Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 47
November 29 – A major political crisis of the first magnitude has emerged from within the ruling summits of the party and government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This crisis cannot be papered over by a pro forma exhortation to unity, as was done by Vice-Premier Teng Hsiao-ping in an interview reported in a Nov. 27 New China News Agency press release.
In it Teng said that “present-day China is stable and united, concentrating on the four modernizations from the central committee down to the localities. The party central committee headed by comrade Hua Kuo-feng is united and fully confident of carrying through the four modernizations.”
Present-day China is not “stable,” is not “united,” nor is the whole country “concentrating on the four modernizations,” least of all “the central committee down to the localities.”
Above all, it is highly questionable whether the central committee is indeed headed by Hua Kuo-feng, as Teng states. Were that wholly the case, Hua would be making the statement and not a supposed third-ranking deputy chairman.
We must correct [mistakes] in the spirit of seeking truth from facts,” Teng is quoted as saying in the interview given to the chairman of the Democratic Socialist Party of Japan. And Teng has many times before spoken of the importance of “facts.”
Indeed, we must all seek truth from facts, which is what all Marxists have always insisted upon, and not do violence to them, as does Teng.
By all means let us get at the facts from which to draw conclusions. But let us do it not from the viewpoint of bourgeois pragmatism as does Teng, but from the viewpoint and world outlook of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism, which seeks first and foremost to filter out the meaningful facts and to generalize on the basis of what these demonstrate.
The demonstrations in Peking and the poster campaign initiated on Nov. 19, which are still in progress, demonstrate beyond any doubt that there is no unity in the central committee. Against whom are the posters directed? Not against Teng. Nor are they for the so-called Gang of Four, for Mao, or even for socialism.
Some of the posters denounce “ten years of fascism.” “From 1966 to 1976,” says one poster, “China was under a fascist regime.”
Fourteen of the 26 current members of the Politburo were also Politburo members during the last decade. They are therefore also cast in the role of “fascists.” Another poster protests the “illegal” elevation of Hua Kuo-feng to chairman and wonders out loud why it should not have been Teng Hsiao-ping, who was characterized as no less than a “representative of the proletarian revolution.”
Some posters go so far as to praise the U.S. and compare China unfavorably with U.S. imperialism.
Who praises all these posters and the demonstrations (except some which are “not specified”)? Teng plus the entire imperialist bourgeoisie from Tokyo to Rotterdam!
Enough about “unity” and seeking “truth from facts” a la Teng.
What is the real situation in the ruling summits of the new governing group in China which took over formally after Oct. 6, 1976? The new governing group is a coalition composed of the triumphant Right (that is, political reaction within the framework of a workers’ or socialist state) currently headed by Teng and the heterogeneous Centrists headed by Hua. The latter group is distinguished by the fact that it has no definite political and economic program other than the one presented by Teng.
To one degree or another they both share hostility to the progressive Maoist Left that was routed and destroyed two years ago. But the Center is unwilling to go along with Teng’s political, and especially economic, program, particularly as its dangerous implications become clearer with each passing day.
The Rightists are strong because they have a definite political and economic program. They are bold and brazen because it is they who engineered the overthrow and the destruction of the revolutionary left-wing forces.
The Centrists, true to classical form, collaborated, went along, and now to a large extent find themselves captives having to choose merely between completely fading out of the picture or going along. Failure to do the latter presents them with the specter of being purged.
The coercive apparatus, particularly the police and security forces, are apparently all the way with Teng or are not letting themselves be heard from as a progressive opposition.
Such a coalition as exists in China today is at best internally unstable; in periods when class tensions and social contradictions rise, as they have been doing in the last two years, a political crisis is sure to emerge. That is what has happened.
The acuteness of the political crisis has its deepest roots in the origins of the Cultural Revolution. In the popular mind, as represented by the imperialist media, this was one long list of purges with the avowed objective of bringing about an egalitarian society free of material incentives and “bonuses” to workers, and for the abolition of the privileges of the intellectual elite. Of course, in an oversimplified form it is perhaps viewed that way by many in China as well.
To bring about a society free of exploitation and privilege is the general objective of all revolutionary and socialist movements. It is, however, the means by which the movement seeks to effectuate its goal that proves the seriousness with which the goal is pursued.
In that light, the Cultural Revolution is to be sharply differentiated from, for instance, the many changes during the post-Leninist epoch in the socialist countries, the purges of individuals and even whole layers, and the successive changes of personnel and administration in the governmental apparatus.
The Cultural Revolution is unique because it took the first step in reforming the People’s Republic of China by attempting to change the form of state – not the essence of its class rule, but the form of state – from that of a bureaucratic, degenerated apparatus to a Paris Commune type of state.
This is made crystal clear by Point 9 of the 16-Point Decision which was adopted on Aug. 8, 1966, at the Eighth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The decision called for the institution “of a system of general elections like that of the Paris Commune.”
This distinctive contribution to revive genuine socialist democracy met with tremendous initial enthusiasm. That the effort faltered subsequently, as was shown by the short-lived Shanghai Commune, belongs to another chapter in the history of the Cultural Revolution.
No revolution, with the exception of the Russian Revolution and the Paris Commune of 1871, had so shaken the bourgeoisie, the liberals, the reformists and revisionists, as did this attempt at such a great transformation. No wonder it evoked such fury among the bourgeoisie and all its enemies conjured up so many accusations to mask their hatred of it!
In reality, however, it was a festival of the masses, no less than the Chinese Revolution itself.
The struggle today is not merely, as some bourgeois press reports say, between the holdovers from the Mao period and the Rightists who have reemerged and become rehabilitated. It is not just a struggle to settle old scores or to obtain official positions. It is not just a naked power struggle bereft of political and economic and class significance. If all were “unity” and “stability,” as Teng said, the question of holdovers and the removal of officials, even thousands of them, during the Cultural Revolution would not now, two years after the victory of the Right, surface in an acute political crisis.
There are objective class issues which are of the most crucial importance and which are imperiously demanding a solution one way or another.
The issues may be formulated as follows: what should be the course of China’s economy? To repeat over and over again, as has become the custom, that China must modernize, must advance via the “four modernizations” – agriculture, industry, science, defense – explains nothing, since all agree on that formula.
The question is whether and to what degree it takes on a bourgeois direction, geared more and more to the world capitalist market. A corollary to that question is whether in gearing to the world market, especially at the speed which Teng and his cohorts are promoting, will it so integrate China into the world capitalist market as to make it wholly dependent upon it.
Finally, does not this course signify complete dependence on Western imperialism and Japan both economically and militarily?
Those are the crucial questions that are wracking the political establishment of the PRC. If one is to speak of “seeking truth from facts,” then it is these questions that must be raised and honestly put to the fore for broad political discussion in the party, in the press, and among the masses as a preliminary to finding a way out of the abyss facing China following the suppression of the Left.
Consider some of the results of the rightist course which have only recently surfaced.
The PRC – the great People’s Republic of China – which used to pride itself that it would generously grant aid or extend credits and loans to underdeveloped small countries without any interest charges, has now applied for aid – to whom? To the UN! And for a pitiful sum of $15 million. This, by the way, means it is competing with poor Third World countries for aid from one of the imperialist-controlled channels of the UN.
On the other hand, it is in the process of negotiating a $500 million contract with the West to build a chain of modern hotels to accommodate the inflow of foreign businessmen and tourists.
This sounds precisely like the way the imperialists have proceeded in underdeveloped, neocolonial countries, such as Iran.
Hotels to accommodate foreign guests, tourists, and businessmen are unquestionably important. But the staggering amount of money involved, even for a country as large as China, is clearly indicative of the strategy of imperialist finance capital, the strategy known as the “in and out, boom and bust” attitude which characterizes the avaricious and predatory transnational corporations. They want to get in quickly, make a fast buck, and then get out quickly. And they try to adjust their plans with a view to the boom-and-bust cycle in order to minimize their losses and enlarge their extortionate profits.
Do the Chinese Communist leaders really have to be told this? Teng in particular is played up in the capitalist press as “shrewd,” “knowledgeable,” “pragmatic,” “cunning,” and “wily” – one who is able to deal with the West as a “tough representative” of the PRC. That may very well be so. But it does not at all fit with the interview he gave to Japanese Democratic Socialist leader Sasaki in which he elaborated on his economic program, but which portion the press release of the New China News Agency of Nov. 27 neglected to reproduce.
As quoted in the New York times (Nov. 27), Teng said he was “seeking the economic progress of China under the program for ‘four modernizations.’ The key to the program is foreign assistance, he asserted at the end of his session with Mr. Sasaki. ‘In 1972,” said Teng, ‘through the Shanghai Communique between the U.S. and China and through normalization of Chinese-Japanese relations we produced the conditions for obtaining external assistance.’”
What were those conditions for obtaining external assistance, assistance from the imperialists?
“However, we wasted four years. The chaos created by the Gang of Four delayed our start. Unless we got rid of the Gang of Four we could not adjust our views and accept external aid.”
So the imperialists withheld aid because of the “Gang of Four,” because of the Left wing. That certainly puts Chiang Ching, Yao Wen-yuan, Chang Chun-chiao, and Wang Hung-wen in the role of revolutionaries, which with certain qualifications is absolutely true.
However, it’s not so much that China wouldn’t accept external aid from the imperialists (if it were extended without conditions), but that the imperialists wouldn’t extend it. Now things have changed, we are told.
“China,” says Teng, “has now reached the point where we can get the help of those with experience, and bring in funds and technology of foreign countries.” Really!
For years and years, and decades upon decades before the Chinese Revolution, when China was headed by feudal, colonialist regimes, the imperialists did not bring in funds to China but drained it of its resources and funds. Why would they be more generous to a great and mighty socialist republic? Why have the imperialists become generous now and want, in the words of Teng, to “bring in funds and technology” as well as “experience”?
They didn’t do so in the days when Lenin was at the head of the Soviet Socialist Republics. They didn’t really do so, except in a very limited extent, in Stalin’s day. And the U.S. still has a ban on most trade with the USSR, as well as against other socialist republics.
Why then this great interest in China now that there are “genuine true Marxist-Leninists” at the head?
Teng is right, however, in another respect. The way he is orienting fundamental political, economic, and military matters and gearing them firmly towards Western imperialism has caused a virtual stampede of bankers and industrialists from all over the imperialist world to pour into Peking. For, to use a current phrase in the jargon of imperialist finance, they see there now a $350 billion El Dorado, a neo-colonialist bonanza, a dazzling opportunity for super-exploitation the likes of which they have not seen since the Revolution.
It will not be trade on an equal basis, it will not be an effort to modernize China and give China what it needs for socialist construction. It will be what the imperialists need to bolster their own system and fill their coffers with whatever they can extract from the labor and resources of China.
This is what must inevitably loom large in the minds of those in the Chinese CP officialdom who are beginning to see where Teng’s version of how to develop China into a modern powerful socialist country is leading. Of course, this is merely the projection of a tendency. But it is inherent in the Teng program even though it has not yet been carried to its ultimate conclusion. However, this is its fatal direction unless it is reversed.
At the present time, notwithstanding the achievement of a certain level of industrial production by the leading capitalist powers, there is nevertheless still prevalent a deep, worldwide economic crisis which is complicated by intractable inflation. How does this affect China?
China considers itself a Third World country and like other Third World – or more correctly underdeveloped – countries is subject to the vagaries of the world capitalist market, particularly if it permits itself to be “opened up” by the imperialists without the severe safeguards which a socialist state imposes upon foreign trade, commerce, and general economic intercourse with the imperialist powers.
Certainly Yugoslavia is witness to this. But at least Yugoslavia has this merit, that it has considerable trade and commercial relations with the socialist countries which has enabled it to balance imperialist penetration and maintain the skeletal anatomy of a socialist state.
How does the current capitalist crisis affect all Third World countries? Most underdeveloped countries, including China, are buyers of industrial products and technology of various sorts. They sell mostly raw material products. The prices of raw material products, except those controlled by imperialist cartels under the aegis of transnational corporations, suffer most catastrophically during the crisis. However, the imperialists control industrial products and technology, whose prices do not at all decline but on the contrary escalate, especially under the impetus of inflation.
If China leaves itself open to the world market, as it is presently doing, it must buy in a seller’s market and sell in a buyer’s market. It therefore must sell at lower prices and buy what it needs at higher prices.
The severity of the capitalist crisis does not affect a socialist country the same way it does a capitalist country. But because the capitalist mode of production is the predominant one in the world, it certainly affects socialist countries in their external relations with imperialism. This is absolutely true, not only for China but for the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.
Nor is this the major factor working to the detriment of the new economic policy advanced by Teng.
There is still the matter which all underdeveloped countries face in dealing with the imperialists if they wish to obtain advanced technological equipment, scientific know-how, and development: How to pay for it. Nowhere is it made clear how the PRC plans to pay for its vast purchase of technology, equipment, and scientific know-how from the imperialists.
But this is the crux of the matter. This is where invisible strings are attached by the imperialists. The stampede by the transnational corporations to Peking is based on hard calculations.
One of the few details that emerged from the Sino-Japanese trade agreements was to the effect that China obligated itself to pay in dollars, which indicates that even in the field of international currency matters the Teng leadership is lining itself up with the dollar even against the yen and the mark. Both Tokyo and Bonn regarded this aspect of the trade agreements as a definite plus for the U.S.
Teng’s reorientation of the Chinese economy in a pro-Western direction comes on the heels of what Teng, Hua, and the others called “disruption” of production by the so-called Gang of Four. This was suspicious from the very beginning, when in January 1977 Hua Kuo-feng announced that it would take a whole year to undo the chaos and economic sabotage of the “Gang of Four.”
The truth of the matter, of course, was that the so-called economic sabotage and chaos could not possibly have been of such dimensions as to necessitate a whole year to set economic matters on an even course. Such disruption, of necessity, would have had to be on the scale of a civil war involving millions upon millions of workers and peasants. How could all this evil work have been done by a “handful of conspirators”?
Because Teng and the political Rightist current that he represents are intent on modifying China’s economy in a bourgeois direction with the collusion of imperialist finance capital, there has of course been economic chaos. But it is this attempt at a changeover, which we must remember is still in its incipient stages and by no means full-blown, that is responsible for the chaos. It is this which has caused a political crisis in the summits of the present group. Once against the economic situation as always ultimately finds a political reflection in the struggle of contending factions.
This is what has caused Teng to stage-manage the Peking demonstrations. Anyone who reads even the sketchiest of reports about the posters knows that they bear the most striking resemblance to the slogans of the so-called dissidents in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. The spontaneity which the bourgeoisie is finding in the demonstrations is strictly of a manufactured character.
Teng has invoked the demonstrations. He has done this out of necessity. This accounts for the fact that the Centrists, who went along with Teng and in fact have become to a large extent his captives, are now sensing ferment from below. Their unwillingness to go all the way is what has occasioned a wide-open split.
To demonstrate that he is in the saddle, that he is really the power behind the throne, Teng pulled out virtually all the stops by invoking the counter-revolutionary slogans in the posters. It was designed as a threat to the Centrists. It’s meant as a club to be used against them unless they kow-tow or cave in completely.
Yet it must also be clear, as a writer in the French press has correctly put it, that there are also in China today the “radicals of the Right.” This phrase is meant to be counterposed to the radicals of the extreme Left – the progressive Left opposition – who have been deposed and expelled. These are right-wing extremists who wish to go much further than Teng. They are the tail that may ultimately wag the dog. There is not way to tell at the present time.
It is possible, however, that Teng, especially when one considers his age, may only be fronting for the radicals of the Right. But the slogans calling for “human rights,” “democracy,” etc., do not precisely fit the political and social physiognomy of the Teng Rightist grouping. They are more fitting for the radicals of the Right, the out and out counter-revolutionaries.
A recent article in the People’s Daily gave an analysis of the purges during the Stalin period. No one is precisely able to make out what idea was behind this article or who it was directed against. But the thrust of it was that during Stalin’s time innocent people were convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Stalin, the article said, admitted some of this at the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 but no one was rehabilitated. Khrushchev, who supported Stalin all the way on the purges, later took advantage of this and thereby got himself installed as the head of what China calls a new bourgeois restorationist regime.
The implication of all this is not, as some may think, to equate Khrushchev with Teng, which was freely done in the period when Liu Shao-chi and Teng were purged as “capitalist roaders.” The implication is that if the Centrists do not agree to go along with Teng in not only rehabilitating the purged Rightists but also in adopting his economic, political, and military program, then they will get something even worse: a radical Rightist, a real counter-revolutionary, not one who is just a revisionist, not one who is just embarking on the road of collaboration and collusion with the imperialists and turning the Chinese economy towards it, but one who will restore bourgeois class relations in China and in a word bring back the domination of the bourgeoisie.
Inherent in present-day China are two possibilities: a revolutionary regeneration and a reinvigoration of socialist construction on the basis of planned economy or an out-and-out bourgeois counter-revolution. The Teng regime is transitional and provisional in character. China may go either way.
So far as the Centrists go, they are too heterogeneous a group to launch an independent offensive of their own without a preceding intervention by the masses. Hua himself could as well serve as a nominal leader for a diverse grouping of Centrists as in his current position in which he partly covers for and partly genuinely collaborates with Teng’s reactionary program.
The obscure debate reflected in the organs of the People’s Liberation Army has indicated every since the reemergence of Teng differences of the military command with Teng’s so-called modernization. This may merely reflect the usual position of the military demanding that a larger allocation of the modernization budget go to defense. It is equally possible, however, that the PLA, having undergone changes first under Peng Te-hui, then Lin Piao, and finally Yeh, may be seeking a more independent role. And given its earlier revolutionary position it is not improbable that a progressive opposition from the military and some of the left Centrists may coalesce against the Rightist danger.
The fact that Teng has been propelled to the forefront of Chinese politics after being twice toppled indicates that this was not the work of mere accident or conspiracy along, not due to the personal qualities of Teng, but that the social forces behind him have deep roots in hostile class elements in Chinese society.
They are not, however, the predominant social force which is occupied by the Chinese proletariat and peasantry, who at the moment have neither spoken nor participated in the scheme of things planned out by the new governing group.
Last updated: 11 May 2026