70% Good, 30% Bad… A small assist from a piece of Chinese political history that might be no harm for Irish politics. Your thoughts? August 22, 2008
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
It’s funny how echoes from the past crop up at the strangest times. This week hasn’t been great for political deaths. Leo Abse, the old Old Labourite went, for some reason I’d thought he’d passed on years ago. I’d forgotten about his tome on Brown and Blair but someday perhaps I’ll summon up the courage to order it on Amazon.
Meanwhile someone with genuine mass political impact died. For reading the Irish Times one will see that:
CHAIRMAN MAO Zedong’s anointed successor, Hua Guofeng, who held power briefly in China before reformists banished him from the pinnacle of the Communist Party, died in Beijing yesterday.
As the Times notes:
Hua, “Wise Leader” to Mao’s “Dear Leader” and the third of Mao’s hand-picked successors after Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao, was the only one to survive being chosen for this famously perilous role.
Indeed, there must have been a certain… wily quality to Hua.
Hua became Communist Party chairman in 1976, having supported Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a 10-year period of political tumult which led to widescale chaos and saw millions hounded and persecuted, and Mao famously told him on his death bed: “With you in charge, my heart is at ease”.
Well, not sure what tells us about the sort of a judge of character Mao was. And the Guardian notes, rather acidly, that “Strangely, according to Hua’s account, no one else was present.”. Odd that – eh? But if accurate, Mao might not have been so much at ease had he the power of foresight, because seeing which direction the running dogs were…er…running:
…Hua made the order which secured his place in history when he approved a military plot to arrest Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing, and other members of the Gang of Four who were blamed for Mao’s excesses during the Cultural Revolution.
And his own prestige, again as the Guardian notes:
After Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four, [allowed] Hua continue to provide a guarantee against a wider upheaval which might bring down too many who had been implicated in the Cultural Revolution.
Perhaps too much prestige for he:
…now proclaimed a grandiose plan for Four Modernisations (of agriculture, industry, science and technology and national defence) which would, he claimed, turn China into a “powerful socialist country by the year 2000″. Yet Hua also proclaimed a policy of the Two Whatevers: “We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave.”
Soon after he was topped by Deng Xiaoping. Deng, no slouch when it came to witty phrases dubbed Hua “chief whateverist”, and I’m genuinely sorry that I had forgotten that little piece of rhetoric because one could use it in so many contexts. So Hua left the chairmanship and went into virtual obscurity despite remaining on the Central Committee. Which perhaps is as great a testament to his skills of political triangulation as his surviving the Cultural Revolution.
Some reports said he resigned from the party for health reasons in 2001.
Some would say that to make it that far within the party while retaining his health was no mean achievement.
“Whateverist” indeed. Perhaps Hua had the last laugh living to a ripe old 87 which is more than can be said of some who sailed close to the Chairman.
As the Guardian noted:
He reappeared in 2007 at the 17th congress, where the camera at one point caught him gently dozing.
You know, it’s years since I thought of the Gang of Four or read much about Chinese communism. Maoism and me just never really hit it off – and can I say a big thank-you there to those former paragons of Maoism the CPI-ML who even after they had broken with Beijing for the real Stalinist superpower Tirana somehow managed to retain the worst and most hectoring elements of their previous ideological home (they, the CPI-ML, no doubt would say it wasn’t them that changed, but everyone else, and for once they’d have more than a smidgen of truth on their side) – which is doubly ironic because one of the first intellectual, as distinct from emotive, events that pushed me strongly down a Marxist line was a documentary produced by an American which I saw way back in the mid 1970s describing a Chinese collective farm and the distribution of farm equipment. It looked so… rational. And hey, thirty odd years later and feeding well over a billion or so people they must have gotten something right.
But that said the Cultural Revolution largely left me cold. Too random, too obviously open to abuse for personal or ambitious reasons, too irrational. Moscow might be staid, it might be totalitarian, but Moscow was stable and cautious and it’s interesting how that stability and caution is attractive to a fairly large segment on the left (I’ve been thinking recently, and it’s far from an original thought – but in the context of a diminished left it seems somehow apposite – how until quite recently orthodox CPs always tend to be more rather than less likely to support larger social democratic parties playing Athens to their Rome).
Anyhow, all that is fascinating, but a line in the Irish Times really caught my eye. It noted that:
The Cultural Revolution was condemned, and Mao’s era was reassessed as “70 per cent good, 30 per cent bad”.
It’s brilliant isn’t it? There’s a certain rough sort of honesty about it – even if one were to suggest that the balance might be closer to 55/45. Because it at least attempts to suggest that some good existed, that we should look at Mao as a figure with a balance sheet. I genuinely like that.
But the great thing is that it can be used in any political context. And arguably should and much more often.
Charlie Haughey? 20/80?
Bertie Ahern 40/60?
Am I being too kind or too unkind?
And what about the left and/or progressive end of the spectrum. Let’s start with a few favourite figures. De Rossa? 55/45, or I could, on hearing the howls of dissent reverse that figure… Joe Higgins, well closer to the Great Helmsman, I’d say about 70/30. Gerry Adams… wait, I’m not going there…
So over to you…
Ah, the 1981 Resolution on Party History, which is the framework historians of the CCP have had to work within ever since. And in fact it goes further than that, with certain areas being wide open for critical study and others – well, not exactly off limits, but more circumscribed.
It’s a good one for dealing with flawed leaders, which is really any kind of leader, and getting away from the left’s hagiography/demonology meme.
Although I can see this opening up yet more furious arguments… “Oi, where do you get off saying Ted Grant was only 60% correct when you scored Sam Marcy at 70%?”
Do you have nine judges and remove the best and worst scores before taking the average of the rest?
I think that there is still a lot of gufff about China and Mao. The Great Leap forward was a disaster and the Cultural Revolution was even worse.
Of course the revolution was needed and did a lot of good.
But there is little or no democracy. ie, Sentencing two old age pensioners to a reeducation for criticising, This is awful.
The cult of the leader seems to be gone. This is a plus. I gather that the dead Kim in North Korea is still the chief of state.
I read an interesting autbiography of a CCP founder who became a Trotskyist, it was originally on limited circulation within the party.. Deng’s daughter visited him when she was writing Deng’s biography. He was one of the few left who knew Deng in France.
Always regarded the maoists her and elsewhere as the least rational people on the left, and I have met some strange individuals.
China needs and hopefully will get a democratic revolution which will add to the 1948 one and avoid a descent into gangster capitalism as in the ex USSR.
Ted Grant, only 60%
Yes ejh, and it has to be an international panel…
It’s difficult isn’t it Jim. Listening to NPR the other day one correspondent made the point that China has succeeded (largely) in keeping its population fed, educated, etc… no small achievement with such numbers. Whether that is enough though is the question. Certainly you’re right, even such minor infractions as those pensioners ‘committed’ are dealt with so disproportionately. That said I think it democratise… but in which direction…
“Ted Grant, only 60% ”
In August 1990, on what was then the hottest day ever in the UK, I was at a Militant summer camp in the Forest of Dean, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. That afternoon Ted Grant gave a talk on the subject (having spent most afternoons reading the Daily Mail, with occasional glances at the Financial Times to mine some quotes).When he wasn’t sure he was talking loudly enough he pointed to the microphone stand and asked “Is this one on?” There was no microphone in the stand. After this was pointed out to him he asked of a second microphone stand “What about this one?” There was no microphone there either.
Ah, good old Ted… I am reminded of when Mary Robinson ran for the presidency and the SWM had been very hard on not voting for her. Kieran and Marnie and Wingfield and all the other Bolsheviks were quite strident on the point. Until they went to London for the Marxism conference and all the Irish comrades were dragooned into a special meeting. Table at the top, Chris Bambery on one side and Lord Callinicos on the other. Cliff strides in, waving the Irish paper, and screaming “What is this crap? You aren’t voting Robinson? Yes you are, and you’ll have her picture on the next front page!” Whereupon Ireland’s Bolshevik vanguard folded like a house of cards…
What did the SWM have against voting for Robinson?
skidmarx, that’s a great anecdote. Still as splintered notes, when it came to certain matters TG could be quite…forceful.
I’d echo Garibaldy, what was the problem with Robinson (apart from the obvious one or two), surely she was better than the other two?
I think their problem was there was strong residual hostility to supporting a Labour presidential candidate at all; especially to one who had left the Labour Party over the Anglo-Irish Agreement and had no connection at all to the unions and community activism; and who was brought in by Spring as a direct response to the left’s hopes that Noel Browne would be the candidate. Robinson made no claim to even being a socialist.
However the Brits saw the bigger picture and as Splintered notes went buck ape. However my re-collection was that was all post-election. Robbo was already president before any such meeting with Cliff and the politbureau. There was no Robbo front page or call to vote for her. At the Marxism in Ireland conference in November 1990, just after her election there was still no party line. Shelia McGregor of the SWP CC took this tale of woe back to London and it was July 1991 before the SWM leadership and a rather stunned group of rank and filers got it in the neck at Marxism in London. So if the SWM backed her it was very retrospectively. In fact I remember when she sacked some cleaners at the Aras some people nodding their heads and saying ‘told you so.’ By 1997 the lesson had been so beaten into the party’s heads that they unthinkingly backed Adi Roche, with all the zeal of the converted.
The above of course is subject to the vagaries of my drink addled memory.
I do however remember that Austin Currie’s TV ad in the same campaign featured the civil rights movement and the Caledon squat very strongly.
Final 1990 presidential point; Brian Lenihan got a higher vote among the under-25s than Robinson and she was elected on Currie’s transfers; perhaps not the social transformation that some imagine.
By the way, what the fuck has this got to do with Ted Grant? Or 30-70 for that matter?
I shared a house with a comrade from the SWP in 1988 and said to her once that I found Cliff really impressive and she said that he’d lost a bit of his oratorical power since the late 70s.
When I first saw far left groups on the TV in the late seventies and they all seemed to have an elderly guru I swore I was never going to join one of them. But I did find that Cliff seemed to make an incredible amount of sense.
Yes, D&C’s memory is probably better than mine with regards to the time line – I know some things happened, but when it comes to the year I’m sometimes hazy. But I do remember the Irish leadership getting a major spanking from Cliff on the issue, which is probably why they then retrospectively moved to a position of saying Robbo’s victory was a great social transformation. I have a feeling they were wrong before and wrong after.
Yeah, elderly gurus did abound, and founding fathers were always reluctant to let go the helm. It was a small miracle that Militant eventually managed to dump Ted, even if they did treat him a bit shabbily. But I liked Cliff a lot, warts and all. I also liked Sam Marcy, though I don’t think I’d have liked to be in his movement.
Now that I think about it, Eamonn McCann made a speech at the Irish Marxism in 1990 where he made fun of a Fintan O’Toole article extolling Robinson as the dawn of a new progressive era. It got a lot of laughs. Shelia McGregor was not amused and reported back.
Yes, I think the social transformation was over-hyped and the actual election results forgotten.
Cliff was a great public speaker but a bit of a bollocks if you ask me. Then again you couldn’t stay at the top of that lot for 40 years without being one!
Cheers for the info on Robinson. Seems a bit weird of a position but I guess there was a lot more scepticism of electoral practices then.
Very interesting history there in itself. A case of can’t see the wood for the trees? I was never, and remain not much, of a fan of MR. Bit too much of the liberal, too little of the leftist. But, she served a purpose in some respects. Hard to see the FF/Labour government being so progressive on say gay rights if she hadn’t made it to the Aras.
Dunno about that WBS, but you may well be right. I’m inclined to think that the times were changing on a whole range of issues – in essence, the delayed secularisation of southern society had been gaining momentum since the 60s and 70s came to fruition in the early 90s, doubtless speeded up by the Bishop Casey and subsequent scandals in the Catholic Church. I don’t think that government was in a position to resist that. Although it’s certainly interesting that when the law changed it became more liberal than the UK rather than just copying it.
I’d agree, there was a sort of head of steam building up. But, was it inevitable it would change then? After all, only a few years later the divorce referendum was knife-edge and had it gone the other way might not have come back for a further five or more years?