The big-character wall posters that were such a feature of the 1966-69 Cultural Revolution have proliferated anew on the streets of China’s cities in recent months. Although neither so extensive nor so frenzied as the campaign during the Cultural Revolution, the current poster campaign once again has all the earmarks of having been instigated by the dominant Maoist wing of the bureaucracy.
The poster campaign developed throughout China in response to an editorial in the February 2 People’s Daily, the official paper of the Chinese Communist party published in Peking. According to Chinese newspapers and radio broadcasts, this editorial launched the “mass political struggle to criticize Lin Piao and Confucius” on a nationwide basis on instructions from Mao and the Central Committee of the Communist party.
The Tenth Congress of the party in August 1973 posthumously denounced Lin and expelled him from the party (see Intercontinental Press, September 17, 1973), and the first attack on Confucius occurred two weeks prior to that. But up until February, the campaign against Lin and Confucius had been muted.
The February 2 editorial changed all that. The campaign was not merely an abstract theoretical question, the People’s Daily said, but “a serious class struggle and a thoroughgoing revolution in the realm of ideology in China. It is a war declared on feudalism, capitalism, and revisionism and a heavy blow to imperialism, revisionism, and reaction. It is a matter of prime importance for the whole party, the whole army, and the entire Chinese people....”
The editorial concluded, “We must act in the revolutionary spirit of daring to go against the tide and storm in our advance and, under the leadership of the party Central Committee headed by Chairman Mao, carry the struggle to criticize Lin Piao and Confucius through to the end.”
In response to this call, study meetings, exhibitions, and mass rallies were held, and big-character wall posters began to appear. The February 5 New York Times reported that posters were sighted in Shanghai and Peking, although in Peking they were generally kept from the gaze of foreigners. A February 22 Reuters report from Canton described the development of the campaign there:
“Streets in the city center are festooned with slogans written in bold black and red characters on colored paper. Some slogans, with characters up to two feet high, are strung across the streets.”
John Burns reported in the February 28 Christian Science Monitor that every village and town along the rail route from Peking to Canton had its poster displays. The campaign was even more extensive in Wuhan than in Canton. The station walls there, he wrote, “are plastered over with an extravagant display that leaves hardly any of the masonry uncovered,” and a four-story building nearby “has one entire facade covered with posters.”
The themes of the posters in the first stage of the campaign were restricted to criticism of the reactionary ideology of Confucius and its use by Lin Piao in his alleged plot to “usurp party leadership and state power and restore capitalism.”
The next stage, however, saw attacks on some factory managers who had not heeded the February 2 call diligently enough. Posters accused them of dragging their feet on the campaign to criticize Lin and Confucius, and attacked as “economism” any attempt to use production as an excuse to downplay “the ideological work of the masses.” Such attacks were reported from Shanghai as well as from Yunnan, Kirin, Liaoning, and Szechwan provinces.
The poster campaign went a step further with local party and military leaders in some provinces being denounced by name. The March 29 New York Times quoted “reliable witnesses” who reported wall posters in Taiyuan, capital of Shansi province, “calling for the removal of Hsieh Chen-hua, first party secretary and military commander of the province, and Tsao Chung-nan, deputy political commissar of the province.” Also reported have been poster attacks on Tseng Ssu-yu, the commander of the Shantung Military Region; Han Hsien-chu of the Lanchow Military Region; and Li Teh-sheng, commander of the Shengyang Military Region in Manchuria. Li, one of the five deputy chairmen of the party, is the most prominent official to be attacked to date. Posters denouncing him were reported first in Anhwei and then in more than a dozen other provinces.
The May 16 Christian Science Monitor reported that in five other provinces -- Kirin, Fukien, Honan, Shantung, and the Sinkiang autonomous region -- local leaders were attacked for a variety of “serious mistakes,” but were not named outright. In Hunan, Shensi, and Kwangtung, the report stated, radio stations had denounced local “sworn followers” of Lin Piao, but it was not clear whether those under attack were still in public life.
Posters Flower in Peking
The next stage in the campaign began on June 13, when big-character wall posters attacking the Peking Municipal Revolutionary Committee appeared openly on the streets of Peking. According to a Reuters report of that date, the posters accused the committee of trying to rehabilitate the reputations of former Chief of State Liu Shao-chi and former Mayor Peng Chen, both of whom were ousted during the Cultural Revolution.
A report from Hong Kong by H.D.S. Greenway in the June 15 Washington Post stated: “Previously, the display of critical wall posters in the capital was strictly curtailed. They were allowed only in certain areas, usually behind the walls of compounds, and foreigners were discouraged from photographing or even reading them. All that has changed now, and according to reports reaching here, the Chinese have even set aside parking areas for foreign diplomats and journalists who wish to see the posters.”
The campaign developed further with attacks on individual leaders in Peking. Le Monde of June 26 reported:
“Two high-ranking Chinese individuals have been taken to task by name in a new series of posters that appeared the morning of June 25 on the walls of Peking. They are Chia Ting, vice-president of the capital’s Revolutionary Committee, and Ti Fu-tsai, a member of the Cultural Group of the State Council. The authors of the posters -- a group of workers from the Peking locomotive factory -- accuse these two individuals of having ‘plotted’ with Chen Po-ta, former secretary of Mao Tsetung and a member of the Political Bureau’s Standing Committee, prior to the August 1970 session of the Central Committee in Lushan.”
Some of the wall posters in the current campaign have reported violence and bloodshed in certain provinces.
“According to new wall posters that appeared on Peking’s walls on Monday, June 24,” the June 25 Le Monde said, “more than 200 people have been killed in the course of incidents that occurred in Kiangsi province in southeast China.... The June 19 clash, in which it is reported that ‘projectiles,’ ‘clubs’ and ‘iron bars’ were used, took place in the provincial capital, Nanchang....
“The posters are signed by workers from Kiangsi province, who report that families have been decimated and cite the case of a 71-year-old woman who was killed. They also report that several persons have been arrested. The June 19 incident, the authors state, was stirred up by ‘rightist elements’ who, armed with cudgels, commandeered several trucks for use as propaganda vehicles.”
According to an earlier account by Agence France-Presse, cited in the April 17 Washington Post, visitors in Canton saw posters there saying that about thirty persons had been executed by firing squad for having opposed the campaign against Lin and Confucius.
Accounts of jailings and mistreatment in prison have also appeared in the posters. A Reuters dispatch in the June 28 New York Times mentioned one poster written by “a woman who said she had been beaten and had her arm twisted during a stay in jail lasting 329 hours.”
Another poster, signed by Chong Jun-de, a member of a people’s commune in Kirin province, tells how he was arrested in Peking on May 26 for having put up big-character wall posters. He was imprisoned in the capital for ninety-nine hours, during which he was subjected to a severe disciplinary measure called “the position of the boat.”
The June 26 Washington Post reported that “he was then transferred to a prison in his own province of Kirin, and stayed inside for 16 days.
“He ends his account: ‘And now will I be arrested again for having put up these posters?’
“Insisting that his behavior [was in accord with the] teachings of Chairman Mao, he said he had the courage ‘to go against the tide.’“
Case of the Golden Monkey
The July 2 Christian Science Monitor quoted the following accusation as an example of the charges being leveled in recent wall posters.
“Our party is a party with internal factions. Though led by Chairman Mao, it includes representatives of the United States, Chiang Kai-shek, the Soviet revisionists, and the bourgeois and landlord class.”
This poster was signed by “Golden Monkey,” supposedly a pseudonym for a worker in the Peking Number 2 machine factory. An ancient Chinese legend celebrates the feats of a golden monkey with magical powers to right wrongs. Commentators such as Joseph Lelyveld in the July 20 New York Times have also regarded the pseudonym as a reference to a line in a 1961 poem by Mao, but they miss the deeper significance of the allusion.
It was actually used by Mao at the very moment he launched his attack on Peng Chen and the Peking Committee of the party during the Cultural Revolution. Mao told a group of his followers that the moment had arrived for Sun Wu-kung, the legendary “monkey king,” to raise his “golden cudgel” against Peng Chen’s “imperial court.” Mao then called for Peng’s dismissal. The obvious inference, which would be grasped by most Chinese observers, is that “Golden Monkey” claims Mao’s authority and support.
“Golden Monkey” has authored some of the more audacious posters that have appeared. One series attacking the Peking Municipal Revolutionary Committee was pasted up along with many others opposite the committee’s offices on Eternal Revolution Street in the capital. Le Monde reported them in its June 26 issue:
“In particular, these posters ask why do certain leading bodies have a ‘twofaced’ attitude? Why have former leaders, who followed the capitalist road, been reinstated in their positions, and sometimes even in more important posts than they occupied in the past? Why have the priorities ‘profit’ and ‘production’ taken precedence over the principle of ‘politics in command’ ? Among other things, the ‘Golden Monkey’ accuses ‘a high leader of the party,’ who is not named, of having come to his factory several times to ‘persecute’ the ‘revolutionary rebels.’“
Paste Up and Tear Down
In the most recent development in the poster campaign, many of the posters have been ripped down. “Persons operating under the cover of darkness,” John Burns wrote in the July 5 Christian Science Monitor, “have torn down more than half the protests pasted on the slate-gray walls opposite the offices of the city’s Revolutionary Committee.”
The posters that were removed apparently dealt with the situation in the provinces and vented personal grievances against the bureaucracy. Many remained, however, that attacked “unnamed persons in the top echelon of the Revolutionary Committee for a grab bag of rightist errors, including attempts to rehabilitate the principal villains of the 1966-69 Cultural Revolution,” Burns said.
“Coming as it did between midnight and dawn Wednesday, when armed soldiers keep a close eye on the few people who pass down the street, the action was almost certainly not spontaneous. But who ordered it and why remained a mystery.”
“Golden Monkey” is one of the poster-writers who has suffered in the latest purge of posters. The July 9 Le Monde reported that the poster campaign continued unabated, but that “Golden Monkey” had been “exposed” in a series of wall posters drafted by “representatives of the masses.”
“The latter,” Le Monde stated, “are a group of workers belonging to the same factory as ‘Golden Monkey’ -- or his true name, according to the poster, Chen Chia-hou -- and they accuse him of being a ‘counterrevolutionary’ element, coming from a family that had exploited the people and whose members, before liberation -- 1949 -- had been either reactionary capitalist bankers or large landholders. Chen Chia-hou is accused, among other things, of having violated the CPC Central Committee directives on the conduct of the campaign against Lin Piao and Confucius.”
However, “Golden Monkey” struck back with a new poster on July 19, charging that “capitalist roaders” were still in power in the Municipal Revolutionary Committee in Peking, according to the July 20 New York Times. “The Municipal Committee needs a revolution,” demanded the new poster, charging that the committee was negating “newly instituted rules and regulations,” presumably the most recent guidelines on the conduct of the campaign.
Maoists in Command
In spite of some wall posters possibly voicing individual grievances or representing a counterattack by those in the line of fire, the general thrust of the current poster campaign through its ups and downs and different stages has been carefully directed by the dominant Maoist section of the bureaucracy. It is an integral part of their overall campaign to criticize Lin Piao, Confucius, “and other swindlers.”
Their real targets were pointed out in previous issues of Intercontinental Press. (See articles by Les Evans in the May 6 and May 27 issues.) The attack is aimed at high officers in the People’s Liberation Army who were close to Lin Piao and at the discontented among the more than 8 million youth who have been sent to the countryside since the Cultural Revolution.
Although the anti-Lin, anti-Confucius campaign did not develop in earnest until February, it had certainly been in the planning stage for some time. The main themes, including the broad outlines of the poster campaign itself, were prefigured in the report to the Tenth Congress last August by Wang Hung-wen, the Shanghai party leader who emerged from the congress as the Number 3 man in the Communist party.
H.D.S. Greenway reported in the June 15 Washington Post that some of the posters have accused the Peking Municipal Revolutionary Committee of trying to suppress Wang’s report.
“Instead,” Greenway wrote, “the revolutionary committee stressed the report of Comrade XX, posters say. The comrade is not named, but the only other report given at the congress was by Chou En-lai.” Leaving aside the question of whether Chou is actually under attack, Wang’s report can be seen as having served to launch the poster campaign.
Wang reported on the new constitution the congress adopted. Under point five, he first reaffirmed that “we must strengthen the party’s centralized leadership....” He stressed that “it is laid down in the articles that state organs, the People’s Liberation Army and revolutionary mass organizations ‘must all accept the party’s centralized leadership’“ and also that “the entire party is subordinate to the Central Committee.”
“... a party committee’s leadership,” he said, “must not be replaced by a ‘joint conference’ of several sectors.” In what could be a reference to groups with power bases in the provinces, he added, “The party committee... must unite people ‘from all corners of the country’ and not practice mountain-stronghold sectionalism.”
After pointing out that unity must be “on the basis of Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line,” Wang continued;
“Now, I would like to discuss with special emphasis the question of accepting criticism and supervision from the masses.... They have the right to exercise revolutionary supervision over cadres of all ranks of our party and state organs. This concept has taken deeper root throughout the party, thanks to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. However, there are still a small number of cadres, especially some leading cadres, who will not tolerate differing views of the masses inside or outside the party. They even suppress criticism and retaliate, and it is quite serious in some individual cases.... We must have faith in the masses, rely on them, constantly use the weapons of arousing the masses to air their views freely, write big-character posters and hold great debates....”
The press communique issued after the congress hailed it as “a congress of unity, a congress of victory and a congress full of vigor.”
Unity is certainly a theme of the campaign to criticize Lin Piao and Confucius. The message is clear -- neither any deviation from the dominant Maoist line nor any challenge to the firm control of the ruling Maoist wing of the bureaucracy will be tolerated.
Peach Mountain Opera
The poster attacks on party leaders in Shansi province and in Peking followed the extensive denunciation by the party leadership of the opera Going Up to Peach Mountain Three Times. The attack first appeared in the February 28 People’s Daily.
The criticism also appears in the March issue of Red Flag, the party’s theoretical journal. The March 8 Washington Post further reported that “nearly half the provinces of China have made mention of the offending opera in local radio broadcasts.”
The article launching the attack charged that “the Shansi opera... written collectively by the Writing Group of the Cultural Bureau of Shansi Province, is a very poisonous weed that negates the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and tries to reverse the verdict on the renegade Liu Shao-chi’s counterrevolutionary revisionist line.”
The author of the review, Chu Lan, claimed that the opera was a thinly disguised rewrite of a previous opera, Going Down to Peach Garden Three Times. This opera appeared in January 1966, and according to Chu Lan, was part of a campaign in Shansi province by Liu Shao-chi and his wife, Wang Kuang-mei, “to counter Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line” and to “glorify” themselves on the stage. “The name of the opera has been altered,” the article stated, “... but the theme, the plot, and the relations among the central characters remain unchanged.”
The article compared this opera and the opera Hai Jui Dismissed From Office, which was also described as “a poisonous weed” during the opening rounds of the Cultural Revolution in 1965.
“In the early 1960s,” the reviewer wrote, “someone served up the opera Hai Jui Dismissed From Office, which tried to reverse the verdict on Peng Teh-huai; and now this opera tries to reverse the verdict on Liu Shao-chi.”
The opera was performed in Peking in January at the North China Theatrical Festival, which was sponsored by the Cultural Group of the State Council. It would appear that groupings in the party with bases in both Shansi and Peking are under attack by the Mao leadership. The fact that the opera could be produced at all in Shansi, and then performed in Peking, is an indication of their strength.
When the poster campaign was stepped up in mid-June through the displays in Peking, there were reports that this was a result of directives from the Central Committee. Similarly, the ripping down of some of the posters at the beginning of July occurred soon after the appearance of a widely circulated editorial in the July 1 People’s Daily.
The editorial stipulated that “whether in the east, west, south, north, or center of our country it is the party that exercises leadership in everything. The current movement to criticize Lin Piao and Confucius must be conducted under the centralized leadership of party committees.” The editorial was headed “The Party Exercises Leadership in Everything,” and it repeated that theme throughout. It commemorated the fifty-third anniversary of the founding of the Communist party of China and was reprinted in full on the front page of all Peking papers.
The party leadership is apparently wary lest the current campaign get out of hand. They are sensitive to the danger they run if the Chinese workers, students, and peasants take for good coin the exhortation that the masses “air their views freely” and “criticize and supervise.”
“Mass criticism” is nothing more than one of the weapons the bureaucrats cynically use against their opponents in the party. There is nothing democratic about it, of course. The very themes of this campaign are authoritarian -- against any form of reconciliation; a stress on centralism, with no deviation permitted from Mao’s line; pressure for a speedup in the factories.
The “freedom of criticism” of the Maoists means freedom of accusation -- the organized stirring up of informers against their opponents in the party. Undoubtedly, the Maoists supply the dirt as well, having access to comprehensive dossiers on all party members. The accusations of corruption and the accounts of repression and brutality that have surfaced in the wall posters logically prompt a question: Isn’t it likely that such disclosures of corruption and privilege hold for all sections of the bureaucracy? Naturally, any posters attempting to respond with counteraccusations would be quickly removed.
The targets of this fraudulent “mass criticism” are those mentioned in Wang’s report as “some leading cadres.” A May 7 Hsinhua dispatch reprinted part of a recent article from the People’s Daily hinting at the existence of a list of opponents. The article quoted Mao on the need to “guard against revisionism, and especially its emergence in the Central Committee of our party.”
‘A Handful of Class Enemies’
No members of the Central Committee were named, but the article warned: “At home, a handful of class enemies attack the Cultural Revolution both overtly and covertly. They are a handful of present-day devotees of Confucius who have extreme hatred for social change and progress. They are revisionist restorationists, opposed to the Cultural Revolution, and the most decadent and reactionary social force -- a bourgeois force for restoration....
“Investigation into their personal records reveals that some were backbone elements of the Kuomintang and its youth organization; some were landlords, local tyrants, reactionary bureaucrats, reactionary capitalists or their offspring; some were unreformed bourgeois rightists; some were renegades, special agents and unrepentant capitalist-roaders who were winkled out during the Cultural Revolution, and some were lackeys of imperialism or social-imperialism.”
Some of the possible victims have already been indicated. The poster attacks on Han Hsien-chu in Fukien province could have been prompted because of his previous links with Lin Piao. “The current issue of Hung Chi [i.e., Red Flag], the party’s ideological journal,” according to the April 15 New York Times, “assails a pamphlet that was published in the coastal province of Fukien three years ago when he was the commander there.
“The pamphlet was lavish in its praise of Lin Piao.... How is it, asks the party journal, that the ‘big poisonous weed’ of this pamphlet wasn’t severely criticized after Mr. Lin’s downfall? Obviously, there was a conspiracy and ‘now is the time to repudiate it thoroughly,’ Hung Chi says.”
Similarly, the poster attacks on Li Teh-sheng could be a result of the fact that he was director of the army’s General Political Department -- in charge of all military propaganda -- when that pamphlet was produced.
Leo Goodstadt, writing in the July 1 Far Eastern Economic Review, reported that the Kiangsi Daily has polemicized against cadres who were reluctant to throw themselves wholeheartedly into the movement against Lin and Confucius. He linked the polemic with the recently reported violent incidents there.
“Why did Kiangsi emerge as the first to wash its dirty linen in public?” Goodstadt asked. “The explanation seems to lie in the special difficulties created for the province by its military command. It took almost half a year after Lin Piao’s death to get rid of his chief military supporters in Kiangsi. As a result, considerable confusion still seems to prevail in both the provincial Party and government structures, with considerable jockeying for position by military figures anxious to build a firm political base.”
Taking the Youth in Hand
The deportation of youth to the countryside continues. According to a May 4 Hsinhua dispatch, “Nearly 400,000 educated young people in China have gone to settle in the countryside since the beginning of this year to accept re-education by the poor and lower-middle peasants.”
However, an interesting side of this phenomenon has been revealed by the current campaign -- the necessity for close supervision by party cadres of these rebel youth. The same Hsinhua dispatch reports, “A large number of cadres have been sent to the countryside to help local party organizations educate young city people. Shanghai has sent more than 2,000 cadres to villages in Anhwei, Kiangsi, Sinkiang, Inner Mongolia, and Heilungkiang.”
A June 27 Hsinhua report tells how 8,000 young people have been successfully “settled” and “re-educated” on the outskirts of Chuchou, a city in Hunan province. Success was achieved in this task because “the Chuchou municipal committee of the Chinese Communist party raised its consciousness of the struggle between the two lines during the great movement to criticize Lin Piao and rectify the style of work.” The report stated that “factories send cadres to take charge of the young people’s study, work and life.”
Beginning in June, the Chinese press began to put great emphasis on the necessity to “train a contingent of theoretical workers in struggle.” The June 6 Hsinhua, for example, carried a report of a meeting in Peking “to exchange experience in training workerpeasant Marxist theorists” that was attended by 13,000 persons. Organized by the Peking municipal committee of the party, the meeting “called on the party organizations to train a mighty contingent of Marxist theorists under the guidance of Chairman Mao’s proletarian revolutionary line.”
The purpose of such “contingents of full-time and spare-time Marxist theorists” can be easily envisaged. They are to serve as irregular troops in the service of the regime to keep the “educated young people” in check and to carry out the Maoists’ campaign against their opponents in the party apparatus.
The function of the Mao Tsetung Thought propaganda teams during the Cultural Revolution was explained in an article by Liu Hsi-chang, vicechairman of the Peking Municipal Trade Union Council. As summarized in a June 22 Hsinhua dispatch, he said: “Peking workers, along with men of the People’s Liberation Army, organized Mao Tsetung Thought propaganda teams during the Cultural Revolution to station in places where intellectuals are predominant in number. They thus mounted the political stage of struggle-criticism-transformation in the superstructure.”
The “contingents of Marxist theoretical workers” will have the same function. With the further unfolding of the anti-Lin, anti-Confucius campaign, these “contingents” might also find a more active role in “winkling out” the opponents of the Maoists still holding prominent posts in the party, the army, and the government apparatus.
Source: https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1974/IP1230.pdf#page=15&view=FitV,35