PURGE HALTED IN CHINA

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28473, 31 December 1957, Page 9

PURGE HALTED IN CHINA

“Rightists Now In Isolation”

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 8 p.m.) NEW YORK, December 29. The Chmese Communist Party today announced the end of a nation-wide purge of Rightists but warned bluntly that other shakeups would occur “repeatedly for a number of years to come,” the United Press reported from Tokyo. The announcement said that “Rightist elements” in the nation and the party were now in complete isolation. “Now the situation in the class struggle may be relaxed for a certain time,” it said. The report, made earlier this month to a meeting of the Chekiang Provincial Party Congress, was disclosed to the outside world today by the Communist New China News Agency.

The United Press said the New China News Agency emphasised that the report, made by the provincial party’s first Secretary. Ching Hua, dealt with questions that were “nation-wide and not just local.”

While disclosing a let-up in the purge of anti-Communist elements, Marshal Chiang warned that “the bourgeois Rightists and other antiSocialist elements are never reconciled to their doom and in certain conditions are liable to launch new attacks.”

Marshal Chiang admitted that the Rightists and “counter-revo-lutidnaries” had stirred up things in frenzied attacks.

In one county, he said, “many agricultural co-operatives collapsed in the course of disturbances” during the first half of the year. The provincial party leader cautioned that fluctuations when anti-Communist elements again might arise would occur repeatedly for years to come, the United Press said. The shake-up was known as the •rectification campaign.** It followed Mr Mao Tse-tung’s call for "letting a thousand flowers bloom and all fields of thought contend.” Many Chinese had taken Mr Mao at his word and became overcritical of the Communist regime. The United Press said that Radio Peking, meanwhile, disclosed forecasts of major cv's in Communist Chinese defence expenditures and a period of marked austerity as the nation pushed efforts at industrialisation.

The military cuts were predicted by Vice-Marshal Chu Teh, known as the “grand old man” of the Chmese Communist Army. Marshal Chu Teh, speaking before the closing session, of the National Finance Conference in Peking, appealed for a further reduction in military and administrative expenditures, the New China News Agency reported. The military leader, who is now 71, emphasised that “aL available funds should be concentrated on socialist construction,” and that “expenditure for non-productive purposes” would be pared to a bare minimum.