Correspondents' Correspondence
KISS, GEORGE P. BROCKWAY / LASZLO T.
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS China's Capitalist Road New York—The United States...
...Shortly afterward, Soviet Secret Police chief Yuri Andropov referred to these meetings as "examples of collective strategical decision making...
...These have grown in vehemence and scope, until today the new Chinese leadership is said to be preparing for a total war aimed at conquering the whole world, not merely Asia...
...In any event, there was for everyone to see the degeneration of the Soviets into the totalitarian bureaucracy of Djilas' New Class...
...Few Westerners, with the possible exception of doctrinaires like the late Joseph McCarthy, would dream of objecting to this sentiment, which seems the very model of no-nonsense, can-do, winning-is-the-only-thing pragmatism...
...This is a strategy not for a war, but for a battle that would, in its lingering aftermath, cripple Peking as a global ideological competitor to Moscow...
...A famous slogan of Teng's may lead the way to clarification...
...The presence of Defense Minister Dmitri F. Ustinov in the Soviet Party boss' entourage gave the trip's message—this is your last chance to listen, to do as we saymaximum effect...
...And we are not alone among Western nations in this regard...
...All this has raised the question of why the USSR mounted its momentous campaign of brinkmanship against China at a time when, clearly, no amount of bluffing could change the anti-Soviet status quo in Peking...
...Wherever visitors went in the early '70s they were informed that the farm or the factory or the school or the hospital had produced x before Liberation, 2jf after Liberation, and 3x after the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution...
...Such a reading of the situation is by no means impossible, and it does not exclude other complementary readings...
...Mao, on the other hand, was attracted to the United States just because he found Russia repellent...
...A long line of humorists from Artemus Ward through Mr...
...It immediately took Hanoi's side and the slogan "solidarity with the people of Vietnam in their struggle with the Chinese hegemonists" became a central theme of Soviet politics...
...He is, indeed, more likely to understand and seek to emulate the achievements of the Soviets...
...In the present case, the four people have been named, and there seems no reason to doubt that they shared similar ideas...
...Even without control over Cambodia, Hanoi has become the dominant power in the region and its presence in the Soviet camp assures Moscow not only a dynamic ally but a salient foothold in China's "underbelly...
...There is plenty of precedent for this sort of thing, both in China and elsewhere...
...We of course have some experience ourselves with inscrutable politics...
...That the systematic—unsystematic, rather—destruction of elites disrupted production may have been a surprise to Mao, but it was evidently a price he was willing to pay...
...It is when we ask about these ideas that we run into trouble...
...A capitalist roader, then, is not necessarily or even probably sympathetic to the ideals or practices of American society...
...Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS China's Capitalist Road New York—The United States probably could not and certainly should not do anything to advance or retard the palace revolution that now seems to be proceeding erratically in the Peoples' Republic of China...
...We know that the Chinese are fascinated by numbers...
...It was this bureaucratic society that the Maoists saw as Right deviationism, as opportunism, as, in the end, capitalist roadism...
...This happened for a reason surprising and simple: Mao Tse-tung, one of the greatest movers and shakers of history, one of the most successful of doers, one of the most eloquent proponents of dialectical materialism, was not, in the sense generally understood in the West, a materialist at all...
...But the Kremlin's overture to the victors must all have come to the same point: Peking would have to recognize in some form Soviet ideological ascendancy...
...During the summer Brezhnev concluded all his summit meetings at the Crimea with the loyal Communist bosses of Eastern Europe (except for Ni-colai Ceausescu of Rumania) and Mongolia by emphasizing this solidarity...
...Meanwhile, Radio Moscow and the Soviet press initiated a series of extremely harsh attacks against Peking in May...
...they have Five Kinds of Red and Seven Kinds of Black and much else...
...The Gang was, we are told, counter—revolutionary, which is odd, because this is the very charge the Gang leveled against its successors...
...He followed the Marx of The Critique of the Gotha Program in insisting that distribution was not the problem, that once socialist equality was achieved material progress would take care of itself...
...The Cultural Revolution everywhere shamed and degraded those who enjoyed power or status in industry, in education, in medicine, in the Army, in politics, or down on the farm...
...Or perhaps by his male chauvinism...
...Mao and the Maoists were certainly proud of their material achievements...
...Thus in April 1977 the Soviets launched a verbal attack against Party Chairman Hua Kuo-feng's leadership, charging unregenerate Maoism...
...These hints were preliminary indicators of Moscow's intention to involve its Warsaw Pact alliesat least financially—in whatever action it might take against China...
...There are no capitalists or protocapitalists in China, in power or out of power, and we will only be misled if we expect ideological slogans to make allies—or enemies—for us...
...And the Gang distorted the Thought of Maostill another odd coincidence...
...Is all the uproar caused by a personal aversion of Chiang Ch'ing for Teng Hsaio-ping...
...It doesn't matter," said he in 1967, "whether a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice...
...The class struggle," he reiterated, "is by no means over...
...nor is political confusion dead in France, where one of the most conservative parties calls itself Radical...
...Or, as in the ostensible occasion for the Great Cultural Revolution, by a dispute over a critique of a play produced two years ago...
...The first of these was a trip across Siberia by Leonid I. Brezhnev marked by pep talks urging rocket units and combat troops to be vigilant, and climaxed with a review of military maneuvers on April 5 at Khabarovsk, a highly sensitive point on the Chinese border...
...Peking New YorkThe power struggle that erupted in Peking after Mao's death no doubt seemed encouraging to Moscow, long eager to remove his followers from the reigns of power...
...In this regard, China's decision to back Cambodia against Hanoi, and its abrupt claim last spring of the right to protect its minorities in Vietnam, provided the Kremlin with a slight moral edge (vis-avis the rulers of Cambodia) and the makings of a legitimate excuse to actually start the scheme rolling...
...The Kremlin boldly moved forward in Southeast Asia, too, by making Vietnam a full member of Comecon...
...And by early 1978 Moscow began demonstrating, through a series of coordinated actions, its determination to take a much harder line toward China...
...Their objective: to overrun parts of Northern China (Inner Mongolia, Manchuria) with their vastly superior forces and remain there until the humiliating defeat generates a crisis, or perhaps disintegration, among the still fermenting Chinese leadership...
...the Indochinese "Balkans" could set Eurasia ablaze and—given the new U.S.Chinese relationship—perhaps the world—Laszlo T. Kiss...
...The Gang plotted a return to capitalism—again an odd coincidence...
...Dooley and Will Rogers to Russell Baker and Art Buch-wald has found that taking political slogans seriously is always good for a laugh...
...In short, China's capitalist road is not an extension of Wall Street...
...There is a striking similarity between today's Indochina and the strife-torn Balkans on the eve of World War I. Once more the Russians are the principal instigators in an explosive region, and just as then the Tsars manipulated the South Slavs through appeals to Pan-Slavism, now the Commissars are relying on the notion of "proletarian internationalism" to advance their ideological frontiers...
...Yet this apparently innocuous aphorism was an assigned cause of Teng's fall from Mao's grace in 1967 and again in 1976...
...The wit of W. S. Gilbert had a similar base...
...In any case, the winning Chinese faction, albeit moderate, refused to yield Mao's defiant legacy of independence...
...But the pattern of Soviet maneuvers since last April strongly suggests that the Kremlin rulers have made a decision in principle to launch a very limited military attack against China...
...It is unlikely that free speech and the free market hold charms for him...
...At the same time, it was clear that material progress was not an end in itself...
...The present Chinese epithet "Gang of Four" strikes us as a bit bizarre, but it is not likely in itself to mislead us...
...The real objective was equality, material equality to be sure, but liberty and fraternity, too...
...In the interim, the Kremlin's calculated support for Hanoi received contractual sanctions in the Soviet-Vietnamese friendship treaty signed on November 3. In essence, the treaty gave Vietnam the green light to overthrow Cambodia's brutal masters on the one hand, while on the other it gave the USSR the option to move against China should it decide to protect its ally by attacking Vietnam...
...We can and should, however, try to understand it, and our understanding will be clearer if we recognize at once that literal translations of Chinese political slogans and epithets are, let us say, inscrutable...
...The chief factors among the many others that will determine when, if at all, this plan is implemented are possible drastic changes in the respective hierarchies of the feuding Communist parties, and the finding or manufacturing of an ideal casus belli...
...In the light of Ceauses-cu's closeness to Peking, his subsequent defiance of the Pact's decisions to increase military spending and better integration (i.e., control) of the member-armies under Soviet command, virtually confirmed that Moscow was trying to extend its satellites' obligations to its Far East ambitions...
...There is, though, a crucial difference between the two historic scenarios: The stakes this time are infinitely higher than in 1914...
...Are we faced, then, merely with a clash of personalities...
...We will find allies, and enemies, too, but we should look for them on the grounds of real rather than imaginary national interest.George P. Brockway Moscow vs...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 1
