Movement Toward Moderation

Since the anti-Lin Piao, anti-Confucius campaign was launched with great fanfare early this year, it has given rise to a number of puzzling events. First "revisionist" (i.e., vaguely anti-Maoist) operas were vigorously attacked, and members of the Politburo were criticized in wall posters. For several months it seemed that Premier Chou En-lai himself was under pressure from leftist factions in the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Many observers were predicting that the campaign heralded some major new development--perhaps on the scale of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-69. In recent weeks, however, the mysterious program has been grinding to a halt without any apparent major changes being produced.

The demands of winter and spring for revolution by the masses have turned into summery reaffirmations of regular party authority. Indeed, the leadership of the party has been made nothing less than sacrosanct. As People's Daily recently put it, "Of the party, the government, the army, the mass organizations and the cultural and educational institutions, whether in the east, west, south, north or center of our country, it is the party that exercises overall leadership."

Formally, the anti-Lin, anti-Confucius campaign is continuing, but countless newspaper articles and radio broadcasts emphasize that it is being conducted "under the centralized leadership of party committees."

Leftist Factions. Internal conflict is being actively discouraged. The August issue of the theoretical journal Red Flag stresses that "there are 1,000, even 10,000 reasons for being united to face the enemy, but there is not half a single reason for a split." As if to make concrete the spirit of national unity and the rejection of factionalism, 13 high-ranking army officers purged during the Cultural Revolution were rehabilitated last month. The most important of them, Yang Chengwu and Yu Li-chin, were purged in 1968 for sending squads of soldiers to attack the Cultural Revolution headquarters and arresting members of the Cultural Revolutionary leadership.

That alone would seem to augur trouble for the leftist factions within the Peking leadership that have been trying to turn the anti-Confucius ideological campaign into a broad attack on party moderates. The enhanced authority of the regular party apparatus appears to have tipped the power balance in favor of the moderates. Prominent leftists like Chiang Ching, Chairman Mao Tse-tung's wife, and Politburo Member Yao Wenyuan have faded from public view. At the same time, the moderate party leadership that emerged after the Tenth Party Congress a year ago has endured intact. Chou Enlai, whose relative inactivity over the summer led to rumors that he was out of favor, seems now to have been in genuinely poor health. Party Vice Chairman Teng Hsiao-ping, who took over many of Chou's duties, continues to be prominently featured in the press. Significantly too, party members who are associated with China's outgoing foreign policy continue to outrank most of the radicals.

The likeliest explanation for the new move toward unity and moderation appears to be concern over China's economic slowdown. Only a few weeks ago, the Chinese press was reporting that because of the ideological campaign, "a number of leading cadres felt that to be immersed in production would be dangerous." Now the Sinkiang Daily is warning: "Persons who pay no attention to looking into production are not good leaders." The country already faces higher costs for such essential imports as fertilizers and industrial technology, and with population growth continuing at almost 2% a year, even an excellent fall harvest will not significantly increase the per-person share of grain. In the end, it seems, the need for uninterrupted production took priority over the desire for ideological purification.

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