by Philip Short
Whatever the mistakes [that have been made], the dictatorship of the proletariat is, for the popular masses, always far superior to … the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie … Some people consider that Stalin was wrong in everything: this is a grave misconception … We should view Stalin from an historical standpoint, make a proper and all-round analysis to see where he was right and where he was wrong and draw useful lessons therefrom. Both the things he did right and the things he did wrong were phenomena of the international communist movement and bore the imprint of the times.39
Under Stalin's leadership, it insisted, the Soviet Union had made ‘glorious achievements’ in which he had ‘an ineffaceable share’, while his ‘mistakes’ had been confined to the latter part of his life.
The editorial marked the beginning of the slow unravelling of the Sino-Soviet[Q1] alliance. It made clear that, in future, China would copy Soviet experience only selectively. It raised questions, even though implicitly, about the role of Stalin's subordinates, now his successors, in the crimes of which he was accused – triggering, not long afterwards, an acrimonious exchange between Mikoyan and Peng Dehuai. ‘If we had spoken out, we would have been killed!’ the Armenian admitted. ‘What kind of communist is it that fears death?’ came Peng's disdainful reply.40 But, most important of all, the People's Daily's comments signalled a fundamental change in the Chinese attitude to Moscow. It was written from the standpoint not of a junior partner but of an equal. Mao was sitting in judgement on the hasty actions of a neophyte Soviet leadership.
Ideological differences were part of the problem. Wu Lengxi, the official note-taker at meetings dealing with Soviet affairs, described in his memoirs how the Politburo spent days on end discussing differences with Moscow over Marxist-Leninist theory.41 But Mao also objected viscerally to what he called the Soviet Party's ‘self-proclaimed big brother position’, arrogating to itself the right to set the agenda for the world communist movement and to interfere in the internal affairs of other parties. China was not demanding leadership or even joint leadership of the movement, he said, but he did expect the Russians to consult the Chinese Party to ensure that they were in agreement on ‘correct’ ideological positions instead of proclaiming them unilaterally.
As 1956 unfolded, Mao's concern that Khrushchev was ‘throwing out the communist baby along with the Stalinist bathwater’,42 as one contemporary writer put it, seemed amply justified. After riots during the summer in Poland, the Soviet-backed leadership in Warsaw, which Khrushchev had personally installed only half a year before, was replaced, over strong Russian objections, by a new ‘liberal’ group, headed by one of Stalin's victims, Wladyslaw Gomulka. Soon afterwards, a still graver challenge to Moscow's dominance came from Hungary, where the Stalinist First Secretary, Matyas Rakosi, was deposed by reformists led by Imre Nagy.43
In Poland, Mao supported Gomulka, on the grounds that the root of the problem was the same Russian ‘great power chauvinism’ that China had had for so long to endure.44 Liu Shaoqi was despatched to Moscow, where in October he persuaded Khrushchev not to resort to armed intervention. But when Hungary announced that it was leaving the Soviet bloc military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, Mao took a very different view. Supporting the right of a brother party to choose its own path to socialism was one thing; sitting with folded hands in the face of counter-revolution was another. Again, Liu put pressure on Khrushchev – this time to send in troops to put down the revolt by force.
The mess the Soviet leaders had made in their own east European backyard further lowered them in Mao's estimation.
On November 15, 1956, shortly after the Russian army occupied Hungary, he gave the new Chinese Central Committee, elected at the Eighth Congress a few weeks earlier, the benefit of his reflections on the past year's events:
I think there are two ‘swords’: one is Lenin and the other Stalin. The sword of Stalin has now been discarded by the Russians … We Chinese have not thrown it away. First we protect Stalin, and second, at the same time, we criticise his mistakes …
As for the sword of Lenin, has it not also been discarded to a certain extent by some Soviet leaders? In my view, it has been discarded to a considerable extent. Is the October Revolution still valid? … Khrushchev's report at the 20th Congress of the CPSU says it is possible to seize state power by the parliamentary road, that is to say, it is no longer necessary for all countries to learn from the October Revolution. Once this gate is opened, by and large Leninism is thrown away …
How much capital do [the Russians] have? Just Lenin and Stalin. Now [they] have abandoned Stalin and practically all of Lenin as well – with Lenin's feet gone, or perhaps with only his head left, or with one of his hands cut off. We on our part stick to studying Marxism-Leninism and learning from the October Revolution.45
That was far harsher than anything Mao had said before, even in the privacy of the Politburo. Although his remarks were kept secret, they inspired a second People's Daily editorial, published at the end of December under the title, ‘More on the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. The road of the October Revolution, and specifically the violent seizure of power by the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, it declared, were ‘universally applicable truths’. Any attempt to ‘evade this road’ was revisionist.46
When Zhou Enlai visited Moscow in January 1957, he found, unsurprisingly, that the Soviet leaders were ‘displeased’.47
By then, four major areas of dispute had emerged between the two Parties – all stemming from the 20th Congress. First came the assessment of Stalin: Mao insisted that he was ‘three parts bad, and seven parts good’.48 Next, there was the argument over Khrushchev's ‘parliamentary road to socialism’, which was closely linked to the third issue, peaceful coexistence. Imperialism, in Mao's view, was unremittingly hostile towards the socialist camp. The December editorial had concluded: ‘The imperialists are always bent on destroying us.49 Therefore we must never forget … class struggle on a world scale.’ For China, this made perfect sense: its UN seat was still occupied by Taiwan;II its last sustained contact with America had been on the battlefield in Korea. The Soviet leaders felt quite differently. They dealt with the United States and the other capitalist powers, at the UN and through diplomatic channels, as a matter of routine. For the Kremlin, a judicious mixture of competition and contact with the West was far more attractive than the sterile immobilism of the Cold War. Last and in some ways most troubling for the Russians – because it was impossible to tell where it might lead – was Mao's stress on contradictions. This had never sat well in Moscow. Stalin himself had criticised it as un-Marxist. Yet here was Mao now proclaiming that Stalin's abuses of power showed that contradictions arose even under socialism. In December, the People's Daily had affirmed the existence of ‘contradictions in socialist countries between different sections of the people, between comrades within the Communist Party, [and] between the government and the people’, as well as ‘contradictions between socialist countries, [and] contradictions between Communist Parties’.50 From the Russian standpoint, which held that monolithic unity was the highest possible good, that was a can of worms that no one wished to see opened. The communiqué issued after Zhou Enlai's visit was adamant: ‘There have been and are no essential contradictions … in the relations between socialist states. Even if in the past there were … shortcomings, they are now being rectified and eliminated.’51
Despite these differences, there was little at the beginning of 1957 to suggest an imminent rupture.
While Zhou complained of the Soviet leaders’ unwillingness to face up to their own mistakes, their ‘subjectivity [and] narrowmindedness … and [their] tend[ency] to patronise others and interfere with other brotherly parties’ and governments’ internal affairs’, he was careful to add that ‘in spite of all the above, Sino-Soviet relations are far better now than during Stalin's era’.52 Mao, too, was relatively sanguine. ‘Not all Soviet farts are fragrant!’ he noted. Khrushchev had a swollen head and wa
s blinded by power, and if the Russians persisted in their errors, ‘it is certain that, one day, it will all have to be brought out into the open’. But disputes between communist parties were inevitable, and Beijing and Moscow would continue to seek common ground.53
Throughout the first half of the 1950s, China's intellectuals had been treated as one of the ‘black classes’, hostile or at best lukewarm towards the communist revolution.
The thought reform movement which accompanied the Korean War was punctuated by personalised attacks against named individuals and their works, among them the philosopher, Hu Shi, whose lectures Mao had attended as a library assistant in Beijing.54 There were also campaigns against films, such as The Secret History of the Qing Court, set during the Boxer Rebellion, which was denounced for capitulation to imperialism; and The Life of Wu Xun, about a nineteenth-century beggar who used his savings to build schools for the poor, accused of promoting capitulation to feudalism.55 Another major effort to bring the intellectuals into line involved the liberal thinker, Liang Shuming, who had had the temerity to criticise the communists for taxing the peasants too heavily. At a meeting of the Central Government Council, to which Liang had been invited as a guest, Mao pilloried him for more than an hour:
Mr Liang styles himself a ‘man of integrity’ … Do you really have ‘integrity’? If you do, then make a clean breast of your past history – how you opposed the Communist Party and the people, how you assassinated people with your pen … There are two ways of killing people: one is to kill with the gun and the other with the pen. The way which is most artfully disguised and draws no blood is to kill with the pen. That is the kind of murderer you are.
Liang Shuming is utterly reactionary, yet he flatly denies it … What service did you do, Liang Shuming? In all your life, what service have you ever done for the people? Not the slightest, not the least bit … Liang Shuming is an ambitious schemer, a hypocrite.56
It was using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. To Mao, any expression of heterodox thought might carry the seeds of future opposition. Liang escaped with a verbal drubbing. But two years later, when Mao decided that the intellectuals needed a sterner lesson, the abrasive glove of persuasion gave way to overt repression.
In a case that bore strong parallels to the persecution of Wang Shiwei, at Yan'an, a left-wing writer named Hu Feng was accused of leading a ‘counter-revolutionary clique’ and imprisoned. During the second half of 1955, a countrywide witch-hunt was conducted for ‘Hu Feng elements’, provoking numerous suicides in literary and academic circles.57 Like Wang, thirteen years earlier, Hu's offence had been to refuse to submit to the Party's will. Like Wang, his fate offered a terrifying warning to the intelligentsia generally of the perils of failing to toe the Party line.
It should therefore have been no surprise that in April, 1956, when Mao called for a new blossoming of intellectual debate under the slogan, ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend,’ it fell on very stony ground indeed. After the bludgeoning they had received over the previous six years, the last thing Chinese intellectuals wanted was to have to stick their necks out publicly and start speaking their minds again.58
A variety of factors had combined to bring about this abrupt – and, at the time, wholly unconvincing – change of course.
China was at peace. The Party was securely in control. The transition to a socialist economic system was already far advanced. The exceedingly tight grip the regime had maintained on every aspect of national life, justifiable, perhaps, in the early years, had become counter-productive. The main theme of Mao's speeches that spring was the need to decentralise power. ‘Discipline that stifles creativity and initiative should be abolished,’ he said at one point. ‘We need a little liberalism to facilitate getting things done. To be strict all the time won't work.’59
Sooner or later, a thaw of this kind was inevitable. As Mao would have put it, it was part of the dialectic inherent in all things. ‘If war is not brewed60 during times of peace, how can war come so suddenly? If peace if not brewed during war, how can there be peace so suddenly?’
But in the early part of 1956, two additional factors began pushing the Party towards liberalisation. One was the shortage of skilled manpower – above all, of scientists and engineers – which was blocking Mao's plans to speed up economic development. To try to remedy this, intellectuals’ salaries were raised; they were allotted better apartments; attempts were made to woo back Chinese professors living in the US and Europe.61 But Mao soon recognised that, if the problem were to be resolved, Party bureaucrats would have to stop interfering in academic matters they did not understand; and intellectuals would have to be given more latitude to work as they thought best.62 The second factor was the Secret Speech, and China's decision as a result to stop mechanically copying Soviet methods. In education, in factory management, in fields as diverse as genetics and music, Chinese intellectuals and managers suddenly found themselves, for the first time in years, with a margin of freedom in which to experiment.
In the summer of 1956, none of these changes could be described as dramatic. The most visible effect of relaxation was to lend new colour and vitality to the spartan austerity of Chinese daily life. Young women began wearing flowered blouses. Foreigners reported the occasional cheong-sam, the traditional Chinese long skirt, slit decorously to an inch above the knee. Dances were permitted, to the music of Gershwin and Strauss. The People's Daily went from four pages to eight, and Liu Shaoqi admonished Chinese journalists to make their stories less boring.63
Politically, the repercussions were minimal. The personality cult around Mao survived essentially intact.64 The only significant change came at the Eighth Congress in September, when references to ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ as the Party's guiding ideology were excised from the CCP Constitution. But that was treated as a glitch occasioned by the changes taking place in the Party's leadership structure as Mao began to implement his plan, under discussion since 1952, to withdraw to the ‘second front’.65 He was beginning to feel his age, he had written to Sun Yat-sen's widow, Soong Chingling, earlier that year. ‘One must recognise the symptoms that one is on the downward side of things.’66 A new post of Honorary Party Chairman was created but left vacant, to await the time (generally expected to come in 1963, as Mao entered his seventieth year), when Liu Shaoqi would assume his mantle.67
Then came the crisis in Poland and the Hungarian revolt.
Communist regimes everywhere watched, horrified, fearing that the contagion would spread, as the socialist bloc threatened to implode. China was no exception. In the winter of 1956, Mao made speech after speech, reassuring the Party, and its non-communist allies, that there was little chance they would be exposed to similar unrest.68
He went on to ask what had caused the storms in eastern Europe. Part of the answer, he told the Central Committee, was that the Communist Parties in Poland and Hungary had failed to do a proper job of eliminating counter-revolutionaries. China had not made that error. But the other factor was bureaucratism, which had led Party cadres in both countries to become estranged from the masses. This problem China had not solved:
Right now there are certain people who behave as if they can sit back and relax and ride roughshod over the people now that they have the country in their hands. Such people are opposed by the masses, who [want to] throw stones at them and hit them with their hoes. From my point of view, this is what they deserve and I find it most welcome. There are times when nothing but a beating can solve the problem. The Communist Party has to learn its lesson … We must be vigilant, and must not allow a bureaucratic work-style to develop. We must not form an aristocracy divorced from the people. The masses are justified in removing anybody who has a bureaucratic work-style … I say it's better to remove such people; they ought to be removed.69
The answer, Mao said, was another rectification campaign – but in a form which would provide a safety valve for popular discontent. The problem in Hungary, he argued, was that t
he Party there had failed to deal in a timely fashion with the contradictions between rulers and ruled, with the result that they had festered and become antagonistic. ‘If there is a pustule it must emit pus,’ he went on. ‘It is precisely from such things that we must learn our lesson.’ It followed that in China, workers should be allowed to strike because ‘this will be helpful in solving contradictions among the state, the factory directors and the masses’, and students should be allowed to demonstrate. ‘They are just contradictions, that's all. The world is full of contradictions.’70
Thus, by the end of 1956, the two major elements of what was to become the Hundred Flowers Campaign – a rectification movement to make the Party more responsive to the wishes of the people; and a relaxation of controls to allow the venting of public dissatisfaction – had both already been decided. The only uncertainty was over when it should start (Mao had suggested the following summer), and how sweeping it should be.