Red China: How to End the Class Struggle

Ever since Moscow and Peking openly split on Communist ideology, Mao Tse-tung’s high command has been quietly cracking down on everyone rash enough to question the hard-line Marxism separating him from the hated Khrushchev revisionists. Apparently, the purges have not been too successful, for last week the shadow of dialectic oblivion was falling on Mao’s two most influential victims so far, and it had be gun to look as if the biggest public brainwash since 1957 was not far away.

Latest victims were two widely respected intellectuals, Central Committee Member Yang Hsien-chen, party the oretician and former president of the elite Higher Party School, and Historian (and onetime English professor) Chou Ku-cheng, whose General History of China has been a standard work for nearly 30 years. Their crime was pure heresy: contradicting Mao’s infallible doctrine that “everything tends to divide into two,” which is the very foundation for Peking’s dialectical battle with Moscow. According to the “one-into-two theory,” disputes are never resolved except by force, so that Moscow’s cherished concept of peaceful coexistence is impossible. “The contradictions and struggle between Marxism-Leninism and modern revisionism can not be dealt with by mediation,” warns Peking.

According to Yang, the one-into-two doctrine is backwards, suggesting that the Moscow-Peking split is therefore reparable. “The law of the development of things is that two merge into one,” he said in a series of lectures and articles that were widely read by party intellectuals. “All opposing social forces are merging. To study dialectics is to learn the capability of linking two opposite ideologies into one.”

Historian Chou went even farther. According to the Peking People’s Daily, he was “in recent years” teaching the “convergence of all ideologies — the revolutionary, the unrevolutionary, the nonrevolutionary, and even the anti-revolutionary.” Charged the newspaper angrily: “There is no ‘convergence,’ but only round after round of struggle as a result of which either you or I will live or die.”

In all probability, the criticism was no life-or-death matter for Yang or Chou. But disgrace was doom enough for the pair since it presumably means they will publish no more books and teach no more classes. Which might go to prove their point that even the class struggle has its limits.