China's rumbling political crisis entered a dramatic new phase last week when violent demonstrations shook Tien-an-men square in Peking for the first time since the cultural revolution ten years ago. According to the Hsinhua News Agency, a hundred militia were wounded during the rioting, twelve of them seriously. Vehicles were set on fire, and a Public Security Office facing onto the square was burned and ransacked.
On the Ching Ming festival the day before the riots, thousands of mourners had filed into Tien-an-men to lay wreaths to the memory of Chou En-lai, who died in January. It was the removal of these wreaths during the night by security police that provoked the violent reaction of the crowd. Tens of thousands of militia were drafted in, many of them (to judge from vehicle licence-plates) from outside the capital, to quell the rioting.
Reports state that some of Chou's mourners raised slogans in support of the moderate Teng Hsiao-ping, who has been under attack from 'radicals' in recent weeks. A document purporting to be Chou En-lai's political testament, published recently in Tokyo, showed that Chou and Teng shared similar political positions.
In this sense, whoever organised the incidents in the square was executing Chou's testament. But the size of the demonstrations does not necessarily reflect widespread mass support for Teng and his policies. Judging by reports, pro-Teng slogans were only raised by a handful of demonstrators, and most of the crowds were drawn by affection for Chou Enlai rather than support for Teng. Modernising Serious observers will wait for more evidence to emerge before drawing firm conclusions about the meaning of the Tien-an-men troubles. But it is clear that they were closely connected with the recent sharpening, triggered by the death of arch-mediator Chou En-lai and the imminence of Mao's own 'meeting with Marx', of the power struggle that has rumbled on in the party leadership ever since the cultural revolution.
To apply the labels 'moderate" and 'radical' to the leadership factions involved is only useful if they are properly qualified. It would be just as wrong to confuse Chiang Ching and co. with the genuinely radical forces that emerged during the cultural revolution, as it would be to accept the slander that Teng Hsiao-ping is out to 'restore capitalism'.
The two factions both share the aim of modernising China's poor and backward economy before the year 2000. Where they differ is on how to achieve this aim. Mao's instinctive response to the problems of economic development is to launch limited campaigns to reduce privilege, corruption and other symptoms of bureaucratic degeneration that might threaten to alienate the rank-and-file. The proposals of his opponents are more classically Stalinist: to allow small increases in differentials for a growing 'professional' stratum, and thus to create a narrow privileged layer to act as a cushion between the rule of the bureaucracy and the masses.
But in other ways the Maoists are clearly to the right of their opponents. Their proposals for 'all-round dictatorship' have meant in practice the extinction of all elements of proletarian democracy. The 'moderates' in the leadership, despite their hostility to real socialist democracy, favour a certain liberalisation in political and cultural life to ease.
Chinese soldiers demonstrating against Teng Hsiao-ping social tensions.
Other issues which may divide the two camps include foreign policy, and in particular relations with imperialism and the Soviet Union. Here the evidence is flimsy, but all Mao's past opponents have been more prepared than him to see joint action with the Soviet Union, and the implications are that the present dispute is no exception.
It would be over-simple, however, to see the Tien-an-men events exclusively in terms of the struggle at the top. Once the violence flared up it was Wu Teh, staunch 'moderate" and ally of Teng Hsiao-ping, whose voice boomed out from the public address system warning against class enemies and counterrevolutionaries'. The rioting also gave Teng's -opponents in the leadership precisely the excuse they needed to strip him of all the powers he has accumulated in recent months.
A common feature of most political campaigns that have developed since the cultural revolution is the constant emergence of forces mobilised outside the conventional channels and independent of all wings of the bureaucracy Development Workers' political actions in past years invariably developed in the shadow of the student movement or a section of the bureaucracy; but the 1974-75 strikes were remarkable for their apparent independence of all outside influences. This growing maturity and self-confidence of the Chinese workers partly reflects their numerical growth and the rapid socio-economic development of the country.
Other sections are also becoming increasingly alienated from the established order. Since the cultural revorunon many munons or young people have been dispersed from the cities to the countryside because of the inability of China's industry to absorb new levies of school-leavers. This 'rustification' drive discriminates against workers' children and suspected political dissidents, and such youth therefore resent their fate and see themselves as especially disadvantaged. Many tens and even hundreds of thousands have fled back to the cities, where they present a serious crime problem and are an obvious focus of dissent.
Corruption Ordinary Chinese have many other reasons to resent the Maoist leaders. The cultural reTENG HSIAO-PING.
In fact, all Mao's recent campaigns have been markedly totalitarian in character, in sharp contrast to the classical Maoist themes of participation and the "mass line". The same Mao who in 1966 inspired the youth in China and the world with rhetorical references to the Paris Commune now eulogises Chin Shih Huang, China's ruthless first unifier and a practitioner of the totalitarian philosophy of legalism.
The Maoists' fear of the mass movement has inevitably reduced the force of their drive against the 'moderates' in the leadership. It is a little remarked but telling detail that the same day Teng was stripped of his posts, his close ally Li Hsien-nien reappeared in public after a period of absence. Moreover Hua Kuofeng, the man chosen to fill Chou's old post as prime minister, is not a radical' but a compromise candidate acceptable to both factions Bureaucratic But as Mao's death draws nearer, the pre ssures that emerged almost immediately after Chou's death for a quick resolution of the leadership struggle are bound to intensify -all the more so since the "radicals' are aware that Mao's powerful backing for their faction can only last as long as he does. Fearful of the masses, both leadership factions will probably confine their battles to the bureaucratic apparatus, in which case the struggle will more and more assume the typically Stalinist form of police purges, frame-up trials, and so on.
But in the long run, as Mao has never tired of saying, it is the masses who make history In the struggles that break out in future years, revolutionaries will support neither of the existing leadership factions, but take the side of the independent workers movement At the same time they will seize on the radical aspects expressed in a fragmentary and distorted form in the rival programmes of the two factions - the egalitarian drive of the Maoists, the timid liberalisation calls of the "moderates' - and weld them into a new independent revolutionary programme.