Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 49
December 12 – The swing to the right inaugurated by the new governing group in China continues unabated. The reactionary poster campaign which was instigated by Teng and his allies and which lapsed momentarily in Peking has now also engulfed other cities including Shanghai and Wuhan.
The poster campaign is deeply significant because while it was inaugurated from above it also shows a tendency to go further to the right than even Teng and his allies would wish.
Many of the over manifestations of the internal struggle inside the new ruling group are merely of a symbolic or token character; they do not portend in and of themselves more than a mere tendency in the direction of overhauling (in reality overthrowing) the political conceptions and basic social, economic, and political achievements of the Chinese working class and peasantry during the Cultural Revolution and long before that.
But it is the speed and tempo of this reactionary drive which is more alarming than the tendency itself. Otherwise it could be overtaken by a progressive revolutionary tendency, given new and more favorable circumstances especially of a world character.
Of all the most recent rehabilitations carried out by the Right-Centrist governing coalition headed by Teng on the one hand and Hua on the other, the rehabilitation of former Defense Minister Peng Teh-huai is the most significant. He symbolized the early rightward trend, in a political sense, in the military establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
This is not at all to underestimate his long revolutionary career in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and his outstanding military achievements. It was under his stewardship as Defense Minister, however, that rank and distinction were introduced into the PLA. Veterans of the PLA will remember that rank and distinction were later abolished under Defense Minister Lin Piao.
This matter of rank and distinction is an extension into the military field of the struggle over material incentives, bonuses, and privileges for the upper crust in Chinese society. The rehabilitation of Peng, therefore, stands out in sharp contrast to the continued vilification of Lin Piao who championed a democratized, revolutionary army much more in line with the original Chinese Red Army where rank and distinction had been non-existent just as it was during the Lenin period in the Soviet Union.
Last updated: 11 May 2026