Mao Sinks And Swims
CHINA
By DICK WILSON
HE Chinese Communists have emerged from I the storms of this spring and summer, still holding hopefully to the same old course, but with marginal changes in the navigating team which strengthen the possibility of an eventual shift in direction. The storms have been more than usually diffi- cult to evaluate because they combined both seasonal and special factors. Their origins go back to the relaxation of revolutionary discipline which was dictated in the early 1960s by the famine and by the failure of the Great Leap Forward. In Mao Tse-tung's dialectic such times of slackness are always followed by campaigns to tighten the political screws again. Since 1964 China has been undergoing two nation-wide drives, one for 'rectification' within the party itself (the so-called 'four clean-ups') and one for socialist education generally. The latter campaign was designed to nip revisionism in the bud in the places where its establishment would do most harm: namely, the schools and universities. But the campaign did not bite in its early phases. Lu Ping, Presi- dent of Peking University, responded to the instruction to divert yet more of his students' time and energies into factory work to ensure their ideological purity, by asking: 'Am I to be director of a factory or a school?' This kind of resistance was all the graver for coming from party officials of long-standing loyalty. So this year the socialist education campaign gas intensified. Its effect on China's economy can be gauged from the following remark in a Canton newspaper in February: 'These days, when you are in the region of Canton and enter the scientific research units, you would be stunned. The research offices are mostly empty, and some are simply closed. The men have gone to take part in the socialist education campaign. and have thrown themselves in the melting-pot of class struggle.' . Six weeks ago came the decision to postpone gll university enrolments this year by six months, ind to reform the entrance examination to faypur revolutionary ardour at the expense of a. expertise. Students will graduate after one or two years instead of after three or four, so that they can be flung into the class struggle earlier. Mao is thus attempting the complete destruction of the educational system in a search for guar- antees that the 'revolutionary heirs' who will one day rule China will stick to the socialist path. The party journals explain that the struggle between capitalism and socialism `may take cen- turies,' and that contradictions `will persist for a billion years,' because the Chinese bourgeoisie 'still have great strength, . . . money, and ex- tensive social and international links.' So Lu Ping and other university presidents, not to mention scores of lukewarm playwrights, journa- lists, educators and party propagandists, have been dismissed. This went too far for many party officials, even in the higher echelons of leadership. It was a particularly hard line to push in Peking, tradi- tionally dominated by intellectuals and scholars, and the former bailiwick of Peng Chen, sixth in the effective hierarchy of the Politburo. Peng may have been disgraced because he was reluctant to press the campaign in Peking. It is also possible that he was held responsible for the misdeeds of his underlings, or that his rivals in the Politburo took advantage of his local difficulties to get him out of the way. It is at this point that we encounter the special factor in the drama: the first sign of the struggle for the succession. Until now, Mao's extraordinary charisma has held the Politburo together, but as it fades it becomes harder for his colleagues to work in harmony. At this stage personalities are still stronger than policies in deciding alignments. There are internal debates going on in the party, to be sure. The two outstanding issues concern foreign and economic policy. What priority ought to be given to world-wide revolt in Africa and Asia? Peng Chen happened to be closely in- volved with China's relations with Indonesia, and it could well be that the Communists' disastrous setback in Djakarta gave him pause. lust before his downfall, Peng was chief host to a visiting delegation of Japanese Communists, on whom Peking normally relies for support against Moscow : on this occasion they urged a tem- porary reconciliation with Russia in the light of recent Communist reverses in the tiers monde and to present a united front in Vietnam. It is possible that Peng flew a kite in the Chinese Politburo on these lines. Vietnam is not in itself an important bone of contention in Peking. The Chinese national in- terest and the Communists' ideological convic- tions coincide in wanting the Vietcong and the Vietminh to traverse their long, dark tunnel alone, tying the Americans down in South-East Asia, exhausting American energy and tarnish- ing the American image.
But there are differences of opinion in Peking over the degree of material aid which the Chinese should give to their southern allies, and this is where the debate about revolutionary priorities overlaps with the debate over economic policy. Those who arc political ideologists first still yearn for more mass mobilisation, another leap forward and further collectivisation, all on the basis of self-reliance (i.e., without outside help). The economists hope that such excesses will be avoided, and some of them must be increasingly concerned about the technological backwardness to which these policies condemn China. A similar debate goes on within the army, between the professionals (who would like modern weapons and maybe a Soviet alliance) and the party-soldiers. Lin Piao, the Defence Minister. appears to have established the latter in command. although this week's confirmation of the fall of Ho Jui-ching, the Chief of Staff, shows that the tensions persist'. The need for more dis- cipline than the party itself can produce led Mao to use the army. led by Lin, his old trusty from guerrilla days, as his chief weapon in the rectifi- cation campaign. Mao is still swimming at seventy-two, but there are recent signs that he may no longer be in continuous control of affairs. The excessive personal cult of Mao is not charac- teristic of the man himself. Mao may have begun by using the army for his own ends, but it looks more and more as if the army has used its tem- porary advantage to gain power at the party's expense. A number of Lin's own trusted lieutenants are being promoted. Alternatively, the new in-group in the party may have decided that the army is needed to cushion the party against the shock of losing its messiah, and that Lin will be the best father- figure to succeed Mao. Lin Piao is still on the right side of sixty, but tuberculosis has weakened him and he exercises authority over the long- distance telephone rather than by personal activity. Somehow he does not convince as leader of a palace coup. As for the party leaders themselves, Liu Shao-chi, the head of state, is probably too old to be involved in jockeying for the succession. and he was in any case a patron of the disgraced Peng Chen. Chou En-lai and Chen Yi, the Premier and Foreign Minister respectively, enjoy little power within the party, and although their personal preference would be for a more liberal policy, they are adept at trimming their sails to the prevailing wind. The field thus narrows to the sixty-four-year- old Teng Hsiao-ping, the party's Secretary- General and the man with the tightest grip on its machine. Astonishingly little is known of this short, limping Szechuanese whom the Chinese students in Paris in the early 1920s called the. 'doctor of mimeographing,' because he spent more time in political organising than in his
studies. An American who met him behind the guerrilla lines in 1938 reported that he had 'a mind keen as mustard,' and another observer has dubbed him a 'peppery Napoleon.' Teng has always followed the Maoist line, as far as anybody knows, but this is no guarantee that he would follow it without the personal guidance of Mao.
The most likely prospect now is of a gradual takeover from Mao by this Lin-Teng team, sup- ported by Chou and the party apparatus. But the school reform, the politicising of the army and economic stagnation will certainly arouse more antagonism from the intellectuals, students and professionals (both civil and military), and after Mao's death the new. team might conceiv- ably retreat to a more liberal position in deeds if not in words. Its unity might not survive, of course, and China is in any case becoming less monolithic, more difficult to govern and to keep ideologically pure.
Lesser men than Mao will not find it so easy to transcend reality, and will be under far stronger pressure to-come to terms with it. But we should not expect this process to be either fast or smooth, and we should be prepared for its being heavily disguised by outraged pro- fessions of conformism to the Maoist line.
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