E-Kantipur

The People’s Republic of China marked her 60th anniversary recently with a mammoth military parade. China being our good friend and next-door neighbour, we are impressed by her progress and congratulate her for her achievements. This humble article is an attempt to highlight what we understand by the “Cultural Revolution” about which Chinese leaders have talked about so much, and what the prospects of success were of the second “Cultural Revolution” ordered by Mao in February 1975.

 The “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” was ordered by Chairman Mao Zedong in November 1965 to enforce his ideology and carry out a thorough purge of the Communist Party by a section of the party leadership. The leaders sought to rally popular support against the party bureaucracy. The Cultural Revolution marked the culmination of a struggle inside the party leadership which had continued since 1958, and in which three main issues were involved: internal policies, defence and foreign policy, and successor to Mao Zedong as supreme leader.

Mao was found to be anxious to prevent the emergence of a privileged class of state and party bureaucrats and technicians, and to hasten the transition from a socialist society based on the principle of “to each according to his work” (in which material incentives and wage differences existed) to an egalitarian, classless and stateless society of pure communism, based on the principle of “to each according to his/her needs.”

To pursue his aim, Mao launched the “Hundred Flowers” movement in 1957 which encouraged popular criticism of state and party officials. In 1958, he started the “Great Leap Forward” combining the formation of agricultural communes with a crash programme of industrialization. The failure of this policy greatly reduced Mao’s influence. He was succeeded as president in 1959 by Liu Shao-chi who remained powerful for the next three years.

The slogan of the Cultural Revolution was first put forward by Chou En-lai in his report to the National People’s Congress in December 1964. In this report, he called for a radical transformation of an ideology which was inconsistent with the economic base and the socialist political system. He defined the aim as follows, “To abolish the bourgeoisie and capitalism once and for all by a prolonged class struggle.”

During the Cultural Revolution, the military leaders watched the virtual dissolution of the vast power system which the revolutionary founders had built up. Chinese military leaders still recall the misadventure of their former chief, Lin Piao, who was found to be too political and too ambitious, and paid for both with his life. During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese cities were invaded by hundreds of thousands of youths with slogans and posters denouncing “bourgeoisie capitalist revisionists”. The left leaders seized weapons from the police and army posts, and there were bitter battles at some centres. An American author summed up the revolution as “a collective frenzy, a war of each against each”. Several Chinese personalities still recoil from the memory of the near-anarchy of that period.

Having tasted the bitter fruits of the revolution, Mao’s followers and the politicised masses had shied away from firm alignments in the second round which was regarded as inevitable. And, sure enough, early in February the following year, Chairman Mao decreed a new nationwide campaign to wipe out the remnants of the bourgeoisie, thus dashing the hopes of those who were looking forward to a period of calm and stability. Mao had instructed party committees at all levels to carry out the movement against the bourgeoisie “right through to every grassroots unit”. He said it should be pushed through concurrently with the 18-month-old campaign against the late defence minister Lin Piao and the old sage Confucius. While stating the need to carry out still another purge, Chairman Mao pointed out that there was a good deal of muddled thinking even within the party on this issue.

One editorial published in the People’s Daily then had said that more revolutionary purges were inevitable in China during the transitional period from socialism to communism. The stress was on the need for the proletariat to exercise dictatorship over the bourgeoisie. The paper admitted that “bourgeoisie rights, influence and corruption still existed in China” at the time.

The younger ones of the extreme Left, who made a big splash during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, had begun to elbow out the moderate ruling group of the party; but had now (with one exception) themselves been elbowed out. The new Chinese constitution showed that the moderates had survived and proved more durable than the extremists. The year 1972 marked a complete reversal of almost every reform of the Cultural Revolution. In fact, some of the fruits of the revolution were openly ridiculed. Mao’s own followers subverted the revolution.

This ended the period of instability, putting China firmly on the path of progress.  Commenting on his deviation from radical Maoism, Deng had remarked that he did not care “whether a cat was red or white, but it had to catch mice”. Thus ideology was subordinated to pragmatism. The result of which we are seeing in the progress being made by China today.

The lesson for Nepal is that constant wrangling about a system will get us nowhere. Stability and peace are needed for progress, irrespective of what system we may adopt. China and India have both been making progress with their own respective political systems and ideologies for the last 60 years, whereas we are still stuck with system phobia and the associated discord, disharmony and division. As a result of which, instead of leaping forward, we are going further downhill.

(The author is a former secretary, Nepal Government)

Shyam Pd Adhikari

spadhikari@wlink.com.np

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