One Mist for Another
FEIS, HERBERT
MAO'S 100 FLOWERS A DISCUSSION On February 27, at a closed session of the Supreme State Conference in Peking, Mao Tse-tung, Chairman of China's Communist party, delivered an address entitled "The...
...Herbert Feis, formerly of the State Department, is author of The China Tangle, The Road to Pearl Harbor and the new Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin...
...One of the most ardently repeated assertions of the exponents of Communist ideology has been that within Communist society harmony and identity of interest always prevail among all...
...Such restrictions as those on the right to choose or change jobs and residence, of course, bore more heavily on some than on others...
...True, he maintains that these are fundamentally different than the contradictions in capitalist society...
...Who could have listed them more comprehensively than he now has...
...In one great leap this Chinese leader has thus boldly bounded out of the clouds of Communist teaching into the clearer world of reality...
...But Mao has guarded this candor by diffusing a fresh protective mist over another aspect of these realities...
...they have their philosophical caps and philosophical whiskers, their philosophical slippers, and philosophical fans...
...The unending need felt for constant indoctrination showed this to be so...
...To deal with this situation, Mao announced the formula: "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend...
...David Nelson Rowe is Assistant Professor of Chinese History at Yale University...
...To the operation of this process he attributes a magical positiveness, an assurance that all the perpetually occuring contradictions can be fairly adjusted...
...Let me explain these two impressions...
...Mao Tse-tung was engaging not merely in teaching but in an urgent effort at persuasion...
...It is a wav of assuring the Chinese people that the troubles which beset them are only transient, and will be solved by the inevitable next step to unity...
...This skillful though ponderous formulation is purposeful...
...Was there, for example, to be better housing and more varied food for the millions in the near future or more steel in the far future...
...The restraints and suppressions imposed on individual initiatives and desires, it could be assumed, would remain areas of tension between many individuals and the authorities...
...he makes this out to be the route which socialist society must travel to become more united and consolidated...
...Harold R. Isaacs, veteran writer on Asia, is now at MIT's Center for International Studies...
...He begins with "contradictions within the working class, contradictions within the peasantry, contradictions within the intelligentsia, contradictions between the working class and peasantry on the one hand, and the intelligentsia, on the other...
...It is a new verbal cloak for dictatorship—by making it appear merely as a servant of an unchallengeable political process by which the people progress toward their own desired destiny...
...Free-minded observers of the system as it was actually operated in the Soviet Union have known this belief to be mythical—a seductive but unachievable condition...
...Whatever basic plan of production was adopted had to have different consequences for different elements (working groups, age groups, political groups, sex groups, school groups and the rest...
...there is even a philosophical standard for measuring the nails...
...MAO'S 100 FLOWERS A DISCUSSION On February 27, at a closed session of the Supreme State Conference in Peking, Mao Tse-tung, Chairman of China's Communist party, delivered an address entitled "The Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People...
...The determination of how much productive energy would be devoted to expansion of heavy industry and how much to satisfy present wants obviously affected the welfare of the masses—often contrary to their wishes...
...One Mist for Another By Herbert Feis Mao Tse-tung's "hundred flowers" speech of February 27 seems to me to have cleared away the mist (more elegantly called the '"mystique") which has habitually concealed the realities enveloped in one aspect of Marxist-Leninist doctrine...
...However, when Mao Tse-tung turns to explain how, and with what certainty, all these are to be adjusted, he immerses himself in a mist as dense as the one he dispelled...
...Other sections of his speech, devoted to issues of current importance in China, make that clear...
...He ends with "contradictions between the interests of the state, collective interests and individual interests...
...between those in a position of leadership and the led, and contradictions arising from the bureaucratic practices of certain state functionaries in their relations with the masses...
...There is no escape from it, he avows: "Marxist philosophy holds that the law of the unity of opposites is a fundamental law of the universe...
...between democracy and centralism...
...But until Mao Tse-tung spoke out, the devotees always denied that issues such as these expressed real differences of interest and desire, or "contradictions" in his language...
...Decisions about terms and conditions of work on collective farms and in factories, about taxes and compulsory savings, plainly meant "more" or "less" for some elements in the community than others...
...Still, it is easier for Western students of society to understand him, for they are familiar with strains, tensions and conflicts of interest in their own countries...
...This will be accomplished by what he calls the "unity-criticism-unity" process...
...Here three experts analyze some of the implications of the speech...
...That there was resistance to the imposed arrangements about these and many, many other features of working and living in the Soviet Union and China was proven by the continual need to compel acceptance—always by some, at times by many...
...But decorating the purpose, and perhaps at points outrunning it, may be detected that inclination of Chinese instructors noted by Oliver Goldsmith's imaginary Lien Chi Altangi—Citizen of the World: "Our scholars of China have a most profound admiration for forms . they may properly enough be said to be clothed with wisdom from head to foot...
...Four months later, the New China News Agency released an edited text, which omitted Mao's confession of 800,000 slain by Communist terror, but did include revelations of mass discontent ("contradictions") which had led some Chinese (Mao admitted) to expect another Hungary in China...
...Individuals and groups who maintain dissent are henceforth to understand that they are resisting not the command of a single party (itself run by a srtlall group) but futilely contending against constructive development...
...Even elementary analysis pointed to many differences of interest and disparities that were inescapable in the most ordinary realms of policy-making...
...But—and mark the buts—this law can only fulfill its beneficial nature (1) in regard to contradictions that are "non-antagonistic" by his definition, (2) if the people and their Communist teachers learn how to deal with such contradictions in a correct way, (3) if there is an alert and vigorous dictatorship to control the expression of differences (contradiction) and decide what the constantlv changing basis of unity is to be...
...In propounding these and related new interpretations of Leninist doctrine...
...This was so—the dogma runs —because it must be so when all property was owned in common (by the state) and when "class" divisions of capitalism were extinguished, as they were to be...
Vol. 40 • August 1957 • No. 32
