TEN-YEAR RECORD OF MAOIST "DEMOCRACY"
The following data on the practice of “intensive democracy" in the Communist party of China over the past decade indicates some grounds for skepticism about Mao's promises of instituting "extensive democracy" outside the party through the "great proletarian cultural revolution."
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According to the party statutes, the supreme organ is the National Party Congress which is to be reelected every five years. It is supposed to meet at least once a year to discuss outstanding questions. These stipulations have been disregarded for a long time.
The last National Party Congress, designated as the eighth, was held in September 1956. Since then the elected delegates have met only once, in May 1958. There have been no new elections for more than ten years and no recent mention of convening the Ninth Party Congress.
The failure of the Mao leadership to abide by the provisions of the party statutes is all the more impermissible in view of the fact that at the Eighth Party Congress in 1956 the statutes were amended with the specific purpose of initiating regular mandatory meetings.
In his speech motivating the amendment, the party's general secretary Teng Hsiao-ping told the congress that "the principles of internal party democracy can only be kept alive if the congress meets regularly and exercises to the full the functions assigned to it." If this rule was ignored, he went on, the consequence would inevitably be detrimental to "democratic centralisn."
(With Liu Shao-chi, Teng now heads the list of "the counterrevolutionary revisionists who are in authority and are taking the capitalist road.")
According to the statutes, the Central Committee of the CCP is empowered to make any necessary decisions in the intervals between meetings of the Party Congress. But the Central Committee has met only spasmodically and not even the prescribed minimum of "at least two plenary sessions a year" has been kept up since the Communists came to power.
Thus the Central Committee did not
meet at all during the critical year of
1960 and only once in 1961. The penulti-
mate official plenary session was the
tenth in September 1962. Reference has
occasionally been made to an unofficial
Central Committee gathering in September
1965 but the nature of its deliberations
and decisions have not been divulged.
TENG HSIAO-PING
The eighth Central Committee held
its eleventh plenary session in Peking
from August 1 to 12, 1966. It was presid-
ed over by Mao Tse-tung and adopted the
16-point declaration concerning the "great
proletarian cultural revolution." Point 9
states: "It is necessary to institute a
system of general elections, like that of
the Paris Commune, for electing members
to the cultural revolutionary groups and
committees and delegates to the cultural
revolutionary congresses."
Up to now these promised elections
remain in the same state of limbo as the
constitutional elections to the congress
and Central Committee of the CCP over the
past ten years.
GOVERNOR OF TOKYO