China's New Order
HUDSON, G. F.
THE CCP AT 50 China's New BY G. F. HUDSON in the territory of China, but in the seat of government in the former capital of the Ming and Manchu emperors. One thing, however, has not changed: the...
...These purposes were only partially achieved...
...Second, it was in accord with Mao's desire to rekindle revolutionary elan and create "revolutionary successors" to the men of Yenan by giving the younger generation the experience of "making a revolution...
...At this point in the story Mao appears to have become a bit worried lest he might fall into too complete a dependence on the PLA...
...One thing, however, has not changed: the secrecy of political decision...
...In addition, the Cultural Revolution had involved no ideological repudiation of Marxism-Leninism, under whose banner Mao had risen to his eminence...
...Even if the PLA is not just the people in arms, as Mao would wish it to be, its habitual use for purposes of political agitation and economic construction, and the antiprofessional bias of Maoist ideology, make it an integral part of the normal body politic...
...The CCP sustained much greater damage politically as a result of the Cultural Revolution than the cpsu had suffered from Stalin's far more bloody purge of 1936-38...
...At provincial levels, also, the PLA men are everywhere well represented in the new Party officialdom, and often in overwhelming strength...
...It is a wing of the Party rather than something outside it...
...the spirit of Yenan—simple, martial, frugal, puritanical, egalitarian, anti-intellectual, antiprofessional—clashed with the demands of a complex industrial society: professional specialization, technocratic elitism, reliance on material incentives...
...In several provinces both the first and second secretaries of the new Party committees elected by provincial congresses convened since the Cultural Revolution are soldiers on active duty...
...When at last the civil war was won and the Party came into possession of all China's cities (where it had been decisively crushed in 1927), it launched a program of high-speed industrialization intended to build a wealthy, powerful nation on the ruins of the old economic and social order...
...First, unlike a mere military coup, it had the form and appearance of a genuine revolutionary upheaval...
...The Cultural Revolution was thus aimed not so much at any sort of innovation as at the restoration of something that was supposed to have been lost...
...Lin Piao's succession to Mao as leader of the Party, for example, has been written into the new ccp constitution—a remarkable innovation, for not even Stalin went so far as formally to nominate his successor...
...Moreover, the Party is no longer housed in a girls' school in a foreign-administered enclave withcoup d'etat in November 1917, using improvised forces composed of mutinous soldiers and sailors and detachments of armed factory workers...
...Officer ranks apart from current command were not recognized, and all soldiers, from the newest recruit to the Chief of Staff, addressed one another as "comrade fighter...
...It is a matter for speculation what significance should be assigned to the shift in the location of the seat of power in terms of domestic or foreign policy...
...The experience gained by the Party during these two decades, therefore, was that of leading communities of armed peasants in a state of siege...
...The function of the pla in the Cultural Revolution was not to seize power direcdy but to provide protection for those who were exhorted by Chairman Mao to "bombard Party headquarters...
...when they toured the country to "exchange revolutionary experiences" public transport was provided for them, and if they beat up an old man it was only at odds of a thousand to one with an army behind them to guarantee that nobody interfered...
...The main historical contrast is defined by the chronology...
...But the leadership's habits of thought and action were those formed by the long years of marching, fighting and ruling in the deep "medieval" hinterland of the Chinese subcontinent...
...The one institution that seemed to have preserved the spirit of Yenan with an undimmed flame, at least after the dismissal of Peng Teh-huai as Defense Minister, was the pla...
...And even at the height of their little day of power and privilege, they did not get any experience of revolution as their grandfathers had known it...
...But it soon became necessary to get rid of the Red Guards, whose licensed hooliganism was rapidly bringing Chinese society and its economy to the verge of collapse...
...It must be expected that when Mao Tse-tung dies real power will rest with the legions...
...Founded by a "congress" of a dozen persons—one of them Mao Tse-tung—meeting secretly in a girls' school empty because of the summer holidays in the French Concession in Shanghai, its membership now runs into eight figures and it formally controls a "people's republic" that is the world's most populous country...
...But it should be recognized that there has been a basic shift of power to the pla as a result of the Cultural Revolution, and the formal rebuilding of the Party has not reversed what has been done...
...This was not a matter of a simple coup d'etat or military takeover of the kind the world has become accustomed to elsewhere...
...After seizing power they faced a counterrevolution and fought a civil war, but throughout this struggle they retained possession of Petrograd and Moscow, were solidly based in the principal industrial areas, and used the alliance Lenin made with the peasant jacquerie solely as an aid to the urban proletarian cause...
...In China, on the other hand, for more than 20 years, beginning in 1927, the Communists possessed substantial armed forces perpetually engaged in warfare against either the Chinese (Kuomintang) central government or the Japanese, and conG. F. HUDSON, formerly Director of Far Eastern Studies at Saint Antony's College, Oxford, where he is now a Fellow Emeritus, often analyzes Asian affairs in these pages...
...The secrecy of Chinese Communist politics today is as great as that of Russia's in the days of Stalin and greater than that of the contemporary Soviet Union's...
...The use of the Red Guards to carry out a purge in which the pla was really the decisive power factor had two great advantages in Mao Tse-tung's view...
...The Party has been nominally, and to some extent really, rebuilt and restored to the authority in the state Marxist-Leninist creed requires...
...The Bolsheviks in Russia captured power in Petrograd and Moscow by a rapid Order THIS MONTH the Chinese Communist party (CCP) is celebrating its 50th birthday...
...In none of these other countries has there so far been evidence that the Party no longer "controls the gun...
...For some time before the Cultural Revolution, a propaganda campaign inspired by Mao held up the pla as a model of the virtues of frugality, discipline, hard work, and selfless dedicated service...
...In spite of the theory that "the Party controls the gun," Mao, who had spent so much of his life in the midst of soldiers and had gained the supreme leadership of the Party in a situation where the civilians depended on the Army for their daily rations, felt closer to the military men in the CCP than to the civil servants and economic directors...
...The soldiers insured immunity from arrest for the swarms of students and schoolchildren who were mobilized to denounce, humiliate, beat up and on occasion kill Party cadres and members of the intelligentsia, particularly in the teaching profession, classified as "taking the capitalist road" and as supporters of "China's Khrushchev...
...THIS BASIC conflict led to the extraordinary phenomena of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution...
...Consequently, all that was left when the youthful romanticism of the Red Guards had been dissipated was the reality of the military power that had reduced the authority of the Party to naught...
...It must be born in mind that this ascendancy of the Armed Forces in China does not signify quite what it would in a country where the Army is more specialized in its functions and possesses a more professional officers' corps than in China...
...What goes on in the inner circles of the Party is shrouded in a mantle of security so dense that it can be a subject only for inference and conjecture, with scope for wide differences of interpretation even among observers who have devoted much study to the evidence available...
...The Communists of the 1920s and 1930s endured all kinds of hardships and dangers...
...The Party's military arm, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), remained essentially a guerrilla organization until the last stage of the civil war, sustained by petty local industries producing small arms and such things as uniforms, shoes, paper, and medicines...
...The Red Guards of 1966 took no risks...
...But enough is known about the past history of the Party to provide useful indicators for estimates of current trends, and it is possible to discern a specific character of the ccp, particularly in comparison with its one-time mentor and model, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...
...Nevertheless, the events in Communist China during the past five years have certainly created a new kind of political order—different from what has been produced by Communist revolutions in Europe and different from what prevailed in China itself before 1966...
...In China, however, the position of the Armed Forces is now so strong that to some extent the regime has come to have the character of a military dictatorship...
...Stalin had purged the Soviet Party by action of the secret police without formally changing the political system created by Lenin...
...In Mao's eyes the Party had degenerated since 1949, it had become contaminated by revisionism and absorbed in administrative detail at the expense of its purity of revolutionary faith...
...Although the ccp's aim, and that of Chairman Mao himself, was to combine the building of a modern industrial economy and military system with the perpetuation of the heroic guerrilla tradition of Chingkangshan and Yenan, there was a contradiction between the two purposes that has never been fully resolved...
...Mao's critics and opponents in the Party were removed, his personality cult was carried to the extremity of adulation, and higher education was reduced to the point where nothing was left except vocational training and the study of "Mao Thought...
...When the moment came for Mao to mount an offensive against those who had "taken the capitalist road" and had gained control of the Party apparatus, it was on the pla, led by Defense Minister Lin Piao, that he relied for support...
...It is always dangerous for a dictator who is not himself a professional soldier to base his power exclusively on the armed forces...
...It was impossible to undo all this: The Red Guards could be sent packing, the representatives of the mass organizations could be quietly downgraded, but the men of the pla could not be reassigned to that status of subordination to civilian Party authority from which Mao had raised them...
...a Communist party was still theoretically required and it was decided to rebuild its organization...
...Mao, in contrast, openly justified "rebellion" against the Party and set up so-called Revolutionary Committees where Party cadres had to share power with representatives of the pla and of "mass organizations" outside the Party as new organs of control...
...An underground political organization, they did not previously have their own armed forces or control a territory where they were the governing authority...
...Unfortunately, the Party had been so shattered during the Cultural Revolution, so derided and discredited, that it became extremely difficult to revive the morale of its members or its prestige with the Chinese people...
...they risked imprisonment and torture, death in battle or execution...
...The boys and girls who had stormed Party offices at the behest of their charismatic leader were sent off to the countryside to "learn from the peasants," who did not want them and made them as unwelcome as possible...
...At the same time, the pla has attained a position within the Party that makes the Chinese People's Republic unique among Communist states, and certainly quite different from the Soviet Union or the Communist-governed countries of Eastern Europe...
...trolled large rural areas that included a few small towns but no centers of modern industry...
...THE SOLUTION has been a compromise...
Vol. 54 • July 1971 • No. 15
