Vol. 72/No. 2      January 14, 2008

From the start, Washington and other imperialist powers imposed tremendous political, economic, and military pressures on the young workers state. The U.S. government refused to recognize the government, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Instead, it insisted that the capitalist regime that Chiang Kai-shek had set up on the Chinese island of Taiwan was the legitimate representative of the Chinese people.

Washington cut off trade with China. U.S. troops in south Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, plus the U.S. Seventh Fleet patrolling off China’s shores, kept the revolution encircled.

In spite of this, major social changes took place rapidly in the new China. Hundreds of millions of peasants won ownership of the land they worked and an end to debt slavery. The production of electrical power increased by 400 percent, coal by 300 percent, textiles by more than 100 percent, and steel by more than 1,100 percent within the first decade of the revolution.

Working people also advanced culturally. The number of children attending elementary school nearly tripled from 22 percent in 1950 to 60 percent in 1958. Women by the millions began entering social and political life. Curable diseases such as polio, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and tetanus were virtually wiped out. The accomplishments were dramatically superior to those of neighboring India, which won independence from Britain in 1947 but, unlike China, remained under capitalist rule and imperialist domination.

The previous article (see December 24 issue) explained how the Stalinist leadership of the CCP under Mao Zedong tried to restrain the mobilizations of workers and peasants and hold off a socialist revolution, until mounting imperialist threats led it to change course. Once in power, the Communist Party continued to give priority to the interests of a privileged middle-class layer, not the working class and peasantry. It feared the initiatives of the masses and sought to regiment them, putting a lid on political discussion of how to move forward.

From the mid-1920s, the CCP had followed the line of the Communist International dominated by Joseph Stalin, adopting its zigzags between ultraleft adventurism and right-wing opportunism, depending on the prerogatives of the bureaucratic caste in the Soviet Union. Now in power itself, the CCP approached political questions from the narrow nationalist interests of the bureaucratic caste it was consolidating in China. That meant putting the brakes on the workers and peasants who strove to place their stamp on the unfolding revolution.

In the countryside, peasants sought to consolidate and extend the gains of the revolution through the formation of small-scale cooperatives, whereby several families shared tools, animals, and labor to increase production and living standards. This initiative was endorsed by the government in 1951.

But in 1955 Mao launched an adventurous course of administratively trying to speed up the pace of development without the mobilization or leadership of the rural and urban masses. The peasant-led cooperatives were replaced by bureaucratically imposed “higher-stage” cooperatives in which party and government officials, not those working the land, became the administrators. Some peasants resisted the change, including by slaughtering their livestock.

In 1958 the CCP declared the “Great Leap Forward, “a campaign to supposedly turn China rapidly into an industrial giant under the slogan “Catch up with England in 15 years.” A sizable segment of the rural population was organized into industrial production and construction. “People’s communes” were decreed. Each such unit grouped together 5,000 peasant families who were to give up their private homes and plots of land to live communally and work under near military conditions. This policy followed the course of forced collectivization of land that the Stalin regime had brutally imposed on peasants in the Soviet Union.

Families were pressed to set up primitive steel-making furnaces in their backyards and to collect scrap metal, including personal belongings, to melt down. A productivity push also took place in the factories, with callous disregard for workers’ health and safety.

The Great Leap Forward was a disaster. Food grain production dropped from about 200 million to 150 million metric tons from 1958 to 1960. Famine began to spread, claiming an estimated one million lives. In industry, the frantic drive for production led to a sharp decline in the quality of goods produced. The backyard steel furnaces made little usable steel but wasted enormous amounts of labor. By 1959 the Mao regime was forced to back away from that policy and the “people’s communes.”  
 
Defeat in Indonesia
Not long afterward, the Stalinist misleadership in China was responsible for a devastating defeat for the working class, this time in Indonesia. As in many semicolonial countries, the Indonesian toilers identified with the Chinese revolution and looked to its leadership.

The Chinese CP advised the Indonesian Communist Party to bloc with the “progressive” wing of the bourgeoisie represented by President Sukarno. From the narrow nationalist—as opposed to internationalist—perspective of the CCP, it was preferable to maintain good relations with Sukarno, who had diplomatic relations and carried out trade with China, than to lead Indonesian working people to organize for socialist revolution.

Politically demobilized, workers were unprepared in 1965 when General Suharto led a coup that, with little resistance, crushed the workers movement and massacred hundreds of thousands of members and supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party, the third-largest CP in the world. It was the biggest defeat for the international working class since the victory of fascism in Germany in the 1930s.  
 
‘Cultural Revolution,’ Red Guards
Shortly after the disaster in Indonesia, the Mao leadership launched what it called the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in China. It had nothing to do with advancing the proletariat, culture, or revolution. Its goal was to purge Mao’s opponents from party and government positions of power and to consolidate his faction in control.

Millions of teenage youth were mobilized across the country into contingents of the “Red Guards” to root out those branded as “capitalist roaders” and “bourgeois” elements. The targets were Mao’s political rivals, but a wide range of cultural figures and intellectuals were the initial victims. Instead of an open debate on questions that sorely needed discussion—from the Indonesia debacle, to how to advance the Chinese economy, to the lack of workers’ democracy—Mao’s opponents were simply accused of being counterrevolutionaries seeking to restore capitalism.

What followed was a giant assault on progress and culture. Following the bureaucrats’ dictates, the Red Guards arbitrarily went after anything they deemed might deviate from “Mao Zedong Thought”: Greek and Roman statues, plays by Shakespeare, anyone wearing jewelry or sporting a “bourgeois” haircut. Many schools were closed for several years. The number of periodicals in the country dropped 1,300 to about 50. Most books became unobtainable. The exception was the writings of Mao—books of catechisms whose possession proved one’s loyalty to the CP chairman, the very opposite of scientific socialism.

Thousands were killed in sharp clashes between rival factions. Many party and government office holders were removed and imprisoned, or publicly humiliated and brutalized.

In 1969, once Mao felt his faction was securely in control of the party, army, and government, he unceremoniously dumped the Red Guards, many of whom were shipped off to the countryside for a lifetime of forced “reeducation.”

While this destructive factional warfare raged in China, the workers and peasants of nearby Vietnam were battling half a million U.S. troops. Precious little political or material aid was extended to the Vietnam liberation fighters by either Moscow or Beijing. Both Stalinist regimes rejected the pressing need for a united front against the imperialist war, based on the narrow interests of their respective bureaucratic castes.

Mao died in 1976. In the subsequent power grab by competing bureaucrats, his faction was ousted. But the new leaders of China were cut from the same cloth as the old. The next article will take up the developments that ensued.

Link to second article in series