China's 'Third Force'

Elegant, Robert

THE NEW INTELLECTUAL OPPOSITION China's Third Force' By Robert S. Elegant Hong Kong The intense Chinese university student quoted the words with quiet passion. Stanza after stanza flowed from...

...Such goals appear negligible to the doctrine-obsessed Maoists...
...A conference of writers and artists held in Tientsin in north China last November was denounced by the Maoists as an "illegal" gathering of the "third force...
...They seek to put down the violent civil disorder released by the Cultural Revolution and to enforce sufficient authority to maintain a functioning economy...
...Externally, the "third force" stands for the defense of China against hostile powers, rather than the forward policy of "world-wide liberation through people's war...
...Chiang Ching, who had established herself as the Termagant of the Left and the most extremist voice speaking on both politics and arts, not only permitted the attacks on Chi Pen-yu and her other followers but finally led those attacks...
...and Kang Sheng, the former security specialist, whose role is obscure...
...Chiang Ching, Mao's actress wife, who was long the bellweather of the extreme Left...
...There are 21 Revolutionary Committees in existence in China's 29 administrative divisions, but they are neither Maoist nor unchallenged...
...Almost involuntarily, the People's Liberation Army has become the chief instrument of the pragmatists...
...But further questioning satisfied him that the student was genuine, and he remembered how many times during the past century of turmoil in China liberals had fled abroad to escape death—then returned to meet death...
...The angry young men of Communist China demand not destruction, but construction...
...Internally, the "third force" calls for freedom of expression and for great modification of economic controls, as well as for abandoning the illusory goals of the Maoist perfectionists...
...Already riven by the battles between the Maoists and their chief enemies, "the small clique of men in power in the Party following the capitalist road," it has in fact ceased to function as an effective instrument of power...
...The image of Mao, moreover, has become hazy and somewhat unattractive to the Chinese people during the past few years...
...The Maoists set out to destroy the structures of the Communist party and the People's Government in order to reassert their own absolute power...
...Chen Po-ta, Mao's former political secretary, who is the theoretician of the Cultural Revolution...
...Less than a quarter of the Central Committee members, for example, are persona grata in Peking, and provincial Party committees, the strongholds of the "men in power," have simply passed out of existence...
...In the eyes of those who believe he still lives, the excesses of the Cultural Revolution have soiled the aura of Mao Tse-tung...
...Chairman Mao Tse-tung has made Petofy a favorite poet of my group...
...Self-preservation is the cardinal virtue among the Maoists, though so many have failed in that virtue...
...Certain general demands of the "third force" are clear because they are absolutely opposed to the Maoist positions...
...The "third force" is unlikely to achieve direct political power, but it is likely to exert decisive influence on the future shape of China...
...Where did you learn those verses...
...It seemed almost too pat to the scholar...
...In the provinces, the pragmatic Revolutionary Committees seek to maintain order...
...It is an irony, however, that the Maoists have created precisely the enemy they feared in precisely the form they feared...
...There have been many interpretations of the significance of the shift, but it is almost unmistakably a portent that the pragmatists are rising in Peking as they have already risen in the provinces...
...Thousands of functionaries have been purged, but other tens of thousands of military officers and political cadres still seek to give China a semblance of government...
...She probably had no choice...
...Everyone from Liu Shao-chi, the discredited President of the Chinese People's Republic, to minor cadres in minor counties who were removed by the Maoists, is championed by the new movement...
...Lin Piao, the ambitious former field marshal and present Defense Minister, has proved unable to command the total loyalty of officers who are compelled more by local allegiances than by Maoist ideological rectitude...
...Anarchy has cast up hundreds of local leaders of local factions, and each of them rallies his followers to maintain and enhance his position...
...Stanza after stanza flowed from his thin, bitter lips in an invocation to revolt...
...The middle-aged scholar who sat beside him on a balcony overlooking the magical sweep of Hong Kong harbor recognized the verses with astonishment...
...Those structures, usually inaugurated with the formal approval of the divided leadership in Peking, are called Revolutionary Committees in tribute to the Cultural Revolution's original intention of recreating the political system of the Paris Commune of 1871...
...Rising from the "new trend of thought" which first became visible a year ago, the "third force" represents the only coherent new thinking in a China torn by dissension...
...The student had reached the refuge of Hong Kong only a week earlier...
...he asked...
...He wondered if the coincidence had been contrived for his benefit, while he marveled at the Robert S. Elegant, a frequent contributor, is Southeast Asia bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times...
...Their positive program hardly goes beyond the outburst of one young Chinese who demanded: "Just let the Communists put their own Constitution into effect, let them give us the freedoms they promised...
...As a consequence, it is wracked by dissension...
...Yet their appeal is immense, for they express the yearning of a people much tried...
...not perfection, but reasoned compromise...
...Rumors of his mental and physical debility are so common as to appreciably decrease Mao's influence, and many Chinese actually believe that the man they see is an imposter playing the role of their dead leader...
...All of us know those lines," the student replied...
...Instead they have destroyed the greater proportion of their remaining control over events in China as well as their own cohesion...
...Backed by university students and other concerned young people, intellectuals who repudiate both the Maoists and the pragmatists are casting their own program for China...
...Trapped by its own extremist program and battered by popular revulsion, the Maoist leadership has been dwindling since the Cultural Revolution began in mid-August 1966...
...If the association is highly volatile, it is also highly influential...
...The Communist party itself has also been subjected to the shocks of the bitter feuds among the Maoists...
...Clustered around the enigmatic figure of 74-year-old Chairman Mao Tse-tung, this group claims to speak with his transcendent authority and to represent legitimate power amid the collapse of political and social institutions precipitated by the Cultural Revolution...
...He did not die in bed, but fell fighting tyranny—and we shall do the same if we must...
...Behind the fog of words that obscures the reality of China, the shape of those three forces is broadly apparent...
...Triumphantly, he concluded with the famous line: "God, i ask only that you not let me die in bed...
...China's official propaganda organs have reported that the new group calls itself "the third force"?an implicit recognition that three significant factions now contend for effective power and for the soul of China...
...Chiang Ching, at any rate, displayed no less vehemence in her assaults on her own followers than she had in her assaults on the "concealed rightists" who broke away from the Maoists earlier...
...Not quite of the inner circle, he has nonetheless become an important executor of Maoist policy while continuing some connection with the second major faction, the Revolutionary Committees...
...In the capital, aging leaders contend like men stranded in a belea-gured city who still struggle for the trappings of authority, though the reality of power has fled...
...At the very moment that Eastern European regimes are being shaken by rebellions among the intelligentsia, the most rigidly Stalinist community in the Communist world is fighting off a threat from a new group combining intellectuals of the "Right and the extreme Left...
...That incitement to a bloodbath evoked no discernible response in action, but a thrill of horror must have run down the spines of millions who have already seen much bloodshed...
...There is little chance that power in China will pass to the hands of the amateurs, but their concepts seem sure to dominate whatever government finally emerges from the present turmoil...
...Inspired by a loose confederation of senior generals in Peking and revolving around the equivocal figure of Premier Chou En-lai, the Revolutionary Committees offer a form of liberalized Communist rule enforced by the bayonet...
...The latest "directive of Chairman Mao" promulgated by the official press called upon the Chinese people to fight against the "traitors within the Communist party" with the same ruthless brutality the Communists displayed toward the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek...
...They are too disparate, too ephemeral, and too closely tied to local conditions...
...Bureaucrats, technicians and intellectuals, condemned as "enemies of Socialism, the Communist party, and Chairman Mao," coalesced into a non-Maoist force...
...Their members are old Bolsheviks, whose purposes and methods owe much to the long experience of totalitarianism...
...In Kwangtung and Kwangsi Provinces in the southeast, the East Wind Faction and the Flag Faction, each mustering about 240,000 "warriors," fight with weapons captured from acquiescent Liberation Army units or looted from shipments intended for North Vietnam...
...Its effective influence is clouded not only by practical opposition to its designs, but also by widespread doubts of Mao's authority and by general antagonism toward his canonical thought...
...The dogmatic Maoists, by proclaiming the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 as a crusade against liberalism, united the opposition...
...The more cohesive opposition to the two major formal factions is the "third force," made up of associations the Maoists describe as "underground organizations...
...You have to fight, or you'll be swept away," explained a refugee who had campaigned for one faction before deciding that he saw no future in China...
...It joined together men who had early felt disgust at the excesses of Maoism and men of the "extreme Left" who were bitterly disappointed by the Maoists' failure to institute their idealistic programs...
...A fifth figure, Security Minister General Hsieh Fu-chih, occupies an anomalous position...
...It presents plays and holds forums designed, the Maoists charge, to "alter the climate of public opinion...
...Their position is simple, almost naive...
...Elsewhere, troops moving to maintain order are met with determined resistance which is not necessarily ideological in origin...
...The first, if only by chronological seniority, is the Maoists, the small group of men who, after a fashion, manipulate the stage-machinery of power in Peking and call themselves the Party Center...
...And public opinion will, after all, decide the ultimate victors in the continuing struggle...
...Aside from Mao himself, only four names remain unquestioned: Lin Piao, Vice-Chairman of the Party, who is Mao's chief lieutenant...
...Unlike the Maoists, they are dedicated neither to producing perfect human beings through an ideal social system nor to the "liberation" of all mankind by guerrilla war...
...Appointed in mid-1966 to purge the Army and make it a perfect instrument of the Maoists, Yang succeeded a general appointed in mid-1959 to perform the same task...
...The Mao figure now expresses itself not in coherent, extended written discourse as in the past, but in brief sibylhne exhortations...
...But they are hampered by popular apathy, and they are tormented by armed clashes among the different factions born of the anarchic freedom that marked the early days of the Cultural Revolution...
...He was replaced by Huang Yung-sheng (Huang the Ever Victorious), who, as military satrap of southeast China, vigorously suppressed Red Guard disorder...
...To a normally tolerant public disgusted with constant charges and counter-charges, the "movement to re-open the verdicts" may well appear a return to sanity...
...China is today divided into three major political factions, and the newest faction, at once the greatest danger to the Maoists and the greatest hope to the Chinese people, is made up of writers, artists and teachers...
...The most dramatic manifestation of unrest in the Army was the recent dismissal of Yang Oheng-wu (the names means literally: Yang Who Has Become a Weapon) from the post of acting chief-of-staff...
...For the first time, a significant group preaches conciliation, rather than ever more vicious dissension...
...Even the adolescent Red Guards, those wild enthusiasts of the Cultural Revolution, have turned away in some numbers from the man whose chief message appears to be: Make greater revolutions and create greater turmoil...
...The falling away of the Leftists has been startling during the past half year—its climax being the attacks upon Chi Pen-yu, editor of the Party's ideological journal, Red Flag, and his subsequent eclipse...
...verbal valor of the young man who had taken himself out of the fight by fleeing to Hong Kong...
...The Revolutionary Corrimittees are pragmatic, though, and, therefore implicitly non-Maoist organizations...
...The "third force" also attacks the Maoists by demanding the "reopening of verdicts" hastily rendered against the Maoists' enemies...
...All dominated by generals, these Committees include a high proportion of the local "men in power" whom the Cultural Revolution took as its primary targets...
...In counterpoint to the Chinese translation, he heard in his mind the Hungarian original of the paean to rebellion written more than a century ago by the Magyar poet Sandor Petofy...
...Thus the Communist party of China is today a ghost organization, though many Party leaders retain substantial positions in the jerry-built new structures that attempt to exercise control throughout China...
...Its purpose is less the rehabilitation of individuals than calling attention to the injustices perpetrated by the Cultural Revolution...
...They stand absolutely opposed to the intellectual repression, the arid theories, and the material deprivation of Maoism...
...Though these factions are linked in loose alliances which extended across provincial boundaries, neither their ideologies nor their policies are truly unifying elements...
...They use a variety of means to assert themselves...
...The corpulent figure appears at mass meetings, moving with awkward angularity and never speaking...
...Since the Maoists warned so vehemently against the example of the Petofy Circle's incitement of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, it is not remarkable that the dissident youth of China should find inspiration in the poetry of Sandor Petofy...

Vol. 51 • July 1968 • No. 14


 
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