CHINA TODAY-1 "A Revolutionary Society Run By Working People”

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31881, 8 January 1969, Page 7

CHINA TODAY-1 " A Revolutionary Society Run By Working People”

In the last tw o years I have attended hundreds of meetings in China. Speakers usually opened by saying something like this: “What I have to say is simply my own opinion. It represents my understanding of the position. I haven’t a very high political level and my understanding is in fact limited. If there are shortcomings and mistakes in what I say, I hope you will point them out.’’

I can’t think of any better introduction to an article on China today. It gives an idea of the constant search for knowledge and deeper understanding of social laws which animates the several hundred million working people of China.

As working people they understand that it is essential for everyone to speak up and have his say so that the opinion of each can be heard and tested against facts known to all. They recognise that pooling opinions puts collective wisdom to the service of the people, whereas any individual's experience is limited. This mass democracy where everyone speaks up and has his say taken into account is socialism’s recognition of Mao’s “the people and the people alone” (not any individual) “are the motive force in the making of history.” Making History

Through this process of mass democracy the Chinese people are consciously making history; they are identifying what mistakes have been made against the people’s interests, finding out what was right and what was wrong in the past, and forging a new unity which will provide the basis for a further stride forward in the long-term task of consolidating socialism and ultimately building communism.

Much has been written and spoken about China, both favourable and unfavourable. Written material to support any particular view can be quoted—sometimes it is correct, sometimes it is false, and sometimes a mixture with a grain of truth hidden in a mass of misconceptions and, in some cases, distortions. The older I get, the more I realise that nothing in life is simple. On the other hand we have to try to get at the essence of things. And in my view it is very important to get at the essence of what is China.

So in this first of three articles I will present my understanding of the essence of China today and, in the following articles, will try to

deal with a limited number iof questions which appear to be of particular interest to j New Zealanders.

Constant Change The outstanding thing about China is that it is a revolutionary society. It is a society run by working people who recognise life as a process of constant change and are determined to see that these constant changes are made in the interest of the working people who make up the vast majority. The modem Chinese state was founded in 1949 through revolution, through armed struggle. The guiding philosophy of this state, and of the Chinese Communist Party as expressed most completely in the writings of Mao Tse-tung, is that struggle between the old and new, between right and wrong, continues throughout man’s existence on earth. Sometimes this struggle is open and sometimes hidden, sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent. There are plenty of objective facts in the world around us to substantiate this view—wars, uprisings, economic crises, strikes, lockouts and, at a more intimate level, differences and arguments between young and old, between parents and their children.

After The Storm China is now emerging ' from the cultural revolution, 1 a social storm which was the first of its kind in the world ' and the first in China. I say the first in China because I ' believe that there will be 1 more cultural revolutions in J that country, maybe one or ' two more in this century. Their outward forms may be different but the control and purpose will be the same. The upheaval which has taken place in China has its own precise definition—the great proletarian cultural revolution. It is great because of its scale and what it aims to achieve. It is proletarian because its proclaimed aim is that the working class must take the lead in everything. It is cultural because it embraces all spheres of thought history, philosophy, literature, the arts, drama, law, economics—in short the struggle between new and old ideas everywhere. It is a revolution because it involves radical change. The essence of this radical change is that all political power which has come into the hands of people who were no longer prepared consciously and conscientiously to build socialism had to be taken away from them and placed in the hands of those who were. State Defined The Chinese define their state as a dictatorship, a democratic dictatorship of the working people. This recognition is based on the Marxist view that all states represent the interests of a particular class, for example, that the Kuomintang exercised state power in the interests of the feudal land-owners and bureaucrat-capitalists. The cultural revolution has been accompanied by violence. It is after all a revolution. But it is a revolution in which the people are called , on to educate themselves. At all times, from its start and throughout its course, the Chinese Communist Party has called for people to refrain

from violence and has insisted that the method of reasoning not force must be used. It is basic to Mao Tse-tung’s ideas that ideas cannot be imposed by force, that people only change their ideas when !they understand why these ideas are wrong and that the process of change is a gradual one which is accompanied by a rise on political consciousness. Mao’s Prestige Mao Tse-tung’s prestige in China is so great, as is that of the People’s Liberation Army which he founded, that if China had been a dictatorship in the sense that Nazi Germany was a dictatorship he could easily have displaced or suppressed those who disagreed with his interpretation of social development He did not do so.

Instead, he put his ideas to the test of practice. People were expected to find out, discuss and analyse for themselves. They did so. In this process of the mass exchange of ideas, intense political struggle developed and on occasions led to violence. But only rarely was the People’s Liberation Army called on to intervene. In fact in the early stages neither the P.L.A. nor any other organ of state authority was allowed to do so. Nerve Centre Peking is the country’s political nerve centre. In some two years of the cultural revolution I saw one man badly injured and a few others who suffered light injuries as a result of blows. On a number of occasions I saw people scuffling and usually others acted promptly to break it up. Of course I didn’t see everything that happened in Peking. But I moved around quite a bit. Peking city has a population of 4,000,000. So, approximately, has New South Wales. When I passed through Sydney early in December the N.S.W. toll of road fatalities for 1968 had then passed the 1000 mark. In China, road fatalities are practically unheard of. On the other hand, people have lost their lives in the cultural revolution. But when I read a statement by Lin Piao that maximum gains have been made in the cultural revolution and that losses have been minimal I think this is a more accurate description of the situation than, say, a report written by somebody who hasn’t even been inside China. One Step The course of the cultural revolution has been a vindication of Mao Tse-tung’s line. It can best be likened to a gigantic exercise in social engineering. An exercise which was often allowed to run freely but which was never out of control. We are all familiar with the idea of changing nature. We have examples of it all around us in New Zealand. Mao Tse-tung has launched China on the much more formidable path of taking practical steps to change human nature and build a society where private, selfish interests give way to public interest, where society places its highest values on the efforts of those who set out to serve the people wholly and entirely without thought of , personal gain. What, one may ' ask, is new about this? The fact remains that the Chinese people, on the biggest i scale yet in history, are ex- . ploring new ways to achieve . this aim. I Political Struggle [ The cultural revolution was . not a crazy criss-crossed pati tern without rhyme or reason, i Nor was it a struggle for per-

sonal power between groups of wildly ambitious men. It was however a political struggle and the issue was political power, who should hold it and for what purpose. In my opinion the issue has been decided in favour of

; those who believe that China j should carry on the revolution, carry on the task of building socialism. This, I believe, is the essence of what has been going on in China. As the Chinese themselves might say they are working to bring the superstructure of society, that is the realm of ideas, into line with the country’s socialist economic base. 1 have called this, for want of a better term, social engineering. Building A Bulwark They believe that if they had not done so, the old ideas, the old habits of thought and action would have' asserted themselves and the time would have come when these ideas would have gained control and the socialist economic base would have been modified leading finally to the establishment of a form of capitalism. Several New Zealanders have commented to me that the writings of Mao Tse-tung often represent axioms accepted by all. There is, I think, truth in this and in Mao’s repeated warning against blind acceptance of anybody’s views. In the years to come I believe the Chinese working people will achieve new feats of social engineering to put these axioms into practice. The first thing which Mao Tse-tung expects others to do is to think for themselves-. In 1949, when the Chinese Communists came to power after 30 years of arduous and extremely complicated political and armed struggle, Mao said that this merely represented the first step on a march of 10,000 li. Today we are in a better position to grasp the full significance of that remark. We can also say, I thifik, that the cultural revolution, vast as it has been in scope and complex as it has been in its course, is merely another step in that journey.

By D. W. LAKE, a former New Zealand journalist who recently returned to this country after living and working for the last six years in China.