Red China watchers have been waiting for the blow-up in the power struggle between Hua Kuo-feng and Teng Hsiao-ping. Judging from the published statements of both, their parting of the ways has already taken place but has not been formalized. Teng has said Marxism and Maoism are not holy writ and may be questioned. He has urged that the children of intellectuals be given preference in according educational opportunities, because they are better prepared mentally. Scientists need not toe the Marxist-Maoist line, he has said, and only those who rebel against the regime are to be considered enemies.
In each case, Hua has a different view. The two agree only that the mainland must be "modernized" and that education is important. In a recent speech, Hua asked whether the modernization of science and technology could be left to those who serve in research institutes and universities. As for scientists who are not Communists, he said, "We hope that more and more people will gain a better understanding of Marxism and firmly establish a proletarian Communist world outlook through studying Marxist theories, through class struggle and practical work. When that has been achieved, we shall be speaking the same language, not only the common language of patriotism and the socialist system, but increasingly the common language of the Communist world outlook." He said, "Politics is the commander, the soul of everything, and failure to grasp political and ideological work will not do."
Teng, the realist, feels very differently. "The last three decades have seen profound changes and new leaps in almost all areas of science and technology," he said. "New sciences and technologies have emerged and are still doing so. New industries have been founded on the basis of newly emerged science and technology. Of course there are now and there will be many theoretical research topics with no practical application in plain sight for the time being. But a host of historical facts have proved that once a major breakthrough is scored in theoretical research, it means tremendous progress for production and technology sooner or later."
If scientists are influenced by bourgeois ideology, that is not so serious, said Teng, in sharp contradistinction to the stand of Hua. "As long as they are not against the party and against socialism," he said, "we should educate and remold the intellectuals and give them a warm helping hand. In socialist society everyone has to remold himself." Those who study hard to improve their knowledge are not to be regarded as enemies of the regime. Scientists are to be excused from studying Marxism and Maoism. It is enough if they devote themselves to science. Hua said nothing of talent. Teng said, "Discovery and training of talented people by our scientists is in itself a great achievement and contribution. The history of science shows what great results can be produced in the field of science from the discovery of a genuinely talented person."
Teng's most famous remark is that he didn't care whether a cat was black or white so long as it caught mice. This is the ultimate realism, the final pragmatism. It is not in keeping with Marxism or Maoism. The Chinese Communists cannot embrace materialism and at the same time discard ideology.
The Teng-Hua contest aside, how could the Chinese mainland with 900 million people become realistically revisionary while under Communism? Mao sometimes recognized the extreme poverty to which the Communists had doomed the mainland. Of the peasantry himself, he recognized the sheer impossibility of keeping the promises of the "great leap forward" period. Somewhere along the line, realism of a kind caught up with Mao and brought on the "cultural revolution." Sometimes advertised as an exercise to keep the "revolution" going, the cultural upheaval was really a measure to control the people and cut them down to economic size and especially to keep the peasant in his place.
The hope for modernizing China is that which resides in the free enterprise system and its incentives and rewards. This is the hope that started China moving forward in the years just after the National Revolution overthrew the Ch'ing dynasty of the Manchus and then started the country on the road to modernization in the spirit of Dr. Sun Yat-sen and the Three Principles of the People.
The economic growth - some have called it an "economic miracle" - of the province of Taiwan is a case in point. Taiwan remains free under the sovereignty of the Republic of China. The island is anti-Communist and pro-free enterprise. But its modernization and prosperity did not spring full blown from entrepreneurs who managed to escape the Communist takeover of the mainland and even bring some machinery with them.
In 1949, when the mainland was falling, Taiwan was poor, backward and far behind the more prosperous provinces of China. The Japanese had not established industries of any size. They were interested in having Taiwan as a market and as a rice, sugar and salad bowl for Japan. Only light industries were established and these principally to supply domestic demand. Even agriculture, the backbone of the economy, was primitive. Absentee ownership of farms virtually precluded any strong efforts by the tiller to increase production. The landlord would reap the lion's share of the proceeds.
Not much attention had been paid to Taiwan between 1945, when it reverted to China from Japan, and 1949 when it began to serve its purpose as the bastion of survival and mainland recovery. For one thing, Taiwan was "far out." It often had been neglected even before the Japanese period. Not so many mainland Chinese saw its value. China had plenty of land. Also, China was preoccupied with the Communist rebellion and the effort to recover from the ravages of eight years of war with Japan.
In 1949 and 1950, everything was changed - and yet it really wasn't. The bastion didn't amount to a whole lot then. It had several million people who spoke a provincial dialect and didn't know the "national language." Who would think of comparing its principal cities of Taipei and Kaohsiung with the great Chinese industrial cities? Its farmers were poor and had been browbeaten by the Japanese. In fact no one - not even the most optimistic and experienced administrator or industrialist - could then predict what Taiwan would be like three decades later.
The big difference was made by land reform. If Taiwan was to be industrialized and modernized, the movement had to begin with the farmer. It was more or less like an attack on poverty in which people are helped to help themselves. God must have loved the poor, it has been said, because he made so many of them. Not to help the poor farmer would be to doom Taiwan to perpetual poverty and prevent the rise of the middle class required for economic progress. Once the farmer was given the hope of a better future, all things began to change.
Today the farmers of Taiwan constitute only about 30 per cent of the population. They are still not as prosperous as their city cousins, but that is partly because the most enterprising have become city dwellers. Without modernization, the farmer could not have been spared to go to the city and participate in the creation of an industrial society. Taiwan's gains have been built on the people of the countryside.
This is the point at which the Communist attempt to modernize fails so completely. The Communists are starting with the cities, with the cadres, with the bureaucracy - and neglecting the peasant, who has always received the short end of their stick. Workers have received small pay increases in the last year; the peasant is lucky to eat. Agriculture is down again in 1978.
Writing in the Far Eastern Economic Review of Hongkong, David Bonavia, who formerly served as London Times correspondent in Peiping, presented this analysis: "There can be no doubt that elites in (Red) China - which never really disappeared in the Cultural Revolution anyway, but only concealed themselves to some extent - are forming again fast. On the broadest level, (the Chinese Communist) leadership's commitment is to rapid economic modernization, which means industrial investment. This does not mean that no more effort will be put into developing the rural areas.
"Some investment is going into chemical fertilizer plants and mechanization is the proclaimed goal, but evidently the Politburo's main thoughts are elsewhere. Symbolically, a movement has got under way to remove the Tachai model production brigade from its national pedestal: people are being told now that Tachai's road to success is not the only one, nor is it necessarily the best one for other rural communities.
"The cities are where the main investment is going to go, and since Mao's 1956 speech "On the 10 Major Relationships" is being taken as the basis for planning, it is the large cities and the coastal cities that will get the biggest slice of the cake. Thus the workers will be an elite by comparison with the peasants - as they have in fact always been under the Communists in terms of incomes and living standards. Mao's glorification of peasant life and culture did not stop the peasants running to take jobs in the cities whenever they had the chance.
"So the old problem of the gap between urban and rural living standards will increase, creating the feeling that the workers are better treated than the peasants. This is not in itself a disastrous problem - the Soviet Union has lived with it ever since the October Revolution. But it creates a sense of alienation and encourages the peasants to find ways of putting up the price of their products relative to the consumer goods and equipment they buy from the cities. Hoarding, underdeclaration of yields and potentials, black marketeering, free markets, overeating, inaccurate accounting, maltreatment of machinery and plain indolence are the normal peasant reactions to such a situation, and (Red) China cannot well afford them. If food supplies to the cities suffer, this may necessitate more grain imports and cause discontent among the workers, perhaps forcing the authorities to undertake unpopular measures to squeeze more supplies out of the peasants."
As for the need for intellectuals - now stressed by Teng - Bonavia notes that "intellectual work is often a high-risk affair. A worker often runs the risk of an accident or occupational disease, but an intellectual runs the risk of social disgrace and destruction of his or her self-esteem through competitive or contradictory work by other intellectuals. The life-work of an academic may be invalidated by new research or discoveries. A dramatist's plays may be badly received. And in (Red) China, above all, intellectuals are the first to be suspected of the all-embracing crime of political deviation."
Red China has no "intellectuals" under the age of about 60. Those who survived three decades of Communism were educated and supposedly learned to think for themselves when China was free under the Republic of Dr. Sun Yat-sen and the Three Principles of the People. Those who might have been "young intellectuals" joined the parade of refugees to the free world or are still in labor reform camps. The brainpower for modernization would have to include that of young men and women. The education that is supposedly beginning now would take years. if it could be cleansed of the Communist taint - which it cannot.
Modernization on the Chinese mainland today is as impossible as it was 20 years ago when the "great leap forward" failed so totally. Not until the lessons learned in Taiwan are applied on the mainland through restoration of the sovereignty, the government and the freedom of the Republic of China can the people of the Chinese subcontinent move toward the 21st century.
Following is a summarization of events in Red China and related developments in the period from August 16 through September 15:
AUGUST 16 - The Chinese mainland's crop output in 1977 was described as "disappointing" due to drought or flooding in virtually all regions. An American agricultural expert, Dr. Alva Lewis Erisman, agricultural officer of the American consulate general in Hongkong, estimated that the 1977 output of grain dropped 7,000,000 metric tons compared with 1976.
AUGUST 17 - Mayor Gordon Wiser of St. Joseph, Mo., announced there would be no red carpet for an agriculture delegation from Red China. "I wouldn't have a Communist in my home," he said. "If they are from Nationalist China, I will welcome them."
A former "vice mayor" of Shanghai and prominent journalist, Chin Chung-hua, has been rehabilitated 10 years after his death. The "New China News Agency" said Chin was "persecuted to death" in 1968 "by the counterrevolutionary revisionist line of the gang of four."
AUGUST 18 - Chinese Communists are expected to put the "gang of four" on trial, Asahi Shimbun reported from Peiping. The dispatch said several senior officials are already being tried for collaborating with the "gang of four."
The Japan-Red China "peace and amity treaty" will not change Japan's interpretation of the Japan-United States security pact involving Taiwan, Seichi Omori, director general of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's Treaties Bureau, told the Diet. The Japanese government has included Taiwan in its 1960 interpretation of the Far East area where peace and security are to be maintained under Article 6 of the Japan-U.S. pact.
The "mayor" of Canton, Chiao Lin-yi, one of the most active officers in municipal and provincial affairs in Kwangtung in the past decade, is being questioned for alleged association with the "gang of four," the Hongkong newspaper Ming Pao reported.
Red China's "minister of commerce," Wang Lei, has been sacked after only a few months on the job. Yao Yi-lin was appointed in his place. Chien Min was made "minister of the fourth ministry of machine building" which handles electronics, replacing Wang Cheng, who died in March.
Hua Kuo-feng infuriated Moscow with a trip to the strategically sensitive Black Sea, domain of the Soviet fleet. Hua visited Romania's largest shipyard at Constanza.
AUGUST 20 - The Peiping regime under Hua Kuo-feng and Teng Hsiao-ping is embarking on a de-Maofication campaign, according to Stewart Dill McBride of the Christian Science Monitor.
The Peiping regime is using every opportunity to insult the Soviet Union, said Richard Bernstein of the Time-Life news service in an article med from Hongkong.
Red China and the Soviet Union traded bitter insults over each other's African policies at the World Anti-Racism Conference in Geneva. The Chinese Communists called Moscow "the most vicious enemy of the African people" and the Soviet Union replied by accusing Peiping of treachery in dealings with guerrilla movements on the continent.
AUGUST 21 - A tough and violent power struggle is still going on in hundreds of localities on the Chinese mainland nearly two years after the fall of the "gang of four," Time reported. The Communist press and radio, which normally tell only good news, are carrying daily reports from the provinces that efforts to wipe out the influence of the "gang of four" are encountering stiff resistance, Time said.
Hua Kuo-feng opened his nine-day visit to Yugoslavia with a slashing attack against the Soviet Union on the 10th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The Chinese Communists admitted that the quality of farm machines produced on the main land is poor.
A Chinese Communist Army cadre has publicly denounced the Peiping police for their working methods, claiming he was an innocent victim on two occasions in six months. Liu Kuo-chen, a military cadre based at Tsinan in Shantung province, said he had been "horribly beaten" by militiamen and locked in a cell after he had reported the theft of his traveling bag. He was himself accused of theft and sentenced to a short term of "reform through labor." After being released, he returned to Peiping to seek justice. When a search showed he was carrying a sculptor's knife and ration coupons for six kilograms of cereals, he was locked up again for carrying an illegal weapon, trafficking in ration coupons, refusing to admit his errors and being in Peiping illegally. He was sent off for more "reform through labor." Liu demanded he be rehabilitated and given back his titles, that the police and militiamen who had beaten him should be punished, and that an inquiry be started into public security bodies.
AUGUST 22 - Three Kalmuk-Mongol leaders in the United States have written a letter to President Carter expressing their concern over U.S. efforts to "normalize relations" with Peiping. They said the Chinese people under the Communist regime are suffering terror, hunger and enslavement which have forced thousands of them to flee to Hongkong.
Red Chinese military leaders have assured North Korea of Peiping's support in case of war, a North Korean broadcast said.
Red Chinese troops and heavy artillery are fighting in support of Cambodian forces in the border war against Vietnam, Hanoi officials said.
AUGUST 23 - The Financial Times of London reported the situation of a factory in Canton to explain why it is difficult for Peiping to raise the rate of economic growth on the Chinese mainland. An article by David Housego said output from the farm machine repairing and manufacturing factory is about 35 per cent below capacity.
The Soviet Union lodged a verbal protest against the Japan-Red China "peace and friendship treaty" signed August 12. This was the first official Soviet reaction to the pact. Soviet Ambassador to Japan Boris M. Zinovjev met Administrative Vice Foreign Minister Keisuke Arita at the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo and warned that the Soviet Union would take necessary steps if Moscow thought the treaty conflicted with Soviet interests.
AUGUST 24 - Communist cadres on the Chinese mainland are openly showing apathy toward political campaigns launched by the Peiping regime, an intelligence report from the mainland said. Cadres respond to instructions or orders from Peiping "in a perfunctory manner," the report said.
The Soviet Union blasted Red China's military expansion policy and warned that if war came the mainland would suffer vast destruction and mass annihilation.
Posters implicitly attacking Teng Hsiao-ping have appeared in Peiping, according to the Hongkong Daily News.
AUGUST 25 - Red China has purchased another half million metric tons of U.S. wheat, bringing to 2.5 million metric tons the total purchased since April, the U.S. Agriculture Department said.
Vietnam claimed that a large number of Chinese Communist "hooligans" and border police crossed into Vietnam, killed two Vietnamese border guards and wounded 25 Vietnamese.
An increase in public security activity has been noted in Peiping on several occasions this month. Reliable observers saw lorries transporting convicted criminals. Foreign residents reported seeing the lorries early this week in a northwestern neighborhood. Two open lorries each carried three youthful convicts.
AUGUST 26 - Relations between Red China and Vietnam took a turn for the worse as Peiping accused Vietnamese troops of occupying mainland territory after killing seven Chinese and injuring many others in a border incident.
The Soviet Union, beset by bad publicity about its own dissidents and fuming over Red Chinese leader Hua Kuo-feng's Balkan tour, accused Red China of "massive violations of human rights and freedoms." The official Tass news agency said, "Masses of common citizens ... are brutally victimized and humiliated" and "persons suspected of dissent or discontent" are quickly put on trial.
The Soviet Union said Japan's "friendship treaty" with Red China is encouraging Peiping warmongering.
AUGUST 27 - Vietnam reported a series of anti-Red Chinese official meetings among representatives of Hanoi workers, youths and residents of the province where a bloodly clash took place.
AUGUST 28 - There will always be power struggles on the Communist-held Chinese mainland, according to Ross Terrill, research fellow at Harvard University. As the Chinese Communists try to modernize, Terrill said, they will tighten social controls.
Vietnam has seized six Chinese Communist ships because they violated the territorial waters of Quang Ninh province, Hanoi Radio said.
Ma Ssu-tsung, a Chinese musician who escaped to the United States from the mainland several years ago, has refused an invitation to return to the mainland.
AUGUST 29 - Red China accused Vietnam of an armed buildup along the border. "Settlement by violence is the core and negotiation is for covering up the violent settlement," NCNA said of what it called "Vietnam's dual tactics."
AUGUST 30 - Peiping is supplying the Communist guerrillas in Rhodesia with arms and equipment, according to Battleline, a publication of the American Conservative Union. The monthly published a bill of lading issued by the "(Red) China ocean shipping company" for shipping guns, ammunition and equipment to the "Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) African National Union."
The newly concluded "peace and friendship treaty" between Japan and Red China will not affect trade and cultural ties between the Republic of China and Japan, T. Horikoshi, president of the Interchange Association of Japan, said in Taipei.
Reports of contacts between Saudi Arabia and Red China to set up diplomatic relations are "absolutely baseless," according to Saudi diplomatic sources in Jeddah.
Literaturnaya Gazeta, a leading Soviet weekly, accused Red China of trying to fan the flames of World War III in Europe and said Peiping is "playing the European card" in pursuit of its hegemonistic goals.
AUGUST 31 - Remnants of the gang of four have described Hua Kuo-feng and Yeh Chien-ying "as dictators of fascism" in a wall poster appearing in Shanghai, an intelligence report from the Chinese mainland said.
Red China is facing the prospect of another poor harvest, the third in a row, and very probably will be importing more wheat this autumn, Business Week said.
Vietnam gave Red China a formal warning against further border violence by stranded Chinese Communist refugees in a statement that brought deteriorating relations between the two former allies to a new low.
SEPTEMBER 1 - Peiping will not take Macao back from Lisbon in the foreseeable future, according to the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hongkong. The magazine said Peiping is worried that a change in Macao's status would send inter national capital fleeing from Hongkong.
Hua Kuo-feng returned from visits to Romania, Yugoslavia and Iran.
SEPTEMBER 2 - Canton and the border town of Shumchun have become abortion havens for Hongkong teenaged girls. Reliable sources said a daily average of six to ten pregnant women cross the border to seek abortions on the Chinese mainland.
SEPTEMBER 3 - Stalinist Albania called Hua Kuo-feng a warmonger and said Peiping is seeking world domination.
Red China has inserted commando volunteers deep inside Vietnam in spy operations, Hanoi Radio said.
SEPTEMBER 4 - Red China's chief delegate to Vietnam talks returned to Hanoi to continue negotiations.
Hua Kuo-feng made a local inspection visit to Sinkiang province, the "New China News Agency" reported. Hua told people the radical "gang of four" had done "serious damage" to the region.
SEPTEMBER 5 - Moscow is dead set against America's transfer of arms and technology to Peiping, the Washington Post reported. D. Doder wrote from Moscow that Soviet leaders consider such a transfer would be "a grave threat to their long-term interests."
Red China charged Vietnam has blocked a border bridge and suspended traffic on the Sino-Vietnamese railway in a deliberate move to worsen relations.
Red China's official press has joined in a campaign to topple Peiping "mayor" Wu Teh, a supporter of the "gang of four," who is the last person on record to criticize Teng Hsiao-ping. The campaign against Wu and several provincial chiefs who supported the radicals suggests their days in office may be numbered.
Two were wounded by machine gun fire from a Chinese Communist gunboat when six refugees aged' from 18 to 21 were approaching Macao in a fishing vessel from the Chinese mainland.
SEPTEMBER 6 - The Chinese Communists are resorting to strongarm tactics to promote sales of cigarettes on the mainland of China, the Washington Post reported. Jay Mathews wrote from Hongkong that the press is beginning to hint at strongarm tactics to keep the demand for cigarettes at a high level. The reason is that cigarette-making is a lucrative party business. A 60 per cent tax is collected on each pack.
Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin told Japanese parliamentarians in Moscow that Japan made a "historic error" in signing a "peace and friendship treaty" with Red China, Japan's Kyodo news service said.
Teng Hsiao-ping said Red China will announce termination of the Red Chinese-Soviet military treaty by next April, Kyodo reported.
A guerrilla band in South China killed and wounded more than 200 Communist cadres and militia members during a raid on July 9, according to an intelligence report.
The publications of the recently reconstituted Chinese Communist Youth League will reappear between now and the end of the year after being suspended for 12 years, People's Daily reported.
SEPTEMBER 7 - John Cannon, public affairs adviser at the State Department's Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said he saw no change in Peiping's position on "normalization of relations" with Washington.
A split within the ranks of American supporters of Red China occurred when an American Maoist group denounced the "revisionist" Hua-Teng leadership and criticized another pro-Peiping U.S. organization for unconditional support for the Chinese Communist "rightists."
SEPTEMBER 8 - Chang Tsai-chien, deputy chief of general staff of the Chinese Communist army, and his party arrived in Tokyo for a six-day visit to Japan.
SEPTEMBER 10 - About 4,000 Japanese, most of them young, attended a "national congress for victory over Communism" in Tokyo to call for restoration of diplomatic relations between Japan and the Republic of China and to voice opposition to the Japan-Red China "peace and amity treaty."
"Mayor" of Peiping Wu Teh was attacked in very strong terms by name in a big character poster put up in Peiping after several weeks of veiled criticism.
The Chinese Communist Party has sacked six party officials in the central mainland China province of Honan for squandering public money, NCNA reported.
SEPTEMBER 11 -Citing diplomatic sources, Newsweek reported that Russia offered Vietnam $2.6 billion for defenses against its neighbors, including Red China.
Minister of International Trade and Industry Toshio Komot, Japan's top economic official, left for Peiping, reportedly carrying an offer of a US$2 billion Japanese credit to help modernize crude oil and coal mining operations.
SEPTEMBER 12 - American columnist Stanley Karnow said it may be a "dangerous illusion" to assert that Red China could become a major power. The article said Red China "will lack real muscle until it can resolve its mammoth domestic economic problems."
While Hua Kuo-feng and Teng Hsiao-ping are quietly demaoizing Mao Tse-tung, his admirers are waiting for a chance to strike back, the Washington Post reported. Jay Mathews wrote from Hongkong that Peiping's current effort to quote Mao Tse-tung against himself "may create future trouble for intensely competitive post-Mao society that has gone against the grain of some of Mao's strong egalitarian notions."
SEPTEMBER 13 - A Chinese language news paper quoting a traveler from Canton said Chiang Ching, widow of Mao Tse-tung and leader of the "gang of four," had died.
Japan and Red China have reached basic accord on ways to finance joint offshore oil exploration in Pohai Bay, Kyodo reported. The projects initially will be financed by Japanese investment alone, with Red China paying its share with oil in the future.
Vietnam has come under fresh armed attacks from Red China in the north and Cambodia on its western flank, Hanoi reported.
SEPTEMBER 14 - The death of Lin Piao is causing new speculation in the Japanese press. The official account is that Lin Piao, his wife and son were killed in a plane crash in Mongolia while attempting to flee the mainland in September, 1971. The Japanese magazine Bungei Shunju claims that in fact Lin Piao and his wife were murdered in Peiping by forces of the "secret police chief," Kang Sheng, on orders of Mao's wife, Chiang Ching.
SEPTEMBER 15 - Red Chinese Armed boats attacked Vietnamese fishing boats in Vietnam territorial waters, Radio Hanoi said.