Mao's Third Civil War?
Pachter, Henry
It is necessary to date one's commentaries on China; the events are overtaking us, and only by sheer luck did our articles in the two preceding issues remain topical until they were in the hands...
...This reminiscence may have been invoked when Liu Shao-chi and Teng Hsiao-ping were removed from their posts as President and Party Secretary, respectively...
...All Mao's "thoughts" contain no proper analysis of the conditions which gave him the unexpected victory, and he still thinks it was due only to Spartan virtues and correct ideology...
...He participated in the first phase of the Chinese revolution, which led from the coalition between the Communists and the Kuomintang to the slaughter of the former by the latter...
...For indeed, the whole settlement has been served up with a sauce of patriotic gore and to the accompaniment of a war scare...
...Its function was to invade the Convention from time to time and to impose on it the laws that "the people" desired...
...Hence, Mao may win many temporary victories...
...In fact, it has not been possible to publish a plan which has any likelihood of being fulfilled, and this alone may have been a sufficient signal for Mao Tse-tung to unleash the new wave of revolution...
...Therefore, while it still may be helpful to compare the Party hierarchy with the "Thermidorians" and the Maoists with either the Commune or the Bonapartists, it really might be preferable to treat the Chinese revolution as a thing by itself and to consider Mao's model of the revolutionary state quite apart from historical precedents...
...Moreover, it seems that some Red Guards loyal to the Party hierarchy have tried to outflank Mao on the Left, hurling charges of "sabotage" and "capitalist ways" at his own henchmen...
...We have ideological anarchy on top of the anarchy of power, and the lack of ideological precision in this game of mutual recriminations seems to reflect an uncertain grip on the problems Mao proposes to solve and on the apparatus with which he proposes to solve them...
...Stalin, surely, killed his adversaries or humiliated them...
...Mao's romantic despotism has this touch of Bakunin in it, but while Bakunin usually left the revolutions in which he became involved, Mao constantly returns to them...
...Most bewildering of all, none of this seems to fit into any organized scheme of ideological order...
...In my earlier articles I may have looked too much for close parallels in Soviet history or in the history of the French revolution...
...He harassed the Japanese and after World War II led his troops to victory over Chiang Kai-shek...
...Unthinkingly he applies this "lesson" to a task which is much more difficult...
...Instead, the campaign reports which appear in the poster war keep informing us about the large areas of disaffection which must painfully be reconquered—and often fail to succumb to the Red Guards...
...These new cadres were the mobs who were encouraged to re-enact the Great March, terrorizing officialdom and those parts of the population who are wary of revolutionary "leaps," imposing on all a ritualistic cult of the "thought of Mao" and clamoring for a "cultural revolution" which threatens to disrupt the web of traditional Chinese society...
...Faith may move mountains, but it does not build factories...
...The Chinese generally are very nationalistic, and the centrifugal forces may disrupt or sabotage, but will not question the power of the central government...
...he always found people who were servile enough to help him liquidate others until they were liquidated themselves...
...Nevertheless, seeing that the Party machine did not follow him and did not accept the removal of their two leaders, Mao called on "the people" and then his ideological mannekin, Chen Po-ta, started "studying the Paris Commune...
...Perhaps we might think of the old Polish marshal, the ex-socialist Pilsudski, who periodically retired and re-emerged to overthrow a government he had previously established in power...
...With this difference, however: then warlordism was largely regional, today it may also be functional...
...Does he really think he can mold the wild and untrained Red Guards into a new party, as he did shape a bandit army into a ruling party thirty years ago...
...What matters seems only to be loyalty to Mao Tse-tung...
...But Khrushchev had no instrument of power after the Party had asserted its sovereignty against his dictatorial aspirations (he, too, had resorted to members of his family...
...The one Chen Po-ta seems to have had in mind was the Paris Commune of 1792-94, the "parallel government" which gave strength to Robespierre and succumbed shortly after his fall...
...In the Soviet purges at least one knew, or believed one knew, that some people were on the Right and others on the Left...
...Big, enormously complicated China offers more opportunities for both mandarins and anarchists, despotism and bureaucracy...
...The army obviously has been given a new responsibility in securing internal order...
...February 15—In the beginning of February, an uneasy truce seems to have been arranged, probably with Chou En-lai acting as a mediator...
...But what, in the name of Lenin, is Mao up to...
...The Communist bosses thus seem to fall into the same groove of regionalism which was characteristic of their predecessors...
...It is possible that this has succeeded at least to the extent that no one yet has dared to kill Mao...
...It seems that Mao's ideological spokesman, Chen Po-ta, has suggested the model of the great Paris Commune— but let us be sure which: not the one of 1871 which Marx described and which was considered as the classical model of a revolutionary, democratic government...
...He was part of the national revolution and part of the Communist revolution...
...these power-holders have become the spokesmen of vested interests and of groups, notably the workers, who resist demands for more effort, more sacrifice, and more initiative...
...While savagely "Asiatic" in form, it is at the same time a desperate attempt to catch up with the West in a hurry (and in a Chinese way...
...Y.S...
...But here he is, pressing again, trying to prod the weary, opportunistic Party into revolutionary fervor...
...No one knows who is Left and who is Right, who is a revolutionary hero and who is a saboteur, and as in the Soviet Union of the thirties, a man might be a rising star of the revolution today and find himself accused of "revisionism" or of "capitalist ways" tomorrow...
...Today everybody is a saboteur, an economic pragmatist, and a deprecator of Mao's thoughts, a victim of "capitalist ways," and of materialistic temptations...
...but in the end, the forces which already are giving China the woof and web of administration, order, technological advance, and economic security seem likely to prevail...
...but he fell out with both...
...But he did not succeed in shaking the Party into action...
...The feature of the 1871 Commune which appeals to Mao, of course, is the provision that deputies may be recalled and replaced instantly by the voters...
...Other provinces are not so directly threatened by foreign powers, but they are now gaining back some of their old independence...
...But in contrast to Sinkiang, there is no separatism here...
...It also is a revolution in which the people are much more active than the hierarchy now allows them to be, or as they would be if they followed their ancient routines...
...Once more: it is worth the effort to re-read Max Weber on Chinese bureaucracy or to study Chinese history for precedents of the current crisis...
...We now learn of several such "communes" which have been set up in big cities as "parallel governments," thereby announcing that a state of civil war exists between the regular government and the Maoist movement...
...It is said that the Southwestern Regional Administration, comprising the provinces of Kweichow, Yunnan, and Szechwan (ironically, that is where Mao's triumphant Party Congress of 1934 was held) has been branded antiMaoist— an enormous territory of about 250,000 square miles...
...Mao has to resort to his own family...
...it is to create a new dedication to the revolutionary state...
...since the leader had gotten out of touch with his regular power apparatus, he had to call upon new cadres which might be ready to continue the revolution...
...Again, there seems to be something enormously Chinese about this waiting game which Mao, in his turn, is trying to beat by outflanking the Party on the youth front: not only will he survive through the Red Guards who recite his "thoughts...
...The ones were Bukharinites, the others Trotskyists, and then there was a Stalinist center...
...for Liu Shao-chi is as "Left" as Mao himself and Lin Piao, and among those in disfavor now we find political figures who were enthusiastic and others who were skeptical about the Great Leap in 1957...
...He does not merely rule them, he also prods them...
...So they just resist individually—a mode of action one might justly call "sabotage"— and wait patiently for Mao's time to run out...
...It is as though Robespierre, having miraculously survived the Thermidor, had aroused the provinces against the Convention—or as though Lenin had "gone to the sailors of Kronstadt" as he had threatened more than once in order to make the Party compliant...
...In contrast to the Soviet purges, the Chinese civil war is not onesided but a seesaw fight...
...It is much more than a mere "ideology...
...The Chinese situation is different again, and no two historical phenomena can be understood as modifications of one model...
...it is a new principle of organization and an attack on time-honored customs in the land of mandarins...
...Mao had given the Party sufficient power to rule the country, but he also had set up rivals, above all the Army and the Red Guards...
...Now we have to learn a completely new vocabulary which is not very helpful...
...That Mao could mobilize support for himself is proof of the weakness of the Chinese Party system, or perhaps of the inadequacy of such an organization in such a big country...
...If it were not called Maoism, we might name it Chinese socialism...
...The instrument of Mao's struggle has recently been dubbed "Commune," reminiscent of both the classical Commune of Paris in 1871 and of the Chinese village communes which symbolize the revolutionary collectivism of the Maoist movement...
...The cultural revolution is supposed to leave no trace of old China in the empty heads and to fill them with nothing but Mao's thoughts...
...Unless Mao succeeds in provoking a famine he will ultimately be beaten...
...And for a long while Mao's armies had some resemblance to such bandits...
...The civil war has been fought to a standstill so far, with neither the Maoists nor the mandarins being able to overcome each other...
...I think we were correct in de-emphasizing the foreign policy aspect of the conflict in China, and also in insisting that the People's Liberation Army neither initiated the present upheaval nor could be its main instrument without being turned inside out...
...Even Stalin did not put his son in charge of anything bigger than an airplane...
...but that Commune was an orderly, organized government...
...There were those who were merely undialectical and others who were Trotskyite deviationists...
...But it seems that Mao had to call a halt before he had reached all the aims of his cultural revolution...
...Nor can we tell today what the power structure will be in the future...
...Most professional China watchers now have taken similar views and have also confirmed the three aspects which we singled out as strategic in the present conflict: • the experts of all kinds, the Party hierarchy, and the government bureaucracy have resisted the whiplash of a supreme leader who desperately tries to continue the revolutionary dynamism of the heroic period...
...he did not win the civil war, he was able to outlast an enemy about to collapse...
...Yet the Party does not seem to have a coherent conception of its future either...
...His cult also has taken proportions even Stalin could not have imagined (I understand that on Chinese airplanes the cantor indicates the place in Mao's works one is supposed to recite...
...Maoism, for all its anarchical traits, represents a national and centralistic force...
...the authority of the Central Committee is to be restored...
...If, as some have suggested, Mao were "farther to the Left" and the opposition more "realistic," then the latter would publish a "platform," or we might learn through the poster mail approximately what they propose to do for the masses, for the revolution, or for the war against imperialism...
...The posters tell us of a state of anarchy, with armies deciding from day to day whether they will take orders from Mao or from the Party, with provinces declaring their loyalty to this or that leader or council, with departments of government working for or against the ruling party, with terror gangs of different types "seizing power" in the name of the revered leader or of his enemies...
...In all these actions Mao has always influenced the course of events from without...
...as though Trotsky had raised the banner of international revolution in 1925 before Stalin had time to consolidate his power—or as though Khrushchev, in 1964, had refused to bow to the decision of the Presidium and had marched against Moscow at the head of the Communist Youth...
...A streak of the same spirit may be found in Fidel, whose good fortune it is to govern a small island...
...Should neither of these methods succeed in making old China over into a modern nation, then it would naturally slide back into its old evils of regionalism, warlordism, bureaucratism, inefficiency, and powerlessness...
...There is something pathetic about the old leader who is so isolated that he can trust only his wife to carry out his orders and to succeed him...
...The thought of Mao is essentially a do-it-yourself faith which requires and encourages constant spontaneous cooperation, as guerrillas learn in the field or in the homely household examples which the enraptured readers of the "thoughts" recite interminably...
...Surprisingly, unlike Cromwell, Mao Tse-tung has done the opposite...
...It is an effort to do away with Chinese sluggishness and inefficiency, to abolish routine methods of work, to create a severe work ethics, to overcome the mandarin system, and to eradicate the Chinese tendency for officials (whether Communist or otherwise) to fall into corruption, rote, and authoritarianism...
...he organized the guerrilla war and the Long March which led him to Shensi, where he established the first Communist government...
...but at least he seemed to know what he was doing and he displayed remarkable skill in liquidating one apparatus with the aid of the other...
...For 18 years now the Chinese have enjoyed being a nation...
...Now they have to cope once more with satraps and with civil war, and possibly with the danger of provincial separatism...
...Meanwhile, in the last few weeks, many more reports have come in, some more confusing, but others capable of sharpening our perceptions...
...neither did the Army follow him unequivocally...
...During the Russian purges, one was able to construct a condemned man's platform from his Party history, former attitudes, and also from the kind of vilification he was exposed to...
...to fight the individualistic peasant spirit of ancient China and to generate a new industrial spirit of cooperation, spontaneity, and initiative...
...But it was not "the masses" who pronounced them unworthy...
...his despotism is much more personal...
...Bandits used to be hardly distinguishable from local government...
...schools are to be reopened...
...and they don't even stop to differentiate between "revisionists" and capitalists...
...And instead of encouraging co-operation between those who have modern know-how and those whose enthusiastic initiative should heave China out of her routine ways of backwardness and lethargy, Mao has identified initiative with knownothingness and has driven into opposition almost all of those who have certain skills...
...Though the latter still provides us with the classical terms "Thermidor" and "Bonapartism," these must be understood as analogies rather than patterns other revolutions have to follow...
...The alternative is a military absolutism modelled on Cromwell or Napoleon, or borrowed from Spengler's ideas on "Prussian Socialism...
...The danger is serious in Sinkiang (Chinese Turkestan), which happens to be (a) the seat of China's nuclear establishment, (b) ethnically related to the adjacent areas in the Soviet Union, (c) closer to communications and trade centers of the Soviet Union than to those of China, (d) possessed of a tradition of Russian interference in her internal affairs, (e) in the power of a leader who, even while a Communist, nevertheless displays all the characteristics of an independent warlord...
...The best they hope for is that he will wear himself out—and by the way, they don't seem to think that Lin Piao can outlast Mao...
...he appointed his (comparatively) young wife to guide them...
...But today he must provide administration and constructive ideas, and here his revolutionary romanticism must fail...
...it was Mao with a (probably engineered) majority of his Central Committee, and the masses were apprized of their "role" in this historical event only as an afterthought...
...The revolution which really stirs his passion is the Puritan revival, the permanent rejuvenation and purification of the people...
...There is no technological reason why the Chinese Communist party should not have produced the same kind of provincialism which the Kuomintang had produced before it...
...I know of few historical parallels which could guide us in understanding the mechanism of government he had in mind...
...Perhaps we might think of Cromwell's repeated overthrows of the Parliaments he had intended to use, with the aid of an army which upheld him but of which he was utterly suspicious, too...
...Either proposition seems fantastic...
...What Mao has in mind, rather, is the direct and permanent vigilance of "the masses" which Lenin erroneously praised in the Commune...
...There are economic, administrative, educational, and other satrapies, each constituting its own little power machine...
...The Red Guards are to go home...
...but it also has been told to consider defense its first duty...
...Ironically, before the Japanese invasion, Chiang Kai-shek tried something similar on a Christian basis, with a "moral renewal" movement appealing notably to the students...
...While all the satraps individually resist Mao and his Red Guards, they do not seem to have sufficient coherence among themselves to beat him...
...He is still feeding on the reminiscences of the Long March, the civil war, and the war, when indeed devotion and a militant spirit had to substitute for machinery and knowledge...
...But the awe of Mao into which all of China is being hypnotized has not beaten down the resistance of the satraps...
...I already noted that Stalin tried to avoid the appearance of "Thermidor...
...After a period of consolidation he again renewed the revolutionary spurt and started the "Big Leap," whose failure probably caused his eclipse in the early sixties...
...I am going to suggest that something of the kind already is happening...
...And the Chinese state is disintegrating partly from the stress of its internal tensions, partly under the blows of the leader who tries to regenerate it by acts of violence...
...But it is not clear yet what positions will be assigned to Liu Shao-chi, Teng Hsiao-ping, Tao Chu, Chu Teh, and others whose fall has been reported...
...under the iron rule of the Communist party they were thankful for peace...
...the events are overtaking us, and only by sheer luck did our articles in the two preceding issues remain topical until they were in the hands of our readers...
...I do not think this means army rule, for we do not know who rules the army...
...Or does he hope that the turmoil will help the Party to renew itself and regain its original ardor...
...As I see the present civil war in China, it seems to be a sequel to the two or three civil wars Mao has conducted in the past...
...rebel armies are to return to their posts...
...And each functionary is more intent on defending his own bailiwick against intrusions from above, or maybe against infringements by his equals, than on fulfilling the flan...
...The coincidence is not accidental: both Chiang and Mao recognized the "historical task" of quickly getting China out of the seventeenth century of Asia and into the nineteenth century of Europe, a task that Mao felt—and until recently his Central Committee agreed—could be achieved only with the aid of despotic methods and with a revolutionary organization that could borrow its inspiration only from the "levee en masse" of the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks...
...Though originally the technical intelligentsia was annoyed by the unreasonable demands of the Party bosses, it now seems that the regional and functional satraps are in league with the experts...
...This is extremely rare in the history of revolutions...
...If I am not mistaken, we must take the cultural revolution seriously...
...China is an extremely big country with a decidedly underdeveloped communications system...
...minor leaders who had opposed Mao will be permitted to recant...
...Warlords ruled their provinces pretty much as they saw fit, not caring much for the orders of the central government...
...This dialectics of despotism and anarchism should surprise no one familiar with the course of revolutions...
...Normally, such a national despot would ally himself with those strata of a population that are technologically most advanced...
...Mao has spoken of "administrative kingdoms," but his method of smashing them has provoked a reaction which has increased their number and their independence...
...Chinese society is falling the way it always tends to fall when the state does not hold it together forcefully...
Vol. 14 • March 1967 • No. 2
