Chairman Mao was always aware that so long as the transformation from a money economy was incomplete and the socialist wage principle (“from each according to their ability, to each according to their work”) was still in effect, the danger of the restoration of capitalism was very real. He was also aware that only a minority of Chinese masses and cadre clearly and completely understood the goals of the transition to communism and the differences between the socialist and the capitalist road.
Our country at present practices a commodity system; the wage system is unequal, too, as in the 8 grade wage scale and so forth. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat such things can only be restricted (not eliminated). Therefore, if people like Lin Piao come to power it will be quite easy for them to rig up the capitalist system. That is why we should do more reading of Marxist-Leninist works. (Mao Tse-tung, as quoted in “Exercizing All-Round Dictatorship over the Bourgeoisie”, distributed by Books New China, N.Y., N.Y.)
A worker-cadre like me has deep class sentiments for the Party and Chairman Mao as well as experience in my work, but simple class sentiments cannot replace consciousness in the struggle between the two lines and pure practical experience cannot replace Marxism-Leninism. (from an article on “Overcoming Empiricism,” PR #43, 1972)
If the people have blind faith in the Party leadership, the revisionists can take power through the Party. However, if the people go beyond faith in the Party leadership to thoroughly understand the principles of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung thought they will be equipped to defend the dictatorship of the proletariat against any revisionist chief tan waving “red flags” to defeat the red flag.
The people of China have learned through many struggles the necessity of having faith in the Party. However, to prevent revisionism it is necessary for the masses and lower level cadres to be able to recognize revisionism within the Party so they can exercise the revolutionary principle of “going against the tide.” The contradiction between faith in the Party leadership and “going against the tide” is one that can only be resolved by increasing the theoretical understanding of the masses to a very high degree.
This is why the revisionists always complain when Leftists insist on giving priority to political education in the factories, communes, army, and schools. Chang Chun-chiao and Yao Wen-yuan, two of the “gang of four” who were devoted to developing study campaigns among the masses, considered that the major problem in the study groups was dependence on personal experience instead of integrating this experience with the experience of the entire revolutionary movement. They were accused of “criticizing empiricism as a cover for dogmatism”. What the revisionists really feared was the development of theoretical understanding by the masses.
The political consciousness of the people in China is certainly as highly developed as that of any people in the world, due to their experience in armed revolution, in Marxist-Leninist study and in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the many two-line struggles that have taken place since liberation. They are undoubtedly as prepared as any people in the world to resist the revisionist takeover, but they were obviously not sufficiently prepared to prevent it.
This is the underlying reason the revisionists were able to seize power in China. But there are also many particular reasons why the seizure of power took place when it did. The major factor was the death of Chairman Mao Tse-tung in September of 1976. He had guided the Chinese people in revolution for more than four decades and had constantly led them in combatting revisionism. His death was an incalculable loss for the revolutionary forces in China and a tremendous gain for the reactionary forces. Because the Chinese people so greatly loved and respected Chairman Mao, the Right could not have taken power so long as he was alive without instituting a reign of military terror that was beyond their capability. They had to wait until he died so they could misuse his name to aid in the usurpation of power. The purge and mass arrests began less than a month after Chairman Mao’s death.
Chairman Mao was not the only great Chinese leader that has died recently. Of the ten members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the leading body in China, four other great leaders died in 1976: Kang Sheng, Chu Teh, Tung Pi-wu and Premier Chou En-lai. These tragic deaths in succession left China without several of her most capable and farsighted veteran leaders.
Teng Hsiao-ping was removed in April, before Mao’s death, and this left only four members of the original ten member Standing Committee after his death in September: Chang Chun-chiao and Wang Hung-wen, two of the “gang of four”, and Yeh Chien-ying and Li Teh-shen, both military commanders. It was at this point that the revisionists made their move and arrested Wang and Chang as well as Yao Wen-yuan and Chiang Ching and many other top Party and state leaders. This means that the Standing Committee after the October purge was composed of only two of its original ten members. (With the disappearance of Liu Po-cheng, either as a result of the purge or of sickness, the entire Political Bureau, composed of 22 members in January, 1976, has now been reduced to eleven.)
To carry out the line of continual revolution in stages, Chairman Mao had recognized the protracted nature of the struggle and the relative power that the forces that leaned towards revisionism had. He did not attempt to purge the Party of all those elements but followed the strategy of uniting the many to oppose the few and tried to isolate the most dangerous elements, like Teng Hsiao-ping.
Leading People’s Liberation Army (PLA) commanders, such as Defense Minister Yeh Chien-ying and commanders Hsu Shih-yu and Chen Hsi-lien, played a central role in the coup de’etat in October. The political stagnancy of the PLA leadership was one of the central causes of the ability of the revisionists to take power.
The Cultural Revolution never took place in a complete way inside the PLA. Discipline and the maintenance of hierarchy and authority in the armed forces in order to be prepared for foreign attack was at that time considered too important to risk arousing a mass criticism-struggle-transformation movement among the soldiers to criticize their commanders and the policies in the Army. In general, revisionist-leaning commanders were not purged or transformed.
The treasonous actions of Defense Minister P’eng Teh-huai in 1959, of regional PLA commanders during the Cultural Revolution, and of Lin Piao in 1972, dramatized the danger of isolation of the Army from Party control. This critical principle is explained in an article in PR #5, 1975:
Adherence to the Party’s absolute leadership over the Army is an immutable fundamental principle for building a new type people’s army. There has always been a fierce struggle within our Party between the two lines, centering around the question of upholding or opposing the Party’s leadership over the Army. To usurp the military power of the proletariat, the bourgeois careerist Lin Piao made no bones about publicizing the fallacy that the gun commands the Party. . Chairman Mao has taught us: ’Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.’. . Historical experience tells us that the struggle over control of the Army has always been a serious class struggle and two-line struggle. This is a matter of principle of paramount importance concerning the success or failure of the revolution and the destiny of the people. According to Marxist theory of state, ’the army is the chief component of state power; whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army. ’ (Mao Tse-tung: Problems of War and Strategy) The most fundamental thing in upholding the Party’s absolute leadership over the Army lies in firmly implementing the Party’s Marxist-Leninist line. Whether we should carry out education in ideological and political line in the Army is an important question of principle of whether we should practice Marxism and build the Army in the image of the proletariat. To ensure implementation of the Party’s correct line in the Army, it is imperative to unfold a struggle of proletarian ideas against non-proletarian ideas.
During the historical period of socialism, the PLA, if it’s to give full play to its role as the pillar of the proletarian dictatorship, must be armed with the Party’s basic line and, together with the people of the whole country, take part in the struggle of criticizing the bourgeoisie, revisionism, and the ideology of the exploiting classes.
In 1973, in order to break down “mountain-top stronghold” sectionalism growing in the PLA, Chairman Mao rotated 8 of the 11 regional PLA commanders and in the process they lost the position of provincial Party secretaries that many of them had. PLA membership in the Central Committee was greatly reduced and the PLA commanders played less of a role in the Party leadership in general. (Stephen U’halley, Jr., Mao Tse-tung, New Viewpoints Press) In January, 1975, Vice-Premier Chang Chun-chiao (one of the “gang of four”) was appointed by the Central Committee to the post of Director of the General Political Department of the PLA, the top liaison of the Party to the Army, to carry out political education and political work among the PLA commanders and fighters.
Evidently Chang’s political work in the Army caused the revisionists to feel seriously threatened. In Peking Review #10, 1977, the author of an article titled “Ferreting Out ’the Bourgeoisie in the Army’ . . Another ’Gang of Four’ Scheme” complains bitterly that political movements “cause turmoil in the Army” and should not be tolerated:
. . a trusty of the ’gang of four’ in the Army popped up and, under their instructions, rushed from one unit to another in the People’s Liberation Army holding meetings calling for the writing of literary works on the ’bourgeoisie in the army’ and the ’capitalist-roaders with red tabs and red stars,’ clamouring that the task of writing about the ’struggle against the capitalist-roaders in the army’ had ’historically fallen on our shoulders.’ He loudly averred that there were ’indeed several capitalist-roaders, all big ones’ in the Army and that this was an ’acute, life and death struggle’ in which ’risks were inevitable’. . [one of the ’gang of four’s’ trumpeters] went to a PLA unit and talked nonsense: ’There are the two-line struggle and the bourgeoisie in the Party. This is even more so in the Army’. . They also attempted to encourage ultra-democracy in the Army and tried to egg rank-and-file cadres and fighters on to investigate the question of the ’bourgeoisie in the army’ in their superior organs, so as to ’ferret out the capitalist-roaders in the Army’ in order to make a breakthrough and then proceed to create confusion in the whole Army.
In accordance with Chairman Mao’s instruction – don’t meddle in the affairs of the Army – the Party CC and the CPC Military Commission clearly stipulated in the spring of 1976 that the Army should be kept stable. Historical experience . . has proved that an important condition for ensuring that the Army be strong in fighting power is to maintain a high sense of organization and discipline in the Army which obeys orders in all actions. The ’gang of four’ may have held sway briefly in their plot to overthrow the ’bourgeoisie in the Army’ but last October’s thunderbolt drove them into the graves they themselves had dug . .
There are three questions involved here – democratic centralism, class struggle, and Party control over the Army. The principle of democratic centralism is the basis for discipline and unity in the Army. Centralism is more emphasized in the Army than in other aspects of Party life (see Chairman Mao, Selected Readings, p. 150). Ultra-democracy is an ultra-“Left” deviation that must be combatted within the Army. However, to Minister of Defense Yeh Chien-ying and his revisionist cohorts, any anti-revisionist political study in the Army or any criticism from the rank and file is “ultra-democratic”. In order to protect their revisionist line they oppose democracy to centralism and label any efforts to practice democratic principles in the Army as “undermining stability, discipline, and unity.” This is in direct contradiction to the thesis of democratic centralism as explicitly outlined by Chairman Mao in 1962:
Both inside and outside the Party there must be a full democratic life, which means conscientiously putting democratic centralism into effect. We must conscientiously bring questions out into the open, and let the masses speak out. Even at the risk of being cursed we should still let them speak out. The result of their curses at the worst will be that we are thrown out and cannot go on doing this kind of work – demoted or transferred. What is so impossible about that? Why should a person only go up and never go down? Why should one only work in one place and never be transferred to another? . .
Now there are some comrades who are afraid of the masses initiating discussion and putting forward ideas which differ from those of the leaders and leading organizations. As soon as problems are discussed they suppress the activism of the masses and do not allow others to speak out. This attitude is extremely evil. Democratic centralism is written into our Party Constitution and State Constitution, but they don’t apply it. Comrades, we are revolutionaries. If we have really committed mistakes of the kind which are harmful to the people’s cause, then we should seek the opinions of the masses and of comrades and carry out self-examination. .
What is centralism? First of all it is a centralization of correct ideas, on the basis of which unity of understanding, policy, planning, command and action are achieved. This is called centralized unification. If people still do not understand problems, if they have ideas but have not expressed them, or are angry but still have not vented their anger, how can centralized unification be established? If there is no democracy we cannot possibly summarize experience correctly. If there is no democracy, if ideas are not coming from the masses, it is impossible to establish a good line, good general and specific policies and methods. . Without democracy, you have no understanding of what is happening down below; the situation will be unclear; you will be unable to collect sufficient opinions from all sides; there can be no communication between top and bottom; top-level organs of leadership will depend on one-sided and incorrect material to decide issues, thus you will find it difficult to avoid being subjectivist; it will be impossible to achieve true centralism. . If we fail to promote democracy in full measure, then will this centralism and this unification be true or false? Will it be real or empty? Will it be correct or incorrect? Of course it must be false, empty, and incorrect. (quoted in Schram, p. 160-164)
In the article about the Army (PR #10, 1977), the revisionists deny the necessity for political struggle in the Army. For them, it’s ’nonsense’ to say that there are bourgeois, revisionist, capitalist-road elements in the Army, that the two-line struggle is a struggle that may have some place in the Party but definitely must be kept out of the Army.[1] This can only create the conditions for revisionism to breed unchecked.
Anti-revisionist political education does not undermine discipline, unity, and stability in the Army but provides the only correct basis for them. To prevent the struggle against revisionism from taking hold in the Army, the revisionists claim that Chairman Mao instructed something to the effect of “don’t meddle in the affairs of the Army” (although they don’t quote him or tell when or to whom he gave the “instruction”). It is highly doubtful that Chairman Mao would have ever given an order so much in contradiction to the Party’s general line for the Army which he himself formulated in 1929:
The purely military viewpoint is very highly developed among a number of comrades in the Red Army. It manifests itself as follows. These comrades regard military affairs and politics as opposed to each other and refuse to recognize that military affairs are only one means of accomplishing political tasks. .
Hence, organizationally, these comrades subordinate the departments of the Red Army doing political work to those doing military work, and put forward the slogan “Let Army Headquarters handle outside matters”. . As a result, both propaganda and organizational work are abandoned. The methods of correction are as follows: Raise the political level in the Party by means of education, destroy the theoretical roots of the purely military viewpoint. At the same time, eliminate the remnants of opportunism and putchism and break down the selfish departmentalism... Intensify the political training of officers and men . . Arouse the local Party organizations to criticize the Party organizations in the Red Army and the organs of mass political power to criticize the Red Army itself . . The Party must actively attend to and discuss military work. (Mao: “Kutien Resolution of December, 1929, for the 9th Party Congress of the 4th Red Army” emphasis added)
It seems the revisionist PLA commanders feel themselves to be leaders “beyond criticism”, that the affairs of the Army are “not to be meddled in.” Their current attack against the “gang of four” is one more exposure of their hatred of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung thought.
The “gang of four” are charged with using political education to oppose military training in the PLA. This charge is as unsound as the charge that they used revolution to oppose production or socialist consciousness to oppose intellectual development. Political education and military training are a dialectic, as are revolution and production. Both ideological and military training are essential to building a strong revolutionary army. However, only correct political education can lead to correct military training. The revisionist commanders in the Army are to be expected to oppose political education in the Army saying that it interferes with military training. They must oppose political education in order to promote a revisionist line in the Army and protect their positions.
The question of the PLA must be studied in depth to fully understand the dangers of revisionism in a revolutionary army. The fact that revisionists had consolidated their forces within the PLA and that the Left had not challenged their control earlier was a serious underestimation by the Party of the possible role of the Army in capitalist restoration. It also makes the claim that the “gang of four” tried to pull off a coup d’etat even more unbelievable. As Chairman Mao said: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” and “anyone who wants to seize and hold state power must have a strong army.” The revisionists did, and that is why they were able to seize power so rapidly and effectively.
[1] The two-line struggle in the PLA has a long history and has centered around these issues: Building a Soviet-style professional army vs. a people’s army which has close ties to the masses and participates in The The two-line struggle in the PLA has a long history and has centered around these issues: Building a Soviet-style professional army vs. a people’s army which has close ties to the masses and participates in production; advocating that “weapons decide everything” and wanting to buy foreign military technolocy vs. placing soldiers above weaponry and understanding that soldiers’ political consciousness is a deciding factor in war; discipline imposed from above vs. discipline that comes from democratic centralism and gives full scope to initiative from the soldier masses; the purely military viewpoint vs. putting proletarian politics in command; and allowing thfarmy to become an independant force vs. strictly enforcing the leadership of the Party.