China entered the socialist period of its development in the late 1950’s. At that time the major contradiction in the society had become that between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The two-line struggle within the Party developed around this contradiction.
In 1957, Chairman Mao, recognizing the danger of bureaucracy, called for a criticism-self-criticism rectification campaign and issued his Hundred Flowers speech. The Right took advantage of the campaign to launch an attack on socialist construction and push for increasing bourgeois right. Chairman Mao changed the emphasis to make it into an anti-Right campaign after the Right had exposed their dangerous bourgeois line.
In 1958, after the victory of the anti-Right struggle, and guided by the general line laid down by Chairman Mao of “going all out, aiming high and achieving greater, faster, better, and more economic results in building socialism,” hundreds of millions of people criticized the philosophy of servility to foreign things and trailing behind at a snail’s pace. It was under these circumstances that the Great Leap Forward in economic construction and the Peoples’ Commune Movement emerged, pushing socialism in China a big step forward. However, the struggle did not cease. In 1959, the P’eng Teh-huai anti-Party clique advocated tailing behind the Soviet revisionists and attacked the Great Leap Forward and the Peoples’ Commune Movement. Later, taking advantage of the temporary economic difficulties resulting from three consecutive years of natural disasters and the Soviet revisionist renegade clique’s act of tearing up contracts and withdrawing experts, Liu Shao-chi and company again opposed Chairman Mao’s correct line, advocating retreating from the Commune Movement and returning to the use of private plots and private profits and advocating a retreat and consolidation of class relations in industry.
Perceiving the danger of Liu Shao-chi’s revisionist counter-revolutionary line, Chairman Mao launched a massive Socialist Education Movement throughout the cities and countryside in 1964 and issued the call to never forget class struggle. However, Liu Shao-chi tried to use the Socialist Education Movement for his own purposes, sending out work teams to direct the spearhead of the attack down at lower and middle cadres. At this point, Chairman Mao explicitly pointed out that: “The main target of the present movement is those Party persons in power taking the capitalist road.” In 1966, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was launched, organizing the masses of workers and peasants to rectify the Party and to move China forward on the socialist road. On August 8th, 1966, the Central Committee of the Communist Party released the 16 points which guided the Cultural Revolution and which said, among other things:
The masses of the workers, peasants, soldiers, revolutionary intellectuals and revolutionary cadres form the main force in this great Cultural Revolution. Large numbers of revolutionary young people, previously unknown, have become courageous and daring pathbreakers. They are vigorous in action and intelligent. Through the media of big-character posters and great debates, they argue things out, expose and criticize thoroughly, and launch resolute attacks on the open and hidden representatives of the bourgeoisie. In such a great revolutionary movement, it is hardly avoidable that they should show shortcomings of one kind or another; however, their general revolutionary orientation has been correct from the beginning. This is the main current in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
It is the general direction along which this revolution continues to advance. Since the Cultural Revolution is a revolution, it inevitably meets with resistance. This resistance comes chiefly from those in authority who have wormed their way into the Party and are taking the capitalist road. It also comes from the force of habits from the old society. At present, this resistance is still fairly strong and stubborn. But after all, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is an irresistible general trend. There is abundant evidence that such resistance will be quickly broken down once the masses become fully aroused. Because the resistance is fairly strong, there will be reversals and even repeated reversals in this struggle. There is no harm in this. It tempers the proletariat and other working people, and especially the younger generation, teaches them lessons and gives them experience, and helps their, to understand that the revolutionary road zigzags and does not run smoothly.
In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the only method is for the masses to liberate themselves, and any method of doing things in their stead must not be used. Trust the masses, rely on them and respect their initiative. Cast out fear. Don’t be afraid of disturbances. Chairman Mao has often told us that revolution cannot be so very refined, so gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. Let the masses educate themselves in this great revolutionary movement and learn to distinguish right and wrong and between correct and incorrect ways of doing things.
Who are our enemies, Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution and it is likewise a question of the first importance for the great Cultural Revolution. Party leadership should be good at discovering the Left and developing and strengthening the ranks of the Left; it should firmly rely on the revolutionary Left. During the movement that is the only way to isolate the most reactionary Rightists thoroughly, win over the middle and unite with the great majority so that by the end of the movement we shall achieve the unity of more than 95 per cent of the cadres and more than 95 per cent of the masses. Concentrate all forces to strike at the handful of ultra-reactionary bourgeois Rightists and counter-revolutionary revisionists, and expose and criticize to the full their crimes against the Party, against socialism and against Mao Tse-tung’s thought so as to isolate them to the maximum. The main target of the present movement is those within the Party who are in authority and are taking the capitalist road.
During the Cultural Revolution Liu Shao-chi’s bourgeois headquarters was smashed by the mass movement. Following this the Lin Piao anti-Party clique surfaced. Lin Piao used ultra-“Left” and proletarian slogans but the essence of his revisionist line was Right. He advocated an end to the dictatorship of the proletariat, suggested that class struggle had been solved and that production was the main task after the Cultural Revolution. As Commander of the Peoples’ Liberation Army he tried to take the Army out of the Party’s control, usurp military power and then political power. His line and his plot to seize power were defeated and a movement to criticize Lin Piao and Confucius grew out of that struggle.
One of the “gang of four”, Wang Hung-wen, a Shanghai worker who, as a leader of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was later elected to be Senior Vice-Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, reiterated the Party’s principle of criticism on a mass level at the Tenth Party Congress in 1973:
Ours is a socialist country under the dictatorship of the proletariat. The working class, the poor and lower-middle peasants, and the masses of working people are the masters of our country. They have the right to exercize revolutionary supervision over cadres of all ranks of our Party and state organs. This concept has taken deeper root in our Party, thanks to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. However, there are still a small number of cadres, especially some leading cadres, who will not tolerate differing views inside or outside the Party. They even suppress criticism and retaliate and it is quite serious in some cases . . Party discipline absolutely forbids such wrong practices. . We should approach this question from the high plane of two-line struggle to understand it and resolutely fight against such violations of Party discipline. We must have faith in the masses, rely on them, constantly use the weapons of arousing the masses to air their views freely, write big-character posters and hold great debates and strive to create a political situation in which there are both centralism and democracy, both discipline and freedom, both unity of will and personal ease of mind and liveliness, so as to facilitate our socialist revolution and socialist construction. (PR #35, 1973, p. 33)
The struggle launched by Chairman Mao at the end of 1975 to beat back the Right deviationist trend was a continuation of the long two-line struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. As the following passage predicts, the struggle became increasingly antagonistic during the months that followed:
The great victories we have won since the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution undoubtedly constitute a shattering defeat for the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes. They will never take this defeat lying down but will invariably wait for an opportunity to stage a vengeful counterattack in an attempt to reverse the previous verdicts passed during the Cultural Revolution. (PR #6, 1976, p. 7)
In the following sections we will go into specific manifestations of the two-line struggle in five sectors of Chinese society that have been fully discussed in Peking Review during the past two years, during the course of the struggle to beat back the Right deviationist trend and during the current period of reversal of that struggle. These sectors are education, literature and art, healthcare, agriculture, and industry.