The fall of Lin Piao
Joan Robinson
Inside China Peter Worsley (Allen Lane £6.00) The Second Chinese Revolution K. S. Karol (Jonathan Cape £8.00)
Professor Worsley's account of a visit to China is not merely a travelogue, it is rather the reflections of a social scientist upon the difference between the Chinese way of life and that of the rest of the world. After experiencing some scenes of contrasted misery and luxury in capitalist Asia, he crossed the bridge at Lo Wu • to the strains of the internationale.
Viewing the modern developments in the context of revolutionary history, he describes the organisation of agriculture in Communes, "the heart of the matter," life in cities and experiments (still going on today) in reforming education. His visit was in 1972, a period when the consequences of the Cultural Revolution were being shown in the details of practical affairs. He is struck by the emphasis upon equality and upon participation, and by the favourable effects that they have, to all Appearance, on economic and social life. The last chapter is mainly a defence of Chinese policy against critics from the right and from the left; there are two things,' however, that he finds hard to swallow. The first is the rewriting of history to fit the latest iturn of internal politics. How could Liu Shao-chi, and now Lin Piao, have been scabs and traitors from the beginning? The second is the ambiguity of Chinese foreign policy, which seems to put hostility to the Soviet Union ahead of the interests of the peoples of every other country.
At the end, the shock of returning to the "free world" reinforces his sympathy for China.
When a ten-year-old girl badgered me with her tray of chewing-gum, whisky, and Hong Kong newspapers, thought to myself, "Young lady, two hundred yards away you'd be at school." It was only after she had gone that I noticed she had cheated me of twenty cents.
K. S. Karol operates at a different level. A socialist by conviction who has lived in Russia, he has every sympathy with the "other Communism"; at the same time he brings all the sophistication and all the unofficial information of a China watcher to an attempt to trace Out conflicts and changes of policy at the highest level.
He gives a lively account of the origins and course of the Cultural Revolution, enriched by details from unpublished sources, as well aa from his own conversations with many participants on a visit to China in 1971. This leads up to the main purpose and the main interest of the book — an analysis of the fall of Lin Piao.
His interpretations of events and movements are not always indisputable. He denies, for instance, that Chairman Mao's influence was at a low ebb in the 'sixties, during the first stage of recovery from the bad years that followed the "Great Leap Forward." But Mao himself complained that he was then being treated like the ancestor at a funeral, who is revered but not obeyed. After the Cultural Revolution had been launched, he explained that he had intended to fall back into the second rank, to allow his successors to gain authority. During the 'socialist education campaign, in 1964, he realised that things were taking a wrong turn and determined to get them back on to the line that he had foreshadowed in 1956. He used the occasion of a dispute within the purely cultural field to develop a general attack upon "revisionism."
The first response was from students and high-school children. In 1971 it was being said that the Red Guards had played a very positive role in the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, but they fell into factions, and, indeed, became a great nuisance. In the end the workers had to be called in to shame them and to assist in the reform of education. But meanwhile the workers themselves had fallen into disputes that had to be sorted out by intervention from the army.
All this time, Lin Piao was being built up as Chairman Mao's "closest comrade in arms." He had made the People's Liberation Army into "a great school of Mao Tse-tung's thought." (The famous little red book of quotations was first createa as exercises in literacy for the army-5 As rebel groups followed Mao's call to "bombard the headquarters," the Party was in disarray, and it was the PLA that held the country together.
What was it then that destroyed Lin? Karol exonerates him from any connection with the ultra-left and the deleterious behaviour of the May 16th group (this also is a disputable point). He is extremely sceptical of the official story of Lin's plot, and even of his death in a plane crash. Karol lays the whole emphasis on Lin's objection to the detente with USA. Once that policy was decided upon it was necessary to get rid of Lin and his supporters; to do so, it was necessary to wind up the Cultural Revolution.
But surely there was another element in the whole affair. Intervention of the People's Liberation Army in administration was nothing like the kind of military coup that occurs elsewhere. When a group of soldiers was sent into a factory to stop factional wrangling, they went in unarmed. They settled down to talk with the disputants and went right on talking till they could bring them to a reconciliation. All the same, the army could not provide a permanent system of administration. It was necessary to restore the authority of the Party. Mao's intention in launching the Cultural Revolution was to "rectify" the Party, not to destroy it. Perhaps Lin Piao's followers were those who objected to the demotion of the PLA. Moreover, in respect to home affairs, the Cultural Revolution has not been wound up. Its achievements in advancing equality and participation, as Worsley remarks, are still rolling on. Mao's hope evidently is that the rank and file in every institution are sufficiently alerted to prevent any authority in future from pushing them into a revisionist line. But, as Karol insists, a mature political consciousness cannot develop without information and insight. It is not promoted by abruptly turning once respected leaders into scabs and traitors from birth. But so long as foreign policy is ambiguous, it is not easy for the authorities to take the people fully into ,their confidence. Both these authors find their enthusiasm for the Chinese revolution tinged with the same doubts.
Joan Robinson, Professor of Economics at Cambridge University from 1965 to 1971, has written among many books The Cultural Revolution in China.
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