LEE FEGION
Lee Fegion was not a
Marxist-Leninist but in his biography of Mao Tse Tung reflected how morally
Quoting author Lee Fegion
in ‘Mao-a Re-Interpretation’, ‘The speed of
‘In October, 1967 after re-opening the universities, allowed admissions to colleges based on recommendations from one’s work unit. It enabled peasant youths to gain a better education than would have been done by the earlier policy.’
‘Mao initiated the formation of red guards who confronted corrupt party officials and the Royalist red guards who were established. Major clashes erupted between the 2 red guard factions. Mao’s efforts virtually dismantled official avenues of communication between bottom and top. Even when Maoist leaders attempted to contact the various red guard groups to give them personal instruction, they struggled. The Central govt could no longer control day to day affairs and new rebel factions formed daily. The situation grew more chaotic when revolutionary red guards attempted to seize power in factories, confronting the workers.’
‘A very significant development of the Cultural Revolution was that the new core leadership at all levels included a substantial number of worker rebels. During the previous seventeen years of Communist rule, workers representatives had been selected for their diligence at work for their obedience to party directives and had served a little more than tokens at people’s congresses. By contrast the new cadre corps of worker rebels evidenced a keener understanding of political operations and greater willingness to speak their minds.’
‘In sum the empowerment of ordinary villagers promoted a change of political culture in villages. Production team leaders were now chosen by production team members.-with ordinary villagers having a major say in the process. If the production team leaders did not do a good job, they would lose their position at the end of the year. In some cases, the production team leaders had to be replaced every year. Before the Cultural Revolution production team leaders were appointed by village leaders, who were in turn appointed by commune leaders.’
‘A significant achievement of the Cultural Revolution was the reducing of monopoly of agricultural policy, promote local self –sufficiency and encourage co-operative, labour intensive institutions.’
DONGPING HAN
Dongping Han was born in
Quoting
Dongping Han “One of the most important accomplishments of the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution was the empowerment of ordinary people and the
democratization of Chinese society. ‘
‘’Most people
who talk about democracy in this world tend to make the concept of democracy
very complicated. Democracy is a very simple and straightforward concept. It
means that, contrary to the old system which allowed the elite to run the
political affairs, the ordinary people participate in decision making. It means
that ordinary people are part of the governance of their society. In order for
democracy to work, ordinary people have to be empowered and made equal to the
government officials, the old elite. In a democratic society, there should be
no privileged classes and there should be no elite. Everybody should be equal
politically and economically. That is a prerequisite of
democracy.’’
’In the so-called western democracies, one per cent of the people own most of wealth. Because of this gap in wealth, the small rich minority can buy power, influence, and control. They literally have a monopoly over power. That is not a real democracy at all. Democracy like that is in name only. It is fake. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution tried to build a real democracy. It empowered the ordinary Chinese people to write big character posters to criticize their leaders, and required their leaders to participate in manual labour like everybody else. It was a big step forward in the progress of Chinese society. During the Cultural Revolution, most Chinese officials had lifestyles similar to those of ordinary people. They lived in houses similar to those of ordinary people. Their children went to the same schools as other Chinese people. They went to work on bicycles like everybody else. Production team leaders were elected by peasants and worked with peasants in the field every day. Village leaders worked with peasants 300 days a year in the fields because they had to attend meetings and make plans for the community. Commune leaders were required to work 250 days a year with peasants in the fields and county government leaders had to work with peasants for two hundred days a year.’’
MOBO GAO
Mobo Gao was born and brought up in a small Chinese village and did not
leave the village until he went to Xiamen University to study English. He
thereafter went to the UK and completed his Master’s and doctoral degrees at
Essex.
Professor Gao has worked at various universities in China, the UK and Australia, and has been visiting fellow at Oxford, Harvard, and other universities. At present he is the Director of the Confucius Institute at Adelaide.
‘Moba Gao gives a striking blow to the revisionists with the cutting edge of a sword illustrating the 360 degree contrast between CPC before 1978 and after. He gives most accurate figures which testify the gigantic strides of CPC in the Cultural Revolution and degeneration of CPC in the last few decades. Moba also summarises how Mao never initiated struggle for personal power.
Quoting Mobo Gao ‘’Those
who want to preserve the hegemonic status of capitalist values have tried very
hard to erase the facts of socialist achievements from history. For those who
want to fight against this hegemony we need to bring out the facts before the
world. We have to remind the world that it was during the Mao era that the
average Chinese life expectancy rose from 38 years in 1949 to 68 years by the
1970s. During the same period, the literacy rate increased dramatically and
rural health improved dramatically, so much so that it prepared for millions
and millions of skilled and healthy workers in the post-Mao period economic
expansion. The “barefoot doctor” health care system invented in the Mao
era was acclaimed by the United Nations as an incredible success story. The
system was successful in China for three important reasons: Firstly, it
was primarily directed at the poor people in rural China; secondly, it focused
on prevention; and thirdly, it combined Western and Chinese medicine (Chen
2004). These three strategies are significant for developing countries, even
today.’’
‘’Despite
all the claims to the contrary, socialist China’s GNP grew at an average annual
rate of 6.2 per cent between 1952 and 1978. Indeed, as Lin (2006) points out,
the industrial sector outperformed most other developing economies. Although
rural development was not as fast as was desired owing to the industrialization
strategy that aimed at speedy accumulation of capital from the rural sector,
the quality of life by the 1970s in rural China was improved and was on
the edge of being transformed throughout county towns and villages. Though
decades behind the economically developed world, China was already “on a par
with middle-income countries” in human and social development (Bramall 1993,
335). Measured by social indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality
and educational attainment, China, especially urban China, in the Mao era had
already forged way ahead of most market economies at similar income levels and
surpassed a number of countries with per capita incomes many times
greater. By the late 1970s, China stood up as a nuclear power, able to
defy the bullying of capitalist superpowers, a country that had satellite
technology and became the sixth largest industrial power in the world – whereas
in 1949, when the PRC was established, China’s industrial capacity was that of
tiny Belgium (Meisner 1999).’’
The
Cultural Revolution has been routinely touted as Mao’s personal power struggle
against his designated successor Liu Shaoqi, even though all the documentary
evidence suggests otherwise. Mao’s authority in the CCP and PRC was supreme, so
much so that it could never be challenged by anyone. Mao knew it and everyone
else knew it. Mao could have gotten rid of Liu easily without mobilizing
a mass movement like the Cultural Revolution that was supposed to have lasted
ten years, from 1966 to 1976. In fact, as early as August 1966, when the
Cultural Revolution had just started, during the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth
Party Congress held in Beijing, Liu was already demoted from number two
position in the party to number eight. All Mao had to do to achieve this was to
have written a few lines on a piece of scrap paper called the “big poster”.
Many years later Liu’s widow, the very intelligent Wang Guangmei, who also
suffered personally during the Cultural Revolution, admitted that Mao and Liu
had policy differences, and that initially Mao did not intend to remove Liu
politically. (Liu’s political and even personal fate went downhill only after
Mao was presented with “solid evidence” that Liu was once a traitor during his
days when he was an underground communist activist.)’’
Writer
Joseph Ball must be complimented for striking the enemy at its hardest point by
at the very root exposing the lies of Intellectuals like Frank Dikotter. His
brilliant and most dialectical analysis portrays how China in the Great
Leap Forward stitched the very fabric of revolutionary democracy, surpassing
production figures of any third world country.
JOSEPH
BALL
‘In
‘the Great Famine Frank Dikötter alleges that the Great Leap Forward starved
the Chinese masses. This was a complete distortion of history with the book
literally twisting facts. Joseph Ball most effectively countered the lies of
Dikottter, hitting back at the very root. Quoting writer Joseph Ball on the
Great Leap Forward “To read many modern commentators on Mao’s China 4, you would get the impression that Mao’s agricultural and
industrial policies led to absolute economic disaster. Even more restrained
commentators, such as the economist Peter Nolan 5 claim that living standards did not rise in China, during
the post-revolutionary period, until Deng Xiaoping took power. Of course,
increases in living standards are not the sole reason for increases in life
expectancy. However, it is absurd to claim that life expectancy could have
increased so much during the Mao era with no increase in living standards.’
‘For
example, it is claimed by many who have studied figures released by Deng
Xiaoping after Mao’s death that per capita grain production did not increase at
all during the Mao period. But how is it possible to reconcile such statistics
with the figures on life expectancy that the same authors quote? Besides which
these figures are contradicted by other figures. Guo Shutian, a Former Director
of Policy and Law in the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, in the post-Mao era,
gives a very different view of China’s overall agricultural performance during
the period before Deng’s “reforms.” It is true that he writes that agricultural
production decreased in five years between 1949-1978 due to “natural calamities
and mistakes in the work.” However he states that during 1949-1978 the per
hectare yield of land sown with food crops increased by 145.9% and total food
production rose 169.6%. During this period China’s population grew by 77.7%. On
these figures, China’s per capita food production grew from 204 kilograms to
328 kilograms in the period in question.’
‘Even
according to figures released by the Deng Xiaoping regime, industrial
production increased by 11.2% per year from 1952-1976 (by 10% a year during the
alleged catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution). In 1952 industry was 36% of
gross value of national output in China. By 1975 industry was 72% and
agriculture was 28%. It is quite obvious that Mao’s supposedly disastrous
socialist economic policies paved the way for the rapid (but inegalitarian and
unbalanced) economic development of the post-Mao era.’
‘There
is a good argument to suggest that the policies of the Great Leap Forward
actually did much to sustain China’s overall economic growth, after an initial
period of disruption. At the end of the 1950s, it was clear that China was
going to have to develop using its own resources and without being able to use
a large amount of machinery and technological know-how imported from the Soviet
Union.’
‘Although
problems and reversals occurred in the Great Leap Forward, it is fair to say
that it had a very important role in the ongoing development of agriculture.
Measures such as water conservancy and irrigation allowed for sustained
increases in agricultural production, once the period of bad harvests was over.
They also helped the countryside to deal with the problem of drought. Flood
defenses were also developed. Terracing helped gradually increase the amount of
cultivated area.’
WILLIAM
HINTON
The
most politically insightful or illustrative work was by William Hinton who
could perceive the intensity of the mass revolutionary movement at the very
core and portrayed how seeds were planted to germinate genuine working class
power. No writer projected such a sound or analytical political perspective.
Being a visitor three times Hinton penetrated the very heart of China and
upheld CPC politically before 1978 than any foreign writer.
Quoting William Hinton in ‘Fanshen’, ‘The heart of the Cultural Revolution has indeed been a struggle for power, a struggle over the control of state power….But it has not been a struggle over power for power’s sake….It has been a class struggle to determine whether individuals representing the working class or individuals representing the bourgeoisie will hold state power. It has been a struggle to determine whether China will continue to take the socialist road and carry the socialist revolution through to the end, or whether China will abandon the socialist road for the capitalist road.
Socialism
must be regarded as a transition from capitalism to communism (or in the case
of China from new democracy to communism). As such it bears within it many
contradictions, many inequalities that cannot be done away with overnight or
even in the course of several years or several decades. These inequalities are
inherited from the old society, such things as pay differentials between
skilled and unskilled work and between mental and manual work, such things as
the differences between the economic, educational, and cultural opportunities
available in the city and in the countryside, as long as these inequalities
exist they generate privilege, individualism, careerism and bourgeois
ideology….They can and do create new bourgeois individuals who gather as a new
privileged elite and ultimately as a new exploiting class. Thus socialism can
be peacefully transformed back into capitalism. (
In Turning
Point, Hinton placed the Cultural Revolution within an international
context. China faced a serious threat from U.S. imperialism in the Pacific and
Southeast Asia (the Vietnam War was still raging in 1971). In Siberia, the
Soviet Union posed a growing and possibly imminent threat to China’s nuclear
program and plants.
The
primary foreign policy issues in the Cultural Revolution were: how to deal with
military threats from the Soviet Union and the United States; how to develop
modern defensive armaments; and how to continue supporting national liberation
struggles. China was the largest source of military aid for the peoples of
Indochina. A key question was what kind of “opening” or political alliance
socialist China should develop with the West to deal with the Soviet Union’s
growing military threat to China, especially its nuclear program. Deng saw this
opening in strategic terms and was able to use it to rip China off the
socialist road and integrate China into the U.S. imperialist-dominated global
economy. While these questions “helped to define the dividing line between the
contending forces in China,” Hinton emphasized that the Cultural Revolution
developed as a result of internal contradictions arising out of socialist
construction in China.
To be continued=>
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