him to ask any difficult questions about the nature of the revolution and its leadership...

...They are questions which I think have been dealt with more satisfactorily by China-watchers like Kamow...

...He details the events of the years 19651969 in a curiously lifeless way, and while he makes few references to his sources, it is apparent that he relies heavily on the official version of events...

...THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION NICHOLAS R. CLIFFORD The view from Peking Some years ago Owen Lattimore complained of what he called "the bleakness that has year by year been eroding American studies of China since the Americans cut themselves off from that country," a policy, he maintained, which reduced American scholars to "peeping through the Hongkong keyhole or . . . ferreting about among the thousands of tons of published and unpublished Chinese material in their libraries and research institutions...

...We come out of this then with a mixed balance sheet on the questions of whether such studies profit from the presence of their authors in Peking...

...it was actually backsliding into capitalism, reversing what a more orthodox Marxist-Leninist might see as the inevitable forward trend of history towards socialism...

...Watergate as freak show misses everything that's important about it...

...Esmein served as press attach6 in the French embassy from December 1965 until June 1968, and while again he never really raises the ultimate questions behind Mao's policies, neither does he condemn them _9 in advance as "sterile...

...The revolutionary wave which had gathered through 1966 crested in the summer of 1967, a time which saw the radicals at the height of their power, until the outbreak of a virtual anti-revolutionary mutiny by some army units in the industrial center of Wuhan in July...

...Daubier is a Frenchman who went to China in April 1966, as the Revolution was beginning, to teach and to work for the French edition of the Peking Review, before returning to France in 1968...

...the words "Mao" or "Maoist" appear on almost every page, usually more than once, bringing to mind the story told of the orders issued by MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo that the writers of the official history of the Occupation must mention the general's name on every page...

...during the Hundred Flowers campaign of 1957, it was made quite clear that the absolutely fundamental points such as the validity of Mao's thought, or the leadership of the Communist Party, were not at issue...

...and if so, what does that say about the situation in which he rose to leadership...

...The students and workers of Esmein's book respond to natural human stimuli...

...There are many reasons for this production, and money is one of them...

...It is a view borne out by the fact that China has not, as some feared she would, succumbed to military government...

...But it is absurd to pretend (as, for instance, Han Su-yin does) that "China is not isolated except by the exertions of others to isolate her...

...Here is a man who seems to have profited from his stay in China, by being able to read and report on many of the unofficial publications which flourished in China at the time...

...many are thoroughly devoted to the cause, some of them (even in the Maoist camp) are guilty of opportunism, a kind of revolutionary careerism, and many, perhaps most, at one time or another are confused by a political situation in which the course of the Revolution's leadership is unclear, and virtually every faction claims to speak from a Maoist standpoint...

...The complaint is a common one, of course...

...Daubier quite rightly points out that the problem for the leader here is to integrate the forces released by an aroused population into his own strategy, without ruining their spontaneity on the one hand, or without allowing them to become diverted into "sterile" (Daubier's word) discussion of the revolution's goals on the other...

...Now that the freaks have been ousted, the theory continues, we can all rest easy because now we know the system works...

...DOWNSTREAM FnOM WATER(;ATE FRANK GETLEIN The uses of anti-Communism Gerald Ford, along with most Republican candidates, has been urging the nation to "put Watergate behind us," as, for that matter, Richard Nixon used to do...

...The system as system has, in fact, allowed the head freak to retire to palatial exile and prepare for a comeback either in person or as an inspiring myth-figure who selflessly resigned for the good of the country when he failed to get a vote of confidence, presumably in the House of Commons because that's where they have those things...

...By and large they too have been denied direct access to sources within China herself, and like Americans, they are forced to depend on collections of material in Hongkong, in Taiwan and the West...

...China would seem to be a society in which political participation is not only allowed but well-nigh required, and at least since the Yenan years, it has become an integral part of social mobilization...

...the Chairman's enemies, both on the right and ultraleft, "persecute," "murder," and use "underhanded methods," sometimes even going on "savage nocturnal forays" armed with iron bars and bicycle chains, while the Maoists rely on education and persuasion rather than force...

...If experience is the best teacher, it is also the most expensive teacher...

...Actually, of course, we know nothing of the sort...

...Mao has never been a strict economic determinist, and has always made it perfectly clear (in Marxist terms) that there are conditions under which the ideology and superstructure, rather than the economic base, can play the principal and decisive role in a society's development...

...But there were some very real questions which transcended this rivalry, questions dealing ultimately with the Maoist vision for China, and with the immediate and long-range effects of the Revolution itself...

...The operating theory behind this treatment is that the head freak naturally surrounded himself with fellow-freaks FRANK GETLEIN, author o! Playing SoMier--A Diatribe, is criticat-large o/the Washington Star-News...

...I bring up these reflections because since last spring there have again been indications of problems arising within the Chinese leadership, problems which will be exacerbated by the illness of Chou En-lai, and once again observers of China have been trying to read between the lines of the latest reports from the Peking government, searching for clues with which to understand the situation...

...His book was published in France in 1971, but the author has updated it through a number of postscripts written in 1973 for the American edition, and has also been provided with a glowing preface by Han Su-yin, a writer who has done much (sometimes with more enthusiasm than accuracy) to popularize the cause of the new China in the West...

...Esmein spends more time than does Daubier on the situation outside Peking, although places like Szechwan, Yunnan and Sinkiang, where the Revolution ran into trouble, are slighted...

...As if deliberately to make that educational process as difficult as possible, the press and the politicians have all but unanimously treated the whole affair as if it were some kind of psychological freak show...

...That autumn the Army, which in January had been ordered to "support the left" in the Revolution, came down more firmly on the side of law and order, and while there were new outbreaks of violence in the summer of 1968, by autumn "ultra-leftism" was being strongly condemned, and the guiding Cultural Revolution Group in Peking was purged of its more radical members...

...Mass participation in politics is desirable, in short, but becomes "sterile" when questions of ultimate ends are debated, and hence Daubier leaves them unasked...

...29 November 1974:208 The Cultural Revolution from its very inception gave rise to an enormous literature, some very good, some very bad, some of it written in the arcane language of China-watchers for other China-watchers, and some written for popular consumption...

...But Esmein's Mao is a human being, subject to emotions such as anger and disappointment, and his participants in the Revolution are human too, not simply the smiling workers, peasants and soldiers familiar to readers of the China Pictorial and China Reconstructs...

...At its Tenth Congress in August 1973 the Chinese Communist Party adopted a new constitution which warned that there would be revolutions like the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s "many times" in the future, and since late last year there has been a mounting campaign directed primarily against Lin Piao, the former Defense Minister who died mysteriously in September 1971, after having been named Mao's heir during the Ninth Party Congress of April 1969, and against Confucius, the philosopher of the 5th century B.C., in whose name many of the ideals and institutions of traditional China were developed...