Change is eternal in the affairs of men. No matter how finely the mills of the gods may grind, tomorrow is sure to be different from today. The free man, who is by nature an optimist, trusts that tomorrow not only will be different but better. He believes in the improvement, if not the perfectibility, of mankind.
In Asia, not all the changes of the last two decades have been encouraging. Communists usurped the Chinese mainland and went on to wage wars in Korea and Vietnam. No country has been entirely free of Communist infiltration; a number of states have barely escaped succumbing to subversionist conspiracies. Now the pace of change seems to be picking up. The Vietnam conflict may be nearing a denouement. New trends can be discerned on the Chinese mainland in the wake of the Chinese Communist Party's Ninth National Congress. Not every development is favorable to the cause of Asian freedom. There has been no amelioration of the danger to our vast region. Yet although peril remains and evolutionary processes are accelerating, our confidence in ultimate victory is unshaken. Right and justice will prevail.
Vietnam is still the cynosure of our part of the world. The Paris peace talks that emerged from the American bombing halt have not gotten anywhere. North Vietnam claims that Communism has won the war and that the United States is the loser. This is braggadocio. When the first 25,000 Americans go home, more than half a million will remain. The South Vietnamese armed forces have passed the million mark and in both training and equipment are competent to take over an increasing share of the combat burden. The same General Giap who boasts of victory also has been compelled to admit the Communist loss of half a million men killed. At Paris, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong make unreasonable demands and give nothing. In South Vietnam, they continue their aggression, hoping to wear down the Americans and undermine the freely elected Saigon government.
Tension has mounted steadily in South Korea since the despicable Communist attempt on the life of President Park Chung Hee. The Americans lost the Pueblo and a communications monitoring aircraft was wantonly shot down over international waters. Fighting along the Demilitarized Zone is almost a daily occurrence. Korean Communists are raiding along the coastlines and dispatching commando units with instructions to take over villages and plant the seeds of insurrection. Free Korean patriotism and the vigilance of defending forces have combined to frustrate the enemy. Nevertheless, a renewal of the Korean War is not beyond the realm of possibility. Communists taken prisoner say Pyongyang is planning an invasion 1970.
Terrorist attacks on northern and northeastern Thailand have increased in size and tempo. Counter-insurgency operations of the Thai armed forces have contained the threat but the attacks will continue as long as northern Laos is in the hands of the Communists. Any compromise in South Vietnam would open wide the gates to Communist aggression against Thailand. Both the Thai government and the United States are fortunately aware of the need to take measures that will prevent the enemy from exporting another "people's war".
In his political report to the CCP Ninth Congress, Lin Piao made special mention of insurrectionary movements in Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and Pakistan. The Chinese Communists are instigators and supporters of all these efforts to infiltrate, subvert or overthrow legitimate governments. Almost any land in Asia could be plunged into disorder and civil conflict. This is made clear by the disturbances in Pakistan, which only a few years ago was so staunchly anti-Communist, and by renewed Communist threats to Indonesia, which supposedly smashed the Communist Party after the abortive coup attempt of four years ago.
At the root of the danger to our region is the Chinese Communist Party and its diabolical international apparatus for infiltration, subversion and armed aggression. The power struggle on the Chinese mainland has not affected the Peiping bid for hegemony in the Asian region. This is made manifest in events all the way from the border with the Soviet Union in the north to aggressions and support of aggressions in Southeast Asia. To have diplomatic relations with the Chinese Communists only makes matters worse. Pakistan has such relations and an increasingly close relationship with Peiping. This did not prevent Lin Piao from endorsing the insurrectionists who seek to overthrow the Pakistani government and establish a Maoist-style regime.
Free Asia is now studying and analyzing the decisions of the CCP Ninth Congress so as to determine the mainland situation and what is to be expected from the Chinese Communist regime. The aggressive capability and intentions of Chinese Communism must be known in order to formulate an adequate response.
The CCP Ninth Congress was supposed to mark the completion of the so-called "great proletarian cultural revolution". It was to be both a victory celebration and an occasion for putting the pieces back together again. Power struggle had wreaked havoc from one end of the Chinese mainland to the other. The CCP as it existed in 1966 had been destroyed. New machinery of control and administration was required to perpetuate the throttlehold of Mao-think ideology and to put the economic wheels back on the tracks. Mao's thought is supposed to have magical proportions. But even magic requires implementation and the Congress was to arrange for it.
Actually, of course, the Ninth Congress could not terminate the cultural revolution - as both Mao Tse-tung and Lin Piao were compelled to admit. The revolution still has not ended and can reach a conclusion only in the downfall of Maoism and Chinese Communism. In this sense, the meeting of April 1 to 24 marked only the completion of the first round and the beginning of the second. The struggle has to go on. The Chinese Communists said so themselves; mainland occurrences since April bear out their prediction and intention.
Mao expected the cultural revolution to destroy Chinese culture and tradition. The "old" had to make way for the "new", and the latter was to be a mixture of the Paris Commune of 1870, which never existed as an effective instrument of social control, and the mumbo-jumbo of Mao mystique. Not trusting anyone else, Mao summoned the Red Guards to denigrate and dislodge the old powerholders. Then the "young generals" attacked the people and brought about a sharp increase in anti-Mao and anti-Communist feelings among the 700 million people of the mainland, the teen-agers had to be rusticated long before the close of the cultural revolution first round. Although Mao and his cohorts succeeded in taking away the personal power of Liu Shao-chi, Teng Hsiao-ping and others, they still have not dared to drag out the chief powerholders as the Red Guards did with so many lesser figures. After three years, the cultural revolution has left Chinese Communism and Maoism in greater danger than it was before.
The Ninth Party Congress was an inconclusive gathering that revealed many Chinese Communist weaknesses and few strengths. Yet the meeting also gave warning that the Peiping regime remains bent on international aggression and world hegemony. Among the weaknesses, the designation of Lin Piao as Mao's successor was one of the most glaring. In the history of Communist dictatorships, no regime has. ever designated a successor to the ruler. This is an act of dynastic succession and wholly alien to professed Communist ideology. Mao was compelled to go against strong CCP opposition and insist on the Lin Piao succession because of his need for both the defense minister's support and the loyalty of the Chinese Communist armed forces faction that Lin commands. The action cost Mao dearly. He had to push aside old cadres who are also important to the perpetuation of his power. He mayor may not be aware that he has created a rival and undermined the stability of his own dictatorship. Lin Piao has many enemies within both the Party and the military. They will not change their view because Lin has been written into the revised Party charter. Furthermore, they may now come to oppose Mao as well as Lin. The choice of Lin was a difficult decision for Mao to make; he may find it is even harder to live with.
If the Red Guards couldn't drag out Liu Shao-chi, neither could the Ninth Congress. No matter how black Mao and Lin paint Liu, the fact remains that he has friends, followers and loyal cadres in both Party and armed forces. Mao and Lin still dare not liquidate him, nor can they find a scapegoat to undertake the assassination. This is another element of instability in the Mao regime.
The Ninth Congress has had the further effect of hanging the "people's liberation army" around Mao's neck - an albatross that may foretell his destruction. Well over half of the 170 members of the new CCP Central Committee are of the PLA or have PLA connections. While this is evidence that the military now holds Mao's gun barrel, the appearance of unity is misleading. The PLA is not homogenous but deeply factionalized. There are loyalties to leaders other than Mao and Lin. In permitting the military ascendancy, Mao risks a breakdown into partisan units in time of stress or trial. He has also incurred the danger of a military struggle for power. Chinese Communism's "night of the generals" might not end favorably for the Maoists. With so many gun barrels to deal with, Mao may find that his own voice is drowned out in the din of the shooting. Nor is the military deeply interested in Mao's cultural revolution. Mao's wife, Chiang Ching, was frustrated in her efforts to make the generals into proletarian revolutionaries. The military is more than a source of Maoist instability; it is a Frankenstein monster that might turn on its master at any time. Mao retains control of the Standing Committee of the Politburo but in the Politburo as a whole the military is breathing down his neck.
Instability is present, too, in the 29 revolutionary committees of the provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, not to mention the revolutionary committees at local levels. These administrative organs were established after the Party disintegrated and the old administrative machinery of the powerholders became suspect and broke down. The revolutionary committees are heavily weighted with military and factionalized to the point of paralysis. Having established the new Party center after more than two years of trying, Mao now faces the incalculably more difficult task of restoring local social controls and getting the administrative machinery going once again.
In the early stages of the cultural revolution, the PLA was not much affected. Then the Red Guards got out of hand and the military had to be summoned to discipline them and eventually to send them to the countryside, up to the mountains and to faraway frontiers. The military then went on to assume much of ,the power that had belonged to the Party. The PLA is now up to its neck in politics at central, provincial and local levels. This means that the military leadership will be directly involved in the second round of the power struggle. The targets of the first round were Liu Shao-chi, Teng Hsiao-ping and their bureaucrats. The second round will bring the military men who hold the gun barrel into the conflict in a struggle that promises to be more violent and brutal than that of the last three years. There is bound to be a subtle development of relations between the anti-Mao, anti-Communist masses on the one hand and the military leadership on the other. The trend of this relationship should indicate how the next struggle is going to shape up and how it can be expected to come out.
Even if the PLA could unite, there is no slightest indication that the military could solve the political. and economic problems that confront the Maoists. The military can neither construct a substit4te for the CCP nor put factories back in operation and raise production to levels that obtained before the cultural revolution. Mao will have to continue with intraparty struggle both to save himself and because this is something he cannot pass on to the PLA. The upheaval of the mainland will go on and worsen. Its end is to be found in the downfall of Maoism and Chinese Communism rather than the substitution of a military dictatorship with Mao as its father image.
New evidence of Maoist difficulties came to light June 8 with the joint publication of an "important editorial" in People's Daily, Red Flag and Liberation Army Daily. Appealing for unity among Party cadres, the armed forces and the revolutionary masses, the editorial in effect admitted that the Ninth Congress had aggravated Chinese Communist factionalism. These causes of disunity were specified:
-Some "early rebels" have considered that they alone were revolutionaries and leftists, and have attacked and expelled their opponents at random.
-Revolutionary committees have substituted dictatorship for collective leadership ang have not practiced "democratic centralism".
-Members of revolutionary committees have broken down into squabbling factions and have spawned factionalism in revolutionary mass organizations.
-Leaders of revolutionary mass organizations have sought to build their own "mountain strongholds" and have declined to enter into a "grand alliance".
-Revolutionary committee representatives from the military, civil society and the revolutionary mass organizations are mutually distrustful and ,antagonistic. Military men are quick to find fault with "liberated" cadres.
-Relations between old and new cadres of the revolutionary committees have gone from bad to worse. The merest trifle may set off a dispute that paralyzes the committee.
-Some cadres have adopted a devil-may-care attitude toward work and responsibility.
The editorial warned that worsening disunity may result in the disintegration and collapse of revolutionary committees at every level.
However, this growing internal turmoil must not be thought of as presaging the end of the aggressive external policy of Mao Communism.
Lin Piao was explicit about this in his ,political report to the Ninth Congress. He said: "The revolutionary movement of the proletariat of the world and of the people of various countries is vigorously surging forward. The armed struggles of the people of Southern Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, India, Pakistan and other countries and regions in Asia, Africa and Latin America are steadily growing in strength. The truth that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun is being grasped by even broader masses of the oppressed people and nations. An unprecedentedly gigantic revolutionary mass movement has broken out in Japan, Western Europe and North America, the heartlands of capitalism."
He continued: "The foreign policy of our Party and government is consistent. It is: 'to develop relations of friendship, mutual assistance and cooperation with socialist countries on the principle of proletarian internationalism; to support and assist the revolutionary struggles of all the oppressed people and nations' ... Our proletarian foreign policy is not based on expediency; it is a policy in which we have long persisted. This is what we did in the past and we will persist in doing the same in the future."
Lin Piao has exaggerated the importance of revolutionary masses in various countries. He has not misrepresented the hopes and intentions of the Chinese Communists. The Peiping regime has spent 20 years perfecting its machinery and channels of infiltration and subversion. Few disturbances to be found around the world do not involve the Chinese Communists in one way or another. Peiping is an instigator of insurrection in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. Prince Sihanouk has told of the Chinese Communists' attempts to destroy his government even as they pledged eternal friendship. Unrest has been stirred in Burma and India. Indonesia barely escaped being taken over. Nor is the West immune. The bloody, violent hand of Mao has been implicated in the Paris riots and in the continuing student disturbances and racial conflict in the United States.
Lin Piao has not uttered idle threats. With all its internal troubles, the Peiping regime still has the money, the energy and the personnel to continue trying to destroy freedom and democracy wherever they are found. Mao Tse-tung announced his designs for world conquest many years ago. Now he stands pledged to the annihilation of "Russian revisionism" as well as "American imperialism", and he has advertised a willingness to sacrifice half of the mainland population in a nuclear war. His programs for aggrandizement and aggression in Asia and the Pacific are comprehensive, detailed and well known. Mao's enemies cannot say he didn't warn them. The China that has been subjugated by the Communists is supposed to be no match for the Soviet superpower. Yet Mao has not hesitated to fight the Russians along the Ussuri River and in Sinkiang. The meat of ambition upon which he feeds has made him ever more daring and more desperate in his adventurism.
External aggression is as deeply engrained among Maoist policies as is internal enslavement designed to eliminate Chinese culture and the instincts and values of humanity. No matter what happens on the mainland, the Maoist Communists will go right on attempting to export their special brand of violence. The exploitation of external crises in order to reduce domestic tensions is incidental to Mao's megalomaniac determination to rule the world.
All the goodwill in the world can never persuade the Chinese Communists to desist from aggression. Peiping regards nonaligned and pro-Peping countries as pushovers and priority targets. Failure to realize this was nearly fatal for Indonesia. Sihanouk's alertness has saved Cambodia - so far. The North Koreans, who have been inspired to their own super-aggressiveness by the Peiping example, have been compelled to draw away from the Maoists so as to save any independence of action. To think of getting along with, appeasing or reforming the Chinese Communists is an illusion-and one from which the Russian Communists have awakened. That awakening was the reason why the Kremlin summoned the Moscow world conference of Communist Parties. Yet such are the divisions and factionalists of Communism 'that the Russians were unable to persuade the meeting to expel the Chinese Reds from the world Communist movement. The free world need not be so shortsighted as the Communists who seek to playoff Moscow against Peiping and vice versa.
The reality of our time is painful but not complicated. Unless and until the Mao regime disintegrates or is destroyed, the Chinese Communists will continue to aggress against Asian and Pacific nations and make penetrations elsewhere as they can. If nuclear weapons and delivery systems become available, the Chinese Communists will use them for either blackmail or for purposes of destruction and conquest. This is a lesson that the Soviet Union has learned. It seems inconceivable that members of the free world should care less for their security and survival.
With all its weaknesses and internal problems, the Peiping regime cannot be considered a paper tiger. It can bite and it can kill. Its depredations can be prevented, however, by both unilateral and collective actions of defense. Indonesia is an example of the former. At the last moment, loyal and patriotic Indonesians saved themselves. Examples of collective defense are numerous. Several countries are fighting in the cause of South Vietnamese freedom. Whatever their faults, we have in East Asia two important collective undertakings - the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization and the Asian and Pacific Council.
SEATO met recently in Bangkok. Although the organization was not changed, this was a topic of discussion among a membership that includes Thailand and the Philippines. Many Asians hope for an alliance that would provide firm assurance of a quick response to Chinese Communist aggression. To criticize SEATO adversely will avail nothing. The objective is collective security against Peiping regardless of the framework.
ASPAC is only three years old and was not established as a military alliance. But because it includes the principal economic and military powers of East Asia and the Pacific, its development is a matter of great consequence. All members plus guests from Laos and Indonesia were present at the fourth annual meeting in Japan this year. There are differences of opinion as to the direction that ASPAC should take. These do not detract from the progress that has been made in mutual understanding and constructive cooperation.
The Republic of China holds to the view that if the countries of free Asia can come together for economic, social and cultural purposes, eventually they also can see eye to eye about political and military problems. Survival comes before development, no matter how worthy the latter may be. Perhaps not every Asian nation is agreed upon the imminence of the Chinese Communist threat. Yet there is no disagreement that a danger exists and that the record of Peiping's aggressions is essentially as I have represented.
There are those who maintain that Asians cannot come together in meaningful cooperation for the defense of freedom and democracy. Their thesis is disproved in what has already been done. We are not lacking in ability nor in the will to survive as free men. If we have a fault, it is lack of confidence in ourselves. When Confucius was asked about government, he responded that the essentials were food, troops and the confidence of the people. If he had to give up one, that would be the military, and if he had to yield a second, that would be food. "Death is the lot of all men," he said, "but a people without faith cannot survive."
Let us have the faith to use our strength and the enemy's weaknesses to build an Asian region in which each country is secure because all are secure. In such a commonwealth we can at last attain peace with prosperity and both personal and political liberty.