The October purge shared nothing in common with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution or the struggle to beat back the Right deviationist trend in either object or method. In the previous great two-line struggles, the method was the revolutionary upsurge of the masses of workers and peasants, and the object was deepening the political education of the masses and continuing the socialist revolution. In the October purge, on the contrary, hundreds of leading cadre were arrested two weeks before the masses were even informed of what was going on. Then the people were called, by what was left of the Party, to come to mass rallies to “celebrate the great victory”.
In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the struggle to beat back the Right deviationist trend, there were few arrests. The revisionist chieftan, Liu Shao-chi, was finally deposed, but never arrested, in October of 1968, after more than two years of the greatest mass movement against revisionism that the world has ever seen. The arch unrepentant capitalist-roader, Teng Hsiao-ping, was only removed, and never arrested, six months after the struggle to beat back the Right deviationist trend began. The present leaders’ excuse for the mass arrests was that the “gang of four” were planning a coup d’etat . . a feeble excuse (in light of the fact that they had no armed force to speak of) that served to cover for the actual event – a military coup d’etat pulled off by the present leaders.
The Peking Review since the purge has said very little about the “attempted coup” of the “gang of four”. No details of their “plan” have come out, except that it involved creating ideological conditions by writing articles, making movies, and “stirring up the masses”. Neither has the manner in which the “gang of four” were defeated or the events of early October been made very clear in the Peking Review. However, a pamphlet called The Rise and Fall of the Gang of Four (originally published in Seventies, a Hong Kong magazine sympathetic to the Chinese government) which has been widely distributed in the United States to defend the present leaders and attack the “gang of four,” gives a somewhat clearer picture of how the struggle in October developed. After admitting that “the Chinese newspapers give us little enlightenment on (the ’gang of four’s’ plot”, the author goes on to say that the events in October developed out of a struggle over the succession of the chairmanship of the Party:
The ultimate decision [of succession], of course, had to come from the October 7th meeting of the Central Committee. .
After Mao’s death, it was impossible for him [Hua Kuo-feng] to refuse the chairmanship; the alternative was to hand it over to Chiang Ching with both hands.
The author explains that the struggle was one between Hua Kuo-feng and Chiang Ching and represented a struggle between two political lines. The present leaders now repeat constantly that Hua Kuo-feng was Chairman Mao’s personal choice as his successor to the Party chairmanship. If this is true, it was a very carefully guarded secret until Mao’s death (and until after the subsequent purge)! Hua’s selection as Acting Premier in February of 1976 set him up, rather, for the premiership, since it is completely unprecedented for both posts to be held by the same person.
The pretext for the purge and the manner in which it was carried out are described in The Rise and Fall of the Gang of Four in the following manner:
On October 4, the ’gang of four’ used their pen-name, Liang Hsiao, to publish the essay ’Forever Act According to the Principles Laid Down by Chairman Mao’ in Guangming Ribao. In it they stated that ’to alter the principles laid down by Chairman Mao is anti-Marxist, anti-socialist. It’s against the great theory of the continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. . any revisionist chieftan who dares to alter the principles laid down by Chairman Mao will not come to a good end.’ The essay also raised the question of how to select someone to ’succeed the greatly talented one who has died. ’ . . Hua Kuo-feng, after reading the article, reportedly told some people in the Politburo that this was a signal for attack. Yeh Chien-ying was of the opinion that ’the four pests should be eliminated.’ They independently set about carrying out this plan. On October 6, Hua suddenly called a meeting of the Politburo. The four people were arrested on the spot. Their proteges were rounded up the same evening. On the morning of October 7, Keng Piao, head of the International Liaison Department of the Party Central Committee, took over the People’s Daily, the Hsinhua News Agency and the radio station. Troops were sent to Tsinghua University, Peking University, and Hsiaochinchuang at Tientsin where the ’gang of four’ maintained strongholds. Hsu Shih-yu proceeded to the Nanking Military Region to assume temporary control of Shanghai. The Central Committee sent Su Chen-hua, Ni Chih-fu, and Peng Chung to take over the posts held by Chang Chun-chiao, Yao Wen-yuan, and Wang Hung-wen in Shanghai. Shenyang was also temporarily placed under army control. The whole thing was so neatly executed that a Yugoslav newspaper called it ’the most clear-cut and beautiful political battle in the modern history of mankind.’
The author congratulates Hua for his “political courage and decisiveness.” He could just as well have congratulated him for his cunning in carrying out a well-planned conspiracy. This is what is described. Instead of allowing the question of succession and future political line of the Party to be decided in open debate at the Third Plenary Session of the Central Committee of October 7th (the first meeting of the Central Committee since January, 1975), the revisionists independently decided it by a military coup the day before the meeting.
It is impossible to determine how many leading cadre have been purged, removed from their posts, or arrested. A very incomplete list gathered by one-here-one-there method includes, besides Yao Wen-yuan, Chiang Ching, Chang Chun-chiao, and Wang Hung-wen: the Minister of Education, Chou Hung-pao, the Vice-Minister of Education and head of Tsinghua University Chih Chun, the leaders of the Worker-Propaganda Teams in Peking, Tsinghua, and many other universities and schools, Chang Tieh Sheng, a hero of the revolution in education, along with 30 other leaders of Tiehling Agricultural College and many other student leaders as well as teachers in other schools, the Minister of Culture Yu Hui-yung and the Vice-Minister of Culture as well as many writers and artists, the head of Hsinhua (New China) News Agency, Editor of Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily, official organ of the Central Committee), the editors of Hongqi (Red Flag.. the Party’s theoretical journal), and Hsuehshi Yu Pipan (Study and Criticism, a Shanghai theoretical journal), the heads of Peking’s radio and T.V. stations as well as many other reporters of newspapers, magazines, and radio and T.V. stations in China, Chairman Mao and Chiang Ching’s daughter, Mao Yuan-hsin, Chairman Mao’s nephew and personal secretary (in charge of all appointments and documents) as well as the Party Secretary of the Province of Liaoning, the Minister of Public Health, Liu Hsiang-ning, the Minister in Charge of Physical Culture and Sports, Chuang Tse-tung, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chiao Kuan-hua, 16 ambassadors to foreign countries (recalled, we don’t know for what purpose), leaders of the Shanghai and Peking Workers’ Militia and, we assume, leaders of the people’s militia’s throughout the country (who had no ready access to arms), the six top Party and Municipal leaders in Shanghai and at least the two top Party leaders in Yunnan as well as nine military leaders in Yunnan Province, the Second Secretary of Liaoning Provincial Party Committee, the Deputy Secretary of the Anhwei Provincial Party Committee, the First Party Secretary of Kwangsi Autonomous Region, the Director of Public Security in Peking, workers and leaders and Party committee members in many factories in Shanghai, Wuhan, and Peking, the Central Chinese Railroad (including the entire leadership of the Changchow Railway Bureau, the largest in China), and many other cities throughout China, and Party committee members in many communes. (This partial listing is gathered from reports in N.Y. Times, Washington Post, the Rocky Mountain News, Current Scene, and various references in Peking Review.)
The purge first took place in the central leading bodies such as the Central Committee and the various ministries of the State Council. Peking Review #16, 1977 (p. 9) explained that the Central Committee after the original arrests:
. . took effective measures to seize back the leadership usurped or controlled by the ’gang of four’ in the fields of propaganda, culture and education and solve the problems in those areas and departments which were dominated by the ’gang of four’ or affected by their sabotage; and called the ’Second National Conference on learning from Tachai in Agriculture’ and a number of other important conferences and will soon call the ’National Conference on Learning from Taching in Industry.’
The purge is continuing across China in an attempt to isolate the strongest and most resolute leaders from the masses. The two major conferences that have been called on the agricultural and industrial fronts, under the guise of “Learning from Tachai” and “Learning from Taching” have been important events in carrying out the “rectification.” These, along with lower-level conferences on railroad, petroleum and light industry have as their central goal consolidating control of the present leadership in the various industrial and agricultural fronts by re-organizing the local leadership and removing their opponents. In the “National Conference on Learning from Taching in Industry,” held in May, 1977, Yu Chiu-li, Vice Premier of the State Council, gave this description of the goals of the “rectification” in progress:
This job [the removal of the ’followers of the gang of four’] has not yet been taken up in a satisfactory way in a few localities and units mainly because the leadership there either fails to grasp the key link or is encumbered with personal concerns and therefore fainthearted and hesitant in action. In some cases, the leading comrades themselves do not have clean hands and, moreover, are reluctant to make a clean break with the gang and tell everything to the Party and to the masses . . The higher leading bodies concerned must take effective measures in the light of the concrete situation to solve the problems in these units as soon as possible so that they can rapidly catch up with our present excellent situation.
The Party committees of the provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, as well as the departments concerned, should seriously analyze and study the-leadings bodies of the enterprises under their administration. The Party committees of the provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions and the departments concerned should directly help those enterprises which have many problems in their leading bodies and quickly solve these problems one after another without delay. Special attention must be paid to selecting and appointing the two top leaders in each enterprise. This year we must first of all do a good job of consolidating the leading bodies of key enterprises which affect the national economy as a whole. (PR #22, 1977, pp. 12-13 and p. 19)
At the “National Conference on Learning from Tachai in Agriculture”, Hua Kuo-feng, present Chairman of the Central Committee, Premier of the State Council, and Chairman of the Military Commission, called for the continued criticism of the “gang of four” and the “rectification” to be the “central task for 1977,” and went on to say:
Plans have been made at this conference for Party consolidation and rectification in the countryside. The Central Committee is going to launch a movement of Party consolidation and rectification throughout the Party at an opportune moment next year. On the basis of ideological education, we should conscientiously, resolutely, and carefully solve the problem of varying degrees of impurity in ideology, organization, and style of work . . At an appropriate time next year, Peoples’ Congresses should be held in the provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions, and after full discussion and democratic consultation, comrades who meet the five requirements for worthy successors set forth by Chairman Mao, maintain close links with the masses, and have their genuine support should be elected into Revolutionary Committees, leading bodies composed of the old, the middle-aged, and the young, which should be enabled to play a more active role under the centralized leadership of the Party. (PR #1, 1977, pp. 40-41)
It’s obvious the present leaders plan a complete reorganization and “rectification” of the Party at all levels and a re-election of all the leaders of the masses at a local level. An article in Peking Review #10, 1977, shows how the continued purge is taking place, by sending work teams from the Center around the country to carry out “criticism and rectification”:
Party committees in all provinces, prefectures and counties have given top priority to this task [to criticize the ’gang of f our’] of paramount importance. Numerous work teams made up of office workers and cadres have been sent to the countryside. Some 400,000 work-team members have been dispatched to the rural areas in the five provinces of Honan, Anhwei, Szechuan, Shansi and Fukien alone since the beginning of the year.
The five provinces mentioned here are among fourteen provinces in China where the new leaders admit having serious problems in consolidating their control. In Honan the Army was sent in to take over the administration of the Chengchow Railroad Bureau (the largest railroad junction in the country), in Fukien 12, 000 soldiers were sent in to various cities, rural villages, mines, government offices, schools, and neighborhoods to quell disturbances, and the situation in Swezhuan has been described as in “a state of civil war” by the new leaders.
According to the bourgeois press, Peking Radio broadcasts have reported that PLA troops have been sent to Chekiang, Kiangsu, Fukien, Szechuan, and Kuangtung provinces to put down disturbances, and have battled peoples’ militia units in Chekiang and Kiangsu provinces, resulting in hundreds of deaths (Rocky Mt. News, Feb. 24, 1977). According to other reports, intense conflict over the continuing purge has also occurred in Hupeh, Hopeh, Kiangsi, Hunan, Anhwei, Shensi, Shansi, and Liaoning provinces (from Chinese radio broadcasts as cited by the N.Y. Times of December 25, 30, 31, 1976, and Jan. 4, 1977).
The “rectification”, which took place at first only in Peking and Shanghai, and particularly in the central leading bodies, has by now progressed to local levels. It is a process that is meeting strong resistance. The work teams and the army are the two main forces in the campaign to consolidate revisionist power.
We have little information as to the names of the replacements in the ministries and on a local level, and less as to the history of the replacements. However, those we do know about follow a consistent pattern. Su Chen-hua, who replaced Chang Chun-chiao as First Party Secretary in Shanghai, was a top Party leader before the Cultural Revolution but was criticized during that Revolution and was not admitted to the 9th Central Committee. He was readmitted to the 10th Central Committee in 1973 along with Teng Hsiao-ping. The new Minister of Culture, Hua Shan, is a journalist who was criticized during the Cultural Revolution. An Ping-sheng, new Party Secretary in Yunnan province was for 10 years deputy to Wei Kuo-ching, one of the remaining members of the Political Bureau who was Party Secretary of Kwangtung province. Both violently suppressed the Red Guards at the outset of the Cultural Revolution. An Ping-sheng’s new Deputy Secretary and Vice Chairman of the Yunnan Province Revolutionary Committee, Cen Pei Hsien, was the Party Secretary of Shanghai before the revisionist power structure there was overthrown in the Cultural Revolution. In the accounts of the January Storm in Shanghai one can read about his exploits to try to beat back the Rebel Workers’ Movement during the Cultural Revolution and to defend his revisionist clique which ruled Shanghai. The former Railway Minister and close associate of Teng Hsiao-ping, Wan Li, who was removed in the spring of 1976, is now reported by the bourgeois press to be Minister of Light Industry. The Railway Ministry is now run by Tuan Chun-yi, who was removed during the Cultural Revolution for promoting revisionist policies as head of the Ministry of Farm Equipment.
Apologists for the new government emphasize the “mistakes” made during the Cultural Revolution and say these are now being “corrected.” Considering the general pattern of the changeover in leadership now taking place, it seems more likely the present leaders consider the entire Cultural Revolution a “big mistake”. Many of the remaining members of the Political Bureau, such as Yeh Chien-ying, Hsu Shi-yu, Su Chen-hua, Wei Kuo-ching, and Li Hsien-nien resisted the Cultural Revolution all the way along.
Let us make it clear that we have nothing against purges, reorganizations, and rectifications of parties, if it is done to help build socialism, clean out the capitalist-readers, and consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat. But what is the purpose of this “rectification”? To clean out leaders that uphold Marxism-Leninism, consolidate the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and restore capitalism.
The fact that millions of people came to the gigantic rallies that were held to “celebrate the victory over the ’gang of four’ and support Chairman Hua” convinced many people that the “gang of four” must be wrong and Hua right. It does show that the Right can mobilize people in China in its support, especially when it has Party power in its hands. The Right definitely has some pull with a sector of the Chinese people, as it demonstrated in mobilizing huge contingents of workers and students to fight the Rebels in the Cultural Revolution. In some cities, such as Shanghai, they mobilized many hundreds of thousands of workers in such opportunistically-named contingents as the “Scarlet Guards to defend Mao Tse-tung Thought” to fight the Rebels and the goals of the Cultural Revolution. They caused much confusion and nearly outnumbered the Rebels in some cases, such as in Wuhan. The struggle during the Cultural Revolution was no simple one-sided battle.
Once again, in April of 1976, the Right made a violent show of strength trying to rally masses of people to demonstrate in support of Teng Hsiao-ping. Even in these anti-Party demonstrations, they rallied hundreds of thousands of people, and now that they have Party control, it’s not surprising at all that they can mobilize millions. The fact that several million of China’s 800 million people came out in support of the new government is not decisive in deciding which line is right, or who will ultimately win.
Given the fact that the PLA is in the hands of the Right and that it was used to defend the takeover, it is not surprising that the opponents of the purge did not come out into the streets in massive demonstrations or plaster the walls with big-character posters. The struggle will now be a protracted struggle, not a matter of a week of demonstrations or factory takeovers. The strategy that the Chinese communist revolutionaries now follow must be determined carefully by them, given the situation that is developing in China.