China to the Left of Russia

Abstract

Chinese public action in 1963 adhered closely to the doubledual themes of the Tenth Plenum (September 1962) of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): While waging a struggle against foreign and domestic class enemies ... our Party must sharpen its vigilance and correctly wage a struggle. against and against dogmatism. By year's end, the Khrushchevite Soviet Union was being treated as a foreign The drive against bourgeois influences at home shaped up as a strong resurgence of collectivism, accompanied by talk once again of all-people's ownership of the means of production. The warning against dogmatism was largely ignored, except for insistence on realism and practicality in coping with domestic problems and in re-training Party cadres. The attack on revisionism continued with even less restraint than in the past. The entire country went to school in a massive program of socialist education-carried to all Party cadres, to trade unions, to peasants, to the remnant bourgeoisie (reversing a 1962 theme), to intellectuals, to parents and children, to teachers and pupilswhich emphasized that no line could be drawn between domestic and foreign enemies. The mood was extremely militant. Sino-Soviet relations-once comradely, fraternal, socialist-degenerated to open hostility. The year had opened with a brilliant series of Chinese doctrinal attacks on Khrushchevite postures, and had ended with Chinese efforts to excommunicate the Soviet leaders from the international communist movement. In the CCP view, the Soviet Union had joined the imperialist United States to undermine China's socialist construction and to frustrate her capabilities for attaining Great Power status. Red Flag's National Day (October 1) editorial plainly intended Khrushchev in its references to who call themselves 'Marxist-Leninists' and to renegades to Marxism-Leninism, and transparently predicted for him the fate of Trotsky, Bukharin and Rykov. distinguished the genuine Marxist-Leninists and revolutionary people throughout the world from those who attack the CCP. which has adhered to Marxism-Leninism. exposed their policy of capitulation to U. S. imperialism, torn away their Marxist-Leninist cloak... . The Editorial Department of People's Daily bitterly declared (November 2): It is becoming clearer and clearer that the Soviet leaders no longer consider the imperialists, headed by the United States, and the reactionaries of all countries to be their is the. [true] Marxist-Leninists, the revolutionary people, and China in particular, who are their enemy. Khrushchev had characterized Sino-