A look into the past: The long march for freedom

Labour Briefing no. 86, 21 June 1989, p. 9

Transcribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.

By-line as printed: PHIL HEARSE.

In 1949, after a 20-year military struggle against both the right wing nationalist Guomintang and the Japanese invaders, the Chinese Communist Party came to power. It had already, for many years, controlled and administered large areas of the country.

These "red bases" had been run in a dictatorial way which presaged the methods used following the 1949 revolution.

The Party that came to power in that year, although it had ignored Stalin's advice to compromise with Chiang Kaishek's Guomintang, was deeply influenced by Stalinist ideas about the nature of "socialism".

Following the 1927 massacre of Shanghai workers by the Guomintang, the main base of Mao Zedong's Communist Party had become the peasantry. From the beginning, the Mao regime adopted a suspicious and authoritarian attitude to the working class.

For over 30 years there have been continual struggles in the Party leadership and among the masses over economic construction and the appropriate form of political rule.

In 1956 Mao started the "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom" movement which for a short period allowed free debate in the Party and among intellectuals.

But a year later Mao decided the movement had gone "too far". He and Deng Xiaoping mounted the repressive "anti-rightist campaign", in which hundreds were executed.

Alarmed

In 1958, alarmed by the slow development of agriculture and manufacturing industry, Mao launched the "Great Leap Forward".

Millions of peasants were coerced into massive "People's Communes", some of them tens of thousands strong. In the cities and the countryside thousands of backyard steel production units were set up.

The Great Leap was an attempt to force the pace of history by voluntarist and authoritarian mass mobilisation. This method became typical of "Mao Zedong thought".

It also led to continual struggle inside the Party leadership, which was not resolved until Mao's death in 1976.

The Great Leap was a major disaster for both agriculture and industry.

Mao's commandist voluntarism was opposed by a faction led by Liu Shaogi (a veteran of the Long March), Peng Dehuai (a key Marshal in the People's Liberation Army), and Peng Zhen (then mayor of Beijing and today an 87 year old member of Deng's Central Consultative Council).

Heavily influenced by Khruschev in Russia, they argued for more stable and gradual economic growth.

This struggle was fought out within the bureaucracy by "left" and "right" factions. The result was that while the Great Leap was abandoned, the reins of power remained in Mao's hands.

The Communist Party apparatus in the regions had always resisted Mao's "politics in command" methods.

In 1965, the once powerful pro-Beijing Indonesian Communist Party was crushed by an army coup. Mao was widely blamed for this disaster.

He knew that he could command the support of only a minority in the Party, and therefore launched the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution", which mobilised millions of high school and university youth. The aim was to smash Mao's factional opponents.

The Cultural Revolution was widely seen by the western left as an "anti-bureaucratic" movement. In reality, it was a gigantic inter-bureaucratic conflict, which plunged China into three years of virtual civil war.

Mao's "Red Guards" mobilised and organised by the People's Liberation Army under Lin Biao, persecuted and murdered tens of thousands alleged "capitalist roaders".

Only when the "revolutionary committee" which had seized control of Shanghai declared a Paris Commune-style administration did Mao decide to put an end to the movement.

The PLA was then used to suppress the Red Guard movement which it had once organised.

By 1969 the tide of the Cultural Revolution had receded. Of Mao's leading opponents, Lui Shaogi was dead, Pen Dehuai in prison (he died there in 1974), and Deng Xiaoping in disgrace.

The Party's structures had collapsed. Gradually, over the next five years, they were revived.

The turning point in the long factional struggle in the Chinese CP came when Mao and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai both died in 1976.

The continuity of Cultural Revolution-style Maoism was represented by Mao's widow Jiang Qing, who led the infamous "Gang of Four". A month after Mao's death they were arrested by the Beijing PLA garrison.

Uneasy

The Party leadership then passed on to an uneasy alliance between the semi-Maoist Hua Guofeng and the rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping.

By 1978 Deng and his then lieutenant Zhao Ziyang had the upper hand. They proposed a new way forward, a radical departure from Mao's adventures in bureaucratic mass mobilisation.

This involved the de-collectivisation of the peasantry, a radical marketisation of industry, and an attempt to secure investment from capitalist states.

For ten years the Party leadership has pushed forward these economic reforms, which have undoubtedly led to major economic growth, especially a dramatic revival of agriculture.

But at the same time they have engenderd markedly increased social inequality and massive corruption in the CP leadership.

Deng and Zhao Ziyang (now overthrown) never proposed radical democratisation to accompany the economic reforms. Thus China has enjoyed perestroika, but no hint of glasnost.

From 1978 to 1981 a major "democracy movement" seemed underway, symbolised in the famous "democracy wall" near Tienanmen Square.

At first Deng and Zhao tolerated this movement, and even tried to exploit it for their own factional purposes.

But by 1981 they had decided it was a danger; it was ruthlessly suppressed in a purge which resulted in executions and long terms of imprisonment.

But the memory of that movement remained. Many of its activists had developed revolutionary socialist demands for an end to bureaucracy and the establishment of socialist democracy.

They found the same demands taken up by the December 1986-January 1987 student movement, which emerged in part as a response to the student demonstrations then taking place in France.

The democracy movement of May and June 1989 has taken these two previous waves of protest to new levels.

Not only has it been much larger in scale, but the mass involvement of the working class and the emergence of autonomous trade unions has made it a qualitatively greater threat to the bureaucracy.

The brutal suppression of this movement cannot put an end to the long fight for socialist democracy, any more than the 1981 military coup in Poland destroyed Solidamosc.

Spontaneity

Lenin was fond of saying that spontaneity was the initial form of organisation.

The anti-bureaucratic movement in China now faces dark days of repression, arrests, and executions.

New forms of organisation, around a coherent anti-bureaucratic political programme, will be needed to continue the Tienanmen Square movement in conditions of illegality.

If the movement fails to recreate itself in such new forms, China will face regression into Stalinist barbarism or even the restoration of capitalism.

Four decades ago, the Chinese masses defeated imperialism. A new phase of their long march — towards an anti-bureaucratic political revolution — is now underway.

transcribed from the page image, 2 Nov 2026; spelling as printed (Lui Shaogi beside Liu Shaogi; Pen Dehuai beside Peng Dehuai; Chiang Kaishek; engenderd; Tienanmen; Solidamosc; Khruschev; "tens of thousands alleged"). On the page "China: Issues behind the news"; kicker "A look into the past" set in a band. The by-line (By PHIL HEARSE) is set between rules in the second column, mid-article. The bold opening paragraphs are given as the bold standfirst; the italic paragraph on the Great Leap is kept in italics as printed. No jumps. Left out: the Martine Stead photo of solidarity demonstrations in London and its caption; the Hong Kong piece and the Chinese Solidarity Campaign report and notice at left (not his).