The Economist

March 8, 1975
THE WORLD; INTERNATIONAL REPORT; p. 56

China: Enter the big gun

Now China's combative radicals have wheeled out their big gun. Yao Wenyuan, the man who in 1965 launched the cultural revolution for Mao with a diatribe in a Shanghai newspaper, published his first signed article for seven years last weekend in Peking's two leading journals, the People's Daily and Red Flag. It was not the ground-breaker that his 1965 article was, for it followed a series of recent pieces on the same theme. But the fact that Yao, a politburo member and close ally of Mrs Mao, has suddenly burst into print again confirms both the importance of the new campaign and its radical sponsorship.

Yao repeats the warnings which were first issued a month ago about the threat posed to China by a "newly emerging bourgeois class". But he paints the most lurid picture yet of what will happen if "bourgeois rights" like material incentives are not sharply restricted: first, "capitalist ideas of amassing fortunes and craving for personal fame... will spread unchecked", then "speculation, graft, corruption, theft and bribery will rise", culminating in a bourgeois takeover. "Once in power, the new bourgeoisie will first of all suppress the people in a bloodbath" and then move on to restore the capitalist system. "Such is the process of restoration that has already taken place in the Soviet Union."

Most of the bourgeois horrors Yao writes about are ostensibly problems of the future and the past (Lin Piao, of course, was the arch bourgeois villain). But at least one bourgeois crime is clearly identified as "a common occurrence today". This is the use of material incentives to dazzle and corrupt young workers into taking the capitalist road. The perpetrators of this swindle are those familiar characters from the cultural revolution, "the backstage abettors".

These unnamed rogues could be the factory managers and middle-level cadres who have been attacked recently for offering overtime payments and productivity bonuses. But when Yao declares that "there is a profound lesson" in certain of Lin Piao's tactics, the implication is inescapable that, like Lin, somebody today is "offering official posts and other favours as a means of luring people over to form a clique" and that, like Lin, somebody today may also be "using the might of a mass movement to serve his own ends". This kind of crime could not be committed by minor officials. So Yao may once again be pointing his polemics at the very top.

The key question is whether Yao is also acting once again on Mao's express command. The current campaign was almost certainly prompted by some disjointed jottings or musings of the chairman's which somehow issued forth from his Hunan retreat and were subsequently published as his latest "instruction". His central point seems to have been to apply a left-wing corrective to current policy by reminding his colleagues that China must keep moving, however slowly, towards its ultimate goal of pure communism, or risk falling backward into the mire of Soviet-style revisionism.

What seems to have happened next is that the radicals took this as a signal to press for more left-wing economic and social policies -- like cutting down on material incentives -- while the moderates tried to turn the movement to their own advantage by drowning the media in quotes from Lenin on party discipline. All the recent articles, including Yao's, seem to reflect this tug of war as bursts of radical rhetoric end in calls, not for more revolution, but for more study. The campaign could yet swing either way.

An augury reported by travellers from China is that the new line is already being expressed at street level in public trials of assorted criminals. Lorries carrying offenders have been seen halting in side streets of Canton as loudspeakers summon crowds to hear pleas, evidence and sentences imposed by representatives of the local district people's courts. The trials do not yet seem to have involved political offences, but they are nonetheless a reversion to cultural revolutionary practices.

One explanation for the trials is that robbery and other crimes are increasing, at least in south China, as more rural youths rebel against the forced migration to the countryside which was one of the anti-bourgeois policies that Yao defended most vigorously. Now that Hongkong has shut its doors to refugees from China, these young people have been finding uneasy hideouts with friends and relatives. Without legal means of support, they might well turn to crime.