UPHEAVAL IN CHINA RUSSIANS SCEPTICAL ABOUT MAO’S PLANS

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28728, 28 October 1958, Page 10

UPHEAVAL IN CHINA RUSSIANS SCEPTICAL ABOUT MAO’S PLANS

[By ISAAC DEUTSCHER]

[H]

London, October 11.—If the objectives of the Chinese “movement for communes” are clear enough, its prospects are heavy. How, one wonders, have the Chinese peasants received the latest orders and slogans issued from Peking? How do they react to this momentous blow which Mao’s party has now struck against private property and the traditional way of life of rural China? Are the Chinese peasants really devoid of the “individualistic instincts” that have made peasants in so many other countries put up a desperate resistance to collectivisation? The Soviet peasants, when they revolted against Stalin’s forcible collectivisation, slaughtered half their cattle, smashed implements, set fire to crops, and thus to some extent defeated collectivisation even while they themselves were being crushed. Is some such Apocalyptic revolt now unfolding in the Chinese countryside? Or, are the peasants joining the communes “with enthusiasm” as Peking claims, and as some recent Western travellers to China believe?

It is difficult not only for outsiders and foreign travellers but even for the rulers in Peking to judge what is going on in the depth of a mass of 500 million people. But it may be that Mao Tse-tung and his party are now getting dividends from the caution and flexibility with which, in contrast to Stalin and his followers, they arranged the opening phases of collectivisation some years ago. Stalin at first attempted to impose wholesale collectivisation at a stroke and to confiscate from the peasants all their belongings; only bloody resistance forced him to retreat, to compromise, and to make concessions to the peasants’ “property instincts,” in order to save the general framework of tne collective farm. The initial collision, however, was so violent that the memories of it have survived in the U.S.S.R. to this day and weigh even now upon relations between State and peasantry. Less Conflict in China The Chinese collectivisation of the middle 1950’s has evidently not led to any comparable conflict and shock. The peasantry was drawn into the co-operatives gradually and mildly. The farmer’s individualism, which had revolted against Stalin’s raw surgery, appears to have fallen into a coma under Mao’s anaesthetical treatment.

The difference in results has been quick in showing itself. Stalin’s collectivisation was followed by a steep and prolonged decline in the productivity of Soviet agriculture, and by famines and the death of millions. Mao’s collectivisation, has, on the contrary, led to a steady rise in farming output. (This has in part been accounted for by the building of anti-flood dams in the country and by largescale irrigation works which it was easier to undertake with the help of collectively organised labour than it was in the old-time individualistic village). In any case, this year China has a record harvest, nearly twice as large as last year’s and over three times larger than the last harvest before the revolution. The achievement is all the more remarkable because it has been obtained with the most primitive technical means, mainly on the basis of cooperated manual labour.

Unlike the Soviet peasants of the 1930’5, the Chinese have seen their wellbeing improving with collectivisation, however modest that improvement mav be by any Western standard. This seems to have sapped to some extent their attachment to private farming and perhaps even reconciled them to a collectivist economy. Mao Moves Cautiously

Having secured this favourable start for collectivisation, Mao may now possibly find it easier to take the peasants a stage further, towards the commune, the stage of which the Russians dare not think yet. He still proceeds with great caution and keeps his avenues of retreat open. He plans to draw out the whole process of reorganisation over a number of years. He delays the introduction of an egalitarian distribution of income within the commune and tries to give due weight to individual rewards and incentives. He warns the Communists against the use of coercion against the peasants and at the same time |he seeks to overwhelm the ! peasantry’s mind with a mos| • intensive propaganda for the commune. With a favourable start behind him, with the use of such varied ways and means, and with so much subtlety, he may succeed where no other Communist government has succeeded so far.

However, this is only a hypothetical view of the prospects; and some time must lapse before the actual reaction of the Chinese peasantry can be gauged. It is still possible that the experiment should break down with a crash and cause grave social turmoil. Curiously enough, the Russians have received these latest Chinese developments with reserve and tacit irony. “Pravda” published the decree of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on September 11; but until the time of writing, nearly a month later, the Soviet press has refrained from giving its blessing to the move. While its pages were full of declarations of Soviet solidarity with China over the Quemoy conflict and of glowing tributes to Mao’s other domestic achievements, no mention was made of this, the latest and the most momentous domestic development, the movement for the commune. This silence speaks louder than any amount of comment. Moscow Senses Heresy Moscow is not only sceptical about Mao’s latest undertaking —it also senses heresy. Khrushchev may resent the fact that Mao is carrying into effect his old scheme of the Agrotown. What is more important, the whole trend -of Chinese domestic policy is in 1 implicit conflict with Soviet policy. Khrushchev has just made a series of important concessions to the peasants, relaxing the Stalinist rigours of collectivisation: he has sold the machine tractor stations, hitherto Stateowned, to the collective farms; he has freed the peasants from compulsory food deliveries; and

- he has attempted to place the economic relationship between State and peasantry on something like a market basis. To Soviet ears there is something almost blasphemous in the Chinese talk about the commune being superior to any ordinary collective farm, it only because the Chinese commune will for many years to come be based on a technical level of farming far lower than that prevailing m the Soviet kolkhoz. Similarly, the Chinese territorial militias with their “soldiercitizens” and “soldier-labourers’’ have too much of the early Bolshevik aura about them to please Moscow’s late Bolshevik rulers. The Chinese are evidently taking much more seriously their talk about their own “road to socialism” than the Russians would like them to do. Sooner or later these implicit divergencies between the Soviet and Chinese attitudes may give rise to new controversy in the Communist camp. The whole course of collectivisation in China is unmistakably if only implicitly a critique of the Soviet “road to socialism.” Dangerous Illusions? Moscow appears to be as apprehensive about Mao’s present “ultra-radical” deviation from Stalinist or post-Stalinist orthodoxy as it was in 1956-57 about his “ultra-liberal” Hundred Flowers. He had, in Moscow’s view, gone too far in promising freedom of expression; and so he was compelled to go back on his promises and to reimpose monolithic discipline. Is he not now indulging in dangerous illusions about the peasantry’s willingness to accept the commune? In both cases, Mao’s ambitions may have exceeded China’s resources and possibilities. When he tried to carry de-Stalinisation further than the Russians had carried it, he ignored the circumstances that the basic factor behind the Russian de-Stalinisation was Russia’s industrial and educational progress, which became incompatible with many of tne totalitarian practices of the Stalin era. Mao then discovered that his essays in “liberalisation” accorded ill with the mass discipline that is required in the initial phase of forced industrialisation, in which China is engaged. On the other hand, Moscow is inclined to take the view that China is industrially and socially too backward for the “advanced forms of socialism” which Mao now attempts to foster in the country. The Soviet Union, with its powerful State-owned industry and its vastly expanded urban working class, is still shrinking from imposing the Agrotown and the commune on its peasantry, which is relatively much weaker vis-a-vis the State and the urban working class than is the Chinese peasantry. Is it not reckless then of Mao to defy so provocatively the individualism of the Chinese peasantry? These are the questions pondered by the guardians of orthodoxy and the policy-makers in Moscow. But much more than orthodoxy and dogma are involved in this, for if the movement for the commune succeeds in China, the Soviet rulers may well be driven or tempted to follow in Mao’s footsteps. Khrushchev may then take up once again his own abandoned scheme of the Agrotown; and the upheaval which is now shaking rural China may well spread to the U.S.S.R. —(World Copyright Reserved.) (Concluded)