Peking puzzle

Dick Wilson

Why did Mao Tse-tung appear recently Without his usual trusted interpreters ? We do not know for sure, but one plausible answer would be that the radicals in his entourage (led by his ex-film star wife Madame Chiang Ching) are making it more cltfficult for the rival moderate faction to gain access to the Chairman. While Mao Ilves the radicals are able to win more battles than the moderates in the succession struggle. But the war is pretty certain to be won in the end by the more numerous and be. tter organised moderates. This is implicit In the surprise appointment of the fifty-fiveYear-old Hua Kuo-feng, a virtually unknown figure to the outside world, not only as confirmed Premier to succeed the late Chou En-lai, but also as Senior Vice-ChairMan of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee—second in party ranking only to Mao himself. Hua is slightly left of centre, in the Chinese Communist leadership spectrum, whereas C.11011 was at the dead centre and Teng HsiaoEing, the diminutive and abrasive VicePremier who had seemed to be deputising for Chou during his last months and was abruptly dismissed from all his posts last ;‘.'eek, is right of centre. But Hua's promo keeps from the premiership the leading radical, Chang Chun-chiao, and is best interpreted as a move to establish the character of the Post-Mao leadership as basically Moderate. There were several more obvious claimants to the premiership than Mao's protégé f,rom his home province of Hunan, Hua no-feng. Teng himself looked as if he were ueing groomed for the job. But he was evid

ently too controversial as a victim of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, and as a man likely to work actively against the radicals who had engineered his downfall then and thus stir up old conflicts. In any case, as a man of seventy-one he could not have ensured a smooth transition from the old generation to the new.

Chang Chun-chiao is the next senior vicepremier. His advancement to the top seat in the government would, however, have given the green light to the Shanghai radicals. It could also be argued that if a man were wanted with a good span ahead of him, a sixtyfive-year-old like Chang should be passed over.

If Hua survives at the head of the government he will probably play the neutral role as between the various political factions in Peking that Chou performed with such consummate skill. If Hua's appointment was personally blessed by Mao, as is officially claimed, then it is best taken as a warning to both the leading factions—the 'right' under Teng and the 'left' under Chang Chun-chiao —that neither should expect to dictate state policies. Hua's own political position is ambiguous. He has survived all the veerings to left and right of the past twenty years without ever being demoted, and his promotions have come at times when both leftist and rightist policies were in the ascendant in Peking.

In 1955 he was secretary of the party committee of Hsiangtan—Mao's home district. He was instrumental in creating a new irrigation system there, and built a Mao memorial hall at Shaoshan, the Chairman's birthplace which has become almost a national shrine. In 1956, before the Hundred Flowers movement, he was promoted to the Hunan provincial party committee, and in 1958, the year of the Great Leap Forward, he became deputy governor of the province. His election to his first national role, as deputy to the Third National People's Congress in 1964, came at the height of the 'rightist' Liu Shaochi regime against which Mao later launched the Cultural Revolution.

Whereas other provincial chieftains at the start of that holocaust lost power, Hua went from strength to strength, getting the vicechairmanship of the Hunan Revolutionary Committee in April 1968. One year later, when the now-denigrated Lin Piao was dominating policy, he joined the party Central Committee in Peking, going on to be Minister of National Security and one of twelve vice-premiers in the final chapter of Chou's administration. What this record strongly suggests is a capacity to survive changes of lead from the top and conflicting pressures from outside, and it may be that this alone is a crucial qualification to run the government of 900 million people in a country as large as Europe.

It was Hua who last October, at the 'Learn from Tachai' conference which laid down the guidelines for agricultural development over the next decade, gave the closing address detailing what had previously been left vague about the overall plans to achieve mechanisation of farming 'in the main' by 1980. Hua spelt it out that over the coming five years one in three of China's communes must come up the standards of the model county at Tachai, whose example is being extolled nationally. The principal goals were, he said, the ascendancy of poor and middle peasants over rich ones, participation of party cadres in manual work, increasing the harvest and achieving advances in the mechanisation of agriculture, capital construction and scientific farming.

Hua also decreed a programme of annual rectifications in the county party committees which will be responsible for these agricul tural targets, some of whose members had exhibited 'softness, looseness and laziness'.

And private plots are to be restricted to the proportion of total collective land allowed by party policy (usually about 5 per cent). This part of Hua's speech echoes a recent confidential document by Wang Hung-wen, the thirty-year-old textile organiser from Shanghai who was until last week second in the party after Mao. This described the ob jective of the recent political campaigns (to criticise Confucius and Lin Piao, to study the dictatorship of the proletariat and to

criticise the classical novel Water Margin) as

ensuring a continuous rectification at local levels without having turmoil at the centre. What Peking wants is the practice of local 'democracy' (in the Chinese style, which means meetings at which local leaders are criticised, and can sometimes be replaced by their critics, thus allowing an influx of new blood and a feeling of participation in the selection of leaders) without interrupting production at factories or farms and without leading to the factional violence of 1967.

The message from Peking is that the country must buckle down to modernising its economy (which means, among other things, importing Rolls-Royce technology and having good relations with the West) and must do its homework for socialism (i.e. criticism

meetings) outside working hours. If the radicals hope to, win power after Mao they

ought to feel disappointed. The people's militia is no match for the army in a showdown, and although the radicals get support from the urban unemployed they cannot rest many hopes on the urban proletariat, whose shop-floor leadership wants wage differentials and incentives for skilled workers rather than the egalitarian ideals of Mme Chiang Ching, the Chairman's wife. The radicals made a strong attack on their enemy Teng immediately after Chou En lai's death. But now the strength of his support in the party has been proved by the Ching Ming festival of the dead demonstrations in Peking a fortnight ago, while Mme Chiang Ching has been lambasted for telling her life story to the New York history professor Roxanne Witke.

While Mao lives the radicals may hope to get at least half of the political pickings, but afterwards they will be squeezed into a minority position. And it looks as though Hua could be the man to preside over this tricky transition.