COMMUNISTS: Pernicious Tendency

Now that it was too late for the U.S. to lock the China stable, Communists were explaining more or less frankly how they had stolen the horse. During the ’30s and ’40s they had fraudulently advertised Mao Tse-tung and his Chinese Communists as being harmless agrarian reformers —and liberals at home and abroad had rushed for the Red bandwagon. Last week the U.S. Communist Party monthly Political Affairs revealed what Mao himself really thought about liberals; from the July 7 Bombay (India) weekly Crossroads it reprinted an English translation of a little essay Mao had written for the Chinese party in 1937.

“Liberalism in collective organizations is extremely harmful,” wrote Mao. “It weakens solidarity, loosens relations, slows down work, diversifies opinions, deprives the revolutionary camp of its right organization and discipline. Liberalism, therefore, is definitely a pernicious tendency.”

Mao also criticized liberals on the ground that they are too tolerant. They do not, said he, denounce or report the “obvious misdeeds of acquaintances, relatives, schoolmates, intimate friends, loved ones . . .” Furthermore, the liberal Communist is to be condemned for “forgetting he is a Communist Party member and lowering himself to the level of the ordinary folk.”

While Mao was laying these harsh strictures on the wobblers among his followers, “liberals” in the U.S. were busily tearing down Mao’s main enemy, Chiang Kaishek, on the ground that Chiang was anti-liberal and contemptuous of the “ordinary folk” of China.