A New Phase in Chinese Communism:

...But a more immediate stimulus is also needed to forge national unity and arouse patriotic en­thusiasm to its highest pitch...

...There must be an apparent threat of attack, but not real danger of a major war...

...The dangerous thoughts were, indeed, quickly driven under­ground again, and the critics vilified and humiliated, but immense damage had already been done...

...The only dif­ference in China is that the swing of the pendulum has been greater than anywhere else...

...The shock is all the greater when an over-confident raising of the lid suddenly discloses the disaffection hitherto kept underground...

...Mao Tse-tung was quoted as declaring that "the liberation of the productive force of the laboring people has the same effect as the smashing of the nucleus of an atom...

...not only are young children to be cared for in creches so that women can work on the land or in mines and factories, but all meals are to be taken, if possible, in canteens, and household cleaning, sewing and mending will be done by squads going from house to house, so that there will be virtually nothing left to be done privately in the home...

...The present drive for "leaping progress" is no doubt genuinely intended to bring about enormous increases in production, and the communes may contribute to this end...

...Finally, the design of economic life in the communes is aimed at breaking down what the Communists regard as the principal obstacle to the attainment of their ends —the cohesion of the family as the traditional basis of Chinese society...

...Any relaxation of Communist rule leads sooner or later to the point where the process either must dissolve the Party dictator­ship and inaugurate a genuine political liberty, or else must be reversed so that the crumbling monopoly of power may be restored...

...There were signs that this situation was considered far from satis­factory, whether from the political or from the economic angle...

...People are urged to forget their private interests and devote themselves to the com­mon task with utter selflessness...

...in China, on the contrary, there is still a fanatical faith in the early attainment of the Utopian paradise of primitive Marxism...

...The Party, indeed, must be the judge of how much violence or intolerance is needed in order to maintain its monopoly of power, and this is a matter of weighing the various elements and possibilities in a giv?n concrete situation...

...Having collectivized agriculture and virtually expropriated the remaining private sectors of industry during 1955-56, the regime now found itself directly responsible for all branches of the national economy and discovered that in many of them its administration had been unequal to the task...

...The opening of the Congress on May 5 coincided with the publication in the Party organ Jen-min jih-pao of the tirade against Tito which launched the new drive against the Yugoslav heresy in the Communist world, and the proceedings of the Congress (in so far as they were reported, which was only partially) were marked by a combination of invective against revisionism (and its Chinese equivalent, ''bourgeois rightism") and de­mands for "leaping progress" in economic expansion...

...From this Mao drew the conclusion that a milder and more relaxed policy could be pursued without in any way endanger­ing the political supremacy of the Party and the progress of socialist construction...

...Al­ though we cannot know even now quite what was going on in the seats of power in Peking when the policy was tried out, it seems better to regard it as an experiment in relaxation which got out of control rather than as a cleverly laid trap to bring concealed opponents out into the open...

...There is in any case the patriotic motive of making China great and powerful through industrializa­tion and of wiping out the backwardness and humiliations of the last century...

...The propaganda of the current campaign has been full of a quasi-religious ex­hortation to collectivist virtue...

...BUT THE POLICIES of the Chinese Communist leadership over the past three years should not he regarded as merely the result of a fickle opportunism...

...But always there was the reservation that the whole apparatus of repression and coercion must be called into play again if it should prove that the re­laxation was endangering the foundations of the regime...

...Hence hi9 endeavors both to give more freedom of thought and criticism to the intelligentsia and to provide some scope for the expression of dis­content among the people, even to the extent of tolerating strikes and minor disturbances which might represent harmless contradictions between the Government and the governed...

...Moreover, at the same time that the Party had to cope with the political disarray resulting from its ill-judged attempt to combine an ideological dictatorship with a measure of intellectual liberty, it was also confronted with alarmi,ng difficulties on the economic front...

...The Chinese nation must be rallied against "imperialism," which to Peking means against America...

...But for a Marxist-Leninist who is convinced that history is on his side and that the mission of the proletarian vanguard cannot be affected by any blindness of the masses, the revelation of unpopularity cannot be a reason for the abandonment of power or a modification of social ob­jectives, but only for the adoption of sterner measures and greater vigilance against the enemy...

...Military considerations also have undoubtedly played a part, in both the USSR and China, in schemes for economic decentralization...

...The radical revisionists in Eu­rope, such as Djilas and Leszek Kolakowski, are ready for the former alternative, but the Communist rulers everywhere have seen the danger signals and since the middle of 1957 have been endeavoring to tighten up once more the bonds of totalitarian control...

...The new phase of Chinese Communism must be viewed in relation to the situation which confronted the leader­ship during the first four months of 1958...

...In most cases there is no reason to suppose that these muddles and failures were due to anything but the inexperience and incompetence to be expected in the early stages of a planned economy...

...Their rulers, it is held, will want to avoid com­plications in foreign affairs when they have their hands full with internal problems...

...With suitable adapta­tion to the jargon of modern Communist boast-and-boost propaganda, the phrase might well be taken to express 'the spirit of the new phase of the Chinese Communist revolution initiated by the special "second session" of the Eighth Party Congress held in May of this year (the original session having been convened in September 1956...

...A Communist state is highly vulnerable when in the throes of a major eco­nomic reconstruction, and for this reason many political commentators have regarded big programs of economic development in Communist countries as guarantees of peace...

...it has declared that the same organization which will be used to mobilize labor for whatever purpose it is needed can be used also for de­fense in time of war...

...It appears, indeed, that the com­munes are to be run on semi-military lines and that their members, will form militia units available either for partisan resistance in the event of foreign invasion or for the suppression of local disturbances...

...On the other hand, it is just when a Communist government is pressing hardest on its people that it has most need of an external enemy to stir up patriotic emotions and provide a pretext for dis­crediting opponents as agents of a foreign power...

...From the outset Peking has laid emphasis on the military functions, of the communes...

...Later, in the 1930's, when Stalin was faced with a real menace from the expansionist policies of Germany and Japan, preponderance of industrial and military power is capable of performing this function...

...A change of policy back from soft to hard need not involve any reversal of principle, for the Party always remained, in Mao's theory, the sole judge of whether criticisms of itself were permissible and whether any par­ticular conflict was to be regarded as a non-antagonistic one "among the people" or as an antagonistic one "with the enemy...

...a socialist economy is especially vulnerable if it is directed from a warren of offices in a capital city which can be knocked out at one blow...

...The only fixed principles are those of maintaining the rule of the Party and of building socialism...

...Mao Tse-tung, not unreasonably, saw a danger that too much Polish independence might bring dissension and disunity to the bloc in a time of crisis, and he considered that China's part was to help in persuading the Poles to accept a certain degree of subordination to Moscow in return for Mao's moral backing of Gomulka for that part of the latter's program which involved Poland's right to manage her internal affairs...

...It is primarily in this connection that the new policies in Communist China appear to be ideologically, and not just practically, significant, for they bear an imprint of Utopian extremism which goes beyond anything currently practiced in Soviet Russia...

...in this way it is ap­parently hoped that the family, already weakened by the setting of children against their parents and by the en­couragement of informing to the Party or the police against close relatives, will lose all significance as a social unit, since the individual will pass almost his whole life in the wider group activities of the commune...

...The intensity of the campaign against revisionism, which continued in growing volume after all public antagonism to the regime had been silenced, was evidence of the wide circulation of the ideas expressed during the interlude of toleration, and of the seriousness with which the Communist leadership regarded this opposition...

...The Chinese people are being driven harder than ever before...

...Today the "hundred flowers" are dead and the Chinese Communists are ad­vancing under a banner which might well bear the slogan, "Forward to Stalinism...

...But the un­settling and bewildering effects of the unleashing of critisuch circumstances there is a real clanger that the central government may be defeated by the sheer multiplicity of the rural economic units it has to administer, and their amalgamation into fewer and larger entities offers con­siderable administrative advantages...

...In the USSR, the early visions of a perfect society without personal private property, family ties or the use of money have faded with the passing of time...

...The reaction in China, the turn from relaxation and indulgence to ferocious persecution and intransigence, has resulted from the discovery that Mao was not loved as much as he thought he was...

...Between the beginning of 1956 and the middle of 1957, the outlook of the ruling circles in Peking, and particularly of Mao himself, was colored by an exaggerated optimism with regard to the popular support enjoyed by the Communist party and the prospects of China's smooth and rapid achievement of large-scale industrialization on a socialist basis...

...The press was filled with complaints of bottlenecks and shortages, of targets unattained and work held up for lack of essential supplies...

...There is no reason to doubt that he preferred to lighten the burden of the regime if he could, and that the events in Hungary confirmed him in his belief that the greatest danger for the Party in China lay in the tendency to lose contact with the masses and become identified with an oppressive bureau­ cratic system...

...The chances for any power to survive a nuclear war depend largely on the degree of peacetime dispersal of industry and ad­ministrative services...

...There was correspondingly bitter disappointment when China appeared to desert Poland and throw her weight on the side of Moscow...

...The principle of collective work is to be carried out thoroughly...

...The two themes were linked together by the contention that revisionism, at least in its indirect influence, was to blame for the slow development of production : the crea­tive UTge o-f the masses, craving the opportunity to forge ahead at high speed,.was being thwarted and frustrated by the faint-hearted caution of officials and managers who underestimated the productive potential o-f the Chinese people...

...at the same time, they are being led to expect the millennium in the near future and urged to an absolute break, not only with the social class order of the past, but also with all the habitual ways of living...

...Politically, the period of the "hundred flowers" had been extremely disturbing and demoralizing...

...they must not think about their wages or conditions of work, but only about producing "more, better, faster and more thriftily" ; they must "surrender their hearts" and "break out from the small world of individualism into the big world of Communism...

...The task of the Party cadres was now not so much to stimulate the masses to greater efforts as to break down the obstacles, ultimately of an ideological character, which were "restricting the forces of produc­tion" already operative...

...Attacks on revisionism, creation of 'communes' and Peking,s demands for Moscow leadership in 'proletarian internationalism' mark Mao's 'hard' line A New Phase in Chinese Communism By G. F. Hudson A SHANGHAI REPAIR SHOP in former days is said to have proudly displayed a placard in English read­ing: "Any mortal thing can do...

...No regime, even with the intention of operat­ing as an agent provocateur, could really have wanted the blasts of only too telling criticism to' which the insti­tutions and policies of Communist China were exposed, by license from itself, in the spring of last year...

...but the new, in­tensive attack on individualism is also conceived as an end in itself and might be continued even if it were to prove economically a mistake...

...the external tension must be such that the Government can gain prestige and make tangible gains by a strong policy in a situation verging on but not reaching large-scale belligerency...

...During the period of the Soviet first Five-Year Plan, it was too dangerous for the Soviet Union, isolated as it then was, to pursue an aggressive policy or provoke ex­ternal conflicts, but the myth of an impending imperial­ist attack was continually projected and was dramatized by means of the Ramzin and other show trials...

...Undoubtedly he wishes to be loved by his people, and it is always fatally easy for a dictator, who has dragoo;ned a society by sup­pressing opposition and rigging elections, to believe in the reality of the universal praise and adulation that surround him...

...SUCH PRESSURE for total change necessarily involves high emotional tensions and strains in the popula­tion, with risks of resistance and revolt, and it is not in any way surprising that the rulers of Communist China should seek to rally popular support and close the ranks by appealing to patriotic passions against an external enemy...

...The seeds of doubt had been sown everywhere, and the work of years of indoctrination and propaganda suddenly upset by a few weeks of free speech...

...They have reflected rather an adaptation to facts which have been discovered to be different from what they were thought to be...

...The conditions for a policy of this kind are not easy to arrange, and any reckless adventure might well have fatal consequences for the regime...

...In Poland, the more liberal-minded of Gomulka's followers had earlier been enthusiastic about Mao's expositions of the "hundred flowers" principle and the methods of resolving contra­dictions among the people, and for a while there had been talk of a "Warsaw-Peking axis" to check the domi­nation of the Soviet Union in the Communist world...

...Already when Chou En-lai visited Warsaw in January 1957, it was reported that he tried to get Gomulka to acknowledge Soviet international leadership in the joint communique they were to issue, but received the reply that the state of public feeling in Poland at that time made such a gesture out of the question.Ten months later, when the leaders of the governing Communist parties of the world gathered in Moscow to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revo­lution, the Chinese renewed their persuasion of the Poles and this time succeeded in inducing them to- put their signature to the 12-party declaration which recognized the pre-eminent position of the Soviet Union at the same time that it denounced revisionism as the greatest current danger to the Communist cause...