Mao's Two Speeches

Along the ever-humming grapevines of the Communist world and through the chancelleries of the West flashed an electrifying report: just a year after Khrushchev's historic attack on Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, too, had made a "secret" speech, in fact two of them. The speeches could not match Khrushchev's in sensation, but the stir that they are making in Communist lands (Westerners have yet to get a full text) shows that if Mao is in fact bidding for "ideological equality" with Moscow, he will have eager supporters in the satellites, whose leaders are anxious to see "many roads to Socialism" encouraged in preference to the monolithic made-in-Moscow theorizing. In particular, the Poles have what the U.S. State Department jestingly calls a "China Lobby," eager to propagate and if necessary exaggerate China's influence on them.

From what has leaked out of Mao's speech, the 63-year-old Chinese ruler, in a long, theoretical harangue to 800 ideological commandos, denied two fundamental propositions of Soviet ideology: 1) that even in a Communist state the class struggle must continue until the day when a completely Socialist society is established (Stalin, justifying his bloody purges in the '30s, said that the struggle must in fact get increasingly violent, as enemies of the people grow more desperate); 2) that there can be no real conflict in a Communist state between the people and their rulers, since the party automatically embodies the will of the masses. "The old class warfare amongst the Chinese people is fundamentally ended," declared Peking's People's Daily, reporting on Mao's speech. "But new contradictions exist . . . contradictions between the masses and their leaders."

Heart to Heart. These differences are "non-antagonistic," said Mao, and the "just but frustrated desires of the people" must be listened to and taken seriously.

"No organ of parties in government, no person regardless of rank, merits, history or past victories has the right to silence critics." There should be no more terror: the new education of the masses must "be carried on seriously but with the gentleness of a breeze or of light rain . . . Except in major offenses against law or discipline, all should be exempt from punitive measures. Self-criticism and criticism of others should take place in heart-to-heart talks between comrades. There must be no mass public assemblies and no battles." The new campaign even went so far as to ask, "Should we deny masses the right to strike?" and to answer no, for to do so would be to "increase the contradictions instead of resolving them." All this was part of a campaign known as "Unite, Criticize, Unite Again."

More than anything else, Mao seemed to be driving home to his bureaucracy the fact that the kind of discontent that had led to riot and revolt in Eastern Europe was beginning to appear in China. In the factories of Kwangtung province alone, admitted the Communist New China News Agency last week, there have been 13 strikes in the past year. Worse yet, in the same period nearly 118,000 Kwangtung peasants and their families walked off state collective farms and, despite all the regime's effort, more than 16,000 of them had stubbornly refused to go back.

The obvious cause of this discontent was the growing economic crisis (TIME, May 13), which has forced the ever-hungry Chinese masses to pull their belts in yet another notch. Mao, however, chose to blame it on the fact that the Chinese Communist Party, more than 60% of whose 12 million members have come in since the Reds came to power, has grown fat and arrogant in office. The remedy, he announced sternly, was for bureaucrats to stop ignoring his year-old slogan, "Let all flowers bloom together, let rival schools of thought contend." Bureaucrats should get out and mix with the people and heed their complaints. In particular, said a subsequent party directive, all Communist Party members should "perform physical labor regularly, to associate with the masses and eliminate offensive distinctions."

Correcting the Wind. Last week, in obedience to Mao's strictures, Red China's fourth cheng feng ("correct the wind") campaign was in full swing, and the flowers of criticism were springing up like dandelions. In Shanghai long-leashed newsmen publicly demanded that they be given "facilities" to report "actual situations" in the local bureaucracy, and in Peking emboldened students called for the withdrawal of the Communist control group in Peking University. (This development so unnerved the university's dean that he threatened to resign.) Meantime, all over China party dignitaries dutifully turned to toil. At one collective farm 33 generals and 127 field-grade officers suddenly appeared and pitched in to help flabbergasted peasants with the weeding and manure-hauling. In the capital itself Minister of Marine Products Hsu Teh-heng, 63, spent a day as a fish porter--a sight which, according to Radio Peking, "greatly inspired" the populace.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.