China

Thinking the Thoughts of Mao

Michael Meacher

"If I had a son, I wouldn't encourage him to become the chairman of a revolutionary committee. I'd want him to go into the army, and then a commune and a factory, so that he was tested before going on to other things." What other things? Pause, reflection. "To serve the people better."

Thus the chairman of the revolutionary committee of a knitting factory in Peking giving the ' correct ' post-Cultural Revolution reply, eschewing ambition and recommending 'integration with the masses '. But the flicker of self-interest, at the end of a long and detailed interview, peeped out: "before going on to other things" gave an unmistakable hint of not yet completely buried personal aspirations.

If China today represents one thing overwhelmingly, it is the triumph of ideology over economics. It stares out in every aspect of their national life, though as one looks at the hundreds of gazing faces in every Chinese crowd, all equally inscrutable, one wonders how far Mao's Thoughts have really gone home,

Perhaps no field has been affected more by the vast ideological upheaval of the Cultural Revolution than education. Examinations are now out. In choosing students for university, strong preference is now given to those who by the age of twenty-three or twenty-four have had practical experience in a factory, commune or the army. Self-applications now have to be vetted by colleagues in these organisations, and then approved by the relevant higher governmental authority. The criteria are no longer exclusively academic merit.

Propaganda for the great remoulding of society is everywhere. Huge Mandarin characters mounted on pillars dominating the enormous Tien An Men square in central Peking exhort the workpeople to "Unity for Still Greater Victories with Chairman Mao." Along the edge -of the boating lake in the traditional beauty spot of Hangchow, beside the road from the airport, even in Canton zoo, the message is the same. Every household has a speaker system wired up to receive programmes each day for two hours in the early morning, one and a half hours at lunchtime, and two hours again in the evening. The diet is a mixture of news readings from the People's Daily and Thoughts of Chairman Mao, with martial interludes from the Peking opera company.

The process of thought-moulding starts early. At the cotton mill kindergarten near Peking the children were using reading books which all depicted revolutionary scenes, with landlords at the beginning Whipping peasant girls or young manservents and heroic communist forces at the end storming forward. Songs and dancing focus on love for China and for Mao.

Even economics has had to bend. The objectives of the Cultural Revolution in stifling the emergence of a new technocratic elitism were obtained at the price of a stagnation of national output throughout 1966-69 and the cross-country breakdown of industry and communications. Administrative hierarchies were cut back, and indeed the scalpel became an instrument of such butchery that widespread demoralisation persists in many important state planning bodies.

But ideological supremacy on these terms has not lacked a thicket of Western objectors. There are two answers. One is that mind-conditioning in Western capitalism is every bit as pervasive, though infinitely more subtle and sophisticated.

The more important answer, however, is that ideology is bound to be given the supreme role since the Chinese Revolution is rightly focused on the creation of a Socialist consciousness. It is the crudity of the propaganda rather than its existence which makes it unintelligible to Westerners. Yet for all its ingenuousness the achievements of the ideological barrage and of the revolution it spearheads have been stunning.

For a start, poverty has been eliminated from China. In a sense this is a curious thing to say because one could equally argue that poverty is everywhere in China. But what is meant here is that China's poverty is not the degrading or depressing kind, but energising. The low standard of living and general economic underdevelopment is wholly recognised. But it is highly visible relative deprivation, as sociologists would put it, not poorness as such, which makes this condition so offensive and stultifying. And relative deprivation has been abolished in China.

Poverty was a permanent scar across the country right up to 1949. Peasants still readily compare their position now with the days when they had to dig up the roots of trees and boil them in order to eat. There are now no beggars in China; those sights of mendicant degradation that litter the streets of Calcutta, Buenos Aires, Djakarta, and even the Aberdeen district of adjacent Hong Kong, are wholly absent.

The absence of unemployment is achieved by a relatively insulated economy plus centralised planning. But when married women generally work (at equal pay) and when the income range between top and bottom is five to one (compared to twenty to one in Britain), what this means is that the employment system has not only virtually eliminated all extremes of income inequality, but even more importantly provided everyone with a reasonable surplus after meeting essential needs. A husband and wife working, even at the lowest wages, could bring home 70-80' yuan a month, roughly £14. This might not seem much, until it is realised that a month's food and rent for a family with three children would only come to E5-£6.

Even today's 'strongest opponents of the regime admit there is hardly any crime in China. It is perhaps the only country in the world Where hotel room doors can be left unlocked with .complete security and where a purse left in a public place will, if identifiable, be almost certainly returned to the owner. The contrast with burgeoning Western crime rates is stark.

Yet another major change since the Revolution concerns the role and status of women. The old Chinese saying "A wife married is like a pony bought; I'll ride her and whip her as I like " hints at the previous situation. Women were even expected to bandage their feet tightly as a symbol of their subjection to men. Today they not only enjoy equal political and economic rights, but frequently hold the chairmanship of the revolutionary committee governing all organisations.

But perhaps the most fundamental achievement of the ideological drive is a classlessness that is unmatched elsewhere. In view of the extreme class rigidities of the semi-feudal Chinese society within living memory, this is an astonishing transformation. With very few exceptions, all white-collar workers — administrators, university staff, managers, and the rest — are required to do their regular stint on the factory shopfloor or in the communes is the countryside.

Of course all this is earned at a cost. Undoubtedly the greatest restriction is the direction of labour, whivh has certainly led to the transfer of hundreds of thousands up to 2,000 miles across the face of the country. It has also led in a number of cases to the physical separation of husbands and •wives for long periods, though efforts are made to avoid this.

Inevitably a minority must be embittered, but most seem resigned to labour direction. A Professor of Western Sociology we met by chance, not a member of the Communist Party, had just returned from fourteen months working in the country. He had gone voluntarily, since he was over sixty (the age threshold for exemption), having been induced to comply by the criticism

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meetings e had had to attend in front of colleague ...Pressed about the lack of real freedom'Of choice, he insisted: "Freedom in the West .0 petignal interest; but our freedom is freedom for:the,`masses." How widely this PrOkrkoltion is accepted remains an impOrtant question, though the use of strong informal social controls in the form of criticism meetings indicates an entirely different and non-Western attitude to the concept of individual freedom. It is perhaps nearer to the idea of group therapy sessions, and indeed acceptance within the solidarity of the group can be seen as the key feature to the whole Chinese ,' approach. which — for all its crudities, and defects, and whether or not it survives the death of Mao — has achieved, and sustained in peacetime, a greater practical measure of conscious social purpose throughout the nation than any other society so far. As such it deserves Much more attention than the superficialities that so often the West substitutes for serious analysis.

Michael Meacher is Labour MP for Oldham West