China's counter-revolution

George Gale

'To put it in a nutshell, we say, "There is great disorder under heaven, and the situ ation is excellent",' declared Mr Li Hsien nien last April, in the process of toasting Mrs Thatcher's health in one of the halls of the Great Hall of the People in Peking. Mr Li was, is, Deputy-premier and at the time was number three in the Party, number two in the Government. The subsequent restoration of Mr Teng Hsiao-ping may have moved him down one position, but at the end of the Chinese Communist Party's eleventh congress, held last month, Mr Li was one of the five members of the standing committee of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which is the inner cabinet which now rules China. Mr Li remains the senior Deputy-Prime Minister and the man in charge of economic planning. For the record, the other four members are Chair man Hua, Marshal Yeh Chien-ying, the Defence Minister, Mr Teng, and Mr Wang Tung-hsing, who commands the elite Guards who arrested Chairman Mao's widow, Chiang Ching and her accomplices in the 'Gang of Four' last year. So that when Mr Li puts it in a nutshell that there is great disorder under heaven and the situation is excellent, he is a man speaking with authority — and speaking a very favourite phrase of the top Chinese.

When I first heard the phrase I was pleased by it, and disappointed to learn that it was regularly trotted out by high Chinese dignitaries to amuse and discomfit their western visitors. I suppose the idea the Chinese seek to put across is that they find nothing uncomfortable in disorder; that disorder presumes an excellent state of affairs; that disorder is the natural, or heavenly dispensation. I found it a difficult idea to accept last April (so, come to that, did Mrs Thatcher), and now, after the eleventh party congress, it becomes even more difficult to accept. The idea that great disorder presumes an excellent situation is not, I think, supposed to be perverse or ironic or inscrutably oriental or just plain idiosyncratically daft. No: I think they mean what they say, or at least, meant it then. They were saying that there was a virtue in disorder. They were defending China's disorderliness; but in an oblique kind of way, asserting the excellence of the disordered situation. They did not, that is to say, rejoice in the disorder itself, but chose instead to justify it by the excellence of the situation it produced.

I may seem to be labouring a bit. The trouble is that the Chinese have the profoundest respect for, and instinct towards, order. They seek to obey and to conform. They are consequently immensely troubled when they are ordered to disobey; when nonconformity becomes the rule; when dis order is ordained. This is what happened when Chairman Mao proclaimed the Cul tural Revolution in 1965 in an endeavour to elicit out of China if not a continuous revolution then at the least a succession of tumultuous revolutions. The essence of Maoism is that revolution is the political condition most to be desired. The pure political life is the revolutionary life. Once a society and a system of rule becomes stable and bureaucratised, it is necessary to stir it all up again into a new revolutionary brew.

Mao and Maoism run directly against the Chinese tradition of orderliness; but the Chinese respect for authority and the Chinese desire to conform enabled Mao's authoritative command that disorder become the rule of the day to be widely obeyed. The highest authority was being obeyed in disobeying lower authorities, and to disobey was to conform. Students went to the fields and factories, peasants and workers entered the universities. Talking revolution was better than working. Production in farms and factories consequently fell; standards in schools and universities collapsed; and social and political discipline were everywhere threatened. The Cultural Revolution was an exercise in centrallyinduced anarchy, and it seems unlikely that anyone other than Mao could, or indeed would, have attempted to pull it off. That he succeeded, at least to the extent of retarding China's economic, scientific and cultural development for over a decade, is further proof of his towering pre-eminence and of his revolutionary and idealistic impracticability. He enjoyed a semi-divine status as national hero, and without his being the actual embodiment of Chinese nationalism he could not possibly have successfully preached and practised the nonsense that constituted the Cultural Revolution.

China could have collapsed entirely under the strain. That it did not was principally due to Chou En-lai and, before his fall, to his chief lieutenant, Teng Hsiaoping. A degree of administrative order was maintained; and it is pretty clear that the Chinese masses were never convinced of the sense of the Cultural Revolution, for the very simple reason that it did nothing to improve their material lot. What they wanted, and still want, is a higher standard of living. But while Mao still lived, the chief exponents of his revolution held sway: the 'Gang of Four' was entrenched and Mao's wife was as an empress. They succeeded in disgracing Teng and would dearly love to have destroyed Chou himself. As it was, his dying months before Mao, left open the opportunity for them to seize power entirely and make themselves the sole heirs of Mao. It seems that they failed partly because of the extent of popular support for Chou which his death .revealed; and partly because the army chiefs had had enough of cultural revolution and wanted the coun try's economy to be revived in order that the country be re-armed. Marshal Yeh Chienying backed Chairman Hua in his decision to arrest the 'Gang of Four', which Wang Tung-hsing carried out. These three, with the veteran Teng now fully reinstated, and the economic planner Li Hsien-nien, are the winning and ruling five.

Their problems are serious. They have to eradicate the Maoism and the Maoists of the Cultural Revolution without seeming to attack Mao himself; and this they are doing by attacking the 'Gang of Four'. It is a tricky operation, and were it not for the Chinese desire to conform and to obey it would very likely be impossible without provoking very serious unrest. The young revolutionaries who benefited from 'helicopter promotions' under the aegis of the 'Gang of Four' do not take kindly to being weeded out, and those who became accustomed to the pleasures of revolutionary discussion and the carryingout of re-education programmes will not in every case welcome a return to work or to academic discipline. In his speech to the eleventh Congress last month Chairman Hua declared that the arrest of Madame Mao and her three allies marked 'the triumphant end' of the Cultural Revolution, a piece of double-talk designed to obscure the undoubted fact that the 'Gang of Four' pursued the Cultural Revolution and wished to continue with it. If its end is to be marked by the arrest of its most notable protagonists, it can hardly be called a triumphant termination unless, at the same time, it is to be regarded as a disastrous aberration. It cannot be thus regarded, publicly, for this would amount to direct criticism of Mao. And Hua, in the same speech, did not rule out the possibility of there having to be another Cultural Revolution some time in the future.

It strikes me, however, as most unlikely that the present Chinese leadership would themselves embark, or allow or encourage their country to embark, upon another bout of 'great disorder', even under the flattering title of Cultural Revolution. Chairman Hua has called for the screening of suspected radicals; for the past few months the more senior followers of the 'Gang of Four' have been publicly examined and disgraced and some executed; and the new central committee is a thoroughly purged body and its Politburo heavily weighted with army men; the purged party now proposes to regain full control over the Communist Youth League, the trade unions and the women's federations, according to reports from Peking of Hua's address. The new aim of the Chinese leadership is taken from Chou En-Lai's last public speech, in which he declared that China should become a great industrialised nation by the end of the century. If this aim is to be reached, there will be neither time nor resources for the luxury of another Cultural Revolution. Yet Hua says this is still on the cards, for it is unthinkable directly to criticise or attack Chairman Mao, now encased in his marbled mausoleum.

The crucial question, therefore, is Whether there will be, in fact, any further cultural revolutions. Over dinner at the Chinese embassy in London last March I asked the cultivated and intelligent wife of a Chinese diplomat what she thought about the Cultural Revolution: whether she was 'for it or against it. At first she disinclined to acknowledge that she was faced with a Choice, but she was too intelligent to sustain this posture and said, more than once, 'Of course, I am a revolutionary', much as someone might say, if asked his religion, 'I am C of E'. I suggested that China now seemed anxious to increase its industrial strength, and she assented readily enough. I asked: 'But the Cultural Revolution cannot but have impeded industrial growth?' She agreed, but added, 'But it was necessary to keep the revolution.' She conveyed the strong impression that before the Cultural Revolution, the revolutionary purity of China had become sullied and had had to be cleansed: hence the Cultural Revolution. She repeated her 'You see, I am a revolutionary' refrain and suggested the need for periodic Cultural Revolutions, to Purify the revolution and to keep it intact. Every ten years or so there would be a kind; of intestinal purging (itself an oriental notion), followed by a further Great Leap Forward. She wanted China to enjoy the same material wealth and industrial strength as other great nations and she also wanted the revolution to be preserved. In such a desire, the Revolution is the religion and Mao is its Buddha.

The following month I was in China with Mrs Thatcher. On one occasion some of us lournalists went to Peking's most celebrated restaurant, outside the South Gate, to sample its most delicious Peking duck. Peter Snow said to Mr Ma, head of the Foreign Press department of the Foreign Ministry and our principal guide and conductor, 'I suppose there won't be another Cultural Revolution?' Not yet,' Mr Ma replied, 'but later on, sometime, yes. 1 think there will have to be something which you :ould call a further Cultural Revolution.' 3hou1d have asked him, but did not, 'how cnanY Cultural Revolutions the 130 years' tradition of Peking duck — surely the richest and most extravagant of all ways of eating ['owl— would survive. He would have smiled and said, `Oh Peking duck will survive all of them and all of us, Mr Gale.' Chinese cooking of the kind we usually received is immensely elaborate, extravagant of materials and of labour, exquisite to look at, hedonistic in its entire concept and essentially aristocratic. A sign in the restaurant, in which it is a very genuine privilege to be fed, declared 'Serve the People.'

We had arrived in Peking on 6 April of this year — a year and a day after the great Peking demonstration of affection for the suddenly dead Chou En-lai. Richard Harris, the Times's excellent China expert recently wrote, of 5 April 1976: 'That was the day of a massive demonstration in honour of the departed Chou En-lai and unmistakably in rejection of the Cultural Revolution and its legacy of disturbance; even in many ways a vote against Mao.' Yes; but in China we heard no rejection of the Cultural Revolution, even though it had been rejected; and no rejection or repudiation of Chairman Mao, even though he had been repudiated. What we heard was repudiation and rejection of the 'Gang of Four' and constant talk of the reinstation of Teng Hsiaoping. The American Edward Luttwak (heavily quoted recently by Bernard Levin) wrote of his visit to China in 1976: 'At the particular time of our visit the campaign of the hour was still aimed at the fallen premier Teng Hsiao:ping. Hence, everywhere we went, from the New China University in Peking to a Tibetan commune, the briefing would conclude with the slogan: "We must deepen the criticism of the right-wing deviationist attempt of Teng Hsiao-ping to reverse the correct verdicts of the Cultural Revolution."' Teng is now restored to power; the 'Gang of Four' are disgraced. It is obviously risky to assume that a further sudden reversal will not take place. Also, intelligent Chinese refuse to acknowledge the possibility of no further Cultural Revolutions. Nonetheless, I tentatively conclude that the deep desire among the Chinese masses for order and an improved standard of living will be met by the Chinese hierarchy. Lip service to the revolution and to Maoism will continue to be obligatory: the religion will survive, but not its observation.

It certainly makes most sense for the West to act on the assumption that order will now become the rule in China and that the Chou goal of its becoming a great industrialised nation by the end of the century will continue to be aimed at. Such a China finds itself drawn to western Europe and to Japan for its principal economic and political support, because of its continuing hostility to the United States and its even greater hostility to the Soviet Union. The visit last week of Mr Vance, the American Secretary of State, denoted a cool relationship which is considerably warmer than it was and than anything Peking now has with Moscow; but the Taiwan complication precludes a full diplomatic exchange and American public opinion is unlikely to permit President Carter to abandon the Paipei regime should he be so inclined. An orderly China bent upon modernising and industrialising itself will provide an immediately large and a potentially vast market for advanced goods and skills; and a strong China, with a modernised army, if it continues its hostility to the Russian superpower (which seems most likely, given the length of common frontiers, much of which are disputed; given Maoism; and given Chinese chauvinism and its traditional fear of incursion from north and west), will weaken Russia's ability to fall upon Europe. An orderly China is very much in our interest.

China, whether or not it continues to seek stability and industrial progress, will itself remain chiefly introspective. When it chooses to look abroad, it does so in a harsh light. Deputy Premier Li Hsien-nine, in the speech welcoming Mrs Thatcher, from which I have already quoted, had this to day: 'There has been no détente in the world since the Helsinki conference. Far from it. The struggle between the two super-powers for world hegemony has intensified; all the basic contradictions in the world are sharpening; and the factors for war are on the increase. It is precisely those people who keep talking about "the irreversible process of detente" that are sharpening their swords on the sly, stepping up their arms expansion and war preparations . . . Countries want independence, nations want liberation and the people want revolution — we firmly believe this has become the irreversible trend of history.. Going aginst this trend, the expansionists poke their hand into all parts of the world, demanding a yard after getting an inch. This bears the seed of defeat, for they are only courting their own destruction.' This sombre outlook is also essentially a nationalistic outlook; and it is prudent to remember that the Chinese revolution was essentially a nationalistic revolution.

The eleventh party congress, concluded last month, had Chairman Hua endorsing Chou's slogan and rephrasing it so that it now reads: `To grasp the key link of class struggle and bring about great order across the land'; the same congress had Teng repeating the call `To make China a great, powerful, modern socialist country by the end of the century'; and it had Minister of Defence Marshal Yeh declaring, as much on behalf of the army as of the party, 'The party must have not only democracy but also and still more so, centralism, and it is imperative to strengthen party discipline.' The radicals are disgraced and eliminated; and the 1973 congress — the previous one, when the radicals were cock-a-hoop — is In effect disowned.

Teng himself has said that Chairman Hua is the qualified successor to Chairman Mao and that he can stabilise China for fifteen or twenty years. Teng has also told the Chinese: 'There must be less empty talk and more hard work.' It now appears that Hua was selected, as a comparative youngster, as Mao's successor by Chou En-lai, ViceChairman Marshal Yeh and DeputyPremier Li in 1975, when the crucial decision to destroy Madame Chaing Ching's Shanghai-based set — the 'Gang of Four'; was taken. But Mao had to die first; and Chairman Hua had to steel himself to act. Now he appears secure and stability is to be the order of the day. 'This', says Teng, the sincere wish of us all. We old fellows have been struggling for decades. What else do we wantTlf it is good for the party, good for the state, and good for the people, it is good for everything.'

It is likely to be good for us. The fact that Secretary of State Vance has had lengthy and apparently practical discussions is evidence of Chinese pragmatism. China will not give up its claim to Formosa: from Peking's point of view, this is Chinese territory and the civil war has not yet ended. But all the evidence suggests that priority is to be given to stability in mainland China. The party will be purged, of those whom the radicals recruited: in Marshal Yeh's words the 'renegades, enemy agents, new bourgeois elements, hooligans and bad elements of all kinds', who had been presented as 'advanced elements' and who had been 'sent forth to usurp leadership far and wide.' China's new party constitution, published last week, aims to produce 'democracy under centralised guidance' and at 'purifying party organisations.' China, under its new leadership, needs to make good, in Teng's words 'the serious losses and time wasted' by recent political conflicts, which stemmed from the radical victories made in the Cultural Revolution.

A counter-revolution has in fact taken place in China. I think the counterrevolution will survive; it is in our interests that it should do so; and the very obvious western policy is to support the newly stabilised China, to assist in its modernisation and industrialisation, and to encourage all links between China and the west, the new China, which has put its Cultural Revolution very firmly behind it and now prepares to leap forward out of disorder. We do not need to like such a China to appreciate that it serves our interests well.