“Soviet-Chinese Relations, 1945–1970”
Sources of Emerging Nationalistic and
Anti-Soviet Tendencies in the Policies
of the CCP Leadership
Analyses of Sino-Soviet relations between 1945 and 1957 reveal that they developed along lines involving step-by-step strengthening of friendship and cooperation between our parties and countries.
Preceding chapters have discussed the development of comprehensive economic, political, diplomatic, cultural, and military cooperation between China and the Soviet Union and have pointed out the very great importance of brotherly international assistance from the Soviet Union at all stages of the Chinese Revolution and socialist construction of the PRC.
But by the end of the 1950s great-power chauvinistic forces entered the Chinese political arena and began to play an ever more important part in Sino-Soviet relations. These forces in time completely dominated the leadership of the party and the country, and suppressed the internationalist tendencies in the CCP. This raises the question of how to explain the fact that in recent years a group of leading figures in China, who continue to call themselves Communists, have created a threat to the socialist achievements in the country, have engaged in open declaration of ideological and political struggle against the Communist parties and the socialist states and severed ties with the international proletariat? What happened to bring about the dominance of nationalist, anti-Marxist tendencies now determining the political situation in the country? For it is well known that the CCP has performed great revolutionary services; it led the heroic revolution completed by a great people traveling the dangerous road of a long and bloody liberation struggle.
Thus it is useful to examine both the objective and subjective factors which explain this complicated, historical zigzag in the policy of the leaders of the CCP.
The molding of the CCP, the formation of the views of the Chinese Communists, took place under extraordinarily complex conditions. The CCP was born in a semicolonial, semifeudal country, one that was extremely backward from the standpoint of economics, sociology, politics, and culture.
Although the development of the capitalist method of production and goods-money relationships beginning at the end of the nineteenth century hastened the breaking up of feudalism, the main branch of China’s economy remained agrarian, thus suffering remnants of feudalism. In 1949 Chinese industry provided but 17 percent of the gross output of the country, with the remainder coming from agriculture (almost 70 percent), home weaving, and the handicraft industry.
The country’s underdeveloped social structure matched its backward economy. There were only 2.5 to 3 million industrial workers in China in 1949. Petty bourgeois elements predominated among the urban inhabitants. At least 90 percent of the country’s 475 million population were peasants. The bourgeoisie, as a class, were weak and split into two groups, the compradors, primarily prominent entrepreneurs collaborating with foreign imperialists, and nationalists, including primarily the middle and most prosperous stratum of the petty bourgeoisie.
Interwoven into the ideological life of Chinese society were various currents of patriarchal and feudal tendencies, elements of petty bourgeois and bourgeois attitudes, anarchism and Utopian socialism, and, finally, religious beliefs (Buddhism, Confucianism). The militant, Great Han nationalism which for centuries had been instilled by the ruling classes of feudal China was deeply rooted. The centuries of feudalism in China under conditions which isolated her from the rest of the world, and the relatively high level of Chinese culture as compared with the cultures of her neighbors, who often were no more than vassals, acclimated the Chinese to considering their country, institutions, and culture as something exceptional—of “heavenly” origin. The country occupied the leading position in East Asia in ancient times and during the Middle Ages. Its large population, its comparatively high level of civilization, its isolation from other countries, all served to create the illusion that China was the center of the universe. For centuries the ruling clique instilled this notion into the consciousness of the Chinese people. The contradiction between these notions and the real situation in a country which, in modern times, had been transformed into a semicolonial territory led to extreme intensification of national sentiments, and gave rise to the attempt to restore its former grandeur, whatever the cost. The tremendous vitality of this archaic political ideology had long been noted in China. Chinese ethnocentricity had become the highest measure of all values in the consciousness of the ruling circles, as well as in the intellectual strata of Chinese society. Even the majority of the advanced revolutionary intellectuals, to which many present Chinese leaders belong, perceived Marxism and all other progressive foreign revolutionary thought through the prism of traditional Chinese ideology, and primarily in terms of Confucianism.
The victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia, marking the beginning of the epoch of revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism on a world scale, had a tremendous effect on China. It pointed to the Chinese people the way to liberation and contributed to the dissemination in the country of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, of the ideas of scientific socialism. As has been elaborated, Marxist circles were formed in the country with the versatile assistance of the Communist International; these were followed by Communist groups which became the basis for the founding of the CCP in 1921.
The transitional period in the formation of the party was effected with relative speed. Contributing were various revolutionary democratic organizations with Marxist groups as their nuclei. Communists became members of these groups, and adherents of anarchism, peasant socialism, and other philosophies joined them. This diversity resulted later in ideological instability among individual groups of Chinese revolutionaries.
The specifics of the social and economic situation and the political life of Chinese society were reflected in the development of Marxist thought in the country, in the formulation of political views by individual leaders of the CCP, and created great difficulties for the revolutionary movement.1 These difficulties were specifically associated with the weakness of the proletarian stratum of society. The young proletariat, which never had to endure the long class struggle, was a tiny island in a boundless ocean of petty bourgeois elements. The workers’ movement in China had in fact just begun in history, and did not have the necessary experience. The majority of the Chinese Communists, in their social origin, were typical petty bourgeois revolutionaries, with all inherent inadequacies and vacillations. “Given the existing situation in China, the workers’ movement is hardly a big enough factor to be capable of carrying with it all of the national movement against imperialism,” wrote G. Voytinskiy, at that time the Comintern representative in China, in October 1923.
Another source of difficulty was the fact that Marxism was unknown in China prior to 1917. This helped complicate the formation of a genuine revolutionary advance guard in the country. Chinese revolutionary democrats, and many Communists, particularly those among the intelligentsia, considered their primary task the gaining of national, and not social, liberation of China.* Consequently ideas of nationalism prevailed in their consciousness, superseding ideas of the class struggle. What they saw above all else in Marxist-Leninist teachings and in the October Revolution, as Mao Tse-tung himself wrote, was the key to “national rebirth,” and the “saving of China.”
The weakness of the proletariat, the merging into a single revolutionary torrent the tasks of social, antifeudal, and anti-imperialist revolutions, the complex ideological situation, all had their effect on the formation of Marxist thought in the country and on the political views of individual leaders of the Communist Party. People who designated themselves Marxists and proletarian revolutionaries, and who actually were ready to struggle selflessly for liberation of their motherland, frequently joined the CCP and became its leaders, yet in fact their ties to Marxism and the workers’ movement were tenuous. This explains the fact that the leaders of the CCP, treading the correct international path for the most part, and heroically doing battle for the working class, stumbled and made mistakes.
The Plenum of the CC CCP, meeting in November 1927, in a resolution entitled “Immediate Organizational Tasks of the Communist Party of China,” noted that:
One of the basic organizational shortcomings of the Communist Party of China is that virtually all the most active leaders of our party are neither workers nor even poor peasants, but rather are representatives of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia. The Communist Party of China began to take shape as a political movement and as a party at a time when the Chinese proletariat had not yet constituted itself as a class, and when the class movement of the workers and peasants was still in its embryo state. The rise of the national liberation movement, one in which the bourgeoisie initially played a tremendous role, and this is particularly true of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia, determined for a long time to come the growth of class consciousness and of the class struggle of the exploited masses in China. At that time the most radical elements of the petty bourgeoisie rushed to the ranks of our party, occupying the extreme left wing of the front of the national liberation movement. These elements also made up the original nucleus of the Communist Party of China. The mass influx of workers and poorest peasants into the party began comparatively late and as a result of the development of the revolutionary class movement of the workers. Consequently, the leadership role in the Communist Party of China has been retained by those who have come from the petty bourgeois strata. Stirred by the wave of revolutionary enthusiasm and the enthusiasm of the first period, with no training in the theoretical schools of Marxism-Leninism, unaware of the experience of the international proletarian movement, not associated with the exploited lower strata of the Chinese people, standing apart from the class struggle of the workers and peasants, many of these revolutionary petty bourgeois elements could not be digested by the Communist Party of China, nor did they become proletarian revolutionaries later on, yet they brought to the Communist Party of China all of the political instability, inconsistency, inability for organization, nonproletarian skills and traditions, prejudices, and illusions of which only petty bourgeois revolutionaries are capable.2
An article celebrating the 30th anniversary of the CCP noted that:
The Communist Party of China for a long time was located in villages, separated by its enemies, so that it was extraordinarily easy oftentimes for village and petty bourgeois spontaneity, subjectivism, sectarianism, bureaucratism, as well as adventurism, capitalism, and other tendencies to find their expression in the ranks of the party.3
Among other objective factors having a negative effect on the formation of ideology and policies of the leadership of the CCP were the absence in China of democratic traditions of political and economic life, the special role of the army in the course of the revolution, the subsequent activities of the party, and finally the large population of China.
The absence of democratic traditions in the country was aggravated by the fact that the revolution occurred under the conditions that prevailed during a prolonged partisan war, in a situation of isolation from the cultural and political centers in the country. Under those conditions it was inevitable that what occurred during the struggle was a merging of the revolutionary army and the party. Soldiers constituted over 80 percent of the party from the mid-1930’s up to 1949. The army’s role was both that of an armed force to resist the counterrevolution and also that of an organization that carried on party political work among the population of liberated regions, exercising control over economic activities as well. The army thus served as the direct transmission belt between the party and the masses. It became tradition and habit for CCP cadres to solve all problems concerned with revolution and construction by resorting to the army and to military methods. A style of administration became dominant in the party which substituted army commands for democratic centralism.
The size of the population created the illusion among Chinese leaders that human resources were inexhaustible. This led to a sharp degradation of personal value in China, creating indifference to the destiny and conditions of human existence.
Nevertheless, despite these extraordinary difficulties, there formed within the CCP a nucleus of theoretically trained revolutionary Marxists who had gained some practical experience and who were confirmed adherents of proletarian internationalism.
Two definite lines began to take shape within the CCP, the Marxist-internationalist, the banner of which was the idea of the October Revolution, and the nationalist—the petty bourgeois, with its own ideological concept. A significant effect on the course and outcome of the struggle between these two directions was that activities of the CCP after 1927 occurred under conditions of terror, this being the period of the Chiang Kai-shek coup. The central Kuomintang government and the provincial militaristic cliques, the troops of Western imperialists, and the Japanese occupiers all fought the Communists with the same hatred. The Communists proved to be models of selflessness and heroism in the battles for the liberation of the workers, but the majority of the experienced CCP leaders perished in these battles. First to be bled white were party organizations in proletarian centers.
Thousands of Communists fell at the hands of Kuomintang adherents. Membership of the CCP decreased fivefold in the first six months after Chiang Kai-shek’s coup alone, from 50,000 to 10,000. At the beginning of the 1930s repressions against the Communists in Shanghai, as a result of the treachery to which Kang Sheng was a party, caused heavy losses.
At the beginning of 1935 the majority of old party cadres, including many of the most experienced leaders, were physically destroyed, and anything resembling real organization in the cities had been crushed. This was a real tragedy for the CCP.
All party work was in fact concentrated in the military forces under the control of the CCP, in a few support bases far from the political centers of the country and cut off from the main masses of the Chinese proletariat. For a long time party ranks were replenished by the peasantry, by petty bourgeois elements, by defectors from the exploiter classes, and by the intelligentsia. The influx of workers into the party ceased for all practical purposes and the pressure of the petty bourgeois element intensified.
It was during this period that nationalist elements were able to strengthen their position within the leadership of the CCP and within the army, weakened by the losses they had borne. They leaned both on the army and on the petty bourgeois.
It should be noted that under these concrete conditions the nationalists in the CCP were forced to remain in the mainstream of the revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people. The enthusiasm of the masses, the vital need for international support, particularly support from the Soviet Union, dictated to the CCP leadership the only possible road to take, that of the revolutionary struggle. The Maoists, for all their nationalist tendencies, did not believe that the political situation in the international arena, or in China proper, left them any other choice.
Of course it is impossible not to record the dual role of nationalism during the period of the liberation struggle. One side of the coin was progressive, feeding patriotic feelings, rallying the nation to struggle against the foreign invaders, the other the conservative, nationalist side, leading to isolation and confrontation of China with other nations. In such a case nationalism can also develop into chauvinism, and even merge with racism.
This dual role of nationalism is particularly marked in the case of China, with its strong traditions of Great Han chauvinism. Yet at the stage of the anti-imperialist democratic revolution, nationalism, or, more precisely, aspects of nationalism served as the ideological base for rallying and uniting the broadest masses of the Chinese population, and even temporarily put class differentiation into the background. But with the end of the anti-imperialist, democratic stage of the revolution, nationalism exhausted its progressive potential and began to play a completely reactionary role, feeding chauvinistic remnants, interfering with the assertion within the party of the principles of proletarian internationalism and Marxism-Leninism as the only ideological base for the new type of revolution. This gave rise to the most intense struggle between the two lines, nationalism and internationalism, within the CCP and within Chinese society as a whole.
At the beginning of the 1950s the PRC became involved in an active struggle with the vestiges of feudalism; important social transformations were made, the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution were concluded, and the prerequisites for the successful building of socialism were created. The broad scope of assistance given China by the Soviet Union, and by other socialist countries, the use within the PRC of the international experience of socialist construction, all of this made it difficult for the nationalists to maneuver and served to strengthen internationalist tendencies in China and in the CCP.
But the situation changed at the end of the 1950s. More and more facts have become known, showing to what extent Mao Tse-tung and his adherents ignored the theory and practice of scientific socialism. In light of the past history of Maoism this change was no accident, although it would be erroneous to consider it the inevitable, fatal result of the preceding development.
Lenin’s teachings to the effect that it is necessary, indeed vital, for a Communist party to develop the correct policy, to base itself on the working class, to be able to go among the peasantry without becoming lost among them, when conditions are those found in a peasant, petty bourgeois country, are particularly important. Present events in China show the results of ignoring these instructions, when the party lets itself be overwhelmed by petty bourgeois elements, and when it breaks its international ties with other fraternal parties and countries.
The nationalism and adventurism inherent in petty bourgeois revolutionaries gradually rose to the top in the policy of the CCP leadership.
At one time the CC CCP made quite clear the possibility of the revival of nationalist tendencies in the PRC. In an editorial entitled “Once again on the History of the Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” Jen Min Jihpao, the organ of the CC CCP, pointed out:
We Chinese must remember in particular that during the Han, Tang, Ming, and Ching dynasties our country too was a great empire, and that despite the fact that over the course of approximately one hundred years, since the second half of the nineteenth century, our country, having become the object of aggression, was transformed into a semicolony, and although our country today still is backward in the economic and cultural senses, when conditions change, the tendency toward great power chauvinism no doubt will become a serious danger if it is not completely prevented. It must also be pointed out that at this time this danger already has begun to appear among certain of our workers.4
The tendencies toward great-power chauvinism intensified with the increase of the PRC’s economic strength during socialist construction.
The building of socialism requires certain prerequisites: material in the form of developed industry, and social in the form of an industrial proletariat. A country in which these prerequisites are in nascent stages can successfully build socialism only with comprehensive political, material, scientific, and technical assistance of the world socialist system, with the help of its experience, with the support of the world workers’ movement. The example of China once again has confirmed the reality of Lenin’s instruction to the effect that the task of the Communist Party in an economically backward, historically oppressed country is to make every effort to form and increase a working class, to educate it politically, and, at the same time, to establish ties between the working class in that country with the world working class and “merge into the common struggle with the proletariat of other countries.”5
The petty bourgeois, hegemonistic views of the Maoists gradually became increasingly dominant within the leadership of the CCP. This has been clearly demonstrated since the beginning of the 1940s.6
There has been more than one attempt in the PRC in recent years to present the history of relations between the world Communist movement and the CCP in a false light. Apologists for the cult of Mao, distorting the truth, ascribe to him the sole development of all basic positions on strategy and tactics of the Chinese revolution, and declare that the Comintern and the CPSU “only impeded the Communist Party of China in developing the correct line.” It is not only political servility that explains this gross falsification. The Maoist “theoreticians” have as their goal the rewriting of the entire history of the Chinese Revolution and of the CCP along nationalist lines.
Historical literature published in Peking is silent on the international and domestic factors that ensured the victory of the Chinese Revolution and disparages the role of the world Communist movement. What it does with premeditation is distort the picture of the struggle of the nationalist and internationalist tendencies within the CCP, glamorize the political face of the present Chinese leadership, and whitewash the methods used in the internal party struggle. The outstanding feature of these works is the unrestrained exaggeration of the role of Mao Tse-tung at different stages of the Chinese Revolution, and the ignoring of all facts and information that unmask the nationalists who now occupy leading posts in the CCP.
The period that began in the 1940s has a special place in the history of the CCP and its relations with the international Communist movement. There was the campaign “to rectify the style of work” that unfolded between 1941 and 1945 in Yenan, the center of the liberated region. It was during this “rectification” campaign, or movement, as it was called, that reprisals were taken against the old cadres, concentrating first on those educated in the USSR. In essence, the “cultural revolution” was a copy of the Yenan reprisals against the Communists-internationalists.
During the “rectification” campaign anti-Soviet, nationalist tendencies within the ranks of the CCP developed further, the Mao Tse-tung cult of personality became stronger, and the “theorists” who rejected the applicability of the teachings of Lenin to the conditions of the Chinese revolution put in an appearance. Mao Tse-tung was being called the “Chinese Lenin” openly.
Propaganda published by the CCP, as early as the beginning of the 1940s, widely popularized the thesis that the “ideas of Mao Tse-tung,” supposedly an integral system of views, were “a special contribution to the development of Marxism-Leninism.”7 Mao Tse-tung is “a creative Marxist of genius, linking as he has the universal truth of Marxism, mankind’s superior ideology, with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution,” pointed out Liu Shao-ch’i at the 7th Congress of the CCP in 1945.8 And further, “What Comrade Mao Tse-tung has done . . . has been to combine Marxist-Leninist theory with the practice of the Chinese Revolution, with the result that Chinese Communism, the ideas of Mao Tse-tung, were born.” Mao Tse-tung, the 7th Congress was told, had changed Marxism from its European form into a Chinese form.9
Chinese theoreticians became increasingly persistent in their efforts to advance the hypothesis that the importance of the October Revolution was limited by the context of the imperialist, particularly the European, countries, and that the revolutionary model for the colonial and dependent countries was the Chinese Revolution.
Here is what Wang Ming, a party veteran, and for many years one of the leaders of the CCP, wrote about the campaign of the 1940s in Yenan:
In his preparations for [the campaign], and in the course of it, Mao Tsetung repeatedly said that by carrying out this campaign he wanted to achieve three goals: (1) replace Leninism with Mao Tse-tungism; (2) write the history of the Communist Party of China as the history of Mao Tse-tung; (3) raise the personality of Mao Tse-tung above the Central Committee and above the entire party. Why did he have to do this? He answered this himself. It provided him with two possibilities, the first of which was to take over the leadership of the party and thus take into his hands alone all of the authority in the party, and second, once he was sitting at the top of the party leadership no one ever would be able to overthrow him.10*
The “rectification” campaign consisted of three stages, or periods. The first (from the fall of 1941 to the spring of 1942) consisted of “the study of 22 documents” which were mostly speeches by Mao Tse-tung and his adherents. Its tasks were to demonstrate that Mao Tse-tung was a “great theoretician,” and an “initiator of new ideas.”
The second period (from the spring of 1942 to the spring of 1943) was devoted to the “ideological testing of the cadres,” which simply was a program of savage reprisals against party workers to whom Mao objected. The third period (from March 1943 to the 7th Congress of the CCP in 1945) can be characterized as that of the “campaign to expose the spies” and of the party purge.
As is obvious from the content and character of the first period, its main task was to make CCP members aware of the thesis that the “ideas of Mao Tse-tung” were the party’s dominant ideology, and to substitute these “ideas” for Marxist-Leninist teachings. This campaign (more correctly, general purge), in its second and third periods, created within the party, and in the liberated region with its center in Yenan, a situation of psychological terror and conditions for elimination (including physical elimination) of those who did not agree with Mao Tse-tung and his group.
Wang Ming recalls how Mao Tse-tung artificially split the party into two camps, the “dogmatic” and the “empirical.” He included all Communists who had studied in the Soviet Union, those who were engaged in ideological and political work, as well as those who by their social origins belonged to the intelligentsia in the so-called “pro-Soviet, dogmatic group. . . .”11
Mass reprisals against those who did not support Mao Tse-tung took the form of the “campaign to expose spies,” which began in March 1943. “Shock work to trap spies” was organized in Yenan, and this was accompanied by general meetings with threats, demands for confessions of “antiparty activities,” and recantations.
Those in authority forced party leaders as well as rank and file Communists to confess their “sins” in writing. The organizers of this “movement” first obtained from the accused various types of slanderous statements against the CPSU and the Soviet Union. Another indispensable part of the “repentance” was unrestrained praise for Mao Tse-tung, and self-flagellation for having supported the views and the institutions of the Comintern. Similar “educational methods” were invoked to undermine the faith of Chinese Communists in genuine Marxism and in proletarian internationalism.
People who had lived or studied in the USSR were required to “confess” in the form of slanderous attacks against the Soviet Union and against our party during the 1942–1943 rectification campaign. Any occasion was used to sow distrust of the Comintern and of the CPSU. Instilled in the Communists were notions that the Comintern had given instructions detrimental to the Chinese Revolution; that the Comintern influenced the Chinese studying in the USSR to turn against the CCP; that they became indoctrinated as “foreign lackeys of the comprador type” who should “usurp leadership of the Communist Party of China.” Statements made by the “penitents” at the 7th Congress of the CCP (1945) were similar in nature. Thus even then relations with the Soviet Union were guarded, and often frankly hostile.
Thus even at the beginning of the 1940s ideological and organizational conditions had been created for the replacement of Marxism-Leninism by “the Chinese brand of Marxism,” clearing the way for the installation of the “ideas of Mao” as the dominant ideology in the Communist Party of China.
The stronger the position of the Maoists in the leadership of the CCP, the more definite became their nationalism. Naturally, the Maoists assumed a cavalier attitude toward their international obligations.
At the most crucial early period of the Great Patriotic War, the Comintern and the Soviet Union went to the leaders of the CCP with the question of coordination of activities designed to pin down Japanese forces and prevent them from attacking the Soviet Union. On June 27, 1941, the head of a group of Soviet workers in Yenan reported to Moscow that in accordance with his instructions he had raised the question with leaders of the CCP of help to the Soviet Union in event of an attack by Japan on the USSR. Chinese leaders responded that they already had planned a number of measures, and at the final meeting of the sides Chu Teh asked that the Soviet Union be advised that in the event Japan attacked the USSR, the Eighth Route Army would attack the Japanese with all strength available and would be able to provide sufficient support for the Soviet Union. This assurance was confirmed by the leaders of the CCP on July 3, 1941.12
Actually, no practical measures were undertaken. In July 1941 it was reported in Yenan that the Japanese would send their mobilized troops to the mainland, and a request was made that effective measures be taken to prevent their concentration along the Peiping-Kalgan and Paotow directions, that is opposite the USSR, and to disrupt normal traffic on the railroads leading to these points. But this request, like all the others, was ignored by the leaders of the CCP.
As witnesses to these events recall, Mao Tse-tung once again was asked what actions the CCP could be expected to take if Japan went to war against the USSR. This was on September 3, 1941. The reply came in the form of confused and evasive statements, hedged by endless reservations and containing what were known to be demands the Soviet Union could not meet under the circumstances. When asked directly to say what, with no “ifs” attached, the CCP would do in the event of an attack by Japan on the Soviet Union, Mao unceremoniously broke off the talks on this very important question, charging the Soviet representative with lack of dialectical thinking. All further attempts to agree on coordinated action were blocked.
Highly important to the struggle against Japanese militarists and to successful development of the Chinese revolution was the role of the Comintern in implementing the tactics of the United Front of the CCP and the Kuomintang. These aims corresponded to the general policy of the Comintern, and were directed at development of mass movements within the framework of a united international front for the struggle to defend China, for the countries enslaved by German Fascism, and for defense of the USSR. They were directed at the immediate creation inside the country of a united national front and this required the establishment of contact with all the forces opposed to Fascism. But the Maoists, continuing to vow fidelity to their international duty, actually procrastinated and avoided in every way possible following the advice and requests of the Comintern to intensify the struggle against Japanese imperialists.
There was deep disagreement on the question of the United Front among leaders of the CCP. The internationalists met resistance by the nationalists, who rejected the need for a united front and organization of a nationwide struggle against Japanese aggression together with the Kuomintang. And it was not until reality dictated the unquestioned need to create a united front that Mao Tse-tung began to pretend to be an active adherent of this course. But the present Maoist chroniclers say that the tactic of the United Front was the greatest personal contribution Mao Tse-tung has made to Marxism-Leninism.
The narrow nationalist course set by some CCP leaders had a result that beginning with 1941–1942 the troops of the CCP gradually slowed their activities. Mao Tse-tung justified his tactics by saying that “it is better for us to conserve our strength, to defeat the Kuomintang, to take over power in China, and then, with the help of the USSR, England, and America, liberate China from the Japanese invaders. . . .”
The passive attitude of the nationalist wing of the CCP to the war with militaristic Japan in a period when interests of the international proletariat, interests in the common struggle against Fascism, demanded intensification of action against Japan is yet another example of the retreat from internationalism.
Mao Tse-tung spelled out his aim when he said, “Ten percent of our forces to the struggle with Japan, 20 percent to the struggle with the Kuomintang, and 70 percent to the growth of our own forces.” In accordance with this stated aim, the Eighth and Fourth Route Armies took no active part in combat operations against the Japanese for several years. The views that were fostered went something like this: why irritate the Japanese and bring down unpleasantness on ourselves. Better that we live like friendly neighbors with the Japanese. We won’t bother them, and they won’t bother us.
“All units have been ordered not to conduct military operations against Japanese troops and to withdraw when Japanese troops are engaged in offensive operations,” reported a Soviet war correspondent who was in Yenan in January 1943. “Should the opportunity present itself, conclude a temporary armistice with them. . . . All areas, every unit of the CCP [the military units under the supervision of the Communist Party of China —authors], is trading with the Japanese rear. The headquarters usually do not discuss military operations, but rather talk a great deal about trading operations.” 13
Thus in the 1940s internationalist obligations of the CCP in general, and regarding the Soviet Union in particular, bothered the Maoists as slightly as now they disturb China with respect to meeting its international duty to the people of the socialist countries, particularly to the heroic people of Vietnam.
3. Nationalist manifestations of anti-Sovietism among the leadership of the CCP in 1945—1949
The erroneous tendencies in the political line and practice of the Chinese leaders were already apparent on the eve of victory of the Revolution. One example of this is the idea put forth at the end of the 1940s that China “isolate itself” from the socialist countries, including the Soviet Union. This nationalist approach to assessing the future of the Chinese revolution would have interfered adversely with social changes in China and would have moved the democratic revolution away from development into a social revolution.
Mao Tse-tung persistently advanced the idea that transition to the building of socialism in China was in the far distant future, and that China should spend a considerable period of time in the “new democracy” stage before raising the question of socialism. Characteristic also was that Mao Tse-tung saw substantially “favorable conditions” for this in a long period of isolation for China. He had this stage in mind when he suggested that after the victory of the Chinese Revolution the USSR and other socialist countries take their time in recognizing China. It would be better, he said, if China were first recognized by the big imperialist powers: the United States, Great Britain, France, and others.
This “plan” evolved from a narrow nationalist approach to the Chinese revolution. The nationalists in the CCP even then were secretly nurturing the idea of China as a third force to play on the contradictions between the two social systems. It was not until these “ideas” met with a decisive rebuff at the 2d Plenum of the CC CCP’s seventh convocation in March 1949 that Mao rejected them. In his article entitled “On the Democratic Dictatorship of the People” he now appeared as an enthusiastic adherent of alliance with the USSR, and a proponent of the “support one side” line.
Well known also are other zigzags and excursions on the part of the nationalists. For example, on the eve of the disintegration of the Kuomintang, Mao Tse-tung asserted that the CCP should be in no hurry to seize the main industrial centers in China, such as Nanking, Shanghai, and others. He argued that the CCP was in no position to seize the large cities because “it had no cadres,” the Communist Party being composed mainly of peasants.
These and other attitudes caused concern, and patient explanatory work was conducted with leaders of the CCP (by the Comintern). Attempts were made to persuade Mao Tse-tung that it was necessary to pay more attention to the working class in China, to devote more attention to work in the largest of the industrial centers, to see to the purity of the party’s ranks, and to spread developmental work among the trade unions.
The process of fouling the CCP and its leadership with alien elements intensified during the Civil War of 1946–1949, when Kuomintang divisions, corps, and whole armies came over to the PLA of China, together with generals and staffs. This was a period of growth for the CCP exclusively because of the addition of these nonproletarian elements, these holders of petty bourgeois and nationalist views, these members of the Kuomintang.
It should be noted that as early as 1936 the Comintern, addressing the CC CCP, emphasized that:
We are worried in particular by the decision that the party will accept all those who desire to join, regardless of their social origin, and that the party is not worried about its ranks being penetrated by certain careerists, as well as your report of your intention to accept into the party the likes of Chang Hsueh-liang [a militarist, a double-dyed reactionary—authors]. . . . We also would consider it to be a mistake to resort to indiscriminate acceptance into the ranks of the Red Army students and former officers in other armies. . . . We consider it to be incorrect to permit representatives of the propertied classes to exercise political control in Soviet regions . . .” 14
Nevertheless, Chinese leaders not only failed to exhibit necessary concern for the purity of the ranks of the CCP as a Marxist-Leninist party, but instead followed a diametrically opposite policy. The masses of the people who had joined the CCP during the Yenan period, and afterward, knew no other course than Maoist “re-education” and “repentance.” They then became the additions to the cadres of political organs, editorial boards, and Red Army officers. The “rectification” campaign at the beginning of the 1940s was directed exclusively at those who followed the line of the Comintern, and did not share the views of Mao Tse-tung, but it was, in essence, a campaign of total forgiveness so far as actual antiparty elements were concerned. The Maoists granted new amnesty to antiparty bourgeois elements on the eve of the 7th Session of the CCP in 1945, stating that “the roots” of the left-deviationist and right-opportunist mistakes “had been eliminated” and that “all comrades who had admitted to mistakes in the past should be welcomed and enlisted to work for the advantage of the party without prejudice of any kind, so long as they remembered their mistakes and set about correcting them.” Moreover, the amnesty usually favored people with anti-Soviet leanings who had adopted the “ideas of Mao” without question. This became the original forerunner of the “cultural revolution” which developed within the PRC in the second half of the 1960s.
The international Communist movement and the CPSU hewed to the line of supporting the CCP and providing it with comprehensive assistance during the Chinese Revolution. Genuine internationalists could do no less for the Chinese people who had risen to struggle for their liberation, and for the Chinese Communists who were leading this struggle. Then too, despite the grave shortcomings in its leadership, the CCP was a serious ally of the progressive forces in the struggle against imperialism. As we already have pointed out, the CCP, relying on support of the international forces of the proletariat, the experience of the CPSU, and on the tremendous assistance given by the Soviet Union, was able to play its role as the leader of the national liberation and revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people and bring the revolution to victory.
Anti-Sovietism on the part of some CCP leaders during this period seemed an unfortunate exception in the general atmosphere of friendship and cooperation. Nevertheless, this tendency was not random in nature and is worth mentioning in order to establish a more comprehensive analysis of Sino-Soviet relations. Even at the conclusion of the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance, for example, the leadership of the CCP displayed definite distrust and suspicion in relations with the USSR. Chinese leaders were dissatisfied with the fact that the USSR had extended the PRC a credit of “only” 300 million dollars. They did not want to take into consideration the fact that at that very time the USSR itself was having considerable problems associated with the need to overcome consequences of the war as quickly as possible.
Then, as years passed, the Chinese leaders tried to enlist help from the USSR without considering the latter’s capacity to help. Pretensions of nationalist elements in the CCP were so great that in some years they demanded deliveries which would have amounted to as much as 80 percent of the annual production of certain types of machine tools in the USSR.
Mao Tse-tung, in a meeting with the Soviet Ambassador in October 1951, said, “Not everyone in the country, in fact not all the members of the party, agree with our policy of friendship with the Soviet Union.” This, however, was the position of Chinese leaders themselves, and not the feelings of the rank and file of the CCP.
All of these aspects were viewed [in Moscow] as temporary deviations at the time, but in light of subsequent events in the PRC, similar “random occurrences” have acquired an entirely different coloration. They were deliberate steps which led leaders of the CCP to an open political struggle with the CPSU.
Measures were undertaken in 1953 and 1954 to nullify the influences of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association in propagandizing the idea of internationalism and knowledge of the USSR. There was a clearly observable leaning to the side of propaganda dealing primarily with economic and scientific and technical experience, rather than with the experience of the USSR and the CPSU as a whole. At just about this time the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association for all practical purposes curtailed its activities as an organization with branches all over the country. The conference made personnel changes in the leadership of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association. Members who were to become active champions of the basic anti-Soviet line in the CCP were appointed to supervisory organs of the association. The number of members of the Central Administration Board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association dropped from 197 in 1949 to 60 in 1954.
The first years of the people’s power already saw numerous cases of misuse of Soviet specialists. They were barred from production, from concrete work in ministries and departments, without which they were unable to give qualified recommendations based on conditions in corresponding branches of the economy. In some institutions Soviet specialists were burdened with petty current assignments, resulting, naturally, in a paucity of suggestions and recommendations on important questions. Subsequently, this line was transformed in 1958–1959 into an entire campaign of belittling Soviet experience, as will later be discussed.
Great-power chauvinism and adventurism made themselves felt in the first period of the existence of the PRC even in international affairs. At the conference of trade unions of the countries of Asia and the Pacific Ocean held in December 1949 in Peking, the Maoists claimed to occupy the leading position in the Asian revolutionary movement. They asserted that situations in Asian and Pacific countries were quite similar to the situation in China prior to 1949, and that revolutionaries should therefore be guided in their actions under the leadership and experience of Peking. The Chinese representatives proclaimed that “The path selected by the Chinese people for victory over imperialism and its stooges, and for the creation of the PRC, is the path along which the peoples of many of the colonial and semicolonial countries should move in the struggle for the winning of their national independence and of a people’s democracy. . . . This is the path, the path of Comrade Mao Tse-tung. . . .” Many delegates refused to accept these concepts and the Maoists had to back off.
In 1950–1951 the Maoists attempted to foist on the Communist parties of Indonesia and India programs which ignored the concrete situation in each of these countries, and which required that they copy the experience of the liberation struggle in China (the formation of peasant armies, the creation of liberated regions). J. V. Stalin took a decisive stand against this line.
But these were individual cases. The PRC still was an economically backward country needing much assistance from socialist states in order to strengthen its defensive capability and to develop its economy; thus the Maoists were not too openly venturesome.
The nationalist, anti-Soviet tendencies inherent in the Mao Tse-tung environment during early stages of the Chinese revolution became even more pronounced after the death of J. V. Stalin. Mao Tse-tung, in order to “take over” the leadership of the Communist movement, developed a definite strategy and tactics, the reasoning behind which finally was clarified during a later period: use all economic, military, and other help available from the USSR in order to create the material prerequisites for carrying out his course of action; simultaneously use all available means to undermine the authority of the USSR in the world arena and complicate the realization of the plans for building communism in our country. Roadblocks in effecting these plans were the Soviet Union as well as the Chinese people and the Chinese Communists, who were well aware of the importance of the Soviet Union in building socialism in the PRC.
Nationalists among the leadership of the CCP attempted to make it difficult to establish contact between the Chinese workers and the Soviet people arriving in China to help in socialist construction. In May 1954 the State Council adopted and sent to the provinces a special decision categorically forbidding all Chinese, other than workers in foreign sections of corresponding administrative organs, to meet with Soviet citizens who were members of different missions on other than business.
Beginning in 1953 Mao Tse-tung began the gradual elimination of all those who did not share his nationalist, anti-Soviet line. Whatever labels were now used to cover Mao Tse-tung’s attack on Wang Ming [alias Chen Shao-yü—translator], Kao Kang, P’eng Teh-huai, Chang Wen-t’ien [party name Lo Fu—translator], and others, his reprisals against many leading cadres of the CCP had a single purpose, that of eliminating the obstacles in the way of his petty bourgeois, chauvinist course. Documents on the “cultural revolution” indicate that one of the major “crimes” of the CCP leaders aforementioned were their friendly feelings toward the USSR and the other countries of socialism.
It later became known that the struggle between the internationalist Marxist-Leninists and the Maoists—the great-power chauvinists and the nationalists among the Chinese leaders—intensified at the beginning of the 1950s. The alarm was the arrest and death in prison in 1955 of Kao Kang, a member of the Politburo, and a Vice Chairman of the PRC. The various criminal charges brought against him were completely unfounded. Nothing was said about his major “crime,” his being a true friend of the USSR, constantly fighting nationalist deviation to uphold the party’s internationalist line.
However, Mao at that time was of the opinion that there was much still to be obtained from socialist countries in strengthening the PRC, which remained in need of protection. The central factor was that sentiments within the CC CCP and the party as a whole in favor of friendly relations with the USSR through a flexible and reasonable policy were so strong that Mao and his adherents were forced to consider them. This held even more true after the CCP, now wielding power, had to make decisions in connection with the main tasks of the socialist revolution on political and economic fronts.
It must be emphasized that the leaders of the CCP, as they indulged in their nationalist meanderings, never lost hope of extricating themselves from difficulties through the support of the United States of America. There is additional information indicating that in the 1940s these leaders made a number of attempts to reach mutual understanding with the Americans, but at that time these attempts could not have been successful. Washington at that time still was concerned with the prospects for maintaining American influence in China through the Chiang Kaishek regime, thus distrusted advances of CCP leaders. Chinese leaders close to Mao tried to avoid the slightest action that could alienate the Americans and the British. They came out against the participation of Japan and India in the trade union conference that the countries of Asia and Oceania held in Peking in 1949, for example, because of the fear that “this would irritate Washington and London.” At the end of 1949 the Chinese leaders declared that Soviet specialists should not be sent to Shanghai and Taishan because “big American and British economic interests were concentrated there during this period.”
The Korean War erupted in 1950, straining Sino-American relations and for a long time preventing any deal between the CCP nationalists and ruling circles in the United States and, concurrently, forcing CCP leaders to proceed with a policy of expanding cooperation with the USSR.
Mao Tse-tung and his followers also had to consider that there were those in the party as well as among the leadership of party forces maintaining that alliance and friendship with the USSR were one of the most important conditions for a socialist victory.
All these factors, in one way or another, tended to slow development of nationalist anti-Soviet tendencies within the CCP and among its leadership, tendencies which later blossomed so luxuriantly.
Given this situation, the Peking leaders were forced to put aside realization of their great-power nationalist program. They pretended to be friends of the Soviet Union in order to obtain help from the USSR in creating the material-technical base needed to achieve their goals.
This circumstance made it extremely difficult for us to recognize the true nature and the main thrust of Maoist leadership of the CCP in the international Communist movement.
5. Factors contributing to the rise of nationalist tendencies in the CCP
The serious subjective features of the activities of leaders headed by Mao Tse-tung were mixed with objective factors contributing to the birth and development of nationalist, petty bourgeois currents in the CCP. These activities were aggravated by serious gaps and errors in the party line, and by flagrant deviations from Leninist principles of party life.
Soviet specialists who worked in China have drawn the picture of right-opportunist practices in the CCP, a most important aspect of which was its relationship to the working class. They point out that after the victory of the Chinese Revolution leaders of the CCP did nothing radical to create political and economic conditions which would enable the working class to consider itself dominant. Workers continued to lead a wretched, half-starved existence; the working day, in accordance with the labor statute, was 12 hours long. Wages remained identical to those paid under Kuomintang domination.
Leading circles within the CCP, as usual, underestimated the role of the working class in the revolutionary transformation of the country. They considered the workers “immature, illiterate, and politically backward,” thus “not actively participating in the revolution.”
Despite the fact that the CCP had for many years been supported by the peasantry, which had formed the mass base of the PLA and the source of its material supply, Chinese leaders were also indecisive and fearful of undertaking revolutionary measures, even in the villages.
On the other hand, the Maoists obviously were favorably inclined toward the bourgeoisie. They imposed no taxes on trade, engaged in no decisive struggles with black marketeers. The absence of restrictive measures of any kind, even with respect to the big national bourgeoisie, favored the stirring up of its reactionary activities.
The theory that the “new kulaks” to arise as a result of land reforms would thus be a “revolutionary force” supporting the Communist party and the People’s Government was propagated among certain groups of Communists and within ruling circles of the Communist party.
The Chinese leaders, in meetings with representatives of the fraternal parties in 1949, declared that:
The fact that a new type of rich peasant is appearing in the villages poses absolutely no danger, because this rich peasant has received his wealth from the new authority, and supports it decisively. . . . This new rich peasant is revolutionary minded.
In 1949 Soviet specialists characterizing the situation within the CCP noted:
The growth of the party attributable to the working class is insignificant. There is no active effort afoot to attract workers into the ranks of the party. Party organizations are quite cluttered up with the landlord-rich peasant and bourgeois elements, and people are being accepted into the party in many regions without grounds.
These impressions gained by Soviet residents are confirmed by the observations of leaders of fraternal parties who visited China in those years. Viewed with alarm was the fact that Mao “was not providing his people, and the working class in particular, with clear, coherent prospects. Consequently, the concentration in his hands of absolute power excites certain apprehensions.” There also was talk of the “serious danger of complete restoration of capitalism in the city, as well as in the countryside, because the leaders of the CCP did not understand the terrible danger and were doing nothing to combat it.”
The Peking leaders asserted:
It is impossible to permit any sort of class struggle in private enterprises in new China, and we must give the owners the freedom to act if we are to increase production. The working class in China is illiterate, irresponsible, and thus cannot yet be drawn into the class struggle.
Chinese leaders were unconcerned with strengthening the leading role of the working class in its capacity for organization because they placed primary reliance on the rich peasantry. Their statements in a 1951 meeting with Academician P. F. Yudin are of interest in this regard. In their words there were, within the CCP, sentiments in favor “of considering the rich peasants the main figures in the villages, and from this concluding that it was only by following a course of developing the rich peasant economy of China that the productive forces of villages could be developed,” thus “creating the grain and raw materials base for cities and industry. It is necessary, therefore, to support in the villages those Communists whose farms can develop into rich peasant farms and not exclude them from the party. These Communists should serve as the examples for all the peasants.”
Analysis of the causes and factors for the gradual increase in petty bourgeois and nationalist tendencies in the actions of CCP leaders emphasize a definite inconsistency in accomplishment of social and economic reforms. Despite a great deal of work along these lines, the private capitalist sector in the national economy of the PRC remained impressive. In 1953 the proportion of private industry in the total volume of the country’s industrial production was 32.2 percent. The total number of large private capitalist industrial enterprises registered in the country in 1953 was 18,091,* with 185,940 small ones. The actual number was higher, for there were many unregistered private enterprises in the country. The financial organs of the PRC estimated that there were some 10,000 private capitalist industrial enterprises in Shanghai alone that were unregistered and untaxed. Such enterprises employed 5.4 million people in 1953.
Serious breakdowns in Leninist standards in the life and activities of the CCP interfered with successful accomplishment of socialist construction in the PRC from the first years of the republic’s existence. Plenary sessions of the CC CCP were irregular. The Central Committee, elected in 1945 (approximately 40 strong), did not reflect the actual situation of the party in the country, either in numbers or in composition, and was unable fully to cope with the tasks facing it. The CC CCP had virtually no experienced economic and party workers; the military prevailed. Party and administrative authority was concentrated in the hands of leading workers in the provinces, cities, districts, enterprises, and schools. The secretary of a province committee of the CCP was simultaneously the chairman of the province’s People’s Committee. The director of a large enterprise was simultaneously the secretary of the party committee.
The struggle against corruption, waste, and bureaucracy revealed that the party, particularly the state apparatus, was severely polluted by persons alien to the socialist system and to the working class. A great many spies, grafters, bureaucrats, and plunderers of state property were unmasked in a number”of organizations and institutions. Many party and state officials were inattentive to hostile schemes of the class enemy. Instructions issued by the CC CCP on January 1952, in connection with prosecution of the above campaigns, stated that as many as 50 to 60 percent of the total number of workers in many organizations were involved in various types of unlawful activities or immoral acts.
Many flaws in the social and party policy of the CCP which had first appeared during early stages of the Revolution and in the first years of the people’s power now had serious effects. Party ranks were overswollen, yet strict class selection for admission to the CCP was lacking, and the Mao cult of personality was increasingly inflated. All this served to create conditions favorable for the growth of petty bourgeois, nationalist tendencies. Party membership growth was particularly heavy between 1953 and 1957, when 70 percent of all Communists were accepted into the CCP. It is understandable that the increase in the ranks of the CCP at such tremendous rates and on this vast scale could not help but affect the quality of the party. Commenting on the great shortcomings in acceptance into the party, the newspaper Szechwan Jihpao noted that:
. . . some party members have a low level of consciousness, are unclear as to what the party means, and are readily subject to the influence of bourgeois ideology. Some party members have been infected by bourgeois ideology, have mistaken views, have shortcomings in their work style. They are unable to respond fully to the demands imposed on party members. Even the party members who had become members earlier are not without shortcomings in their views and work styles.15
There were very few workers and employees in China on the eve of liberation, no more than 8 million. A rapid increase in the ranks of workers and employees occurred after formation of the PRC, but the proportion of industrial workers remained as before.
It was the social composition of the CCP which lent itself to the development of nationalist tendencies. The party grew with unjustified rapidity, feeding off the petty bourgeois environment. According to May 1953 data, only 450,000 of the 6,100,000 members of the CCP were workers, or only 7.3 percent. Being illegal, organizations of the CCP in major industial centers prior to their liberation from Kuomintang domination were not large. In Shanghai, for example, there were 600,000 industrial workers, yet six months after liberation there were only 6,000 Communists. Because the main peasant mass in China is illiterate, the majority of party members who came from the peasantry also were illiterate, and this presented objective difficulties in carrying on ideological and political indoctrination of party cadres. In 1950, for example, 1 million of the 1.5 million Communists in party organizations in Northeast and North China were illiterate.
One of the most important factors serving to stimulate the growth of nationalist tendencies in the CCP was the consciously fostered Mao cult of personality. Mao Tse-tung’s works were published in the PRC in massive editions right after liberation. By October 1951 the Hsin Hua (New China) News Agency alone had published almost 2.4 million copies of these works.16 A vast campaign to study the works of Mao Tse-tung was organized in the country, while study of the works of the founders of Marxism-Leninism was completely ignored.* In August 1951, for example, local trade unions presented their plan to the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. This plan called for six or more weeks devoted to the study of Mao Tse-tung’s articles. Cadres of workers in state institutions were to devote at least six hours a week to political study, including in particular study of the works of Mao Tse-tung. Students at universities and those studying in the middle schools were to devote 12 to 15 hours a month to studying the works of Mao Tse-tung, in addition to the usual political disciplines.
Publication of Mao Tse-tung’s Selected Works began in October 1951, in accordance with a decision made by the CC CCP, and gave new impetus to the movement to study the “ideas of Mao Tse-tung.” In a report to the 3d Session of the All-China Committee of the People’s Political Consultative Council, held in October 1951, Chou En-lai said:
We must . . . organize the study of the works of Mao Tse-tung on a broad, systematic basis among the active elements of all strata of society, among the soldier heroes, the outstanding workers, members of the democratic parties, all teachers, specialists, and cadre workers, and, through them, provide help for the broad masses of people in their study. The first volume of Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung was published during this session of the National Committee. We must assume the responsibility for encouraging the study of Mao Tse-tung’s Selected Works among all strata of the population.
We must arm ourselves with the ideas of Mao Tse-tung, which combine Marxism-Leninism and the revolutionary experience in China. This is a new task for the democratic united front of the Chinese people.17
Chinese propaganda even then stressed the thesis that the “ideas of Mao Tse-tung” were an integral system of views “contributing to the development of Marxism-Leninism.” This thesis was advanced for the first time at the 7th Congress of the CCP in 1945.
The thesis of the “ideas of Mao Tse-tung” and their decisive role in the victory of the Chinese revolution was strengthened in speeches by a number of the leaders of the CCP on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the CCP (July 1951). These speeches abounded with references to Mao as “great,” “genius,” and the like.
In addition to elements of the Mao Tse-tung cult of personality, there were other circumstances that facilitated the struggle of the nationalists in the CCP with the ideology of internationalism in the party and the country.
Despite the fact that during the first years after formation of the PRC, Chinese propaganda occasionally spoke of the need to master Marxist-Leninist theory, in practice CCP leaders were little concerned with businesslike and detailed solutions of concrete problems of socialist construction and use of the experience of the fraternal parties.
So long as the CCP followed the road built by the Soviet Union, ignoring Marxist-Leninist theory caused no serious negative consequences. But once the Chinese leaders began to underestimate, and then completely disregard Soviet experience, the lack of proper detailed Marxist-Leninist solutions to problems of socialist construction led to serious mistakes in practical activities of the CCP.
Documents from the “cultural revolution” in China provide the basis for the assertion that a struggle between two lines had in fact developed within the Chinese leadership, after the country’s liberation, over the question of the socialist rebuilding of the PRC, and over its foreign policy. The struggle of views on questions of the internal course of the CCP was also reflected in the international policy of the PRC. Chinese leaders in those years tried to introduce their voluntarist views into the party’s policies. Despite their pseudorevolutionary cast, their substance was the conserving of capitalist forms of property particularly in the cities, keeping ties with the imperialist world, and maintaining parasitical attitudes in dealing with the USSR, though simultaneously discrediting Soviet experience and disparaging the authority of our country.
Once having strengthened their position within the party and in the country, and having restored the economy, the Maoists took decisive actions to thrust upon the country their great-power, adventurist views. Initially these experiments on the part of the nationalist elements in the CCP were introduced in domestic policy, and following their failure, in the international sphere.
The negative consequences of the policies of the Peking leaders provide striking examples of where the voluntarist method of leadership, and the cult of personality, alien to Marxism-Leninism, lead if they fail to meet the necessary rebuff. The development of events in China at the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s graphically confirms how dangerous the petty bourgeois nationalist course is for the revolutionary movement. These events should serve as a serious warning to all detachments of the world revolutionary movement.
NOTES
1. A. M. Rumyantsev, Problemy sovremennoy nauki ob obshchestve (Problems of Contemporary Social Science) (Moscow, 1969)—“Maoizm i antimarksistskaya sushchnost’ yego ‘filosofii’ ” (Maoism and the Anti-Marxist Nature of Its “Philosophy,” Kommunist, No. 2, 1969.
2. O. Vladimirov and V. Ryazantsev, Stranitsy politicheskoy biografii Mao Tze-duna (Pages from the Political Biography of Mao Tse-tung, hereinafter referred to as Mao Tse-tung) (Moscow, 1969), pp. 15–16.
3. Narodnyi Kitay (People’s China), Vol. IV, No. 1–2, 1951, p. 12.
4. Jen Min Jihpao, December 29, 1956.
5. V. I. Lenin, Polnoye sobraniye sochinenii (Complete Collected Works, Vol. 39), p. 330.
6. O. Vladimirov and V. Ryazantsev, “On Some Questions of the History of the Communist Party of China,” Kommunist, No. 9, 1968.
7. Chang Ju-long, Idei Mao Tze-duna—kitaizirovannyy marksizm (The Ideas of Mao Tse-tung—The Sinification of Marxism) (Yenan, 1944).
8. Liu Shao-ch’i, About the Party.
9. Ibid.
10. Wang Ming, O sobytiyakh v Kitaye (On Events in China) (Moscow, 1969), p. 37–38.
11. Wang Ming, p. 39.
12. O. Vladimirov and V. Ryazantsev, Mao Tse-tung, p. 53–54.
13. Ibid., p. 55–56.
14. Ibid., p. 68.
15. Szechwan Jihpao, April 16, 1957.
16. Narodnyi Kitay, Vol. IV, No. 7–8, 1951, p. 28.
17. Ibid.
__________________
* Translator’s note: in this latter respect, Chinese Communists faced a situation vastly different from that which confronted the Russian Marxists before the Revolution.
* He wrote this while in exile in Moscow.
* This category in the PRC included enterprises with 16 or more employees, equipped with machinery, or with 30 or more employees, without machinery.
* Translator’s note: this is reminiscent of the campaign to study Stalin’s works in Russia in the 1930s.
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