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SUSPENDS” ADMISSION OF NEW STUDENTS TO UNIVERSITIES
“By George | Novack
The admission of all students to universities and secondary schools has been suspended for six months by decision of the Central: Committee of the Communist party and the government of China, Radio-~Peking announced June. 18. This decision has been taken to permit. revision. of entrance. requirements into the higher educational system. According to the authorities, the present setup is too bourgeois and discriminates. against workers, peasants, soldiers and young revolutionists.
This. means, according +0 ‘the Tune 19-20 Le Monde, that about half a million young people who would normally have entered ‘the university this September will have to wait until next January when the new regulations will be published and put into effect.
Such an ‘arbitrary interruption of the educational process appears on its face to be injurious to the welfare of the nation. In the fast-moving twentieth century, the progress of technology, science, industry, communications and even agriculture vitally ° depend upon’ developing higher educational qualifications among the young generation. This upgrading. is all the more imperative for “=the People's Republic of China which has to modernize itself under forced draft amidst extremely adverse circumstances.
A government guided by socialist standards and aims would strive, as.the Chinese Communists have done so well over the past sixteen: years, to keep on lifting the level of education and culture. In so backward and densely populated a country, this cannot be = achieved evenly or all at once but only in stages and by leaps.
Granted that the children of the poor should be given equal and even preferential access to educational facilities. How is this aim promoted by closing entry into the “upper grades for everyone for six months?
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This stern measure fits into the pattern of maltreating the intellectuals called "hsiafang" in China, which means "to go down." This practice was instituted by a law passed August 17, 1957, after the dissidence displayed by intellectuals and students in the principal cities and universities during the "hundred flowers bloom. period. ‘The law stipulated that intellectuals had to perform a year's work in the country and a month's manual labor at home every year.
Under this policy intellectuals, regardless of age, health, sex, special skills, functions and circumstances, - have been obligated to go and work on menial tasks in the rural areas for from
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six months to five years. They-are thereby Supposed to experience the redemptive virtues ” ‘of hard Manual labor.
‘This edict has ‘been stringently: sapplied in the past few years. In Peking alone, by October 1964, 125,000 people, including architects, doctors, musicians, lawyers, chemists, had marched off to till the land. According to Peking Information on July 19, 1965, millions of students are sent to the country every year to become peasants "of a new sort." It is doubtful that they went with much joy and willingness. . :
They serve in’ obedience to one of the mandates of: ‘Mao! s philosophy that manual labor in an’ by itself purifies and enobles. For example, Hu Yao-pang, addressing the Young Communist League of Chiha on June 11, 1964, said: "As fast as science: and technology progresses, as the size of the conquest of nature grows, in certain spheres and certain sectors of production, hard manual labor will. reappear...it is an extremely important condition, enabling us to transform our ideology and escape degeneration."
“Whereas the founders of scientific socialism viewed the development and diversification of the social division of labor on a national, “and international scale as one of the mainsprings of progress-and the reduction of back-breaking physical labor as one of its most valuable results, the Mao regime seeks to get around and efface by arbitrary methods the inescapable differentiation of. social, economic and cultural functions at this stage of China's evolution and to justify this by exalting the role of hard manual labor.
In a series published ; in The Guardian May 24-26, Marcel Marien, a Belgian writer who recently returned from China after. working for 18 months in Peking, mostly for the Propaganda Ministry of the Chinese government, described some examples of this policy which he had observed. "A professor of philosophy...is put in charge of raising chickens and pigs:in a suburb of Peking. As he doesn't know a thing about it, the fowl die and the pigs don't fatten...A translator .is sent into a printing house to become a printer, while the man he. is replacing will rebuild a wall or plant trees.
"Among my closest colleagues, one stuck on. stamps for the post office, another exercised children on holiday, a third moved house for a family of peasants, and a fourth helped builders to shift bricks.
Most peasants do not welcome these compulsory and incompetent supplementary laborers but resent their presence. This irrational use of both intellectual and physical labor-is economically disruptive. It comes from an authoritarian and unrealistic attempt to skip over necessary stages in the social and historical development Imposed on China by its inherited backwardness and isolation.
This maltreatment of the intellectuals is justified by the official doctrine of "revolutionary proletarian culture," a false.
theory which was rejected and condemned by Lenin as un-Marxist in the days of the original ultraleft "proletcult" immediately after the Russian Revolution. It was subsequently taken up under Stalin and Zhdanov, who are now being surpassed in this field by their disciple, Mao.
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The projected educational reform-is directly linked with the vaunted "high tide of the great proletarian cultural revolution" which "has been unfolding vigorously throughout China for several months, in response to the great call of the Central Committee of the Chinese CP and Chairman Mao Tse-tung." According to a Hsinhua. dispatch from Peking June 11, "the magnitude, impact, intensity and strength of this great proletarian cultural revolution are without precedent in history. The whole of China is a vast scene of seething revolution."
Along with a companion editorial from Red Flag of the same date, this piece tells how the enemy is being unmasked and vanquished through this campaign. "Hundreds of millions of workers, peasants, and soldiers...armed with Mao Tse-tung's thought, have been writing articles, holding discussions, and putting up posters written in big characters to sweep away the ogres of all kinds entrenched in ideological and cultural positions...Those who echo the imperialists and the reactionary bourgeois ‘specialists, ' ‘scholars' and ‘authorities' have been routed, one group after. another, with every bit of their prestige swept into the dust. The reactionary strongholds controlled by members of the sinister anti-party and anti- socialist gangs have been breached, one after another.
Their conspiracy covered every sector of the ideological and cultural front. .:The “bourgeois representatives wrapped in red flags" had built bases in. the fields of philosophy, economics, history, literature and art, ‘the drama , education, journalism and. publishing.
"The most reactionary and fanatical element in this adverse current," writes Red Flag, "was the anti-party 'three-family village' gang." They consisted of:.Professor Wu Han, deputy mayor of Peking, Teng To, secretary of the Peking municipal party committee and former chief editor of Jenmin Jih Pao, the foremost Communist newspaper, and Liao Mo-sha, former departmental director of the Peking party committee.
These prominent Communists are really "bourgeois rightists." Such nefarious forces have been carrying on their clandestine activities for the past ten years. Hsinhua and Red Flag trace their first sallies back to 1957 during the "hundred flowers bloom" days.
These elements resumed their offensive between 1959 and 1962, emboldened by the "temporary difficulties resulting from sabotage by the Khrushchev revisionists and serious natural calamities in
China." To preserve Mao's reputation for infallibility, there is no mention of any wrong or reckless decisions made under his leadership. in connection with the mishaps of the Great Leap Forward.
Wu Han headed the pack of.the revisionist rascals. He wrote a series of articles and plays allegedly satirizing and criticizing the regime in veiled symbolic terms. He thus "served U.S. imperialism > as a cultural-servant...He was personally groomed by the reactionary politician Hu, Shih. and was pro-Chiang Kai-shek and anti- Communist. He wormed his way into the revolutionary ranks on the eve of the. country's liberation and later became vice-mayor. of Peking. Posing as revolutionary cadre while engaged in counter-revolutionary dealings, We Han is in fact a lackey of U.S. imperialisn."
"The ‘current. “upsurge of the great cultural revolution" started early in November shortly after the military take-over and the beginning of the wholesale. butchery of the Communists in. Indonesia. Was this mere coincidence -- or could one of the motives behind the campaign have been to distract attention from the terrible. blow.at Peking's prestige delivered by the Indonesian debacle .and- to shut off domestic criticism of its course in Southeast: Asia? oo
‘In any event, the. campaign went into high gear this May with the unmasking of the "three- family village" and their removal early in June from the Peking party committee. This committee and the -party committee of Peking University were reorganized on June D».
"The ceunter-revolutionary clique" was stigmatized on that date.-as*"an,instrument of the bourgeoisie to exercise dictatorship over the proletariat. " They were accused of waving the black _ bourgeois banner of "liberty, equality and. fraternity.'
"Thrown into utter confusion," these careerists “hurriedly ~ invoked five 'talismans' to support and shelter the bourgeois rightists and suppress and attack the proletarian left." These "talismans" were (1) fake liberalization which argued that otherwise "people. would not dare to speak up"; (2) "construction before destruction" when "it is precisely destruction that we want to come first"; (3) condemnation of the Left as "crude" and "acting like a cudgel" and pretending to be "meticulous" and "profound" when they are really "big-party tyrants" and "big-scholar tyrants" (4) upholding "purely academic discussion"; (5) insisting that "in: the: face of truth: everybody is equal," "everyone has his share of mistaken views," and "Lt, is all a muddle." (We sympathize with this last point. )
Red Flag admits abstractly that "the revolutionary left wing may commit one error or another" but. refrains from pinpointing any specific mistake made under Mao's administration.
. dn one breath the editors declare that the conspirators are only "paper tigers," no more than "a handful of evil men," repu-_ diated by the entire worker and peasant population. In the next .
breath they say "they still have great strength. They have money,. they have extensive social. contacts and international links and they have counter-revolutionary experience. In particular, the ideology : of the exploiting classes still has a considerable market. Some unsteady elements in the revolutionary ranks are prone to be corrupted by this ideology and consequently become counter-revolutionaries. Moreover, the spontaneous influence of the petty-~ bourgeoisie ceaselessly engenders capitalism. Having seized political power, the proletariat still faces the danger of losing it. After > being established, the sécialist system still faces the danger of a capitalist restoration. ae
The plotters: who were preparing to stage a coup. had two. prototypes before them. One was the "blatant counter-revolutionary molding of public opinion by the Khrushchev revisionist group which, soon after, staged a 'palace' coup and: usurped party, military and government power, subverting the dictatorship of the proletariat. " rarriar
The other was the 1956 Hungarian. political ‘revolution where "the counter-revolutionaries also prepared public opinion before they took to the streets to create disturbances and stage riots. This counter-revolutionary incident was engineered by imperialism and started by a group of anti-Communist intellectuals of the People Club [Petéfi Circle]. Imre Nagy; who at that time still wore the badge of a Communist, was 'fitted out with a king's robe' and became the chieftain of the counter-revolution." © -
It is true that both right and left-wing Communists were involved in the Hungarian uprising. But, since the Maoists lump dissidents of all stripds together. under the single label of "csounter-revolutionary bourgeois," it is impossible to tell one: from the other in the present situation.
It is nonetheless clear from the citation of these fresh — political precedents that Mao's directorate is highly apprehensive. that the criticisms of the intellectuals and those higher up may set off explosions among the masses. This would explain why they are so adamant against any relaxation of the strict regimmentation of thought.
i They are equally fearful of - ‘corruption of the youth. " The purge has been extended to the Communist Youth League of Peking whose leading officials were ousted on June 15. The news of their: dismissal was reported to have had "an electrifying impact" on. thé capital and touched off demonstrations of tens of thousands of youth. It is unclear what they were demonstrating for or against. The ring of purge victims was accused of using Peking University, the intellectual center of the country, as a base to win over the™ younger generation to their ideas.
Meanwhile 6,000 students and intellectuals were ordered back from farms and factories to reinforce the ranks of the party on Peking University's campus.
Not all categories of intellectuals are threatened. Red Flag. promises that "ordinary bourgeois scholars" will be provided with =: suitable conditions of work and given time to remold their world outlook: But the regime will have no mercy on "the bourgeois representatives who sneaked into our party, set up their clamor about 'everyone has his share of mistaken views' and ‘it is all 2 muddle' with’no“other aim than of tying the Left. up in| knots. and “opposing the red banner’ while waving red banners.
How are these disguised villains in the Communist ranks and” leadership to be detécted? Red Flag gives a simple test. "Read Chairman Mao's words, follow his teachings and act on his instruction." Otherwise...
Mao's though, it holds, is "the greatest truth since time immemorial.".."The theory and practice of comrade Mao Tse-tung may be likened to the ceaseless movement in the skies of the sun and moon and the endless flow of the rivers and streams on earth.
Such. panegyrics outstrip the homage paid to Stalin at the height of his.despotism. They may have been appropriate to the. worship. of an Asiatic god-emperor by superstitious.subjects. But” | they areswholly out of place in an enlightened society permeated with socialist teachings and scientific attitudes... ..
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The editorial writers warn the watching world not to be misled -- “an excellent. situation without parallel" prevails in China. However, the nervousness evidenced by the purge, and in the. press indicate the opposite of the reassurance. The regime seems _. to be passing through its most severe internal political crisis” Since the conquest of power in ae or at least since the "hundred. flowers bloom" disturbance of 1957 «
The ferocious campaign. against the most outstanding Communist intellectuals is the outward sign of a deep malaise in. the very heart of the regime. Otherwise , why. should the People's Daily explicitly direct warnings against unnamed individuals who are still in the highest positions? The paper said ina leading article: "We shall smash anyone who tries to oppose the party...no matter what his 'tauthority,' no matter how high his post, the ‘whole nation and the whole party will rise to denounce him." Similar warnings have been repeated in other publications in recent weeks.
‘Since it: would take more than intellectuals or even Peking party officials to attempt a :take- -over, these remarks must be addressed to more powerful personages in the army or government. Who might they be?
A Yugoslav correspondent: in Peking, the New Statemen, and Victor Zorza:of The Guardian have all pointed to no less a figure than the Prime Minister Chou En-lai, now visiting Rumania. This
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is sheer-speculation. While in Rumania, Chou vigorously defended the "great cultural revolution" shaking China and asserted that its edge was."turned against a handful of bad elements that are waging ol anti-Communist activity under the cover of a false Communiem.
Tt: remains ynknown who the. heads of the opposition are, what issues they have raised and what. positions they defend, and who the ultimate targets of the purge will be.
- How? long. will it be until these factors in the internal conflict break into-the open?
ISIS CONPERITION FROM CHINA IN FAR