Communist Rejection of the Past
CHANG, C.M.
Communist Rejection of the Past TH E CHINESE Communists have always shown implacable enmity toward Confucianism. Their conquest of the mainland has enabled them to use a terrifying combination of...
...Sons and daughters who exposed their parents as "counterrevolutionaries" or handed them over to the authorities for punishment were hailed as revolutionary heroes...
...The result is that writers have ceased to produce anything of genuine artistic merit...
...It was officially reported that in Tsingtao, a port city in North China, 30 per cent of the students and 60 per cent of the workers were addicted to forbidden literature...
...IN PRACTICALLY everything they do, the Chinese Communists look to the Soviet Union for inspiration and guidance...
...and widows unwilling to remarry were forced to do so...
...It was Stalin's aim, first, to wipe out some 5 million of the more prosperous and independent peasants —the so-called kulaks—who formed a core of latent opposition to Communism, and, second, to force the rest into an organizational framework which the Kremlin could more easily control...
...Divorces were effected in the same casual manner...
...The Chinese Communist regime has decided to abandon the traditional Chinese ideographic writing and adopt phonetic writing based on the Latin alphabet...
...Since the 20th Soviet Party Congress, Peking has enunciated what appears to be a more liberal line on literature, philosophy and science...
...In addition to Marxist classics, Russian works of all types—literary, scientific and technical—are being translated and distributed on a massive scale...
...They even admit that China has a rich "literary heritage," but it must be reappraised in the light of Marxist-Leninist theory...
...In China, the "land reform" was completed only a few years ago, and the peasants, with their tiny plots of land, have not yet been able to produce enough to meet the Government's exactions...
...In November 1953, it was officially reported that 15 per cent of the rural population had accepted the reform, 60 per cent resisted, and 25 per cent were indifferent...
...The total number of Russian works translated from October 1949 to September 1955 amounted to 2,300 and the number of copies printed to 42 million...
...In Chinese colleges and universities, Russian has replaced English as the first foreign language...
...And she is doing this without the advantages Stalin had when he began to cast Russia's agriculture into a new collective pattern...
...If the obstacle to full implementation of the marriage law in the rural areas has been "feudalism," its enemy in the cities has been the influence of "bourgeois ideas...
...Children were encouraged to spy on their parents, wives on husbands, brothers on brothers...
...Their conquest of the mainland has enabled them to use a terrifying combination of pressures, subtle and crude, mental and physical, to eradicate Confucian values on a national scale...
...In Russia, large-scale tractor production accompanied the collectivization program, and the new kolkhozes were equipped with modern farm machinery...
...Some features of the law, such as the abolition of child marriage and marriage by parental arrangement, seem to be based on sound principles...
...Indeed, they have been on the books of the National Government for a long time...
...In order to make classical Communist doctrine available to the Chinese people, the Party Central Committee has established a special Bureau for the Translation of the Writings of Marx, Engels...
...His motivation is obviously more political than economic...
...The Communists do not reject all classical Chinese literature as worthless...
...The Communist Party of China, adhering to Marxism-Leninism, is applying the rich experience of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in building socialism and in other respects...
...They repeat the same basic plot with endless, wearisome variations—glorification of the "people's democratic dictatorship," portrayal of the "positive hero," and trumpeting of the Party message in all its forms...
...It remains to be seen whether the ideographic form of writing, the product of several thousand years of uninterrupted development, can be put out of existence by Party fiat...
...Hu was no mere deviationist but an "agent" of Chiang Kai-shek...
...Hundreds of so-called "Hu Fengists" were hunted down and sent to concentration camps for "reform through hard labor...
...The new line is summed up in the eight-word couplet, Pai hua ch'i feng, pai chia tseng ming...
...In March 1955, the Huang Ming Daily of Peking, a cultural and educational organ of the Communist party, declared that young people in urban centers had fallen into the "bourgeois" error of taking marriage and divorce too lightly...
...Within the span of three years, millions were liquidated as "enemies of the people...
...AFTER Stalin's death, there was a slight change in the Soviet literary climate, and the Russian "thaw" emboldened a group of Chinese writers to demand the liberation of literature from stifling Party control...
...Young people in China have an intense thirst for reading and learning, but they do not find the reading of Marxist dogma and badly translated Russian literature an enjoyable or rewarding pursuit...
...The war on the "feudal" family system has also been fought on the front of love and marriage...
...Observation of Soviet life and long hours of studying and discussing Stalinist strategy and tactics prepared them for the task that awaited them...
...In 1954, Hu Feng challenged the ultimate authority of the Party in things literary...
...That, however, was not enough...
...Reactionary" patriarchs were publicly tried and severe penalties were meted out...
...Indeed, the very magnitude of the obstacles means that the pace must be accelerated, and harsher and still harsher methods will be employed...
...Many people now seek relief and escape by turning to books which give them genuine enjoyment—old romances, Taoist and Buddhist tales, detective stories, love stories, etc...
...This work is still in its preparatory stages...
...Obviously, the resistance has been too strong to be easily overcome, even by force...
...With Russian mastered, the language barrier and the greatest obstacle to Sino-Soviet friendship will be removed...
...Should it be carried into effect, the impact would be tremendous...
...In the 1949-1952 period, this was done through the so-called "land reform" program...
...Communist China is now imitating Stalin's collectivization drive of 1929...
...What makes the Communist marriage law objectionable to the mass of the people is the way in which it has been enforced...
...RUSSIAN INFLUENCE is nowhere more in evidence than in the field of culture and education...
...Confucian values found their fullest expression in the Chinese family system...
...As in the "land reform," violence has played an important role...
...This cavalier attitude on the part of youth, the paper said, tended to undermine their "revolutionary seriousness...
...The Soviet experience is considered relevant to the Chinese situation...
...There is still uncertainty as to how Marxist categories can be applied to China's literary history, and this makes the work of reappraisal hazardous...
...The rural people, whose sense of family loyalty was particularly strong, were made to wage a war of self-annihilation...
...The family system therefore had to be destroyed...
...And, in the present world situation, China must complete the process of socialist transformation in a hurry...
...Kuo Mo-jo, high priest of the Communist literary world, called Hu and his followers "an organized, capitalistsponsored anti-Party, anti-people and anti-revolutionary movement...
...The ultimate objective seems to be nothing less than China's total conversion to the Soviet way of life...
...When reading becomes a matter of obligation, it is no longer pleasurable, and even the most industrious and orthodox Communists often fail to do their assigned reading...
...In China, agricultural production cannot be appreciably increased under the collective system, and there is no need to shift farm labor to factories...
...The collective system has proved its worth as a means of control...
...Following the example of the Soviet Union, Communist China has made "socialist realism" the basis of its literary theory...
...Marriages contracted years before were broken up...
...In the second place, the hundreds of millions of peasants, who are by no means satisfied with their present lot, must be more tightly controlled...
...The People's Daily estimated that in 1955 some 10,000 small book counters in the provincial capitals were selling forbidden literature...
...The policy of the Government, the Committee complained, had not been properly understood by Party cadres, who had formed "the habit of achieving sudden results by means of quick and violent campaigns...
...Family ties were ridiculed as primitive tribal attachments...
...An untold number of rural women committed suicide in passive resistance...
...Family loyalties were condemned as "feudal...
...Indeed, this imitation has become a national obsession...
...Now that he has been officially downgraded, it will be interesting to see if the translation of his works continues...
...He questioned the wisdom of requiring writers to conform to Marxist dogma, to undergo ideological "re-education," to write on subjects and in forms prescribed by the Party, and to live the life of a worker, peasant or soldier in order to write about them...
...Soviet ideas are used to fill the vacuums left by brainwashing...
...But no obstacle, however formidable, can stop the Communist planners...
...The production of literary works is tightly controlled...
...At present, the marriage law is not being enforced with the same vigor and rigidity as two or three years ago...
...In Chinese bookshops, over 50 per cent of the volumes displayed for sale are translated from the Russian...
...Particularly harmful were marriages between persons whose "histories" were "pure" and those from families of counterrevolutionary origin...
...One Chinese literary critic quoted the Soviet author Yekorin to prove a theoretical point, only to find that Yekorin's views had been discredited in the Soviet Union as long ago as 1952...
...Curiously, it was the women, for whose benefit the law was supposed to have been promulgated, who opposed it the most...
...Literature must fulfil a social need and serve as a tool of Party propaganda...
...In Russia, the peasants had grown relatively prosperous during the 1920s...
...Soviet methods are slavishly copied and enthusiastically applied...
...On the other hand, only 5,000 dutifully patronized Party-sanctioned reading rooms and cultural palaces...
...Soviet influence pervades every phase of Chinese life...
...In April 1950, Peking promulgated a new marriage law...
...The collectivization drive has !>een both expensive and bloody...
...In the first place, collectivization is an article of Communst faith...
...Government drives against such reading matter have thus far failed...
...On October 11, 1951, the People's Daily, mouthpiece of the Communist Central Committee, admitted that this was due partly to "feudal" oppression and partly to the mistakes made by Party cadres...
...Insuperable difficulties are still in the way...
...Red China's educational system has been remodeled to bring it more in line with Soviet practice...
...The number of people who read Russian books, however, does not always correspond with the number of books published...
...In Russia, the economic objectives behind the collectivization drive were to increase agricultural production and shift several million farm hands into rapidly expanding industry...
...In order to prove that he had always been a "counterrevolutionary," excerpts of his private correspondence over the past twelve years were published...
...It is arguable whether the gain would compensate for the loss...
...He ridiculed the "spiritless products" of those who sacrificed literary integrity to please the Party bosses and "worshiped a totem pole" in the manner of "primitive and barbarous tribes," It was widely believed that the "totem pole" was a reference to Mao Tse-tung...
...The Chinese Communists, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declared recently, are the most "dedicated imitators" of the Soviet Union...
...Between January and September last year, some 220 different Russian works were translated and 7.7 million copies distributed...
...In China, the collectivized farms will have to get along for some time without any mechanization, for the industrialization program has been unable to keep pace with collectivization...
...The Communist Party of the Soviet Union," said Mao Tse-tung in his greetings to the 20th Soviet Party Congress last February, "is always the shining example for the Communist Party of China...
...Russian," says Chien Tsun-jui, secretary-general of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, "is the tongue of Lenin and the key to socialism...
...He was officially condemned by the Union of Chinese Writers and Artists...
...Collectivization is, in Communist thinking, the prerequisite for socialist transformation...
...meaning: "Let the hundred flowers bloom together and let the hundred schools vie with one another for expression...
...Eight volumes of Stalin's works have already appeared...
...In Peking, under the very nose of the Central People's Government, daily readers at illegal book stalls in obscure corners of the city numbered 15,000...
...Yet, one has to be careful even here...
...Since the Soviet Union has already carried it out, China must follow Moscow's "shining example" at all costs...
...On May 13, 1955, the People's Daily published his recantation and self-castigation...
...In 1955, the Marriage Law Implementing Committee declared that, inasmuch as the law aimed at transforming the basic social structure of China, its total implementation was bound to be difficult...
...The chief spokesman of this group was Hu Feng, a member of the Communist party since the 1920s and a literary critic of considerable influence...
...Lenin and Stalin...
...Hu Feng's audacity brought down on his head the whole fury of the Communist party...
...Mass meetings were held throughout the country demanding increased vigilance against intellectual traitors...
...The change, however, is more apparent than real...
...During the first three years of enforcement, Party cadres made house-to-house investigations, "struggle meetings" were held, and children were called upon to expose their parents' tyranny...
...The movement gained momentum after establishment of the "People's Republic" in 1949...
...They often rushed into marriage after a chance meeting, perhaps "at a dinner party or at a card game...
...It is safest to invoke the authority of a Soviet writer to buttress one's opinions...
...In Communist China, as in the Soviet Union, discussion of the basic ideological issues is still taboo...
...It would mean a complete break with the past, and China's cultural continuity, unique in the history of the world, would be ended and a fresh start have to be made...
...This, however, is no easytask...
...Long before their seizure of power, the Chinese Communists made strenuous efforts to publicize the idea of Latinization in Shanghai and other centers...
...It is hard to see what economic advantage Mao Tse-tung hopes to derive from collectivization...
Vol. 39 • September 1956 • No. 89
