Communist China's First Decade-4. Commune Controversy
DALLIN, ALEXANDER
Communist China's First Decade — 4 COMMUNE CONTROVERSY By Alexander Dallin UPON His return to the United States, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (D.-Minn.) gave an account of his eight-hour...
...Yet this was surely not the last crisis...
...After a 12-day session, the Communist leadership acknowledged that the "gigantic and extremely complex task" would "not be fulfilled very soon...
...While this may become a real motive in Soviet policy toward China, at present there seems to be no evidence to assume any crucial concern in this field among the top stratum of Soviet decision-makers...
...Another hypothesis which defies demonstration at this time is the indirect provocation of the communes policy by Moscow's reduction of aid to China, to the point where Chinese food exports to the USSR began to hurt in 1957...
...The opportunity for pressing home a new compromise now offered itself...
...The Soviet correspondents in China avoided discussing them or reporting on them...
...Khrushchev proceeded to castigate Western sensationalists, cold-war mongers and Yugoslav revisionists for their attempts to split the "Socialist camp" asunder...
...That system is not nearly so good as the state farms and the collective farms...
...On the Chinese scene...
...in early 1930...
...And at his appearance before the National Press Club in Washington, Mikoyan rudely dismissed a question about Mao's stature as a theoretician of Marxism-Leninism...
...this was a course which, as a "good" Marxist, he had to admit was farther from the Communist Utopia than the rash program now embarked upon by Peking...
...on the surface, the solidity and solidarity of the axis were reaffirmed with customary ostentation and with multitudinous pledges of undying affection...
...10, p. 34...
...The completion of this entire process will take 15 or 20 or more years from now...
...When the experiment was discussed, there were overtones of derogation...
...BEFORE long, Chinese political spokesmen went further in asserting that the transition to Communism had already begun...
...The answer lay once again in compromise...
...This is indeed what the Kremlin wanted...
...A Hungarian correspondent wrote: "It does not help much to try to understand with a European mind what this way of life means to the Chinese peasant...
...Time and again foreigners trying to explore Sino-Soviet relations were given a cold shoulder by Moscow officialdom...
...7, p. 30...
...The normalization of relations that resulted from the Khrushchev-Bulganin expedition to China in late 1954 marked the first recognition of the growing—and increasingly independent—role which Communist China began to play after Stalin's death and the end of the Korean war...
...ignoring Soviet experience, charted a new shortcut to Communism...
...Just as Stalin...
...The resolution, in other words, acknowledged tacitly that Moscow had been right in its insistence to go slow, that Moscow had the superior wisdom and experience...
...after all...
...for the Communist and workers' movement and peace movement throughout the world...
...We do not know just what pressure Moscow applied on Peking...
...You know...
...Communism was not even in the offing...
...Even a "Titoist" stand offers little inducement to the Chinese today...
...At a time when the Moscow leadership appears to many foreign Communists —Chinese included—as vacillating, bungling and incomprehensibly pragmatic...
...In an article passed for publication on October 16, Ts...
...A bit reluctantly, Moscow had recognized at various times since 1954 that China's experience and background made desirable certain (none too significant) differences in tactics...
...It reveals (a) the Soviet resentment of the Chinese, (b) the implicit finality of the Soviet judgment, based on Moscow's bitter experience with the earlier communes, and (c) Khrushchev's defeatist attitude, juxtaposing the tried Soviet incentive system to the "old-fashioned" commune which "won't work...
...he was repeatedly asked about the communes...
...Moscow has continued to cling to its arrogation of leadership within the "Socialist camp"—a status of priority formally recognized and reiterated by all the other Communist leaders, Mao included...
...You can't get production without incentive...
...Its outstanding feature was the attempt to ignore the tremendous revolution that was under way in China...
...Nor have we any evidence that Mao is backing any "clique"' in the Soviet Presidium...
...Voprosy filosofii, 1958...
...The contest was squarely joined: To the Chinese enrages who put themselves mentally across the finish line ahead of the Soviet comrades, Moscow permitted a reply predicting the arrival of the "Europeans" ahead of the "Asians" in Communist bliss...
...It added: "We in the Chinese Communist party will persist in the struggle to learn from the great Communist party of the Soviet Union and to consolidate and strengthen the great friendship between our two parties and two countries...
...The militant pronouncements emanating from Peking could barely conceal the insecurity revealed even earlier—for instance, in Mao Tse-tung's speech in Moscow in November 1957, when he had acknowledged that "the Soviet Union has two sputniks, and we have not even a quarter of a sputnik...
...under Stalin, had led him to rebound to a "rightist" policy of bigger and better incentives for the peasantry...
...The economic, political and military difficulties in which Communist China found itself—and its need of further Soviet aid—only added to Peking's willingness to reconsider the issue, at least in form...
...Indeed, compromise seems to have become characteristic of Khrushchev's style of governance...
...All these problems...
...Industrialization, electrification and mechanization "will still take a very long time...
...More fundamental was the vision of an early transition to Communism, which the Chinese project had raised...
...Beneath the formally favorable surface impression, Soviet accounts of Chinese industrial progress now also contained pejorative innuendos...
...We are in full and complete agreement with the fraternal Communist party of China," he declared, "though its methods of building Socialism are in many ways dissimilar from ours...
...This only highlights the fact that the differences over the communes are indeed the most vital ideological problem that can divide Communists, for it concerns the question of the circumstances under which Communism can be achieved...
...The Asian Socialist countries . . . constitute another regional zone and will also [i.e., later] jointly enter Communism...
...It was clear that a serious dispute had developed...
...New China News Agency, December 18, 1958...
...In mid-November...
...The Literary Gazette in Moscow dismissed the communes as a desperate venture, "the only way out of the difficult situation in which the entire economy found itself...
...China's Premier Chou En-lai (Mao Tse-tung being the only Communist leader from within the "camp" not to attend the Congress in person) generously acknowledged Khrushchev's genius and contribution to the "treasure house of Marxism-Leninism...
...Even at the highest level...
...It was the external aspects of the "second revolution" that involved Peking in a muted controversy with Moscow, which neither Mao Tse-tung nor Khrushchev had apparently foreseen or invited...
...To compel Mao to terminate the campaign and to acknowledge the evil of his ways was both impossible in practice, and —if it were done publicly—impolitic...
...The Chinese Party, "guided by the concepts of Marxism-Leninism," he declared, was leading its people "along the road of building Socialism in China...
...After 16 years of Soviet rule, Russia had in 1934 been told that it had reached "socialism"—the lower stage on the road of Communism...
...We must actively use the form of the people's commune and through it find the concrete road of transition to Communism...
...While trying to ostracize the Chinese...
...Senator Humphrey, too, reported that "one of the few subjects that Khrushchev was reluctant to discuss was Communist China and his Government's relation with it...
...It just doesn't work...
...On the anniversary of the October Revolution, Soviet Ambassador Pavel Yudin addressed a meeting in Peking...
...If so, there may indeed be truth in the reports that he wants to take time off to reconsider the theoretical aspects of the problem...
...Socialism was not yet built...
...Some were revealed in the short-lived support which, in the fall of 1956...
...Only those—in or out of the Soviet bloc—who had learned to read between the lines, were aware of some of the problems...
...Vietnam News Agency, December 19, 1958...
...The commotion over the communes was thus by no means the first fly in the ointment...
...On the one hand, Chinese writers, even in Soviet publications, have on occasion continued to speak of the "shoots of Communism" inherent in the communes (e.g., Chin Su-lin, in New Times, 1959, no...
...The resolution of the Chinese party, on August 29, 1958, had concluded: "The realization of Communism in our country is already not something far away...
...The cohesive elements in the Sino-Soviet alliance are still considerably stronger than the divisive ones...
...Yet a month later...
...there is a vacuum of ideological leadership which Mao may well aspire to fill...
...On the other hand, the CCP's ideological organ, Hung Chi, in mid-February specifically accepted the Soviet view that the establishment of Communism presupposed a stage of Socialist development with a system of material incentives a la Soviet...
...The Chinese Communist leadership expected some difficulties in the course of the radical reorganization of the countryside which was launched in August 1958...
...September 30, 1958...
...Liu Shao-chi has been identified as spokesman for the "left," and Chou En-lai as an advocate of a "reasonable" and "realistic" policy...
...Yet in a matter so basic as the organization of agriculture, the sudden announcement of a communization plan was bound to appear as a studied rejection of Soviet experience, an experience which Moscow had been jealous to have accepted as essential for all Communist-led countries and to which the Chinese Communists had been eager to pay lip service...
...It was a novel and dangerous step to split the Communist community into separate and perhaps mutually incomprehensible European and Asian experiences...
...discovered a fount of youth when the aging Soviet leadership was still warily feeling its way toward it...
...Out of 215 commentaries on the Far East broadcast over Radio Moscow during their establishment (October-November 1958), only three mentioned the communes...
...It was as if the argument over the communes provided, at long last, a licit issue over which the accumulated anxieties about China that the Russians had held in for years could suddenly be poured out...
...at best, Moscow credited the Chinese with the "building of Socialism...
...Yet, when pressed, the talkative Soviet Premier (according to Humphrey) remarked about the communes: "They are old-fashioned, they are reactionary...
...Even the satellite press reacted with similar lack of identification...
...See Roderick MacFarquhar...
...And now the Chinese proclaimed that, in effect, the Soviet sacrifices and privations had been for naught, that there was a simpler, quicker way of attaining the millenium...
...On December 10, the Chinese Communists accepted the Soviet suggestion...
...Italics mine...
...Differences remained...
...blaming overzealous underlings for their "dizziness with success...
...In addition, of course, there were the differences over the summit conference plans of 1958, and the probable discord over the closing of the "nuclear club" before China acquires non-conventional weapons...
...To Moscow, this was heresy, and it was surely no accidental misprint in Izvestia, when this paragraph was republished, that the first phrase was changed to read that "the realization of the communes," rather than of Communism, was already "not far away...
...The following week, a new, partially symbolic Sino-Soviet economic aid agreement was announced, and Jen Min Jih Pao, the Peking daily, recognized the Soviet experience as a "brilliant example for all Socialist countries...
...China cannot afford, nor does it want, to precipitate an open rift with Moscow: It stands to gain nothing from such a rift...
...this kind of "all-is-well—next-question-please" attitude seemed to prevail...
...Subsequent practice has not been entirely consistent...
...How could Moscow solve the issue...
...The decision to organize communes throughout China was a double challenge to the Soviet leadership...
...Moscow had difficulty concealing its sense of discomfort...
...in large part, thanks to the difficulties which the Chinese were encountering—not at all surprisingly —in their gigantic transformation of the countryside...
...so now Peking could be brought to recognize that it had gone too far too fast, that in fact Moscow had been right all along in advising less recklessness and less naivete, and that China had not...
...One may well interpret the Chinese resolution, then, as a face-saving retreat intended to mollify Moscow, to acknowledge what Khrushchev wanted—namely, that China was not about to overtake the USSR either in claims of progress or in attempts to institute "full Communism...
...Indeed, a commentary issued almost simultaneously in Peking granted that "the great Soviet Union, which has opened up the road for mankind to advance to Socialism, is now pointing the way to Communism...
...And if one tries to put questions, it transpires that the question was foolish...
...Peking hoped, could be coped with internally, without the intrusion of publicity or the inconvenience of pressure from abroad...
...Oddly, the fear is not so much one of competing power as of countervailing magnetism, independent dynamism and divergent value systems...
...This was neither the first, nor surely the last, crisis in their relations...
...The spirit of sweetness and light in high-level international exchangemanship, to which this encounter had contributed, was put to a rude test when on February 5 Khrushchev denounced the Senator as a "fabricator" of fairy tales...
...In a 10,000-word resolution, the CCP Central Committee stressed, with unusual reiteration, the "gradual-ness" of the impending transition from Socialism to Communism...
...President Ho Chi Minh told United Press International that his Government was planning to organize cooperative farming and had no intention of establishing communes on the Chinese model...
...On the other hand, Peking in no way admitted that the notion of communes—and their Communist potential—had been erroneous...
...In preceding issues, Valentin Chu examined the Chinese national character, Franz Michaels analyzed the structure of the Communist party and J. P. McCarthy the situation of the peasants...
...It made sure that the communization was not copied by other Communist parties —particularly those which were customarily subject to greatest Chinese influence: North Vietnam and North Korea...
...and this put the Soviet Communist party clearly on the defensive...
...Khrushchev now offered an olive branch: In his speech of January 27, 1959, before the 21st Congress of the CPSU, he declared that the countries of the Socialist bloc in both Europe and Asia would move up to the level of true Communism "more or less simultaneously...
...In referring to the newly-instituted backyard bessemers, Pravda wrote on September 26 that these furnaces "differ only slightly from the type used by the craftsmen of the Middle Ages...
...Here was Communist China's reply to the Kremlin's efforts at coordination on the level of state policy: ideological guidance under the common canopy of Marxism-Leninism...
...Hsinhua News Agency, November 6, 1958...
...It was, typically for the Soviet orbit, a family quarrel over political and ideological leadership in the Communist fold...
...On the contrary — while stressing the "unbreakable, fraternal bonds of friendship linking the peoples of the Soviet Union and China"—he insisted that the countries of the "Socialist camp" were advancing "along the trail blazed by the [Russian] October Revolution...
...The formula for China since 1954 had indeed found such a middle ground: more authority for the Chinese Communists, provided they did not challenge Soviet leadership and power...
...While the details remain obscure, we now know of Stalin's ambivalence toward Mao in 1944-48: of the resistance of some Chinese Communists to the Soviet arrogation of unquestioned leaderThis is the fourth article in our series on ten years of Communist rule in China...
...Communist China's Intra-Party Dispute," Pacific Affairs, December 1958...
...It amounted to an assertion of independence in strategy which...
...Though discussing the building of Communism, he pointedly avoided all mention of the communes...
...gave an account of his eight-hour conversation with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev on December 1, 1958...
...A number of earlier differences provided the backdrop...
...A. Stepanyan, a responsible "theoretician," wrote: "It must be assumed that the European Socialist countries . . . constitute a special economic zone and will be the first to enter Communism...
...Clearly China was far from becoming a modern industrial power...
...Yet it has at most lost a round—and perhaps only in appearances...
...Resentments over Soviet attitudes and actions were voiced with alarming frankness and frequency during the brief interlude of the "hundred flowers"—the Chinese analogue of Moscow's 1956 "thaw...
...Even allowing for the fact that Humphrey's was not a verbatim quotation taken down at the time, and granting the possibility that— rather than discarding it entirely— Khrushchev had meant to postpone the old Marxian "from each—to each" maxim until the happy day of Communist plenty, it was still a remarkable statement for Khrushchev to make...
...In North Vietnam, there may have been a split or a change of heart: In December the silent treatment was broken by quasi-official applause suggesting that the Chinese communes were "of great significance...
...At the same time, it touched an exposed nerve in Khrushchev's political makeup: His own failure to push through a "leftist" program of agro-cities in 1951...
...Individual Soviet citizens and officials have expressed concern over the rapid growth of the Chinese population and a sense of uncomfortable loneliness in foreseeing a Sino-Soviet duel for dominance a generation or two hence...
...Another 24 years had passed and the transition to the "higher stage" was still remote, at best vaguely envisaged at the end of several five-year plans...
...They are based on that principle, 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.' You know that won't work...
...ship in the Socialist camp ; of the numerous resentments over economic relations, Sino-Soviet mixed companies, and the condescension with which Moscow treated Peking...
...of China's "forcing Moscow's hand" on either Tito or Berlin, are nonsensical...
...Russia and China today need each other, and there is no reason to assume that the situation will soon change...
...While it is virtually certain that divisions within the Chinese Communist party (CCP) leadership were serious—over both the communization and relations with the USSR— outwardly nothing betrayed the tensions...
...Others pertained to Soviet aspirations in the peripheral provinces of China—Sinkiang and Manchuria—and in nominally independent Outer Mongolia...
...China had claimed to be heading into Communism first...
...yet it has tried to prevent an increase in China's specific weight within the Communist bloc...
...Not a single Soviet leader spoke of the communes...
...It is well not to exaggerate China's influence...
...The absence of a Soviet model was bothersome but not crucial...
...Of these, the most revealing was probably the greater rigidity and consistency in the Chinese image of Stalin...
...Confronted with the growth of Chinese power, Moscow vainly sought to square the circle: It has been interested in maximizing Peking's power vis-a-vis the outside world...
...Militarily, economically, politically and ideologically, it feels far more at home in the Soviet orbit than it would outside it...
...The question remains open as to how many more controversies Moscow and Peking can settle en famille before the high-tension wires between the two capitals break down...
...had called a temporary halt to his "second revolution...
...In an exceptional account on October 23, Leningradskaia Prav-da commented that "the people's communes are just being formed...
...When in January 1959 Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan toured the United States...
...With this problem out of the way...
...It was revealing that the issue which provoked this manifestation of dictatorial insecurity was the relationship of Moscow to Peking...
...Not a word about the communes...
...Moscow had replied that the countries of Europe would attain the "higher stage" earlier...
...While it has grown, the commune controversy — only one entre'acte in the long drama of Sino-Soviet relations—illustrates the limits of Peking's authority...
...Formally, the two senior partners of the "Socialist camp" remained unalterably allied...
...Soviet sensitivity over the entire issue continued to be most abnormal, though in fact the peak of the crisis had already passed...
...On January 12, at the University of California in Los Angeles he, too, stated—in terms substantially similar to those attributed by Humphrey to Khrushchev—that the Soviet Union had abandoned the commune system and that it was not possible to implement the "from each—to each" formula until, at some remote future date, a life of plenty permitted a free distribution of products...
...No less significant were the differences in theory, which the Communist press never spelled out...
...Nepsza-badsag, October 1, 1958...
...Other "theoreticians" even went back to Marx, in whose writings they found 10 preconditions for the flowering of Communism: of these, they claimed, eight had already been fulfilled, and the communes would meet the remaining two: the fusion of agriculture and manufacture, and the fusion of industry and education...
...in terms of China's stature and "face" and in terms of the cohesion and infallibility of the Soviet bloc...
...Perhaps the most extreme counterclaim to Peking's boasts about its shortcut to Communism came in the Soviet journal of philosophy...
...Another was the permissibility of "multiple roads" to Communism...
...On November 21, General Chu Teh...
...It confirms once again, if confirmation were needed, that all assertions of Chinese "leadership" over the Soviet party...
...THE PARTY CONGRESS was turned into a reaffirmation of unity in the orbit...
...On the face of it, Communist China has accepted the backstage strictures and admonitions from the "fraternal" Soviet Party...
...Moscow's discontent with the Chinese adventure was strikingly reflected in the treatment of the communes in the Soviet press...
...Also, Mao's recognition that "contradictions" between the rulers and the ruled existed even under "Socialism" caused Khrushchev to engage in some embarrassed double-talk and quick footwork...
...North Korea, referring to Moscow but not to the Chinese experience, opted for aggrandizement of collectives on the Soviet model...
...To back down, to endorse the communization in China, and to grant Mao unlimited authority to make and unmake Marxist-Leninist theory at will, seemed unthinkable for Khrushchev and his associates...
...China's deputy chief of state and vice-chairman of the Party's Central Committee, told a youth rally that full-blown Communism would be attained in this generation...
...While he is prepared to go to extremes when needed—a multitude of examples from the executed Hungarian Premier Imre Nagy to Marshal Georgi Zhukov and Boris Pasternak confirm this—he often seeks a somewhat opportunist modus vivendi...
...It was in this atmosphere that a Communist official in Peking told the correspondent of the London Observer that "it is the unity of Marxist thought, not the union of Socialist states, which is our strength...
...The problem of the Chinese communes and the Soviet reaction to them illustrate some of the weaknesses and strengths of the Sino-Soviet alliance...
...We tried that right after the revolution [of 1917...
...Mao gave the Polish Communists in their effort to gain greater freedom of action from Moscow...
...Is Mao's resignation in anyway related to the commune controversy...
...Yet each fears the other...
...Two days later, Ogonyok reported, paraphrasing a Chinese official, that "what is being carried out now—the wheel-ization, if one may say so—is a technical revolution...
...It has seemingly buckled under...
...Indeed, Chou's visit to Moscow may be symptomatic of the victory of the "moderates" in the CCP...
...The way was now open for a further "programmatic" compromise...
...None of these sources of tension was ever acknowledged or advertised...
...True, the very presence of Communist China had obliged Moscow to look self-consciously over its shoulder and to respond to the sophomoric curiosity of the Chinese comrades about the shape and size of the Communist paradise with a series of redefinitions and elaborations...
...The opportunity for Soviet pressure was enhanced by the fact that the Russians' sense of superiority and inferiority toward the Chinese was reciprocated in kind by China...
...The change in the pattern of trade is suggested by the fact that the value of Soviet deliveries to China went from $380 million in 1950 to $542 million in 1957, while that of Chinese deliveries to the USSR grew from $188 million in 1950 to $738 million in 1957...
...In China the concept of farm aggrandizement and communization was credited entirely to Mao, no mention being made of Khrushchev's earlier, and abortive, interest in this field...
...Whatever quarrel there was had to be kept en famille...
...Moscow in turn reacted with unusual acuity...
...Throughout the Soviet orbit, the running dispute over rates of economic change has been a crucial index to intra-Party feuds...
...It is revealing that the dispute over the communes should have erupted around an issue that involved no contest of power, economics or strategy in any conventional sense...
...But was this not what Mao had invited by unleashing his millions in their own pursuit of paradise...
...During the further struggle for the building of Socialism [not Communism], this new low-level form of Socialist social organization will develop further...
...Here, Alexander Dallin discusses the controversy over the communes between Peking and Moscow...
...Senator, what those communes are based on...
...An associate professor at the Russian Institute, Columbia University, Dallin is a former research director of the War Documentation Project...
...Moscow made another move to isolate the Chinese comrades...
...A special delegation of the agitprop section of the Soviet Communist party (CPSU) Central Committee toured China for a month and, upon its return, commented with dutiful enthusiasm on China's industrial accomplishments...
Vol. 42 • April 1959 • No. 16
