Mao Tse-tung apparently has fallen prey to his megalomaniacal obsessions. The creator of the Peiping regime, who has mass-produced every kind of misery and disaster on the Chinese mainland, now is desperately trying to fulfill the impossible dream of out-living all his comrades-in-crime.
Knowing that his days are numbered, the ailing chairman of the Chinese Communist Party long ago mobilized his supposedly obedient subordinates in a campaign to protect him from debasement after his death — as Joseph Stalin was discredited by Nikita Khrushchev. But he has come to realize that his attempt has been both ineffective and insufficient. Endless purges of scapegoat intellectuals have failed to persuade the mainland people that Mao's thinking is the panacea that Mao and his sycophants claim.
Stung by a prospect of ignominious failure for all his endeavors, Mao at 72 has become an incurably vicious old man who cannot stand the thought that others may be more hopeful of the future. He fears that upon his death those who are left behind will turn soft and deviate from his line. He wants to live until his own generation is gone, leaving only those who are ignorant of the mellow taste of the world outside.
Many tyrants of China's past have sought the elixir of life. Mao must know such a quest is vain. So he resorted to power tactics to cut down those who see things any way but his. Campaigns triggered by Mao have destroyed groups of prominent leaders every few years since he usurped Chinese mainland power in 1949.
The once powerful "mayor" of Peiping, Peng Chen, who ranked No. 6 in the CCP hierarchy, is the latest to be plunged from high position, accused of the equivalent of high treason. Peng was dismissed from his job as first secretary of the CCP Peiping municipal committee in late May. His down fall recalled earlier purges.
In 1954, Kao Kang, former virtual head of Northeast China, was accused of an anti-party conspiracy and reportedly killed. Down with Kao went Jao Shu-shih, then first secretary of the CCP East China bureau, who was arrested in 1954 and purged in 1955.
"Marshal" and "defense minister" Peng Teh-huai, one of the Red army's greatest heroes, vanished without explanation in 1959 when Mao launched his ill-fated "great leap forward". He was removed from official position later in 1959 and has not been heard from since. Peng Teh-huai, to whom Mao owed much in the early days of Chinese Communism, reportedly dared to criticize the people's commune — a criticism echoed by Khrushchev. Among those who fell into disgrace with Peng Teh-huai was "army chief of staff" Huang Ke-cheng.
Most Serious Yet
The purge now sweeping the mainland under the aegis of a "great socialist cultural revolution" is viewed as the most serious yet because of its background of the aging, despondent, perhaps seriously ailing Mao Tse-tung. Observers in Taiwan pointed out that the burly Peng Chen, who is 67, had been regarded as a possible successor to Mao. Peng was not simultaneously dismissed from his other posts. He has been "mayor" of Peiping since 1951, vice chairman of the "National People'" Congress", and a member of the CCP politburo, secretariat, and central committee. Though he may retain these titles temporarily, it is assumed that he has been assigned to the same kind of political limbo that swallowed up "defense minister" Peng Teh-huai.
Drastic purging has followed the June 3 disclosure of Peng Chen's ouster, supposedly to smash an "anti-party, anti-socialist alliance" in the Red Chinese "capital". The Peiping party committee has been thoroughly reorganized and some of Peng's immediate subordinates removed. Shakeups have taken place at Peiping University, three officially controlled metropolitan newspapers, and the Peiping Municipal Communist Youth League. The purge also has reached out to such distant provinces as Tsinghai, Szechuan, Yunnan, and Kweichow.
Two main theories have been advanced to explain what is happening. One holds that the chief lieutenants of Mao are engaged in a struggle for power as his reign nears an end. The other theory portrays Peiping as a battlefield on which the party's ruling ideologues, committed to doctrinaire foreign and domestic policies, are trying to beat off a challenge from colleagues favoring a more flexible, pragmatic approach to the regime's many problems.
Pyramid Theory
Proponents of the power struggle thesis base their analysis in part on the fact that Peng Chen has never been considered a revisionist. He has been regarded as a "hard-liner" of the same persuasion as "president" Liu Shao-chi, CCP general secretary Teng Hsiao-ping, and Mao himself.
Current relationships among these and other Peiping leaders remain clouded. But some observers, particularly those in the West, have generally believed that Lin Piao, the "minister of national defense", and the short, peppery, ambitious Teng Hsiao-ping have led the drive against Peng Chen and his associates in a move to weaken "president" Liu Shao-chi.
Peiping's leadership, in the words of a June 12 Associated Press dispatch from Hongkong, is like a child's pyramid of blocks. If the top block cannot be knocked off directly, it can be undermined and perhaps brought down by knocking out one or more of its supporting blocks. In other words, Lin has knocked out supporting block Peng Chen but it is obvious that the real target is Liu Shao-chi.
Liu at 67 long has been regarded as Mao's heir-apparent. Peng Chen has been a close associate of Liu since the early 1930s when Peng was one of Liu's top lieutenants — probably the chief one — in the Communist underground of North China. In addition, as top man in Peiping's political organization, Peng controlled the city's powerful propaganda media, including the official People's Daily. It was this fact that gave Lin Piao the opportunity to bring down Pengo
By no stretch of imagination can Peng be called either an intellectual or "revisionist" — the name Peiping applies to those it accuses of favoring the Russian brand of Communism. Peng, in fact, has been violently anti-Moscow in the Moseow-Peiping ideological quarrel. Lin Piao, therefore, directed his campaign against "intellectual revisionists" at writers and editors, including the editor of the Peiping People's Daily. Lin's principal instrument was his personally controlled newspaper Liberation Army Daily. The downfall of writers and editors was followed by the denigration of Peng Chen. In the Chinese Communist way, he was tarred with the command responsibility for others' alleged crimes. Lin may also have hoped to smear "president" Liu Shao-chi and weaken him to a point where he can be attacked directly and perhaps removed.
The "socialist cultural revolution", pushed mainly by Lin's Liberation Army Daily, is a huge campaign of criticism directed against Chinese intellectuals, charged with being soft on capitalism and Soviet "revisionism". Since last November, virulent attack has centered on three of Peng Chen's subordinates — Wu Han, a "vice mayor" of Peiping; Teng To, former member of the secretariat of the CCP Peiping Municipal Committee; and Liao Mo-sha, former director of the United Front Department of the Peiping committee.
Teng Hsiao-ping's part in any power struggle is less clear than Lin Piao's. However, it is considered significant that an old-time associate of Teng was chosen to replace Peng Chen as party chief of the Peiping municipality. He is Li Hsueh-feng, concurrently first secretary of the party's North China bureau, a man who has been connected with Teng since at least the 1940s. Also conspicuous was Teng's appearance in an early-May news photo that showed him seated together with Mao Tse-tung, "premier" Chou En-lai, and Lin Piao at a Peiping reception for Albanian Premier Mehmet Shehu. "President" Liu Shao-chi was neither pictured nor mentioned.
Chou and Liu
There was speculation at one time that the "cultural revolution" had been engineered by Chou En-lai in a power struggle with Liu Shao-chi. This view was based partly on the fact that Chou was the first ranking Peiping leader to declare publicly that a new purge was under way. He told the Albanian group that "this is a fierce and protracted struggle of whether the proletariat or the bourgeoisie will win in the ideological field. "
Chou's statement came on April 30, four days before the Liberation Army Daily joined the "cultural debates" by admitting the existence of a rebellious group high in the Communist Party and saying that the very survival of Mao's ideology was at stake.
Other evidence points in the opposite direction, leading some observers to think Chou was on the losing side in his rivalry with Liu Shao-chi. One such datum is the publication of Kuo Mo-jo's self-criticism in the April 28 issue of Kwangming Jih Pao, the Peiping daily for intellectuals. Kuo, a 73-year-old servant of Chinese Communism and one of its most prolific writers, attested that nothing he had written was socialistically acceptable and that the whole of his output should be burned. In the eyes of Liu Shao-chi and his followers, Kuo had always stood on the side of Chou En-lai The pres sure leading to Kuo's abasement could not have come from the Chou side.
Some free Chinese observers suggested that the chief engineer of the purge could only be Mao Tse-tung. They were of the opinion that only Mao had the authority to order a campaign on such a scale. Peiping announced in February that in the previous year of so 160,000 literary and art workers had been sent to factories, rural areas, and the armed forces to "remold their thinking". This was followed by a few months of relative tranquility on the mainland cultural front. But almost coinciding with Mao's emergence in early May after a disappearance of six months, the campaign started again as the "great socialist cultural revolution". Scores of prominent political, educational, and cultural figures have been subjected to public attack. The targets, to use the words of Chou En-lai in Bucharest, are "bad men who advertise Communist sheep's heads but peddle anti-Communist dog meat" and "bourgeois intellectuals who are anti party, anti-socialist, and counter-revolutionary". (See the separate list of mainland individuals recently under attack.)
Up to the end of May, there were marked provincial differences in the violence of attacks on Peng Chen subordinates Wu Han, Teng To, and Liao Mo-sha. At first many provincial radio stations gave slight attentions to the campaign. By mid-June, however, it had spread to all corners of the mainland. A Hongkong source reported that every monitored province except Honan had its own purges under way. Forums and meetings were held everywhere to denounce the newest target. At the same time, the campaign to study Mao's works and revere his thinking reached a new pitch of hysteria.
The free Chinese observation that Mao had personally ordered the campaign was verified June 17 when Peiping's New China News Agency broadcast this statement:
"At the central committee meeting of the Chinese Communist Party in September, 1965, Chairman Mao pointed to the need to subject reactionary bourgeois ideology to criticism. "
Hongkong Version
With regard to Mao's behind-the-scenes manipulation of the campaign, one Young China Party leader residing in Hongkong said: "Even if Chou En-lai, Lin Piao, and Teng Hsiao-ping are put together, they cannot generate enough power to start a purge of this magnitude." Li Huang, the YCP spokesman, knew Chou personally as a student in Paris and as a negotiator at the conference table during the war. He said the Red Chinese "premier" is "quite capable, staunch, and has the ability to accommodate himself to circumstances, but is just a diplomat." Li said Chou En-lai had always obeyed Mao's orders and added that Chou's April 30 statement about the cultural purge could not have been made without Mao's consent.
Li also described Teng Hsiao-ping in this way: Teng is clever and shrewd but wouldn't dare dream of replacing Chou or Liu Shao-chi as long as Mao Tse-tung is alive because he knows these two senior Communists are much closer to Mao than he is. Li said every move of Lin was made in response to Mao's instructions. Lin was picked up and trained by Mao.
Why did Mao start the current purge? The most reasonable explanation is that he is confused and uncertain about the future of his regime. Many people outside the Bamboo Curtain think Mao is a stubborn man who in his madness fears nothing. In reality, Mao Tse-tung is terribly afraid that young Chinese may denounce his "revolution" and take "abominable, retaliatory actions" against his rule. Press reports from time to time have quoted Mao as expressing fear that people of the mainland may compromise with "imperialism" and bring back the Nationalists or line up with the "anti-revolutionary" elements on the mainland.
As early as 1957, when the "contending and blooming" campaign was in full swing, Mao found out how much the intellectuals hated his tyrannical rule. By that time, Mao had been publicizing his ideology for nearly half a century and had held power for almost 10 years. Now he is beginning to realize that the people will revolt against him at the first opportunity.
Toward the end of the 1950s, Khrushchev attempted to compel Mao to adopt an anti-Stalin line, threatening withdrawal of Russian technical aid from the Chinese mainland. This infuriated Mao. The Russian Communists had held power for some 40 years but Mao's rule had lasted for only a decade. The Russian "reactionaries" who had escaped Stalin's ax were dead and Moscow's foundations were firm enough to tolerate some coexistence with the West. But Mao himself was sitting on a volcano that might erupt any minute. How could Mao accept Khrushchev's demand for compromise with the American "imperialists"? That would mean his own end.
No Compromise
Mao Tse-tung decided to follow his own course in opposition not only to the United States but to Soviet Russia. His stand now became anti-capitalist and anti-revisionist. He would always embrace Stalin's memory, practice Marxist-Leninist doctrines, however outdated they might be, and carry through his "world revolution" to the end.
But things do not always come to pass as one wishes. Mao's despotic rule has turned the Chinese mainland upside-down. The blood and sweat of the people already have been extracted and there is no hope of new external aid. Mao's united front moves abroad have met with setbacks everywhere. In the face of mounting disasters, it is impossible for him to pacify the mainland people.
Since his retirement from active duty in 1959, when Liu Shao-chi was made "president", Mao has been sick and tired, but still capable of some thought. He must have come to see that of all the things he had done and advocated, only ideology remained. So he concentrated on strengthening his teachings and raising himself to the level of Marx and Lenin.
Deeds Instead of Words
Mao, however, overlooked the fact that people judge a ruler more by his deeds than by what he says. Before usurpation of mainland power, Mao succeeded in attracting some attention with the help of leftist writers and propagandists. But after his ascension to power, he reduced the people to a level of near-starvation. Instead of trying to improve their livelihood, Mao attempted to "feed and clothes" them with his ideology. "Mao Tse-tung's thought" has been treated by his cadres as an omnipotent talisman that can solve every imaginable problem. Some of the people may be fooled that way, but not the mainland intellectuals. That is why many Communists have come to hate Mao, and to express their half-hidden sentiments in newspaper articles, historical novels, other books, and motion pictures.
The anti-Communist sentiments and the anti-Mao activities on the mainland have led the regime to wield its political ax in an unprecedented campaign. Even the regime's oldest and highest ranking leaders will be mercilessly struck down if they oppose Mao Tse-tung. This was made clear in a People's Daily editorial of June 4. Entitled "Tear Aside the Bourgeois Mask of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity", the editorial said:
"Anyone who opposes Chairman Mao Tse-tung, opposes Mao Tse-tung's thoughts, opposes the party central leadership, opposes the proletariat's dictatorship, opposes the correct way of socialism; whoever that may be, however high may be the position, and however old his standing, he will be struck down by the entire party and by the entire people."
The editorial also admonished: "We must follow the instructions of the party center, never for a single instant forget class struggle, never for a single instant forget the dictatorship of the proletariat, never for a single instant forget to give prominence to politics, and never for a single instant forget to hold high the great red banner of Mao Tse-tung's thought."
On June 11, Peiping said the "cultural revolution" had spread to the whole of the Chinese mainland but admitted that "some comrades" were still paying no attention to the sweeping purge of dissidents. This admission came as no surprise to observers outside the Bamboo Curtain. So a lengthy Red Flag editorial claimed the purge campaign was being carried out to prevent what happened in the Soviet Union and Hungary. The magazine complained: "Some comrades regard the polemic in the press between the proletariat and the reactionary bourgeoisie as trivial paper arguments of literary men. Their heads buried in their work, some comrades are not concerned with the struggle on the ideological and cultural fronts, are paying no heed to the class struggle in the field of ideology."
Call to Combat
The Red Flag editorial continued: "This is absolutely wrong and highly dangerous. We must shout to these comrades and tell them: 'Comrades! The enemy is sharpening his sword. He wants to cut off our heads. He wants to overturn our state power. How is it that you see it and hear it and take no notice?'"
The editorial went on: "Failure to give this serious attention and take the necessary steps would end in our party and country changing color and would cost the lives of our people... The landlord and bourgeois classes ... still have great strength. They have money, they have extensive social contacts and international links and they have counter-revolutionary experience ... The ideology of the exploiting classes still has a considerable market. Some unsteady elements in the revolutionary ranks are prone to be corrupted by this ideology and consequently become counter-revolutionaries."
The editorial warned the Communist Party against the danger of a coup by "bourgeois and feudal ideology" and "capitalist restoration". It said: "Efforts at restoration are first directed at getting a grip on ideology and using their decadent ideas to mislead the masses... And when the opportunity is ripe, it (bourgeois and feudal ideology) will in one way or another stage a coup to seize political power."
Of the purpose of the "cultural revolution", Chou En-lai said in Bucharest: "We want to entirely liquidate by this great cultural revolution all the old ideals, the whole old culture, all the old habits and customs, created by the exploiting classes in the course of thousands of years so as to poison the people."
After the reformation of its editorial board, the People's Daily of June 20 shouted: "It is necessary to let the masses speak out fully, expose all the representatives of the bourgeoisie, socialism, and Mao Tse-tung's thought, expose all the monsters and demons and, one by one, smash to pieces the reactionary bastions of the bourgeoisie."
The seriousness Peiping attaches to the "cultural revolution" is reflected in postponement of 1966 college enrollment by half a year to permit total revision of the system of entrance examinations. The new system will turn students into professional political instruments and prohibit them from devoting themselves to academic study and individual thinking. This was indicated by the editorial in the People's Daily of June 18:
"In the new method of enrollment in which proletarian politics is given prominence, the best students will be admitted, selected from among those recommended. The old examination system of enrolling students... places school marks in command. This system is a great obstacle to the revolutionization of young people's minds and encourages them to become bourgeois specialists by the bourgeois method of 'making one's own way' and achieving individual fame, wealth, and position."
The editorial explicitly indicated that the primary purpose of the change was to eliminate the influence of the "representative figures of bourgeoisie" — a definite reference to Peng Chen and his followers.
These other epithets were applied to the Peng Chen group by the editorial:
- bourgeois royalists
- anti-party, anti-socialist black line in the educational field
- the bourgeois right
- bourgeois "authorities" and scholar-tyrants
- monsters and freaks
- revisionists
Such editorial venom has been spouted day after day and tends to buttress the impression that the Chinese Communist Party is facing an internal crisis involving much more than a struggle for power. Peiping's latest press pronouncements have served to strengthen this impression. Many scores of prominent educators, party theoreticians, writers, and even scientists have been vilified for "anti-party crimes". Yet purges have barely brushed the top level of the party. From all indications, the struggle is far from resolved.
Portraits of Mao
In early July all Peiping papers carried huge front-page portraits of Mao and articles on Mao's "thinking", ostensibly to hail the party's 45th birthday. The papers carried articles by top leaders in this order: Liu Shao-chi, Chou En-lai, Lin Piao, and Teng Hsiao-ping. This order of precedence probably was deliberate, designed to convey to the party just where each man stood in the hierarchy. Apparently Liu remains No. 2 after Mao. But no one yet knows for sure. It is even possible that Peng is not finished. Such is the way of Communism.
Purge propaganda has demanded the "unmasking" of plotters against the regime. The leadership undoubtedly knows whom it considers to be plotters. The purge architects were strong enough to denounce the Peiping party committee as a hotbed of conspiracy and remove Peng. Yet nothing was said about dropping Peng from the Politburo or even from his job as "mayor", nor has he been publicly vilified as other purge victims have been.
Powerful Forces
Powerful forces seem to have been arrayed against Peng: Lin Piao representing the army, Teng Hsiao-ping the party, and Chou En-lai the "government". But perhaps to bring down the ambitious Peng would require the disgracing of Liu, which would weaken the party structure and make a mockery of propaganda about the invincibility of "Mao Tse-tung's thinking".
In this connection, William Ryan of the Associated Press wrote from New York July 2: "Possibly what the purge architects are trying to do is to persuade Peng Chen to denounce himself and take the blame for Red China's painful reverses in international and foreign policies. That would mean the end of Peng as a power, even beyond the help of Liu.
"Lin Piao's Liberation Army Daily said recently that the struggle now going on inside Red China 'is a protracted and tortuous one which, in time, can even be very violent'. That may be a key. The time is not ripe for the 'very violent' phase."
The purge will continue as long as Mao Tse-tung is in power... as long as there are attempts to perpetuate Communism and Maoist ideology... and as long as the people of the Chinese mainland keep on asking questions instead of blindly following the dictator's orders. Never-ending purges provide iron-firm evidence that the Mao Tse-tung regime is in dilemma and that one way or another, it is doomed to collapse and extinction.