China: Forcing the Revolution to a New Stage

Abstract

It is China's sheer size. It is also the age old traditions and customs, which evoke a curious blend of disdain, admiration, and awe. And it is the dictatorship, in which events provide a stark reflection of a single ruler, in which his abilities, dreams, fears, and passions are magnified to the size of a country. For these reasons, events in China rapidly assume epic proportions and entrance the observer. Indeed, there is an Alice-in-Wonderland quality about China that enables staged events such as mass rallies to become history and significant historical developments such as the Han Chinese migration to Tibet and Sinkiang to pass unrecorded. Such was the case in 1966. The world watched with fascination as youths from approximately 12 to 25 years of age were encouraged to attack and destroy the symbols of China's tradition and the remnants of Western bourgeoise influence. The youth of China-and those in power who supported them-criticized and purged old revolutionary comrades whose lives had been indistinguishable from the cause of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Clearly, something important was happening inside China, but the paradoxes which govern both China's domestic and foreign conduct obscure what those developments might mean.' In domestic affairs, it is hard to reconcile the rulers' ideological militancy with their apparent prudence in directing the nation's economy. Mao Tsetung, Lin Piao, and their supporters launched a frenzied campaign, under the name of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, to sustain the nation's loyalty in the face of a perceived war threat from the United States and to instill a fervor and determination among the masses to pursue the utopian vision which Mao has set before them-a vision of an industrialized, egalitarian China dedicated to the communist liberation of all mankind. But their ideological commitments do not make M1ao, Lin, or Chou dog-