An article in the July issue of Red Flag, the monthly theoretical journal of the Chinese Communist party, attacked "idealism" and called for investigation and study at basic levels so that the "real situation" may be understood before administrative measures are undertaken. This article and several which preceded it support local authorities in their efforts to maintain the status quo in the distribution of work and rewards. Provincial radio reports indicate that cadres and people at the grass roots level oppose any drastic change to eliminate incentives.
Chi Heng (a pseudonym) maintained that the struggle between socialism and capitalism will be long and complicated. Differences in income resulting from varying labor capabilities are inevitable during the historical stage of socialism. However, Chi added, these "bourgeois rights" must be limited by the "dictatorship of the proletariat." This may lead to contradictions and confusion.
Some cadres acted rashly or not at all when faced with a practical problem. They had not studied the theory sufficiently and had not carried out a thorough investigation and study of the problem, the article said.
Chi Heng's article drew an answer in People's Daily just two days after its publication. Tung Sung said that the laws of Marxism require the transformation of a socialist into a communist society. This means a continuous revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, which equates to a continuous attack on the bourgeoisie and capitalism. Classes (and unequal pay) must be abolished.
Another People's Daily article by a military writer, Chao Pei-chen, warned that some people will try to prevent even the smallest reform by insisting that the old laws and rules cannot be changed. He said the people would listen to the voice of change, provided reformers went among the people, studied their customs and habits and indoctrinated them with communist ideology.
A report by Radio Canton gave some indication of the magnitude of the Communists' problem. The party committee of a commune in Kaoho county was said to be combining the study of theory with practice so as to "draw a clear line of demarcation between restricting bourgeois rights and implementing the basic rural policies for the current stage." Most of those attending were said to have upheld the party's line of criticizing revisionism and restricting bourgeois rights. However, some maintained that economic policies being implemented in the rural areas amount to retrogression. They urged revision of the policies. The majority of the people, the broadcast said, do not have a high communist awareness.
Reports from other provinces echoed the Canton uncertainty and confusion. In Hai-Iun county of Heilungkiang, a new party committee came to power. At a rectification meeting, the old committee was denounced for wavering between right and left, for failing to distinguish between right and wrong and for following the Confucian "compromise of the Golden Mean." Committee members were described as weak and seeking peace instead of struggle. Socialism means fighting against capitalism, which must perish, the new committee said, and the imposition of dictatorship upon landlords, kulaks, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, rightists and the "newly emerging bourgeois class elements." It seems the old committee had not restricted bourgeois rights.
At Chi-hsi, a city in Heilungkiang's coal belt, a party work team was sent to restore order among restive workers. The report said the team was "treated both softly and roughly; it was enticed and corrupted, and chased away. The workers used factionalism, gathered people from all sides and attacked the work team. The struggle between the proletarian class and the bourgeois class (of workers) was fierce. The small clique of evil men gathered more people to protect themselves. When dealing with the masses, they pretended to be positive" (to follow the party line).
People's Daily said relations between cadres and masses should be as those of fish to water and not cat to mouse. Masses should not fear the cadres, because fear can easily turn into anger. The paper maintained that in the early days of Communism the people and the army fought side by side. Cadres were counseled not to seek special privilege and eat better than others. They should hold discussions with the people and heed public opinion.
Also connected with the movement against bourgeois tendencies and the campaign against Confucius and Lin Piao was industrial unrest that led to curtailed transport and declines in output of steel and coal. Workers are not only reluctant to work harder for less pay, but are posing social and disciplinary problems which went out of control at Hangchow and other places. Provincial press and radio have demanded unity and the stamping out of capitalist tendencies. Teng Hsiao ping visited Yunnan last February in an attempt to curb unrest, then went to Chekiang in the following month for the same purpose. More than 10,000 troops were sent into Hangchow factories. Steel production was affected by the failure to mine and move coal.
Railroad efficiency declined because of the abolition of bonuses for extra work. Only 10 of the 20 regional railway bureaus were reported to have fulfilled their work targets for the first half of 1975.
The army had to be relied upon once again just as it had during the "cultural revolution" and in the period just afterward. Troops were sent into the fields of at least three provinces in addi tion to the factories of Chekiang. Apparently the PLA forces were present as much to see to ideological loyalty as to work.
One of the army's old leaders, Lo Jui-ching, made his first appearance since November of 1965. He was another surprise candidate for rehabilitation. At the time of his downfall, his military power was second only to that of Lin Piao. He was the chief architect of the Chinese Communist public security system and headed it from 1949 to 1959. Lo was purged in Shanghai. This enabled Lin Piao to mobilize troops loyal to him and take over the Peiping area.
Although the public security system was brought under military control at the start of the "cultural revolution," Lo's followers remained active and powerful. One of his public security units at Wuhan combined with local military and political leaders and industrial workers to rise in revolt. These forces arrested and beat up a close associate of Chiang Ching, Wang Li, and Hsieh Fu-chih, who was then "minister of public security." This incident was a turning point in the "cultural revolution." The influence of the Chiang Ching leftists began to decline afterward.
Lo has long experience in exercising proletarian dictatorship against "class enemies." He must have been called back by Teng Hsiao-ping, who is now the chief of the general staff as well as the "vice premier" who was called on to pinch hit for the ailing Chou En-lai.
No one is quite sure where the army stands today. It held the power when the "cultural revolution" ran into trouble. Without the PLA, the Red Guards would have run rampant and Chinese Communism would have descended into anarchy. But for reasons which are not entirely clear but probably were concerned with lack of political know-how and sophistication, the army turned power back to the party. Now the party rules again but not strongly. It is divided and faltering. The same is apparently true of the army. Teng and La together may not be able to put the pieces together as they wish. Whatever its failings of leadership, the army still has Mao's gun barrel.
The following is an account of Chinese main land and peripheral events in the period from June 16 to July 15:
JUNE 16 - A French expert on the Far East predicted that the death of Mao Tse-tung may be followed by civil war with the army trying to seize power from the Chinese Communist party.
Jean-Pierre Brule, author of The Chinese Red Army, said hundreds of Red Chinese "generals" want to snatch the gun back from the party.
JUNE 17 - Flood and drought are causing problems with wheat and rice crops in some parts of the Chinese mainland. Radio broadcasts, weather data made available in Hongkong and reports from travelers to the mainland indicated serious flooding had occurred in some areas of Central and South China. The provincial radio reports told of drought problems in scattered areas of the northeast and northwest.
Red China may be about to conduct its first census in 20 years. The last census in 1953 produced a figure of 583 million. In 1957 a "sampling census" reported 646 million. Demographers have published estimates ranging from 700 million to nearly 1,000 million.
Latin American and Caribbean Communists have called for unity in the fight for "the second independence" of Latin American and lashed out against the United States and Chinese Communists. Peiping was accused of "flirting with Yankee imperialism. "
JUNE 18 - The Soviet Union warned Japan not to include anti-Soviet provisions in its proposed "friendship treaty" with Peiping. The warning came in a "statement to the government of Japan" carried by the official Tass news agency. Japanese sources said Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko summoned Ambassador Akira Shigemitsu to the Soviet Foreign Ministry to receive the statement.
JUNE 19 - Tass said Chou En-lai has been hospitalized for more than a year and suggested that he is being kept prisoner. A Tass dispatch from Singapore quoted "eyewitnesses" from the Chinese mainland as saying factional struggle in the Peiping regime has become more acute. Tass said a "left-wing" faction headed by Chiang Ching, wife of Mao Tse-tung, had made inroads against a "moderate" wing headed by Chou.
Peiping is the only regime that still jams Voice of America broadcasts, James Keogh, director of the U.S. Information Agency, said.
Old age is taking its toll of Mao Tse-tung, who was 81 December 26. His physical condition has deteriorated considerably during the last several months, according to reports from diplomats based in Peiping and from visitors who saw Mao.
The semi-official South Korean Nae-De News Service reported that Peiping planned to provide North Korea with various new weapons to strength en its combat capability.
JUNE 20 - Railway communications in Southeast China have been disrupted for varying periods over the last two months because of floods. Most seriously affected were the Chekiang-Kiangsi, Nanchang-Kiukiang and Fukien-Kiangsi services.
JUNE 21 - Dr. Liu Chieh, former Chinese ambassador to the Philippines, warned that the Indochina debacle and the Philippines recognition of Red China would intensify the struggle between Russia and the Peiping regime in Asia.
Czechoslovakia said Peiping was interfering in Japan's internal affairs and trying to turn Japan into "a cornerstone of its anti-Soviet policy."
For the first time since they usurped the Chinese mainland in 1949, the Communists pointed with alarm to widespread crime. The Communist party's theoretical organ Red Flag said there is urgent need to protect civil order and "the broad interest of the masses" from criminals.
JUNE 22 - Malaysia told Peiping that it must not support the Malaysian Communist party if it wants friendly relations with Kuala Lumpur, Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak said.
The anti-Peiping campaign in the Soviet press took a new turn with accusations that Peiping's ideological attacks on the Soviet Union were a kind of advance payment to capitalism in the hope of receiving future services. According to M. Skladovsky, the head of the Soviet Institute for Study of the Far East, "It is first of all in Maoism that the imperialist countries find an ally in their struggle against the Soviet Union. The anti Sovietism of Mao Tse-tung's leadership is a kind of payment the Maoists offer for the services they want to receive from the capitalist world."
JUNE 23 - The Chinese mainland population topped the 900 million mark last year, according to estimates of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Steel production fell back almost to the 1972 level in 1974 and grain output rose by only 2 per cent compared with 4 per cent the previous year, the estimates said.
U.S. News and World Report said: "Reports of a deal for (Red) China to purchase the American 'superplane' - the F-16 fighter - are being knocked down by the Pentagon. Military leaders, who were reluctant to see even the commercial Boeing 707 sold to the (Red) Chinese, are adamantly against acquisition by Peking of any of the United States' military know-how."
JUNE 24 - Chiang Ching, Mao Tse-tung's wife, has been the second most powerful person on the Chinese mainland since the "cultural revolution" of the late 1960s, according to Mao's former comrade and co-founder of the Chinese Communist party. The view was given by Chen Shao-yu, alias Wang Ming, who died in Moscow March 27, 1974, in his last book, The Fate of a Lonely Monk.
Establishment of diplomatic relations between Thailand and Peiping will be "a means for Peiping to meddle in Thailand's domestic affairs," the Soviet Communist party newspaper Pravda said.
An Austrian journalist has written a book charging that Peiping has conducted "drug war" against the free world since 1950. Gerd Hamburger, a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines, said Peiping's "drug war represents only one aspect of Communist inhumanity."
A sumptuous banquet for 10 people or so in Peiping costs as much as 400 U.S. dollars, the Baltimore Sun reported. Tilis is what a group of American journalists paid when they gave a dinner at a restaurant in Peiping for their Chinese Com munist interpreters.
Radio Moscow accused Peiping of proposing that Asian nations establish an anti-Soviet alliance under "a faked pretext" of struggling against the hegemony of anyone nation. A Tass news agency commentary said Peiping has had a hard time getting Japan to go along with its anti-Soviet tactics and is now turning to the five non-Communist nations of Southeast Asia to continue lobbying against Moscow.
JUNE 25 - Tea houses, even in out-of-the way places, can't be neglected - they are ideological battlegrounds, said People's Daily. The paper said a county in southern China's Kiangsi province is running propaganda classes for tea house proprietors so they will "recognize more deeply the important significance of running tea houses well to consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat."
JUNE 26 - The Soviet Union called for talks on its proposed Asian collective security system and rejected suggestions it was aimed at Peiping.
JUNE 27 - Peiping said Mrs. Indira Gandhi had shed India's "mask of democracy" by declaring a state of emergency and arresting her political opponents. The "New China News Agency," referring to Mrs. Gandhi as "the defendant found guilty by the High Court," said she "has gone so far as to have the plaintiff arrested." The agency said the political situation in India would become more turbulent as a result of what it called the suppressive measures taken by Mrs. Gandhi's government.
The Soviet weekly ZA Rubezhom urged the Japanese government to resist "attempts by Peiping's leaders to drag Japan into the orbit of their anti-Soviet policy." It is inadmissible that the improvement of relations between the U.S.S.R. and Japan should be hindered by Peiping's Maoist leaders. The Soviet Union holds that it is absolutely necessary to brush aside Peiping's intrigues, and counts on Japan to share this attitude."
JUNE 28 - Chou En-lai apparently was still in a hospital when he met with President El Hadj Omar Bongo of Gabon, the president's wife and their children and members of Bongo's entourage visiting the Chinese mainland.
"Human dignity has been totally destroyed on the Chinese mainland and people there are treated only as tools," anti-Communist fighter Chiu Ming said in a speech at Yokohama. Chiu, who returned to the free world from the Communist-controlled Chinese mainland in February, 1974, told of his mainland experiences.
JUNE 29 - Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. James Shen warned government leaders of some Asian countries that they "are bound to suffer a great disappointment" if they expect the Chinese Communists to refrain from backing the insurgents and dissidents in their countries.
Working women on the Chinese mainland voluntarily carry out family planning because they consider it a revolution in the sphere of ideology, the "New China News Agency" said. NCNA, in a dispatch from Peiping monitored in Tokyo, said "they (the women) consider family planning a repudiation of Confucius and Mencius."
JUNE 30 - The political crisis in India has precipitated a clear-cut rift between Peiping and North Vietnam over foreign policy. While the Chinese Communists have heaped abuse on Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the North Vietnamese have expressed support for her. Hanoi has taken the same stand as Moscow.
JULY 1- Regarding the establishment of diplomatic relations between Thailand and the Chinese Communist regime, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Taipei said: "The Republic of China has instructed its embassy in Bangkok to lodge a strong protest with the Thai government and to inform the latter that the government of the Republic of China considers the diplomatic relations between the two countries to have terminated as of July 1, 1975."
Prime Minister Kim Jong Pil of South Korea said there was reason to believe the Peiping had supported a North Korean plan to invade the South.
Russia charged Peiping had refused to establish diplomatic relations with Portugal because it did not want Lisbon to hand back Macao.
JULY 2 - Violent clashes between rival factory workers have once again surfaced in several big cities on the mainland as a result of the stepped ideological purification campaign launched by the radical faction of the Peiping regime, according to intelligence sources in Taiwan. Violence oc curred in Shanghai, Nanking, Hangchow, Hopei in the lower Yangtze valley and the central China city of Wuhan between late April and mid-May.
"Alarming intensification of Malaysian jungle guerrilla warfare by Communist insurgents, particularly since the Indochina collapse, points to the futility of seeking internal security through friend ship with Peiping." This was the observation by columnists Roland Evans and Robert Novak, traveling in Southeast Asia, in their syndicated column.
The mass circulation Jakarta daily Kompas warned Thailand against possible abuse of diploma cy by the Chinese Communists following establishment of diplomatic relations with Peiping.
The Peiping regime will aid Communist insurgents with weapons and money if the causes are considered worth it, Chu Mu-chih, director of NCNA, said in Peiping. He cited the "struggle against American imperialism" as a possible motivation for lending support to Communist insurgents in other countries.
Peiping claimed the Soviet Union was more likely to start a world war than the United States and compared party leader Leonid Brezhnev to Hitler.
JULY 3 - Rivalry between Russia and Red China in Asia will intensify in the wake of the Communist victory in Indochina, a political commentator said in Taipei. Chen Yu-ching, director of the Department of Overseas Affairs, Kuomintang Central Committee, said the Russians are trying to capitalize on the fall of South Vietnam to expand their sphere of influence in the region, thereby checking Peiping's expansionist policy.
Gen. Praphan Kulapinit, leader of the Thai Free People Party, warned that a friend like Peiping could be very dangerous. Gen. Praphan, who is also president of the Free People's League of Thailand, was commenting on the establishment of diplomatic relations between Thailand and Peiping.
JULY 4 - Members of the Thai Parliament warned that diplomatic relations with Peiping wouldn't halt insurgency in Thailand and might even open channels for the insurgents to increase their operations.
People's Daily said Soviet aid to Egypt "is just like honey on lips and murder in heart." NCNA said "one of the Soviet revisionists' practices is to cut back arms supply at crucial times. Another practice is to control the right to the use of weapons. The third practice is to demand high prices to make fabulous profits."
JULY 5 - Violent clashes between rival factions of workers broke out in Shanghai, Nanking and other big cities on the Chinese mainland between late April and mid-May and paralyzed industries, Taipei reports said. The clashes were evidently stirred up by Mao Tse-tung's wife. Chiang Ching, while visiting Shanghai in February, Chiang Ching called on workers to "rise again."
Peiping accused the Soviet Union of trying to fill the "vacuum" created in Southeast Asia after the United States withdrawal from Indochina. People's Daily said: "What is more ludicrous is the fact that they shamelessly style themselves 'protector' of Southeast Asia, saying that no one is allowed to lure the 'developing countries in Southeast Asia away' from this 'natural ally.' "
Peiping said that the security and independence of the Baltic countries is threatened by a Soviet military build-up in the area. In a dispatch from Copenhagen, NCNA said the Russians were trying to turn the Baltic into their exclusive inland sea and had constantly intruded into Danish waters and air space.
JULY 6 - The New York Daily News published the first part of a series of articles on the Chinese mainland by Michael J. O'Neill, the newspaper's executive editor, who returned from a 25 day tour of the Chinese mainland with a 16 member delegation representing the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He pointed out that Western freedom and democracy were non existent on the mainland. "I never saw a privately owned car, refrigerator, air-conditioner or washing machine," he said.
JULY 7 - The Russians have strengthened their forces facing the Chinese mainland by sending thousands of soldiers, tanks and fighter planes into Outer Mongolia, a British reporter in Peiping said. Clare Hollingworth, Daily Telegraph correspondent, reported travelers on the railway from Ulan Bator to Peiping saw fuel dumps, roads leading to Soviet military camps, hilltop radar stations and several squadrons of MIG-23 fighter planes.
President Suharto of Indonesia expressed a cautious attitude towards establishing relations with the Chinese Communists and Indochina countries when he met Japanese Prime Minister Takeo Miki in Tokyo.
The Soviet news agency Tass quoted Mao Tse-tung as declaring that Red China must gain control of Southeast Asia. Mao said, "We absolutely must get Southeast Asia, including South Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia and Singapore. (Red) China must become the first country of the world."
Despite establishment of diplomatic ties with Peiping, Thailand will enforce its existing anti Communist law, the National Police Headquarters announced in Bangkok.
"Despite the rash of Asian leaders forming links with Peiping, a strong case can be made that the biggest loser of the Vietnam War was Peiping and not, as it may have first appeared, the United States," Time magazine said. "The removal of the relatively benign American presence from the southern flank of (Red) China has caused Peiping a lot of worry," Time quoted a China observer in Washington: "Hanoi's relations with (Red) China are uneasy. Soviet presence in Southeast Asia possibly a naval base at Carn Ranh Bay - would change the whole strategic balance."
JULY 8 - Certain organs of the Chinese Communist party are committing the sin of "pusilanimity" and are failing to follow a "correct political line," Red Flag said. The periodical warned against "factional" tendencies and against "independence from the party."
A large number of workers' colleges have sprung up in the Chinese mainland industrial hub of Shanghai, the "New China News Agency" reported. It said there were only 48 of these colleges there last year but now there are 360 with a total enrollment of close to 30,000.
Dorothy Jurney, assistant managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who traveled to the Chinese mainland, wrote, "Citizens (on the Chinese mainland) are seldom alone and everyone is watched closely by neighbors and fellow workers. Deviate in the slightest from the proper behavior, and peers will seek you out for discussion and pressure. "
Wall posters attacking an army commissar - the first to be seen in the city for nearly a year were ripped down by police in Peiping. The writers accused their deputy political commissar, Tai Geng-yin, of hating and fearing Peiping's anti bourgeois movement, refusing to organize study groups and using the "tools of dictatorship."
Rape and prostitution have become rampant on the Chinese mainland as a result of Peiping's "send-down" campaign, according to an intelligence source in Taipei. Raping of city girls undergoing rustication in the countryside is so common that the Communist authorities have to resort to harsh penalties. Most of the rapists are Communist cadres responsible for supervising the city youths sent down to the countryside for farm work.
JULY 9 - Creed C. Black, editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who toured the Chinese mainland recently, described the regime as "a nation of wind-up dolls. They (the people on the Chinese mainland) get a steady mental diet of Mao thought from the cradle to the grave. They live in a closed society which shuts off outside in formation and ideas."
New posters which went up in several locations in Peiping said Chiang Ching, wife of Mao Tse-tung, was recently under "poisonous attacks."
The Peiping regime controls the number of births through a quota system. Edward Wu of the Baltimore Sun said in his article on Chinese Communist birth control: "Every community section has its own birth plan for the year. Members in each community section decide through discussion and consensus who should have children within the allocated quota."
JULY 10 - Dorothy Jurney of the Philadelphia Inquirer said it is in the schools where the Chinese mainland "appears to an American to be the most depressing, the most deadening. Very little of anything in (Red) China is spontaneous, but the life of the Chinese students (on the main land) is even more regimented than most."
Children enrolled in Peiping's kindergartens and nurseries are taught everything from raising tomatoes to criticizing the late "defense minister" Lin Piao and the ancient philosopher Confucius, a Peiping broadcast said.
Reporting on Chinese mainland industry, Miss Charlotte Saikowski, chief editorial writer of the Christian Science Monitor, said: "Although the (Red) Chinese boast they have no unemployment, there obviously is a great amount of underemployment. One sees workers just standing around in the factories, and many machines seem manned by more hands than necessary. One surprising impression is the rather easygoing pace of work. In plants and elsewhere there is not the air of hard-driving energy one finds in, say, Japan."
The average worker at the Chinese mainland's industrial center of Shanghai makes the equivalent of just under US$40. Salaries for the eight-hour, six-day week of workers at the Shanghai steam turbine plant and the city's diesel engine plant range from US$22 to US$73 per month, the editor of the Milwaukee Journal, Richard Leonard, said in a story based on his trip to the Chinese main land.
JULY 11- Mao Tse-tung is trying to communize the world, an American scholar said in Taipei. Prof. Anthony Kubek of Plano University at Plano, Tex., said Mao is just like Hitler, trying to bring the whole world under his control.
The Maoists are making overtures to the mass media in Japan with the aim of influencing public opinion to force the Japanese government to yield to the Peiping regime's demand for inclusion of a clause that calls for "opposition to any hegemony in Asia" in the treaty of friendship, Tokyo reports said.
Brig. Gen. Seno Hartoni, military commander for West Kalimantan, labeled the Natuna Islands in the South China Sea as the most vulnerable spot in Indonesia for infiltration of Communist cadres and smuggling of arms.
JULY 12 - Peiping accused Soviet leaders of being "loan sharks" in extending credits to developing countries. NCNA said: "The Soviet revisionists who claim to be the natural ally of the developing countries are actually their most merci less natural exploiter in the form of loan sharks."
JULY 13 - Peiping accused the exiled Dalai Lama of responsibility for the events in Tibet in 1959 and 1960 following his flight to India. Peiping said the uprising that followed the Dalai Lama's flight to India, which foreign reports say cost 17,000 Tibetan lives between March, 1959, and September, 1960, was fomented by a "reactionary clique" of upper class Tibetans.
JULY 14 - Peiping is facing a crisis of confidence that could crack its controlled society. A wave of deliberate obstructionism and apathy has threatened to upset the economy and undermine social cohesion, impelling Peiping to appeal strenuously for "stability and unity," Hongkong reports said.
Reporting on "extraordinary mental conformity" and "thought control" on the Chinese main land, Michael O'Neill, New York Daily News executive editor, wrote: "One has to believe at least a typical American has to believe that man's natural impulse for freedom will eventually assert itself in (Red) China. Somewhere behind the intelligent eyes of the professionals and intellectuals we met, I felt there must be a silent rebellion."
JULY 15 - There is very little social mobility on the Communist-ruled Chinese mainland, said John H. Holdridge, former deputy chief of the U.S. liaison offIce in Peiping. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Holdridge said people on the mainland "are more or less frozen in one slot in life from the time they leave school."
Even cats have a role to play in the Communist "revolution." Soochow's renowned canvas embroidery workshops, which traditionally produced designs of kittens playing with balls of wool, have decided that in future they will be shown keeping mice away from stored grain. NCNA said that instead of being represented as "playthings," the kittens will be shown "sitting on piles of grain, alertly on watch."