China: Down with the bourgeoisie

With the dust hardly settled after the moderates' success at last month's National People's Congress, China is gearing up for what looks like yet another radical campaign. The battle cry for the new drive is a "recent instruction" from Mao Tse-tung, the first new utterance formally attributed to the chairman for several years. It is every bit as delphic as most of his previous instructions and the three press articles that "explained" it last week left a wide margin of ambiguity. But what they all seem to indicate is another drive to destroy "remnants of capitalism".

Mao himself has been obsessed with the possibility of a reversion to bourgeois values, and the emergence of a Djilas-style "new class" in China, ever since he first identified the Russians as marching off to revisionist perdition 15 years ago. The congress may well have revived these worries; in fact, the instructions could be some of the chairman's marginal notes on the new state constitution which the congress approved while he kept his distance in Changsha. They do not attack the constitution as such but seem intended to remind Mao's colleagues that the "bourgeois rights" enshrined in that document -- like the right of peasants to farm private plots and the system of paying workers according to their work, on a complex grading system, rather than according to need -- are merely temporary expedients and should be restricted as soon as possible.

Private plots and material incentives in general have always been a political barometer in China. So it seems very likely that this latest campaign is backed by China's more radical leaders who feel they did not get much of a show at the congress. The articles introducing the new anti-capitalist theme suggest that a moderating brake is also being applied: Red Flag stresses the need for gradualism and insists that the "spontaneous forces of capitalism" cannot be overcome "at a stroke". But reports from the provinces indicate that local leaders have already taken the radical hint.

An Anhwei meeting two weeks ago called for action against enemies who are undermining socialist enterprises. A county party committee in Hupeh complained about peasants who are abandoning agriculture for commerce and others who are expanding private plots. And a provincial secretary in the same province cited "new bourgeois elements" who have been colluding with traditional baddies like landlords to corrupt cadres and engage in theft, speculation and embezzlement.

Chou En-lai and his moderate allies should have no trouble swallowing a campaign against such obvious -- and familiar -- illegalities as these. But Chinese mass campaigns have a way of getting out of hand, and last weekhs articles implied that one way this one could turn would be a purge of party and state bureaucracies. This would be a blow to the moderates just when they have managed to reconstruct the state apparatus nine years after the last destructive campaign. Whether the current rumblings will go that far will depend largely on the mood and power of that wily old instruction writer in Changsha.