Nixon's visit to Peking is not a tourist jaunt. The American President is in the People's Republic of China neither to play ping-pong not to take a swim in the Yangtze. He is there to see whether the Chinese government is serious in its intention as far as peaceful co-existence is concerned-in other words to test whether his State Department advisers correctly interpreted Chinese policy vis a vis Ceylon and BanglaDesh as indications that they were prepared to come to terms with American imperialism-or whether it is simply a tactical move designed to end China's isolation and increase her influence in relation to the Soviet bureaucracy. For Nixon, therefore, this visit will determine American policies in Indo-China, If a settiement can be reached, the result would be a division of Asia into spheres of influence and a pledge from the Chinese to stop supporting verbally or with arms guerrilla movements active in many parts of Asia. In our view this is exactly what the Chinese leaders want at the present moment. Provided American troops are withdrawn from Vietnam (i.e. from China's borders) and provided that the United States agrees to recognise Taiwan as part of China (leaving aside the question of its actual transference till Chiang Kai Shek dies) the bureaucrats in Peking will not be too unhappy. Whatever doubts they might have had seem to have been resolved with the disappearance of Lin Piao and Chen PoTa: from Long Live the Victory of the Peoples " War it is back to Socialism in One Country and with a vengeance.
THE CHINESE REVOLUTION: STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES It is not sufficient, however, to explain what is happening in China today simply by concentrating on its foreign policy as the latter is generally a reflection of the internal situation of a country. To understand why the Chinese government is supporting the dictatorships in Pakistan and Sudan or numerous other reactionary and counterrevolutionary states, it is vital to explain the genesis of the Chinese Revolution, though of necessity it will be somewhat schematic and sketchy.
The Chinese Revolution was victorious after one of the longest civil wars in revolutionary history. The party which led it to victory was not the same party which had suffered defeats in Shanghai and Canton in the late Twenties as a result of accepting the advice of the Comintern.! In the Twenties the party's base was rooted in the proletariat in the Chinese cities. Its understanding of the class forces in the countryside was restricted and the practical consequences contained in Mao Tse Tung's correct analysis in the original version of An Investigation of the Peasant movement in Hunan were not widely understood. The defeats in Shanghai and Canton enabled Mao to make considerable gains in the Party and by 1935 the group around him had succeeded in gaining complete control. This period coincided with the purges in the Soviet Union and the complete hegemony of Stalinism in the CPSU and the Comintern. The ideology of the Chinese Party of Mao Tse Tung was, as a result, dominated by the theme of revolution in stages, "building socialism in one country, etc. The internal practice of the party led to a virtual end of debates within the rank and file. However the strategy decided by the CCP, namely, concentration in the countryside, creation of liberated zones and a Red Army to wage a protracted armed struggle was undoubtedly justified, given the situation in China as a whole. The important point to grasp in that while the CCP continued to pay lip-service to the Comintern on the level of theory, its practice was, to a large extent, determined empirically by the needs of the situation which it confronted. Even when the Chinese Communist party, under Stalinist instructions, made a bloc with Chiang Kai Shek, it never subordinated its army to the bourgeois army; on the contrary it showed its superiority by demonstrating concretely how Japanese Imperialism could Another factor which shaped the development of the CCP was the fact that for a long period of its existence it was isolated from the working class in the cities and its largely peasant base facilitated, in a certain sense, the militarisation of the party. While there can be no doubt that it won the support of the peasant masses, this support could not be institutionalised through organs of popular power as it could in the cities. It was mediated via the Party and the army. The nature of the countryside and its inhabitants, therefore, aided the bureaucratisation of the party and given the weakness of Party organisation in the cities, the process could not be easily The military success of the Eighth Route Army coupled with the fact that in the liberated zones the power of landlordism began to be smashed, paved the way to the liberation of the entire country. The defeat of Japanese imperialism in the Second World War provided further aid and despite Stalin's attempts to force the Chinese C.P. to form a coalition with Chiang Kai Shek, the dynamic of the struggle had reached such a stage that the Chinese C.P. even if it had wanted to, would have been hard put to contain the mass uprisings which were taking place throughout the country. The uprising of poor peasants in North China in 1946 symbolised the party's dilemma: revolution or the Comintern? The CCP finally decided to carry on the military struggle and in October 1949 the Chinese armies of Mao Tse Tung and Chu Teh marched into the cities, smashed the bourgeois army and the state apparatus, and proclaimed the existence of a unified Peoples Republic of China. Chiang and a section of his army fled to THE SEIZURE OF POWER The victory of the Chinese Revolution, despite the wishes of Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy, was a defeat for the "theory of socialism in one country" and a vindication of the theses of the "permanent revolution'. For the Maoists, the seizure of power created new problems. In the first instance what existed after 1949 was a situation where the military apparatus of the Chinese bourgeoisie was destroyed, but the latter still retained economic power. Here the weaknesses of Maoism became dominant. The Chinese working class was not mobilised because in Stalinist mythology what had taken place was a 'new democratic revolution'. To state otherwise would have meant being guilty of..... Trotskyism! As a result only the comprador bourgeoisie' was expropriated in 1949 and the so-called "national" bourgeois continued to draw profits and exploit the Chinese workers, a situation which was legitimised by the Maoist regime. However, it was obvious that this farce could not continue, particularly as the new regime had established a monopoly of foreign trade controlled by the State and also because private ownership hindered any effective planning. In 1953 virtually the entire economy in the cities was nationalised, though in many cases generous compensation was paid to the 'national bourgeois. The tragedy of the Chinese Revolution has been that this process in the cities was carried out without the active mobilisation of the Chinese working class and, despite vacillations and a half-hearted search for another way, the Chinese leadership finally opted to re-model the Chinese economy in the cities on Stalinist lines.2 No organs of popular power existed in the cities and the relationship of the masses to the new state was mediated through the Chinese Communist Party. A deformation existed in the Chinese Revolution from the very beginning and led to increased bureaucratisation. This also meant that the Chinese never projected their revolution internationally till the years of the Sino-Soviet split and the Cultural Revolution and even then in a very distorted and near religious fashion. It is important to understand these defects if one is to appreciate the present course of the Chinese THE IMPORTANCE OF THE CULTURAL We will not discuss the Sino-Soviet split here, but its impact globally was extremely important: the destruction of the Stalinist monolith, the beginnings of debate within the European C.P. s, etc., which enabled thousands of newly-radicalised youth to break from the strait-jacket of Stalinism throughout the world. Within China also it posed certain choices and a difference of opinion within 'Cultural Revolution' initiated by Mao to try and regain complete control of the party apparatus. However though the Cultural Revolution was initiated as an inter-bureaucratic conflict, the three principles which Mao proclaimed to justify it are fairly important: 1. To destroy the bureaucracy in the CCP and the State; 2. The right of the minority to exist and criticise; 3. The institution of elections modelled on the Paris Commune at every level of Chinese society.
Even if Mao's understanding of the bureaucracy was not scientific and referred to combatting 'red-tapism', "inefficiency", etc. the other two points are very crucial. Once the faction fight had been won inside the CCP and Liu Shao Chi had been dismissed and denounced as an 'agent of imperialism", Mao, with the aid of the army, ended the Cultural Revolution. But two facts stand out: a section of the masses were mobilised and in certain cases transcended the limitations of both wings of the bureaucracy and the whole period allowed many political discussions to take place. Also the weakness of Maoism was demonstrated once again: only the students were 'officially" mobilised. If Mao was serious in wanting to destroy the bureaucracy the only class in China capable of doing so institutionally was the Chinese working class and it had no place in the Maoist schema. In fact when spontaneous workers' mobilisations began to take place, the Army intervened!
The importance of the Cultural Revolution lay in the fact that it politicised hundreds of thousands of people and therefore one is confident of the ability of Chinese workers, peasants and students to continue the Chinese Revolution by overthrowing the bureaucracy within the next several years. The Chinese masses today are not in the same state as were the Russian workers after the victory of Stalinism. The latter could maintain its power because internally it had demoralised and terrorised a working class decimated by civil war and famine, while externally it had strangled the revolution. The European working class had been defeated. In China and Asia today the situation is vastly different. And this, of course, coincides with a capitalist crisis in Europe and North America. The growing successes of the Indo-Chinese revolution, the spread of the struggle to South Asia, the re-emergence of struggle in Indonesia and Malaysia, weakens the power of the Chinese bureaucracy vis a vis the Chinese masses. That is why the bureaucrats are keen to preserve the status quo. That is why even poor old Lin Piao, anointed Crown Price at the Ninth Party Congress, can't stomach the latest turn and has to be removed (it's interesting that while he was completely incorrect and mechanistic in his analyses, at least he saw the revolution as a world The only way of defending the Chinese Revolution is to extend it. Today the best way to do this is not only by continuing the mass struggles in Asia--and the sub-continent of India is a vital weak link in this respect-but by overthrowing the Maoist bureaucracy. We are confident that the Chinese masses will do this, aided by thr development of the struggle throughout 1 Trotsky was an unrelenting critic of Comintern policies and commented on China: "If, at the beginning of the Northern expedition (1926) we nad begun to organise soviets in the berated districts (and the masses were instinctively aspiring for that with all their might and main)
we would have secured the necessary basis and a revolutionary running start, we would have rallied around us the agrarian uprisings, we would have built our own army, we would have disintegrated the enemy armies; and despite the youthfulness of the Communist Party of China, the latter would have been able, thanks to proper guidance from the Comintern, to mature in these exceptional circumstances and to assume power, if not in the whole of China at once, then at least in a considerable part of China.
And, above all, we would have had a party."
Third International After Lenin, Pioneer, P.1852 cf. Livio Maitan's book on China, to be published shortly by NLB, for details and analyses The Red Mole 28 Feb. 1972 Page 9
simply treated as never having happened. Non-white civilisation is ignored as being automatically worthless. This is often stated openly. Thus one of the history books frequently used in secondary schools? does not discuss China on the grounds that "Chinese civilisation has no connection with Europe: it is a thing apart?. Naturally enough this book not only fails to even mention the 2000 years of Chinese culsent to E.S.N, schools. Thus a report produced by the Inner London Education Authority in 1967 showed that 28.4 per cent of students in London E.S.N. schools were black, whereas the percentage was only 15 per cent in ordinary schools. Moreover this racism is particularly acute in the case of West Indian youth, for three quarters of all the black students in E.S.N. schools were