3 – On the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in socialist China - from People's War 11, March 2017

On the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in socialist China

3

Another mass movement was launched in November 1975 in continuation of the GPCR to “criticise Deng and repulse the right deviationist wind to reverse correct verdicts”. Started in Xinhua University, this mass movement won a significant victory in April 1976 when Deng was once again dismissed from all posts inside and outside the Party. The third revisionist headquarter too was smashed by the GPCR in this way.

However, taking advantage of the death of several senior leaders of the party including Chu Teh, Kang Sheng, Tung Pi-wu, Chou En-lai and Mao in 1976 in quick succession, the hidden revisionists led by Hua Kuo-feng captured important positions in the Party, army and the government in 1976. Hua had become the acting Prime Minister and Minister of Public Security after the death of Chou En-lai. Though outwardly an adherent of Mao’s revolutionary line till then, Hua and his cohorts soon capitulated to the Right, formed an antiparty clique and became instrumental in carrying out a counter-revolutionary coup de etat less than a month after Mao’s death. Hua usurped the positions of the Chairman of the Party’s Central Committee and the head of the Army as well. The capitalist-roaders led by him suppressed the revolutionaries, sabotaged the socialist state, rehabilitated their cohorts like Deng Xiao-ping, dismantled the socialist economy, promoted capitalism and slandered against the GPCR. With the seizure of power by the Deng-Hua counter-revolutionary clique, the ten-year long GPCR reached a dead end. The Chinese revolution and the Chinese people experienced a great reversal.

In spite of this setback, the GPCR won a number of significant victories and achievements in all fields of revolutionary activity. By smashing the three bourgeois headquarters headed by Liu Shao-chi, Lin Piao and Deng Xiao-ping respectively, it prevented the slipping away of political power from the hands of the proletariat and the people, it consolidated the dictatorship of the proletariat, prevented capitalist restoration and ensured the continuation of the Chinese revolution for another decade after 1966. In the field of ideology, it raised Marxism-Leninism-Mao Thought to a higher level by developing the laws of class struggle under conditions of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat through concrete practice.
It demonstrated the absolute necessity of continuing the revolution both in the field of the economic base and the superstructure. It once again proved that revisionism, the most pernicious manifestation of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology within communist movement, remains the main danger to Marxism and revolution requiring consistent ideological struggle. It reaffirmed the importance of applying the dialectical and historical materialist method of “one divides into two” in all revolutionary activity.

In the field of politics, it taught that in the socialist society, the proletariat must continue the class struggle during the entire period of transition from capitalism to communism, exercise all-round dictatorship and guard against the possibility of counter-revolution by uniting all those who can be united against domestic and international reactionaries. It demonstrated the need to rely on the broad masses and to mobilise them to the full, to consistently apply the mass line in order to give full effect to the class line, and to unite the 95 percent of the people to isolate and defeat the 5 percent counter-revolutionaries and bad elements. It highlighted the significance of never forgetting the class struggle, always keeping politics in command and exercising working-class leadership in all spheres. It established the principle of “the three dos and three don’ts” – “Practise Marxism, and not revisionism; unite, and don’t split; be open and aboveboard, and don’t intrigue and conspire”.

In the cultural field, the GPCR overturned the dominance of the revisionists who, under the influence of bourgeois and feudal ideologies, concerned themselves with depicting only the old ruling classes and caricaturing, undermining or ignoring the toiling masses. Mao criticised the Ministry of Culture for sticking to the promotion of old feudal-bourgeois culture while refusing to promote the new socialist culture. If it refused to change, he suggested, the ministry should be renamed as the “Ministry of Emperors, Kings, Generals and Ministers, the Ministry of Talents and Beauties or the Ministry of Foreign Mummies”. Spurred by the GPCR, new models were created in proletarian literature and art including drama, painting, cinema, creative writing, etc. exemplified by the transformation of Peking Opera in which the old form was given a new and revolutionary content.

In education, it opened the doors of educational institutions for the children of workers and peasants on a mass scale for the first time in Chinese history. Millions of students went to the factories and fields to work during the GPCR, thereby bringing a closer integration of study and production, theoretical and practical knowledge, knowing and doing. Millions of worker and peasant masses who were deprived of education by the old society were educated through innovative methods in different kinds of schools to increase mass literacy and raise the cultural level of the people. Extensive ideological-political education was carried out including the collective study of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought as a continuation of the Socialist Education Movement at a still higher stage.

Medicine and healthcare too were revolutionised by the GPCR through a mass approach and keeping the vast rural masses at the centre, since the Ministry of Health proved itself to be a “Ministry of Urban Overlords”. The countrywide expansion of barefoot doctors, the combining of Chinese and foreign medicine and healing techniques, and similar innovations carried out during the GPCR brought basic healthcare to the country’s masses for the first time, raising life-expectancy and the standard of general health to a level unprecedented in China which has not been surpassed even today.

In the field of science and technology, the GPCR encouraged participation, experimentation and innovation by the masses, achieved new heights in the implementation of the principle of ‘red and expert’, reinforced the need for self-reliance on the basis of the old serving the new and the foreign serving and native and brought about a revolutionary transformation in this field. With the mass involvement of the working people in shaping technology, great successes were achieved in improving, mastering and perfecting technology which in turn
promoted production and people’s welfare.

In industry and agriculture, GPCR gave rise to an upsurge in socialist emulation and labour enthusiasm among the working masses encapsulated by the slogan “In agriculture, learn from Tachai; in industry, learn from Taching” which was implemented all over the country. As a result, the targets of the Third and Fourth Five Year Plans (1965-70 and 1970-75) were overfulfilled. Industrial and agricultural production touched new heights and socialist accumulation made rapid progress. Good harvests were reaped for thirteen years in succession since 1962 even amidst the upheavals of the GPCR. This was a result of implementing the line “Grasp Revolution and Promote Production” which defeated Liu Shaochi’s revisionist line of “technique in command” and promoting production through material incentives. All these and other achievements in the economic field during the GPCR went a long way in meeting the basic needs of the 800 million people of China and in securing “the maximum satisfaction of the constantly rising material and cultural requirements of the whole of society through the continuous expansion and perfection of socialist production on the basis of higher techniques” – which is the essential features and requirements of the basic law of socialism (Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, 1953). These achievements rebutted the foul propaganda of the reactionaries at home and abroad who claimed that the GPCR was a disaster disrupting China’s economic development. In fact, with the GPCR the masses of China took great strides towards actualizing the plan suggested by Mao to advance the country’s economy to the front ranks of the world by the turn of the twentieth century.

The GPCR brought important changes in the organisational forms of the party, army and the government. Three-in-one combination of old, middle aged and new cadres in all party committees was instituted. Open-door policy was encouraged in party discussions to ensure the involvement and supervision of the masses in party affairs and to carry out the mass line more effectively. Insignias that differentiated army officers and soldiers according to rank were abolished, self-reliance in military technology and production was achieved, the people’s militia was re-established and the people’s army was more closely integrated with the people and production with slogans like “the whole country should learn from the PLA” and “the PLA should learn from the people”. In government, new forms of organisation such as the “great alliance of people” and the establishment of revolutionary people’s committees throughout the country as per the principle of three-in-one combination of representatives of the people, the army and the party consolidated the people’s political power and the socialist state. During the GPCR, the masses widely used new forms of struggle such as speaking out freely, airing views fully, writing big-character posters and holding great debates. They built new forms of organisation such as the Red Guards, new type of factory committees through which workers participated in decision-making and managers participated in production and women’s federation committees that led the fight for women’s rights and their equal participation in political, economic and cultural life. In this process, the revolutionary masses established new values such as proletarian democracy, self-reliance, plain living and hard struggle, subordinating individual interest to collective interest, respect for physical labour, and so on.