164 { China’s Quest
adjustment in agricultural policy began in 1961, it quickly became bolder and
bolder. As this happened, Mao began to conclude that there were “hidden
revisionists” within the CCP elite, people who professed loyalty to him and
his correct Marxist-Leninist principles but who in fact wanted to retreat from
socialism in the agricultural sector. As the Short Course had explained, this
was what had happened in the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s during a com-
parable period of return to private farming and incentives. Stalin had con-
fronted this “bourgeois line,” defeated it, and pushed the socialist revolution
through to the end.
Soviet experience as laid out in the Short Course offered Mao an example
of how hidden revisionists could worm their way into a communist party, ex-
pand their influence, and ultimately take control and abandon a proletarian
class perspective. Stalin had upheld proletarian principles and used the dicta-
torship of the proletariat to strike down “class enemies” within the party who
took a “bourgeois class stance,” for example by opposing agricultural collec-
tivization.^3 Khrushchev had abandoned Stalin’s intraparty class struggle, and
the hidden revisionists in the CPSU had raised their heads and taken over the
party. As Mao’s colleagues on the CCP Politburo became more and more en-
thusiastic in 1961–1962 about implementation of family farming and private
incentive, it began to dawn on Mao that the same thing was happening with
the CCP. Just as Stalin had used the dictatorship of the proletariat to sweep
aside those in the Soviet Union who had taken a bourgeois class line, Mao
would sweep aside the hidden revisionists within the CCP and push China’s
socialist revolution “through to the end.”
Khrushchev and the CPSU had criticized Great Leap policies as “unscien-
tific” and “left-wing adventurism,” although they generally kept those views
to themselves until after the 1960 break. By the early 1960s, Soviet objections
to the Great Leap were in the open—just as CCP advocates of family farming
began to become bold in their efforts at agricultural “readjustment.” This was
sufficient to cause Mao see a link-up between Moscow and the CCP’s “hidden
revisionists.” Mao also noted that some of the “hidden revisionists” in the
CCP had strong Soviet connections. Defense minister and former Korean
War commander Peng Dehuai had had extensive contacts and interactions
with the Soviet defense establishment. Wang Jiaxiang and Wu Xiuquan (who
would advance a “revisionist” program, as described below) were among the
Soviet-trained cadres Moscow had tried to use to undermine Mao’s leader-
ship in the 1930s. Chen Yun, a key advocate of Soviet-style economic planning
and material incentives, had spent several years in the Soviet Union.
The driving force of China’s policies became Mao’s effort to intensify the
struggle against revisionism, international and domestic. Mao did not com-
partmentalize domestic from international politics. In his mind, the struggle
against international revisionism was linked to the struggle against revision-
ism within China. Exposing and striking at the international revisionists