Letter: China’s Communist Party

Dear Friends,
Frank Offord states that the early Chinese Communist Party consisted entirely of an affluent and educated elite—”the ordinary worker being conspicuous by his absence”. I wonder where he gets his information from, he should read Red Star over China by Edgar Snow, an unbiased account of the early days of the revolution written inside the Communist areas of North West China in 1937.
Mao tse-Tung’s father was in fact a poor peasant who had managed to increase his property and income until he acquired the status of rich peasant, employing only one labourer—his family doing most of the work. Mao himself started working in the fields at the age of six, later became an apprentice in a rice shop. He finally went to a proper school at the age of sixteen, and then against his father’s wishes and with a minute allowance. Lin Piao’s father had once owned a small factory, but had been forced out of business by extortionate taxes. Only Chou en-Lai is a member of a traditional mandarin family. It is true that the Communist Party was founded by intellectuals—so are most organisations—but this is hardly surprising considering that the peasants and workers, oppressed as they were with fiercely reactionary landlords and their attendant thugs, and by immense taxes, had no chance to come into contact with Marxist thought. Once the party had been founded the proletariat joined in large numbers.
One thing is certain, the Chinese revolution was achieved not by power-seeking members of the bourgeoisie, but by men who suffered over twenty years of continual fighting and hardship simply because they believed firmly in their convictions. Maybe these same men betrayed their convictions when they gained power, nevertheless the Chinese worker is now a responsible citizen, not a slave. Of course there will always be people seeking wealth as long as money continues to exist, and these people are worthy of our hate. The SPGB attacks everybody and everything—sometimes justifiably and sometimes not—but exaggeration will do nothing to help the cause. By taking it too far you are liable to isolate yourselves and become entirely impotent. You’ll be saying that ‘Che’ Guevara was in it only for the money next.
TIM DEANE,
Wimborne, Dorset.

Reply
Edgar Snow got his information through being in China at the time, but we can refer our correspondent to what is in our opinion the best work on the subject written so far—Revolution in China by Fitzgerald, from which we quote from page 193:

“At present the Chinese Communist Party is recruited in very large measure from the educated class, the university students … It is thus not really at all a party made up of members of the toiling masses. It could not be, because the peasants are still mainly illiterate, the workmen very little educated, and too few to supply the dominant clement. The university students come from the classes which Mao Tsc-tung has stigmatized as only in part reliable, and lacking in vision and courage, the former country squires or landlords, the city bourgeois and the old official families . . . The present generation of recruits, taken into the party in very large numbers after ‘liberation’ arc mainly university students, still very young. They will form the bulk of the Communist Parly for another forty years
The new members from these mandarin families are, of course, ardent Communists, sincere believers in the New Democracy, servants of the people. They are also precisely the same group of people who have governed China for the last two thousand years. It is in their blood. They are born to rule, and whether by virtue of Confucius and the Emperor, or Marx and Mao Tse-tung, makes very little real difference. Deep rooted, not in any way destroyed by the Revolution, is the old Chinese conviction that government is an affair for the elite, for those who sit in the seats of authority, and that the qualification for such a seat is knowledge of the orthodox doctrine, not blood, nor wealth, but ‘book perfume’ is the real test.”

Regarding Mao Tse-tung’s background we can give a tip—’straight from the horse’s mouth’ by quoting the statement made by Mao himself taken down by Edgar Snow and published in Red Star Over China which, as our correspondent says, is an unbiased account. On page 121 he says that it took the five members of the family plus a hired hand to run their farm while his father devoted his time to his prosperous grain business and other activities. “The old man continued to amass wealth or what was considered to be a great fortune in that little village. He did not buy more land himself, but he bought many mortgages on other people’s land”.

It should be remembered that due to lack of development in China at that time it was not necessary for a prosperous business man to own a firm the size of say Marks & Spencer in order to be “one of the nobs”.

Mao had the equivalent of a provincial University education and graduated at the age of 25 (Mao Tse-tung by Stewart Schram—Pelican Books), and so became one of the educated elite and typical of the recruits to the Mandarin class that has traditionally ruled China right up to and including the present period of Capitalism there.

We do not hate, as individuals, either the capitalists or the wage slaves who work for them; it is the capitalist system of society which we seek to abolish and replace with Socialism.

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE