What Is Happening in China?
Pachter, Henry
The Great Cultural Revolution which vents its ire against capitalistic hairdos, blasphemous traffic lights, Western books, and revisionist street names baffles the old China hands in...
...Perhaps they have information that permits them to hope for a "Thermidorian" reaction against the "Bonapartistic" development of the Chinese revolution...
...It was Lin Piao who announced the theory of "revolutionary ebb," and under his direction Hsiao Hua (the security officer whom he fired last year) introduced the army ordinances of 1964, which stated that conditions have changed since the glorious civil war and that the military must now be organized for political purposes, to carry on the revolution at home...
...In either case, the regime loses the support of functionaries who have acted as transmission belts between policy-maker and people...
...The Great Leap of 1958 was the first occasion for a sweeping purge of all those who identified themselves with their wards' interests...
...Nevertheless, for a while the situation seemed to have been stabilized in a triangular balance of power between the top leadership, the Party machine, and the "four classes" at the bottom of the social pyramid...
...This is an optical illusion...
...In the Great Leap Forward, Mao exhausted the reservoir of leftist, antirevisionist members of the Party...
...Richard Lowenthal has interpreted Khrushchev's ouster as a revolt of the Party hierarchy against threatening despotism and lawlessness...
...at present he tries to substitute for it the impetus of Maoist revolutionary puritanism, which must inevitably mobilize the more orthodox Party hierarchy...
...Mao Tse-tung has fought a successful battle against the Thermidorians, the liquidators, the revisionists in the Party's ranks...
...To understand this we must once more reach back into the treasure house of historical experience...
...In totalitarian states, crises produce a different pattern of personnel mobility...
...Either of two things may happen: The regime can transform itself, through successive purges of functionaries who have become too interested in doing their jobs, into a pure military or police dictatorship...
...It was inevitable that in the course of this purge the enemy's image had to be projected abroad...
...The aim has been not only to reorganize every village into a production brigade, but to implant party cells into every one of them...
...He must provide some widening of support at the base...
...The ruling party must of necessity delegate power to certain executive organs, and the party personnel that has to man these must of necessity take an interest in the efficiency of its own apparatus, in the services it renders, and even in the people whom it is to serve...
...the image of Russian revisionism became indispensable in Peking the moment the Great Leap had to be abandoned: the actual retreat from the pure goal of integral Communism had to be drowned out by intensified attacks on revisionists abroad...
...First, to prevent the formation of power structures on the middle level of the Party organization which would be capable of resisting the will of the top leadership...
...ing of revolutionary fervor, especially in the face of a worldwide conspiracy of revisionists and imperialists working together to subvert the "Motherland of the Revolution...
...Secondly, they assume that the dictator (or directorate) is more or less free to manipulate and manage the course of events, unleashing and silencing currents of opinion at will, or creating ideologies as he sees fit...
...the Party had become a mere shell...
...he institutes mass terror against the middle strata of society and organizes new instruments of power which allow him to prolong his own technique of despotic rule...
...a pattern comparable to a contracting spiral which seems to vanish at the top and to be ever renewed at the bottom...
...Unable to attack the imperialists abroad, he can still impose "war Communism" on the Chinese people...
...but, conflicting as they are, they have two important drawbacks in common—they all start out with the foreign situation and work back into the home situation...
...The Red Guards are described as "a permanent revolutionary organization, tightly organized and disciplined—the powerful reserve force of the People's Liberation Army...
...Thus Schurman writes (ibid...
...the dormant element of rich and elders has been replaced by a leadership group made up of young men and poor peasants...
...There must be hundreds of thousands, nay millions of middle functionaries now in their thirties or forties who would like to enjoy the fruits of the revolution and settle down for a Thermidor...
...Maybe we should add a third aim: to prevent a coalition between those old customs and the new Party organizers...
...it fails to recognize the pressures under which a totalitarian dictatorship must operate...
...Thus he built his machine of security agents within the army and then used the army cadres as instruments to control other areas, notably the government and even the Party...
...This is contrary to every previous experience in totalitarian states—particularly in Communist dictatorships where policy is dominated by domestic problems...
...The director of a factory may report that, while he supports the Plan 150%, his workers can fulfill it only by 50...
...But, as Marx said about the coming depression, we don't know when another narrowing of the spiral will occur, but whenever it does occur, it is certain that Lin Piao cannot hold power with the sheer apparatus of power alone...
...A new wave of despotic or terroristic measures is launched to fulfill the tasks the bureaucrats were obviously unable to fulfill...
...but he might as well have enumerated other historical examples such as the Condottiere of Renaissance Italy and above all the popular-plus-police regime of the Medici in Florence...
...I The term Bonapartism seems to evoke not only militarism but belligerence...
...in Stalin's lifetime the dictatorship ran through this cycle at least three times, always losing the functionaries who had occasion to identify themselves too closely with their area of competence...
...particularly in a rapidly developing country...
...Such an appeal may be made either in the name of national defense—projecting an arch-enemy whose eternal threats or active measures of encirclement impose total mobilization on the beleaguered nation—or the appeal may be to the strengthening of the revolution...
...In the end he had only the GPU (NKVD) itself...
...and the regime of Mao Tse-tung resembles most of all that of Shili Huang-ti (247-210 B.C...
...Stalin's death gave his successors a chance to start all over again, and we have seen Khrushchev first inveigling the Party against the bureaucrats, then the local bosses against the top Party brass, and eventually the masses against the Party...
...It is important to note that each contraction of the power base was followed by a new expansion or renewal...
...There are three variants of this theory...
...Thus, the political appointee sometimes becomes an advocate of that sector's interests, regardless of his higher political commitments...
...One might even say more...
...If these "saboteurs" are actual bureaucrats, the Party 2 Professor Schurman, of the Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies, writes in a special issue of the Diplomat, September apparatus is mobilized to substitute its energy and dynamism but, above all, its righteousness for their expertise...
...One, the Chinese command expects or fears that it might be drawn into the Vietnamese war...
...They could be demoted or expelled only by attacking revisionism in general, at home and abroad...
...The seemingly more radical theories of class war are almost incompatible with an effective support of wars of national liberation abroad...
...In the process of this mobilization, it may acquire a set of new functionaries and thereby a new lease on life...
...just as Hitler whipped up nationalism to a frenzy in order to make the Germans accept the sacrifices of soldiering, so Mao Tse-tung imposes a severe puritan regime on a nation that would like to have a little butter but must produce guns...
...Already after the Twenty-second Party Congress it was possible to predict that, between Khrushchev and the Party, one would eventually have to liquidate the other...
...Napoleon I made himself consul for life after the peace of Amiens, and Napoleon III never expected to get into any war, except an easy campaign of "liberation...
...It risks becoming superfluous, or, worse, losing its ardor...
...There is some truth in all these theories...
...He knew it as "Caesarism" or `Bonapartism...
...Caesar reached for dictatorship after he had conquered Gaul...
...The leader of a farm district may argue that collectivization is right for the rest of the nation, but that in his district peasants will work their private plots more intensively than the Sovkhoz...
...rather, they look forward to a period of revolutionary ebb, to the relaxation of tension between the powers and, instead of "protracted warfare," to protracted isolation...
...We know now that bitter struggles have plagued the Chinese Communist party for the past twelve months and that people like the Mayor of Peking or Chairman Liu Shao-chi favored a more moderate course...
...Some clever experts have tried to solve the riddle by comparing Mao with Hitler...
...Hence, we hear periodically of "bureaucrats" or "saboteurs" who are not willing or not able to execute the Party's commands...
...Does he not need the support of at least the 700,000 cadre Communists...
...But where shall Lin Piao find a new body of functionaries to carry out a revolution...
...He constantly narrowed the basis on which his regime was built—while constantly admitting more members to the Party and widening the appeal of nationalism to non-members and nonCommunists at the base of the social pyramid...
...If they belong to the Party, they are called deviationists, and a more righteous or orthodox faction must take matters in hand...
...What is the meaning of these youthful Red Guards who roam the streets and terrorize the workers even at the risk of production losses...
...now he has to reach outside the Party for support...
...And why do grown-up people declare that they can do their jobs and nurse their children better after reading Mao's works...
...Just as, in the early postwar years, Zhdanov undermined the Soviet army's effectiveness through his revolutionary policies, so Lin Piao deposed those generals who had objected to the misuse of the Army for political purposes at the expense of its military value...
...When Lenin first became dissatisfied with the Party's performance, he thought up the 11Workers' and Peasants' Inspections and the first purges, which went along with a strengthening of the Cheka...
...The "spiral" is rapidly narrowing, and the regime cannot find support unless it can once more mobilize the nation for a new levee en masse against the ogres of imperialism and revisionism...
...Lin Piao, on the contrary, placed ideology above discipline, political awareness above military efficiency, and civilian activities above barracks drill...
...For all we know, the Party had made good provision for the case of Mao's demise, and Mao himself may have been a mere figurehead until he swam down the Yangtse River at record speed...
...Two, Sino-Soviet relations are headed for a showdown, and the spectacle of an anti-revisionist revolution was merely staged to foreshadow the final break with Moscow...
...in its savage drive to communize the villages, to extinguish traditional learning, to militarize the government, and to isolate the country behind huge concrete and ideological walls...
...The two doctrines, that outside dangers are relatively remote and that the revolution must be carried forward at home, are complementary and, together with the fact that Lin Piao's power base is the army, they conjure up the possibility of Bonapartism...
...Or else, the dictator may call upon the good instincts of the people to correct the officials' corruption, so as to prevent the formation of a new ruling class, and not to allow any slacken 1966: "Modern organization is so complex that often it is the office which makes the man...
...Mao's turn to the Left has alienated, along with the generals, other professionals— the economists, the literary editors, the functionaries of the Ministry for Culture and Education, the experts on foreign affairs, and even the propagandists and large cadres of the Party...
...people who also may not be eager to continue the regime of the desert fastness of Yenan where Mao welded his first People's Republic, or of the civil war...
...The Great Cultural Revolution which vents its ire against capitalistic hairdos, blasphemous traffic lights, Western books, and revisionist street names baffles the old China hands in Moscow, Washington, and even Havana...
...The rampage of xenophobia, in their view, is nothing but preparation for total war...
...it is a crisis of the Party, and as they would say in Moscow, "it is no accident" that newly promoted commissars have earned their spurs in the police...
...Commentators with a grasp of the inside news from China have studied the career of Lin Piao, heir apparent to Mao, chief not only of the defense establishment but, more important, of the internal security forces, and director of the political-military cadres which now operate inside all government departments...
...Its "Committees for the Organization of the Cultural Revolution" have been encouraged to assume functions of the regular Party cadres . 3 And all this Lin Piao justifies by asserting that the Party is failing the masses...
...If now we turn our attention to the recent developments in China, it all seems to fall into place...
...From this turmoil, Defense Minister Lin Piao emerged as the strongest leader and heir apparent of Mao Tse-tung...
...The Emperor of China, Hegel remarked, is the least free of all men...
...United States...
...But to do that, he will have to rely on a loyal middle layer of party functionaries—people who want to do a job and who want to get along with those whom they are supposed to command...
...Under his guidance, with the full backing of Mao Tse-tung, the army entered into all areas, of economic construction, and Lin Piao gave its political cadres the right to criticize superior officers irrespective of rank...
...Karl Marx first analyzed this phenomenon...
...This is no mere purge...
...As a consequence, the regime may lose contact with the people at the other end of the transmission belt...
...The simplest answer to such questions, that Mao Tse-tung has gone mad or that he fears to lose his grip on the minds of his successors, eludes the real problem: how can a madman impose a dilettante philosophy on 700 million people whose main problem is simply survival...
...This is a real power struggle inside China, a struggle that has nothing to do with the greater or lesser militancy of China's war against imperialism...
...second, to destroy the framework of Chinese civilization which likewise may enable the people to withstand the leadership's demands...
...As a consequence, the country would lose the revolutionary impetus which is the only guarantee of external safety and internal stability for the regime...
...Stalin continued the purges in successive waves of expulsions and executions...
...Revisionism might or might not be a reality in Russia...
...In the name of preventing a Thermidor, he stages a travesty of the Permanent Revolution by shifting the real seat of power from one apparatus which has become too legalistic and bureaucratic, to another which knows no limits...
...The aim of this "great cultural revolution" thus seems to be twofold...
...To a spectator they may seem to ride on a ferris wheel or (if one prefers a medieval simile) to be thrown up and cast down by a wheel of fortune...
...China experts have rightly interpreted Lin Piao's famous speech in the sense that it is a mere do-it-yourself recipe addressed to Ho Chi Minh, almost denying him the kind of aid that might involve China in a war with the s Every organization reform has a power motive...
...nor do they anticipate starting one...
...In parliamentary democracies, government crises result in pendulum swings from Right to Left and back again, whereby the ruling elites may coopt outsiders from time to time to enlarge the scope of government by consent while basically changing little in their composition...
...It is significant that Moscow's propagandists chose, as their main line of attack against the new Chinese rulers, an appeal to restore the Party to its former role...
...Or, alternatively, the dictator may try to mobilize a new levee en masse, renewing the spiral from below by appealing to "the people" or perhaps to certain lower strata of the Party apparatus...
...There are now enough historical examples to allow a fairly accurate description of this mechanism: the dictator, reaching out beyond the organized supports of power—such as the government or the Party—to the unorganized masses, tries to identify their apocalyptic visions with his own political aims...
...Whatever upset the balance this year (and there are indications that plain inefficiency and natural causes are as much to blame as the system)— if Mao was not ready to take the blame, the Party had to assume responsibility...
...The rise of Lin Piao made Mao's dive a major event in the ideological development of the Chinese revolution...
...If giving in to the general yearning for "normalcy" meant abandoning the tight controls which alone prevent utter chaos, those who were advocating adjustments to the people's demands had to be blamed for the failures and shortcomings of the Plan...
...he cut off the Left wing, the Right wing, and finally the whole middle layer of Party functionaries...
...For all these reasons, and precisely because they expected a low tide of revolutionary wars, the policy-makers had to launch a campaign of revolutionary renewal, with old man Mao extending his hand across two generations to the young students, the future leaders of the seventies...
...As Lenin reached out to the Communist Youth League and to the Workers' and Peasants' Inspections, and as Khrushchev called on "the people" to chase the bureaucrats, so Piao is creating his own youth organization to keep the Party in check and in terror...
...In our time we have seen it develop in Mussolini's repeated "changes of the guard," in Hitler's cold purges of the professionals, and repeatedly in the Soviet Union...
...Lin Piao rose to power first as the representative of the Party in the army, and in this capacity he helped defeat the older and higher-ranking officers who wished to make the army into the most effective instrument of defense...
...Three, the Chinese policy-makers really do not expect to be drawn into a major war in the near future...
...Though the village production brigade superficially often resembles earlier forms of organization...
...This assumption is unhistorical...
...Such a period of relative calm would obviously entail certain risks for a revolutionary party that always justifies its despotic rule by pointing to the danger abroad...
...or it really believes its own propaganda that the American imperialists will attack the Chinese mainland...
Vol. 13 • November 1966 • No. 6
