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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 Sep. - 6 Oct. 1999 Issue No. 449 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 Sep. - 6 Oct. 1999 Issue No. 449
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The Chinese Revolution's jubilee
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
Although the Cultural Revolution was drawing to a close, the ideological climate in which it had been unleashed was still very much there when an Al-Ahram team led by Heikal visited China in January 1974. At a meeting with Prime Minister Chou En Lai and a number of prominent Chinese personalities, Heikal said to Chou while pointing a finger in my direction: "We have among us a friend of the Soviets here. I would like him to put a question to you". In China at the time, there was no crime worse than being labeled pro-Soviet, and I felt my ears growing redder than the Chinese flag. But I gathered my courage in both hands and stood up in the big hall filled with top Chinese dignitaries and officials and said: "We are all very impressed by the achievements of China's Cultural Proletarian Revolution. But I do not understand why China needed to launch a second proletarian revolution when it had successfully launched its Proletarian Revolution in 1949. Did the need arise because China is a socialist country or because it is an underdeveloped country?"
After first admitting that my question was relevant, Chou asked me whether I had read Mao's book on Contradictions in the Ranks of the People. My answer that its relevance lay in classifying contradictions as either antagonistic or non-antagonistic convinced him that I had, and he proceeded to reply to my question. He began by asking: "Why do you assume that there can be many bourgeois revolutions, as was the case in France, but that there should only be one socialist revolution?" He answered his question by saying: "It is because you are assuming that contradictions exist in capitalist societies while they disappear in a socialist society, and our experience has proved to us that this assumption is wrong". He added: "Contradictions continue to exist for a long time in a socialist society and do not disappear simply because the working class has taken over state power."
"Moreover, not all contradictions in a socialist society are non-antagonistic. Not all can be solved by re-education and non-violent means.
There are also antagonistic contradictions that arise not only because the former exploiting classes which the Revolution rose to liquidate are never totally extirpated, but also because of the emergence of new exploiting classes in the new society itself, classes that build up vested interests, and which gradually get separated from the masses. These are what we call the 'capitalist-roaders'".
"These anti-socialist forces do not only emerge far away from the socialist state-power, but are most dangerous when they emerge within the circles of state-power itself, even within the leadership of the Communist Party and at the head of the state. Not all those who call themselves the representatives of the working class are genuine advocates of the socialist path."
Chou went on to say: "There are many reasons for the emergence of anti-socialist forces: the gaps in a country like China between town and countryside, between intellectual and manual work, between work related to developed technology and work related to primitive means of production. These discrepancies are inherited from the old China and will not disappear for a long time."
"The sections of society that deal with advanced technology constitute small islands in the vast sea of China's countryside, and therefore tend to move away from the masses and become condescending towards them. If this phenomenon is allowed to grow unchecked, it can end up bestowing special privileges on the higher echelons of the administration and other elites. The Cultural Revolution was launched to combat such evils. But no revolution is pure. It often becomes bloody and can appear chaotic".
It was unheard of at the time for a member of the Chinese leadership to appear in any way critical of the Cultural Revolution led by Mao himself, let along describe it as 'bloody' and 'chaotic'. The fact that Chou En Lai had broken this taboo raised the question of whether he was in fact nothing but a loyal executive implementing the line drawn by Mao or the advocate of a different line.
Indeed, I could not believe that Chou's input was limited to implementing Mao's line, that a man of his insight, culture, vision and wisdom did not make an active contribution to the development of Mao's thinking. It is well known that Chou was assigned the task of leading the state while Mao devoted most of his time and thinking to the revolution. My question was: was Chou's genius devoted only to finding formulations for the implementation of Mao's though, particularly in the field of managing the state, which is to be protected against uninterrupted revolutionary upheaval, or did Chou think differently from Mao, which would explain his use of words like 'bloody' and 'chaotic' to describe the Cultural Revolution.
While Chou was still alive (he died one year before Mao), Deng Tsiao Peng, the former secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party and one of the earliest victims of the Cultural Revolution, was rehabilitated and projected to the forefront of the political stage after an absence of nearly ten years. When Chou died, however, he was once again expelled from all his functions, this time at the behest of the Gang of Four, which included Mao's wife.
His second fall from grace did not last long. Following Mao's death, Deng, who had refused the second time round to engage in public self-criticism or to admit that he was a 'capitalist-roader', finally won the fierce power struggle that was played out at the top echelons of the Communist Party. This leads me to believe that Chou did not represent Mao as much as he did those who attempted, albeit with great caution, to temper the revolutionary excesses Mao unleashed in the name of the Socialist Revolution and against the 'capitalist-roaders'. In a way, Deng's victory represented a victory for the line of Chou En Lai over the line of Mao Tse Tung.
Today, as we stand on the threshold of a new century, with Mao, Chou, Deng and many of the leaders who shaped modern China's destiny long gone, a full half century after the communists seized power over the whole of mainland China, with all the glories and disasters of this great adventure, is the question I put to Chou En Lai 25 years ago still relevant? I think it is, though now I might perhaps rephrase it differently: Is China's central problem that of socialism or that of development and modernisation? Did China, the most populous country on earth, choose the socialist path, attribute itself to Communism and join the world socialist camp to accelerate development and catch up with the modern world, or is the opposite true: that China considered Communism an end in itself, and development the means to reach that end? It is worth noting here that Chinese Communism is largely home-grown, with very little imported from the outside world.
From the start, China has been careful to build a communism that borrowed very little from the Soviet experience. Very early on, Mao rebelled against the visions of Communism propounded by Khrustchev and Breghnev. Much later, China's leaders condemned Perestroika for introducing political reforms before bringing about the necessary economic reforms which would have guaranteed their stability. And, indeed, the Soviet Union collapsed while Communist China did not. But is China genuinely communist, or is it, rather, a very special case of a country seeking modernisation in the age of globalisation with many odds stacked against it?
This and many other questions come to mind on the occasion of China's Golden Jubilee. What exactly is China's identity today? Is its communism just a cover to justify vilifying democracy, thwarting youth and student movements (along the lines of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989), violating human rights and ensuring the supremacy of a new class of profiteers enjoying state and party privileges at the expense of the rest of the people, the very class Mao sought to crush with his Cultural Revolution? In a word, have the 'capitalist-roaders' succeeded in gaining the upper hand? Has power passed over to a state-capitalist bureaucracy which, though it can be credited with achieving an undeniable amount of modernisation, and which promises, as the new century unfolds, to build a powerful China, cannot claim to be socialist, nor that it can ensure balanced development or curtail unemployment, crime or widespread corruption. A China without dreams, but that will have avoided the sufferings of many other dismantled Socialist states.
Although its Revolution is no longer a legend, China could, together with Japan (whatever the differences between the two states) become the pillar of an Asian version of modernisation with scarcely anything borrowed from the Western liberal path to modernity. In this eastern version of globalisation, the notion of clash of civilisations will have superseded class struggle in determining the features of the new century.
