1963 the party returned to more rational plan-
ning. China’s professionals were appeased and
told that they were part of the working people.
Private plots and handicraft enterprise were again
permitted. The peasantry were allowed to sell
their produce in a free market provided they ful-
filled their state quotas. To feed China’s growing
population – it increased by 80 million between
1957 and 1965 – incentives were necessary to
raise production. Even so, agriculture barely
recovered to its 1957 level and the shortfall had
to be made good by grain imports.
All these policies of the so-called reformists
were opposed by an ultra-left group that placed
the revolutionary class struggle first. The reform-
ers were led by the nominal head of state,
Liu Shaoqui, and Deng Xiaoping; the defence
minister Lin Biao, who in 1959 had replaced
Peng Dehuai, dismissed for openly criticising
Mao’s Great Leap Forward, was a sycophantic
supporter of Mao’s most extreme policies; Mao’s
wife, the former actress Jiang Quing, was another
uncompromising extremist. Then there were
various groupings between the two; Premier
Zhou Enlai was the most enduring and able,
manoeuvring cleverly so that he never lost Mao’s
approval. Mao waited until he judged the time
right before resuming the revolutionary lead.
Unquestionably there was serious inner-party
strife at the top level of the Politburo from 1958
to 1966. Mao permitted the different groupings
to coexist, acting only if there were any outright
criticisms of the chairman himself, such as those
voiced by the disgraced Peng. The inner work-
ings of Chinese party politics permit more than
one interpretation. It is possible that Mao gen-
uinely had to struggle against opponents in the
party to reassert his authority. Much more likely,
Mao deliberately chose to withdraw from time to
time to study and reflect, and to dissociate himself
from ‘rectification’ policies that he would later
attack and condemn.
This explains certain simultaneous but contra-
dictory currents in Chinese politics. In the
autumn of 1962 Mao indicated a return to a more
radical course with a campaign against writers and
the resurfacing of bourgeois and capitalist ten-
dencies. He turned to a new generation: ‘youth
must be educated so that our nation will remain
revolutionary and incorruptible for generations
and forever’. In the spring of 1963 he claimed
that landlords and rich peasants were regaining
their influence, corrupting and manipulating
local party officials, and ‘developing counter-
revolutionary organisations’. Meanwhile, Deng
Xiaoping, now the party’s general secretary, was
giving priority to economic recovery, above all to
repair the ravages in agriculture. Deng had
expressed this view uncompromisingly: ‘As long
as we increase production, we can revert to indi-
vidual enterprise; it hardly matters whether a
good cat is black or white – as long as it catches
mice.’ This did not mean that Deng was a liberal
in the Western sense, that he envisaged aban-
doning communism or authoritarian control
from the centre. He was adopting a pragmatic
approach to China’s immediate economic prob-
lems – any incentives offered to private enterprise
would be determined by the party. The party
would continue to control China.
By 1963, Mao was preparing to move against
Deng and the policies he advocated, but ‘self-
criticism’ saved him in 1966. Liu Shaoqui was not
so fortunate; dismissed from all his posts in 1968,
he died in prison a year later. With the help of
Lin Biao, Mao embarked on an intensive cam-
paign to radicalise the young army recruits with
‘the thoughts of Chairman Mao’.
The famous Little Red Book was written to
indoctrinate them. ‘Study Chairman Mao’s writ-
ings, follow his teachings and act according to his
instructions’, ordered Lin Biao. Mao’s quotations
can be cited in justification of all the changes of
policy resorted to and cover every possible con-
dition. They are taken from his writings and
speeches from the 1920s to the 1950s. By group-
ing them in thirty-three thematic chapters under
headings such as ‘Self-Reliance and Arduous
Struggle’, ‘Serving the People’ and so on, but
then jumbling up any chronological sequence
within each section, they can be used to support
many different arguments by selective citation.
They thus convey a sense of infallibility despite
their contradictions. The Little Red Book became
the holy writ of the student youth revolt of 1966
- that is, of the Red Guards.
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