When the Hundred Flowers Withered
Walzer, Michael
The following study documents, in rich detail, a major political fact: the upheavals which shook the Communist world in eastern Europe during the past few years had significant parallels in...
...Both these countries exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...I must wake up as quickly as possible and correct my errors...
...If you do not make every effort to mend your ways, if you continue to degenerate, if you persist in corruption and rot, sooner or later the people will overthrow the Party and kill the Communists...
...Intellectuals from these groups brought forward a striking confirmation of Milovan Djilas' theory of the "new class...
...Friends whom we treated as brothers and with whom we were on an equal footing before the revolution have become distant and haughty since becoming officials If we do not take an interest in human...
...For a long time I was influenced by feudal ideology and the bourgeois education that I received...
...True socialism is highly democratic, but the socialism we have before us is not democratic...
...In the mind of Professor Fu Ying of the University of Peking, a chemist with a nation-wide reputation, the new "rectification" campaign aroused "feelings of repulsion and aversion...
...The party is declining rapidly It is always armed force that prevails...
...Even after the "rectification" movement had given way to the "antirightist" campaign, a party journalist could still exclaim, with what seems to be genuine surprise: "Writers and artists are not forbidden to sponsor publications founded on the principle of free competition among various literary and artistic forms and styles, provided they obtain permission from the competent authorities...
...All the forces which a totalitarian regime can muster were pressed into the new "mass campaign...
...If we really want to change this state of affairs, we must not only get rid of the Party's totalitarian dictatorship, but must also put the electoral campaign system into actual practise...
...But at the University of Peking, where a large student body enthusiastically pushed the "rectification" campaign, the agitation took on a somewhat different character...
...Totalitarian "liberalization" always runs the risk of seeming to be an invitation to democratic revolution, an invitation which the regime is bound to withdraw speedily...
...After June 8 not a single day passed without full-scale attacks on the "rightists...
...In actual fact a citizen has no alternative but to be a docile subject, or, to put it more bluntly, a slave...
...This reassertion of the integrity of the intellectual has been a prominent feature of the "thaw," in Poland and Hungary, as well as in China: it marks, perhaps, the conclusion of that voluntary career in self-abasement which individual authors, teachers, and artists have so long pursued in relation to the Communist party...
...Chen Hsin-Kuei, a fellow member of the Democratic League, sharpened the edge of this argument: The dictatorship of the proletariat is the source of bureaucratism, subjectivism and sectarianism .. . All sectarianism flows from the ideological question of the absolute dominion of the party, and the origin of this ideological question lies in the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...When the party launches a campaign everyone has to follow along...
...one by one his friends and colleagues repudiated their "errors" and condemned each other...
...As a result, each new summons to friendly criticism is followed by a more thoroughgoing attack upon the critics...
...The following study documents, in rich detail, a major political fact: the upheavals which shook the Communist world in eastern Europe during the past few years had significant parallels in China...
...This situation suddenly changed on June 8 with the appearance of an important editorial in the official Jen Min Jih Pao...
...We therefore asked Mr...
...These words aroused the hostility of a great many students present...
...Like Mme...
...In fact, he argued, bureaucratic monopoly may also be bureaucratic incompetence: The Party is taking the place of the Government...
...What the long-range consequences of the Chinese May will be, remains to be seen...
...Clubs were organized with names reminiscent of the Polish "thaw": The Society of a Hundred Flowers, The Bitter Remedy, The Voice of the Lower Class, The Free Tribunal...
...It has remained at the same point where it was in 1895, at the time of Engels' death...
...In past years, unfortunately, we have rejected and reviled everything which does not come from the Soviet Union...
...And this was but one—though the most important—of the "six criteria" which the party leader provided, and which would seem sufficiently freezing in their implications to kill all but the hardiest, most Communist of flowers...
...Michael Walzer to provide a condensation, and are sure that our readers will be as grateful to him as we are for his skilled presentation.— EDITORS The Chinese "100 Flowers" or "rectification" episode— heralded as an Asian "thaw" when it was first announced in early 1957 —ended this winter with the fourth of the great purges which the Communist regime has conducted since coming to power less than a decade ago...
...We must be kind-hearted, merciful and sympathetic men, courageous, determined and brave...
...Even at that time, however, the rhetoric of spring was associated with the reality of winter, for Mao warned that "words and actions can only be judged right if they tend to strengthen and not to weaken the leadership of the Communist party...
...We must find genuine solutions to our problems and master our difficulties, and the only way to do this is to rouse and mobilize the people...
...drawn up by a group of philosophy students, it urged the student body to turn the wall into a "garden of democracy...
...Urged to join in friendly criticism of the party, they responded by attacking its most fundamental policies...
...If the Communist party abandoned the idea of making the government a one party monopoly, if the Communist party and the various democratic parties offered their various political programs, free mass elections would soon incite the Communist parties and the democratic parties to overcome their shortcomings in order to win as many votes as possible and also to serve the people better...
...Socialism is the elimination of classes...
...Obviously, it was an error on my part to regard socialism and democracy as incompatible...
...After the liberation, [wrote Chu An-ping] all intellectuals enthusiastically supported the party and accepted its leadership...
...Even when one sees something go wrong, one hasn't the right to say so...
...By late May student discontent was growing rapidly...
...It is heartbreaking to live in present society...
...What kind of men have they shaped in the past eight years...
...Chou's reaction to the students' movement was frighteningly simple: Judging from what was recently revealed during the rectification campaign, it is clearly necessary that particular attention be given to the intensification of political and ideological education in the schools...
...During the next month the attacks on Chang did not abate...
...Another intellectual soberly recalled a friend who had been "clubbed to death" in one of the previous "rectifications...
...They lecture and reprimand others, watch over them, spy on them and run to make their report .. . When Party privileges have been abolished then and only then will genuine communists join the Party...
...What they really wanted was to remove state power from the vanguard.., the Commu nist party...
...At the same time, however, actual power has been drawn out of the legal, or semi-legal, state and into the supralegal party...
...The material is drawn from a much fuller series of studies which have appeared in recent issues of Saturn, a remarkably valuable magazine published in France which devotes itself to documenting the conditions of life in all totalitarian countries and is devoted to exposing political terror, concentration camps and labor camps, regardless of whether these appear behind the Iron Curtain or in Algeria...
...furthermore, I sincerely thank the comrades who have helped me...
...Arguments ended in street fights and the number of demonstrations began to multiply...
...Their proposals are singularly revealing about the nature of the "democratic dictatorship...
...This involved a thoroughgoing attack not only on the Communist party monopoly, but also on the totalitarian identification of party and state...
...Once people with "their own theories" appear on the scene, Communist "rectification" becomes impossible...
...but to raise the question of the party's total presence is to raise the question of its total power...
...For whom has it risen...
...I do not approve of reformism...
...In Hanyang, for example, more than eight hundred students organized a strike, held street demonstrations, handed out tracts, shouted slogans, and finally sacked the offices of the Communist party...
...In articles of May 10 and 11, Lo Long-chi, a vice-president of the Democratic League, had urged that a national investigating committee be established to inquire into "deviations" committed during the great purges, and that a similar committee be made permanent for the review of current trials and the defense of "oppressed and persecuted persons...
...And Ko Pei-chi was even more menacing: The masses are still uneasy about the policy of "the simultaneous blossoming of many flowers and free competition among the various ideological schools...
...the Ministry of Education exists only in name and has no real authority...
...After April 27, the people were in the position of a mouse who, at the urgent request of a cat, must tell the latter everything about his behavior which he finds disagreeable...
...Conference, I declared "I love socialism, I also love democracy...
...the latter "is absolutely opposed to the interests of the people...
...In the midst of her speech several students tried to interrupt, but others shouted their approval and begged her to go on...
...As for those people who are content with singing the merits and celebrating the virtues of the Party, they do not deserve the name of men...
...ists"] wishesd to propagate their own theories...
...Chang's intention seemed clear: he was struggling to combine a democratic government with the central planning authority necessary in a backward country...
...That is a fact...
...Since ancient times, there have been many written protests against the status quo, and today, too, we must fight- the present state of affairs...
...Such a discrepancy should be rapidly done away with, or the democratic parties will not be able to go on co-existing for very long...
...These fears show that the masses do not really have confidence in the words of the Communist party...
...There was no intention, of course, of allowing the latter into the castle...
...Thus Teng Ch'u-min of the Democratic League: There are some who, when they are promoted to official responsibilities, assume the air of mandarins and adopt a bureaucratic style of work...
...The essential working of the system has been described by Lin Han-ta, a member of one of the democratic parties and seventh Vice-Minister of Education...
...I accept this treatment...
...On June 9 the Jen Min Jih Pao editorial summed up the party's attitude toward its critics...
...Sun Yatsen, the essential point was made: "liberalization from above" could not endanger the party which was "above...
...1. The intellectual must be a social critic...
...It is saving me again today...
...Rectification" thus developed into what seemed to some people a genuine effort at a limited "liberalization from above"—though it was an effort forced upon the party by the growing popular discontent which accompanied the collectivization campaigns of 1956, and which was further fanned by the Hungarian revolution...
...Until this is done, he wrote, "nobody can guarantee that frank criticism will not be punished...
...Relations between party members and the masses, wrote Ko Peichi, were those of "employers to employees," of "masters to servants...
...periodicals and posters free of Communist censorship were circulated everywhere...
...There too the demand for democracy—a demand so "simple" as to be profoundly revolutionary in a totalitarian society— found a deep response...
...The proposals of these new student clubs revealed the close connection of the growing student movement with that of the older intellectuals...
...it is difficult to see what other outcome liberalization can have...
...4. The Party has substituted itself for the state...
...some were held on the spur of the moment...
...Since the establishment of the Communist regime in China, members of the various democratic parties have been assigned to positions in the ministries of the national government where they decorate the facade of the "democratic dictatorship...
...members of the democratic parties were dragged forward to denounce their fellows...
...I immediately think, by association of ideas, of reform through labor at the Ch'ing Ho Farm...
...There are some who call this a dark machination, but we reply that it was very clear...
...cisms of me that were made by persons in all walks of life greatly surprised me...
...It may be that I did not make myself clear...
...Some of them, one wrote, "trembled as if they were walking over thin ice...
...The education they have dispensed has trained chair-carriers...
...From Shenyang, where a cluster of technical schools surround a large Teachers' Training College, came the clearest formulation of the ideas and aspirations of China's intellectuals and students...
...A group of students published a bulletin called Public Square and drew up a fourteen-point declara tion of principles: Let us fight for freedom of the press...
...In his June 26th "Report on the Work of the Government," Chou En-lai devoted himself almost exclusively to refuting the criticisms which had been directed against the party...
...I wish to eliminate completely my old reactionary "self" so that it will never reappear...
...Criticism, it proclaimed, was of two sorts: well-intentioned and ill-intentioned...
...I do not want to argue in my favor The criti...
...Neither China nor the Soviet Union is a truly socialist country...
...He will yield to the truth, but is not to be intimidated...
...would be a discussion period...
...The Party should ascribe primary importance to this and give the matter particular attention, for no regime can hold out without the confidence of the people...
...Most of the criticism, though radical in its implications, was moderate, even cautious, in its tone...
...If party organizations exist in the schools, I strongly doubt the possibility of promoting the development of scholarly work...
...From within the party itself, Yan Wen-tsih struck out at the supervision of the intellectuals: There is neither freedom of thought nor freedom of speech, either in the country or the Party...
...two class-rooms were set aside for meetings and loud-speakers installed .. At one of these meetings on the grounds in front of the canteen Miss Lin Hsi-ling, a fourth-year student at the law school, with four years in the Red Army to her credit also, launched a dramatic attack on the party...
...Despite all this, the period of hesitation was very brief...
...In order to fulfill a program such as this our group must become the guiding nucleus of the masses now in motion...
...Perhaps with the Hungarian and Polish Octobers in mind, the regime turned first to the intellectuals...
...For history has taught us that the rise of a privileged class infallibly and inevitably produces insurmountable contradictions . .. And especially during the past two years, the Communist party [has] set itself up as a privileged class, considered itself above the masses, vaunted its grandeur, power, glory and righteousness...
...What we need is a drastic change, a complete transformation .. . During the campaign to eliminate counter-revolutionaries, 720,000 persons were unjustly convicted .. . In China, there is no freedom of the press...
...The Ministry of Education is kept in the dark about many questions and is given no information whatsoever...
...the counter-offensive of the party had begun...
...Many of the posters on the "democratic wall" endorsed the angry words of Ko Pei-chi, while others urged the enactment of the practical suggestions of Lo Long-chi...
...The yard in front of the canteen looked just like Hyde Park: thousands of students attended debates and heard one orator after another...
...In 1927, after rejecting the glorious Chinese Communist party, I became one of the important middle-of-the-roaders-30 per cent anti-communist and 70 per cent anti-Chiang Kai-shek...
...Leaders of the democratic parties had greeted the announced "thaw" with an immediate program...
...The Communist Party has replaced the government .. . Our country has no legal system .. . In 1956 I went from Peking to Yumen and saw workers' strikes with my own eyes...
...These "new mandarins," it was charged, used the rhetoric of class struggle to protect and maintain their own special privileges...
...The call to a second revolution is clearly contained in the Shanyang statement, which appeared just before the government crack-down...
...Now it is my opinion that although the party directs the country, the country is not the party's property In my opinion...
...The student movement, spreading rapidly through the universities, had not only given body to the agitation of the intellectuals, but had brought forth its clearest and most resolute manifesto...
...I specialized in opportunistic activities in the political and military spheres...
...The joint declaration was one of the few "thaw" documents which offered a thoroughgoing critique of the methods and results of communist collectivization: It is not true that all the peasants joined the co-operatives willingly...
...From April 1 to June 8, 1957, Chu An-ping was editor of the Kuang Ming Jih Pao, an organ of the democratic parties...
...the flow of denunciations soon began...
...And so on: the accusations were intoned as preparation for a ritualistic slaughter...
...I criticized Stalin excessively and venomously...
...Every refutation had the tone of a warning: The splendid results achieved during our first five-year plan are irrefutable realities...
...The same day a second poster appeared beside the first...
...liberalization from above" is soon replaced with a more traditional repression...
...Whereas the Communist party is free to expand among the mass of workers and peasants, the democratic parties may recruit their members only among intellectuals of a ripe age—most of whom are over 30 or even 40 years old...
...He proposed the creation of a genuine parliamentary system...
...otherwise there can be no solid guarantee that divergent schools of ideological thought will be able to compete freely...
...It was in their behalf that Mao issued his February proclamation: "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend...
...For the time being at least, one thing is clear: there will be no more flowers...
...And these 373 latent evil thoughts rose up again in 1956 following the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU...
...The discomforts of this situation were described by Lung Yun, a former president of Yunan province and a member of the 1956 government delegation to the Soviet Union: Many people speak with reserve and anxiety...
...The party's ideological leadership is like a blindfold...
...As the old saying goes: "As soon as they have entered the dragon's lair, their reputation is multiplied ten-fold...
...I expressed my repentance therein, but I had not yet completely extirpated the roots of my evil thoughts...
...it is worth quoting at length, and may serve as an epilogue to the Chinese "thaw": My erroneous ideology and faulty actions have historical roots I...
...The editorial of June 11 pointed to the students as potential critics of the communist regime: "These rightist elements thought they could take advantage of the lack of social experience of young students and thus find allies among the mass of students...
...What mattered at the moment was the response that Mao's formula found in the country...
...Neither China nor the Soviet Union has yet done away with class distinctions...
...These new posters were of different colors: red, green and so forth...
...Such men could have no illusions about the party's new call to criticism...
...They become Party members because for them the Party is the path to honors, influence, power and money Once inside the Party they become...
...We in China," the vicepresident of the University of Tsinghwa warned, "are on the brink of a 'Polish incident' or an `Hungarian incident.'" Whatever exaggeration this statement may contain, it describes the achievement of the student movement—and explains the hasty intervention of the party...
...It would have been worthwhile to reprint the Saturn articles in their entirety, as well as the massive references appended to these articles...
...It lacked, however, that quality of totally abject self-humiliation which the regime required—though it was abject enough: It is possible that my opinions may be serious mistakes that constitute a form of resistance to the leadership of the Communist party...
...In addition, of course, it was an effort to regain among the Chinese intellectuals some of the credit the regime had lost as a result of the Khrushchev revelations at the 20th Party Congress...
...a sufficient grasp of the role which ought to be played by the state institutions...
...Since the democratic parties have the right to exist and since their critical programs tend toward communism, why should they not be allowed to govern the country in turn by taking over the executive power...
...Alongside the new parliament he would have established a group of planning bureaus composed jointly of Communists and democrats, along with "leading public figures" and representatives of "the people's organizations...
...This was the answer to an effort by the party to postpone student participation in the "rectification" campaign until the summer holidays, until, that is, the student community had broken up for vacation...
...but this would have taken up at least an entire issue of DISSENT...
...The students of the People's University of China, at Peking, gave a warm welcome to the remarks made by Ko Pei-chi," a Chinese journalist declared •a few days later, "because he has the support of the vast majority of university students...
...the men who formulated it faced the full weight of the "anti-rightist" campaign which began after June 8. They had raised what the Communist leadership apparently regarded as the most dangerous of questions...
...Or rather, it was part of that peculiar kind of "self-criticism" by which a Communist party, without doing any harm to its general position, tries to free itself from the incumbrance of past "errors" and brutalities...
...All those who have lived through the great movements [i.e...
...In close collaboration with Chang Po-chun, president of the Chinese Peasants and Workers Party, and Lo Long-chi of the Democratic League, he turned the intellectuals' protest movement toward a concrete political goal: the realization of multi-party democracy...
...This possibility is in perfect agreement with the law of socialist development...
...I1 On May 19, 1957 a poster denouncing the Communist Youth League appeared on the wall of the student canteen at the University of Peking...
...The relations between the party and the masses," one Chinese journalist wrote, "are exactly the same as those between a cat and a mouse...
...spontaneous" demonstrations took place in factories throughout China...
...Now, the fact is that Marxism-Leninism has ceased to develop...
...Once the intellectuals began to speak out, they rapidly developed an extensive and radical critique...
...But in this they were not successful: opposition proved not so easy to engineer, and to control, as in unanimity...
...The two centers of their agitation were the uni versities and the remnants of the old democratic parties—especially the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang and the Democratic League—which had once formed a non-Communist left opposition to Chiang, and which the Communist party has since allowed to eke out a marginal existence in the "people's democratic dictatorship...
...The constitution of the People's Republic of China is a scrap of paper: the Party can observe it or not just as it likes...
...emboldened by the favorable reaction of the people, especially of the students, and by the apparently well-meant silence of the party, the intellectuals reclaimed their traditional position as social critics: Educated people, [wrote Yang Yu-ching, an editor of the review Research in Political and Juridical Sciences] naturally tend to use their pens to criticize actual conditions, and, in fact, truly educated people are opposed to the current situation...
...To my mind it is a form of socialism based on feudalism...
...The criticism of the intellectuals and students was rejected on all fundamental points, and a campaign was launched against all opponents of the regime...
...Other critics attacked the "lordly" arrogance of party officials, the priority, favors and advantages enjoyed by the Communists, their extraordinarily rapid promotion, the sub sidies they obtained without difficulty, the free medical assistance given to their families, the exceptional facilities provided for their children's education...
...The people of the entire country have demanded that I be strictly treated as a rightist...
...The present conditions of literature and art are worse than they were during the Kuomintang period," wrote one Chinese intellectual...
...This explains why the personnel of co-operatives are inadequately trained and mediocre, why they operate in the midst of confusion and disorder, why they are so overstaffed, why their members seem so little eager to work...
...In fact the majority were forced to join...
...The attack upon the party bureaucrats was carried on by other intellectuals...
...Nor is there any democracy within the Party itself The freedom Party members are...
...3. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the dictatorship of the Communist Party...
...Through a "rectification of working methods" the Central Commit tee hoped to "fill the moat" and "knock down the walls" which divided the Communist apparatus from the masses...
...If the party organization tries to do everything on its own, then we cannot have a satisfactory administration...
...The people must be given free rein to organize new political parties and new clubs, and to publish magazines which reflect actual public opinion...
...From the universities, intellectuals attacked the central dogmas of party ideology, and demanded the right to think through on their own the premises of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy: Everyone is in unanimous agreement, [wrote Lei Hai-tsung, an historian of Nankai University] that Marxism-Leninism must develop...
...The party knows nothing about scientific matters...
...Such an effort, the editorial went on, is "doomed to a shameful defeat...
...III Throughout the period of the "thaw" the attitude of the party was confused...
...supposed to have to criticize the work of the Central Committee is an empty sham, since in actual practice the conditions which would enable them to criticize the Committee do not exist...
...Finally, on June 21, in a special article by Mme...
...Only once was Wu revealing: The alliance between Chang Po-chun and Lo Long-chi was formed on the heels of the twentieth Congress of the CPSU...
...I hope that, led and educated by the Party and Chairman Mao, I will be able to start a new life and once again love the Party .. The July 1 editorial of the Jen Min Jih Pao had declared that there was no need to punish the "rightists" unless they persisted in their errors: "the people's state is very stable...
...And Ch'en Ch'i-yan, an official of the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang: A number of people who formerly were not communists have now become party members and, as a result, are aware that they are different from the masses...
...I was of the erroneous opinion that if we added scientific techniques and "democracy" to socialism, life in our country would be more perfect...
...Tsuei Hsiung-koun, under-secretary of the Party Committee, declared that "though it was not forbidden to stick up posters, this was not a good way to develop the rectification campaign...
...Chang Po-chun had revealed himself "dissatisfied with the leadership of the Communist party...
...Lo Long-chi had demonstrated a "lack of confidence" in the Party...
...This is a kind of blindfold on the mind...
...A second series of proposals exposed the shadow-life to which the democratic parties have been condemned: And now let us take a look at the methods of carrying out what is known as the "policy of long-term co-existence and mutual supervision" between the Communist and democratic parties...
...They consider themselves superior to the people...
...It was drafted late in the period of the "thaw" by Chang Po-cheng, assistant director of the Teachers' College Propaganda Department, and Hwang Chen-lu, editor of the college review...
...To be sure, it is always possible to set up machine-guns to repress disorders, but it is to be feared that these machine-guns may one day be turned about and fired in the opposite direction...
...Ch'en reported the continuation of the old mandarin custom of "giving posts to all one's relatives...
...in the intensive fight against the rightists, including the fight against myself...
...ion the heart of the matter is the idea that the empire belongs to the party...
...Yet the confessions seem not to have been considered entirely adequate, for on August 4 the Council of Ministers adopted a series of important decisions concerning "the question of education through labor...
...No directive can come into force unless published jointly by the Central Committee of the Communist party and the Council of Ministers...
...Others printed amazingly varied samples of the attacks upon the regime, without ever disputing them...
...A series of positive demands for the separation of state and party was elaborated by the president of the Peasants and Workers Party, Chang Po-chun...
...The former "can be completely wrong or not entirely so...
...I propose that drastic steps be taken to revolutionize completely the existing social system...
...So what is the use of having Ministries in the Government at all...
...Totalitarian control was threatened...
...When it sends directives to its junior services, they are ignored...
...This corresponds precisely to the situation of the [Chinese] dogmatists: they are stagnant...
...In some places the students went in for direct street action...
...Mao's criteria, however, became famous only later...
...In a totalitarian society even the demand of the individual artist or scholar to be left alone is a radical one...
...Yang Ya-chin, who has already been quoted in favor of allowing a critical intelligentsia, was the first of them: The rectification movement is a movement in which party members should get up from their sedan chairs...
...The Shenyang declaration went on to provide a brilliant summation of the ideology of the Chinese May: Our main problem is how to get rid of the absolute, totalitarian dictatorship of the Communist party...
...The argument thus developed through an alternation of an almost "Aesopian" criticism, a frank and radical attack, and a bewildering— perhaps intentional—naivete...
...Peking University soon became a focus of student agitation...
...One may put a scholar to death, but one must not smear him...
...The intellectuals turned their brief month of freedom into a long hour of truth for the Communist regime...
...the three great purges] of the past have become like the bird that is frightened by the bow...
...I wish to participate with the people...
...2. The Communist party is the new ruling class...
...More and more people have joined the Party for selfish reasons...
...However, on the evening of May 19, during a Communist Youth meeting, Mr...
...Chu An-ping, he declared, had "venomously slandered" the Communist party...
...A member of the Democratic League, Wu Han, played the role of chief accuser...
...The social sciences of capitalist countries should not be rejected in toto...
...But these people [the "right...
...The great Chinese Communist party saved me in the past...
...It] will enable us to expound such ideas as will make the conservative forces retreat under the pres sure of public opinion...
...This same connection of party and state was attacked by China's Food Minister, Chang Nai-ki, a member of another of the democratic parties...
...We must strive to achieve true socialism...
...Another member of the Peking University faculty warned of the consequences: The party is said to be withdrawing from the masses...
...In a similar vein Tsien Kia-kiu, a member of the Democratic League of China, defended the "superior intellectual" and argued for free cultural exchange with the West: I hope an effort will be made to study and understand the ideological situation of the superior intellectual, and that we will not simply be content with party members' biased reports...
...The intellectuals tremble with fear more and more every day and their life is even less tranquil than under the Japanese occupation or under the rod of the Kuomintang...
...5. The people will overthrow the party...
...By July 1 the editorialist of the Jen Min Jih Pao was ready to announce that the hundred flowers promise had really been a lure for bourgeois weeds: "[The enemy] had first to be exposed, and it was only by allowing the poisonous weeds to appear on the ground that they could be extirpated...
...The Student Association announced that every evening from 5 to 10 p.m...
...The press was full of the new campaign...
...resolutions were adopted in government offices and in schools...
...The next step in what began to appear as a dialogue among critics— while the party looked silently, and ominously, on—was taken by Huang Hsin-ping, a teacher at a girls' high school in Tientsin: Since the Communist party is the instrument of the class struggle and since this class struggle is fundamentally over in our country, why cannot the leadership of the Communist Party be diminished slightly...
...Let us fight 'for democratic socialism...
...Hesitantly at first, and then with great vigor, the Chinese intellectuals took advantage of the opportunities offered by the "thaw...
...And there are some who say that the standard of living has risen...
...more and more arrogant...
...On July 1, 1951, the 80th anniversary of the glorious, great and correct Chinese Communist party, I published my self-criticism under the title: "The Communist Party Saved Me...
...At present, the party and the people are a hundred miles away from each other...
...But by June 8, 1957 its essentials were complete: the Chinese intellectuals had worked out a rough theoretical understandin of both the role of the Communist party and of the nature of democratic processes...
...At a conference organized by the Department of Industrial Economy, Wang Teh-chou warned the party leaders: "If the present rectification movement is not 90 per cent successfuI, the Communist party will fall...
...This is a fine tradition...
...We have nothing but the mere shadow of a democracy, even by comparison with the pseudo-democracy of capitalist countries...
...As early as June 10—barely two days after the "anti-rightist" campaign was announced—Chang Po-chun had offered his first confession...
...I loathe my abominations...
...For example, we have discarded sociology, political science, psychology and jurisprudence...
...A Chinese journalist has described the next few days: The appeal met with an enthusiastic reception among the student body and posters began coming in from all sides, gradually covering the canteen wall...
...Subsequently, the "rightist" ministers were dismissed from their posts or reduced to minor clerical positions, though the repression, at least on the top levels, did not take the form of bloodshed or imprisonment...
...Sun Yat-sen, the Communist prime minister stated clearly what was at stake: These rightist elements have adopted the point of view of bouregois democ racy...
...Private citizens must be allowed to found newspapers...
...In the years that followed the Liberation, China did not become a socialist democracy...
...This sort of isolationism is childish and perfectly absurd...
...come from the landowner class...
...But by February and March 1957 Mao and his associates had decided that it was necessary to involve the masses in this ritual: "self-criticism" was to be supplemented by friendly criticism from the people themselves, encouraged and patronized by the party...
...it is also possible that they are not so serious...
...Many students felt they have found a way of speaking freely, and suddenly it was as though they were breathing the air of democracy...
...Now it spread to universities, colleges, institutes, and secondary schools throughout the country: from Peking to Tientsin, Shanghai, Sian, Nanking, Harbin, Hankow, Chungking, Shenyang, Hanyang, etc...
...For those members and officials of the party who used to drag about in down-at-the-heel shoes and who now go driving about and wear woolen uniforms...
...After the events in Hungary, they felt that the Communist party could no longer continue to direct the country and that the time for the democratic parties had come...
...On July 15 Chang issued a definitive confession...
...And it becomes increasingly evident as one goes From the Central Government to the lower levels Many Communists still have not acquired...
...beings, if we spoil human relationships, if there is neither friendship nor humane feelings then of what good are socialism and communism...
...The practical demands which might have followed from this had actually been presented earlier...
...The rights of public meeting, association and publication are purely fictitious, existing only in the text of the constitution...
...It would be more correct to say that it is the masses that are withdrawing from the party...
...Ko was to become one of the symbolic figures of the Chinese May...
...After that date, no further criticism was printed...
...The next morning they went right ahead sticking posters on the canteen wall and on walls in their residence halls...
...He angrily denied Stalin's boast that Communists are made of "special stuff": ". . . that is not a scientific statement...
...People are not free to say or think what they wish...
...We chronicle it here as a case study in the problems and contradictions of a totalitarian society...
...It took over a month for the regime to step in and halt the flow of criticism...
...I even went so far as to deal lightly with the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism [At] this year's session of the Political...
...After 1895, Lenin and Stalin put forth some new ideas about particular matters, but they spoke chiefly about revolutionary problems...
...On the evening of May 20 the Party Committee backed down and "permitted" the continuation of the "democratic wall...
...The errors committed by Stalin in the exercise of the dictatorship have proven that the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat is open to criticism...
...It was one of the high moments of the Chinese May...
...by attacks and reprisals...
...It has an air of mysticism...
...The theoretical basis for this attack was not developed until late in the period of the "thaw...
...They have slandered the democratic dictatorship, describing it as the source of all errors and all shortcomings...
...The students formed clubs and associations and held meetings...
...The new social science established by Marx and Engels has remained, fundamentally, in a state of stagnation since 1895...
...emphasis added...
...When the "rectification" was first planned in the months after the Hungarian revolution, it was aimed at the Communist Party itself...
...one may kill him, but not disgrace him...
...Those who claim that this plan has been spoiled are adopting an attitude hostile to socialism and are deliberately seeking to deny the results achieved by the hard work of the entire people...
...The Chinese Communists sought to appropriate the "thaw" as a tactic of rule, while avoiding the consequences which Poland and Hungary had experienced...
...I want to repeat once again: if you, the members of the Party, do not mend your ways, the masses will overthrow the Party and kill the Communists...
...The superior intellectual has his pride...
...underlying principle of all the contradictions between the party and the non-Communists are to be found precisely in the ideological question of the Communist party's absolute and exclusive domination over China, in the idea that the party is the only master and the proprietor of all China...
...But relations between the party and the masses have so deteriorated in recent years that they constitute a problem that most be settled at once In my opin...
...The artistic and literary works produced under party supervision can not be compared with those produced prior to the liberation," wrote another...
...A number of party members install themselves in sedan chairs, and set a distance between themselves and the masses...
...Their fears are perfectly understandable...
...The censorship of books and periodicals must be abolished...
...Then the students pressed further: At this point they began to hold group discussions...
...We should not be satisfied with the Party's rectification campaign, with paltry reforms and the scant concessions made to the people...
...At the University of Peking—which was soon the center of student discontent—Ko Pei-chi, a lecturer at the Physical and Chemical Research Center, described the gulf between the people and the party in terms which were essentially those of class analysis...
...others were organized in advance...
...Now in actual fact, the dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing other than the dictatorship of the Communist Party...
...Other "democratic walls" were soon covered with slogans, caricatures, posters, and declarations...
...The full weight of the "mass campaign" was now brought against the few men who were to be compelled to offer public confession...
...And they were of various kinds: violently critical articles, snappy comments, poems written in the style of Mayakovsky, biting slogans, satirical verses or caricatures...
...Some of its journals tried to erect a "wall of silence" around the spreading student movement...
...these were now designated "rightists," a category which came to include many outstanding leaders of the democratic parties...
...Only on the basis of such protection could political life be resumed...
...During that crucial month—between the announcement of the "rectification" movement in a Central Committee directive of April 27, 1957 and the beginning of the repression of all but one of the hundred schools on June 8—China experienced what one writer has called "an Hungarian incident without an armed struggle...
...In addition "anti-party" activities were uncovered within the ranks of the CP itself...
Vol. 5 • September 1958 • No. 4
