6 - 12 September 2001
Issue No.550
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 6 - 12 September 2001 Issue No.550 |
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Revisiting China
Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, visiting China, remembers his first trip -- right after the Cultural Revolution
Two days ago, I began a 10-day visit to China at the invitation of the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs, as part of a delegation from the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs. This was my second visit to China, and it was separated from my first by 28 eventful years. I was curious to see the changes that had occurred in the nearly three decades since my last visit, which took place in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. At the time, I was a member of an Al-Ahram delegation headed by the paper's chief editor at the time, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal.
One of the highlights of that visit was a three-hour meeting the Al-Ahram team had with the legendary Zhou Enlai. Before we entered the great hall in which the Chinese prime minister received his guests, Heikal told me that he would be calling on me during the meeting to put a question to our host. It was just as well that I was given advance warning, because in the middle of the discussion, Heikal suddenly pointed in my direction and told Zhou Enlai that I was "a friend of the Soviets" who wanted to ask him a question. With the Soviet and Chinese locked in a fierce ideological battle, it was just about the worst introduction I could have had. I felt my ears turning red, but Zhou Enlai, true mandarin that he was, seemed more amused than annoyed and graciously invited me to speak.
Collecting myself, I managed to ask him the question I had prepared, which was why China felt the need to launch a second proletarian revolution -- in effect what the Cultural Revolution amounted to -- when it had successfully accomplished its first in 1949. Was the need dictated by the fact that China was a socialist state, or by the fact that it was an underdeveloped state?
Zhou Enlai replied to my question with a question of his own, asking me whether I had read Mao Zedong's books, On Contradiction and Contradictions in the Ranks of the People. I replied that I had, adding that I found Mao's ideas on antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions a fascinating and valuable contribution to Marxist literature. Satisfied that I had indeed read the books, Zhou Enlai proceeded to answer my question: "Why should you assume that, in a given society, it is normal that there could be several bourgeois revolutions, but that there can be only one socialist revolution? In France, for instance, there have been a succession of bourgeois revolutions, beginning with the great French Revolution of 1789, another revolution in 1830 and yet another in 1848, not to mention the Paris Commune in 1870. You proceed from the assumption that bourgeois revolutions are not expected to eliminate class struggle, while a socialist revolution is. In this logic, it follows that if there is a need for a second socialist revolution, socialism has not been realised. But things are not that simple, especially in non-developed societies where class struggle has not reached maturity, even if state power is in the hands of a genuine socialist leadership."
According to Zhou Enlai, even under a socialist leadership popular aspirations can be thwarted by what he called "the bureaucracy." To our amazement, he described the Cultural Revolution as "bloody," but justified it as necessary to shake the bureaucracy, which, by its very nature, is opposed to change. Developing societies in particular cannot allow the bureaucracy to become too powerful, as this inevitably leads to freezing the status quo and impeding development, which in turn keeps society shackled to the bonds of backwardness. He then moved on to talk at some length of the tense relations, or antagonistic contradictions, between China and the Soviet Union, obviously from a Chinese perspective.
Although antagonistic contradictions are supposed to be exclusive to bourgeois class societies, the two countries that both attributed themselves to socialism developed an antagonistic contradiction between them. How to explain that relations between socialist states can deteriorate to the point where the laws of capitalism, not of socialism, come to govern their relationship?
Over half a century ago, the triumphant march of the Red Army into Beijing consecrated the victory of the socialist revolution in China. Soon after, Mao visited Moscow and remained almost a year in the Soviet capital. It was believed at the time that his lengthy stay abroad was to draw on the experience of the Soviet Union in building socialism. But today we know that a very serious quarrel developed between Mao and Stalin. The requirements of a socialist revolution in an underdeveloped country like China differed immensely from what the Soviet experience had been, both internally and at the global level.
Publicly, both Stalin and Mao spoke of the "indestructible friendship that unites the two socialist states." No one could imagine how deep the rift was to become, especially in the '60s, when Mao openly distanced himself from the Soviet line by launching the Cultural Revolution.
Today, we are witnessing a new rapprochement between Russia and China. The Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, recently visited Moscow and signed an agreement with President Putin. Russia is no longer a communist state, while China maintains that it is, albeit one with very specific characteristics. Neither Russia nor China deny that antagonistic contradictions operate within their societies, but for the first time the relationship between them is regarded as non-antagonistic. Is it because the ideological component in their relationship has disappeared? A common ideology in the past, communism, was not enough to suppress the antagonistic nature of that relationship. Now that they no longer share a common ideology, can the two states build a more solid relationship?
A question that intrigued me the last time I visited China was whether Zhou Enlai was just a brilliant executive who applied Mao's policies or the architect of a policy of his own. I left the meeting with the Chinese prime minister convinced that he did not have a personal agenda but was simply putting Mao's policies into effect. But with hindsight, I have come to believe the opposite. Zhou was instrumental in ensuring the smooth transition of power after Mao's death. It was he who protected and ensured the comeback of Deng Ziaoping, one of the main victims of the Cultural Revolution. Zhou's main concern was to ensure the perpetuation and survival of the Chinese state, while Mao was more concerned with preserving the ideological fervour of the Chinese Revolution, whatever its destabilising effects.
At a seminar in Yugoslavia some 20 years ago, I met a Chinese activist who had suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution. This was after the death of both Zhou and Mao, and after the removal of the Gang of Four who, led by Mao's widow Jiang Qing, represented the most extreme wing of the Cultural Revolution. It was they who invented the term "capitalist-roaders," the worst epithet that could be hurled at anyone during those turbulent years. I remember the Chinese activist telling me that he hated Mao for the havoc he had wrought on China, but held Zhou in high esteem as its saviour. It seems the convulsions China was going through mirrored an intense power struggle within the ruling establishment that was not visible to the external world. In a way, the Cultural Revolution was an expression of antagonistic contradictions superseding all other considerations.
Now the presidents of China and Russia have come together, not in the name of ideology, but of realism, stability and peace. Both socialist experiments suffered from defeats. The leaders in both countries admitted that basic reforms were needed. The Soviets under Gorbatchev introduced perestroika, which gave priority to political reform over economic reform and led to the breakdown of the Soviet Union. The Chinese, on the contrary, focused on economic reform without altering the political structure of the regime. They relinquished neither socialism nor communism. When it comes to the internal buildup, there is no common measure between Chinese and Russia.
What both states do have in common is similar apprehensions in the field of global politics: mainly, the Bush's administration's insistence on pushing ahead with its antimissile defence shield, which both states see as a first step towards a particularly dangerous type of arms race.
Russia no longer attributes itself to communism, while China does. Is this distinction important in Washington's eyes when it comes to evaluating the current rapprochement between the two countries? Or is it irrelevant in the context of a world order that can only be described as unipolar despite the many cracks in its armature? And how does China fit into the new game? That is one of the intriguing questions to which I hope to find an answer during my second visit to China, 28 long years after my first.
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