TNAG-0752-FCO40-956-Future-of-Hong-Kong-1979 — Page 200

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Revolution, of which manual labour for students, barefoot doctors, and sending school leavers to the countryside are examples, were praised daily and fulsomely two years ago. Today the evaluation has been officially reversed and the first 17 years of Communist rule in China are now deemed to have been basically all right. The "new born things" have not been abandoned on the hillside but are being subjected to the test of reason and experience.

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11. In military affairs Mao saw men not weapons as the decisive factor. He was keen enough that China should have an atomic bomb to deter the Russians but nevertheless declared it a paper tiger". This and the policy of self-reliance militated against the import of modern defence technology. The purchase of the Spey engine from Rolls-Royce in 1975 was an exception almost certainly attrib- utable to the influence of Chou En-lai and Teng Hsiao-p'ing which, we are told, was lucky to survive the "machinations of the Gang of Four ". Today Chinese leaders are showing a keen interest in foreign defence technology. Professional training, neglected for years because Mao thought political indoctrination more important, is being conducted with a new enthusiasm.

12. I could continue the catalogue almost indefinitely. The development of foreign trade, once condemned as selling the country's birthright and “fawning on foreigners" is now a priority target. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution Mao's closest associates, his wife and the Minister of Defence Lin Piao condemned all art ever produced in China or abroad up to that moment. This nihilism deadened the intellectual climate long after the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution had subsided. In 1977 the Chinese and foreign cultural heritage has been restored to respectability and the slow process of restoring confidence among Chinese writers, film and theatrical producers and painters has begun with the rehabilitation of many who were despatched into oblivion by the Cultural Revolution. Films from before 1966 which have mouldered in the warehouses of the Ministry of Culture are being shown again. Young people are no longer encouraged to “go against the tide " as they were by Mao when he thought things were not going his way. Now the watchwords are order and discipline. Mao explicitly declared that the sources of political impurity, "the bourgeoisie ", was to be found right inside the Communist Party and among those in power. The new leaders dismiss this as a distortion by the "Gang of Four ", except, of course, in as far as it can be applied to the " Gang " themselves. And so on.

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13. This catalogue of reversals reflects the policy issues which lie behind all the trumpeting about the "Gang of Four". It is true that the "Gang" were bidding for power although whether they were the unsuccessful instigators or the victims of a coup de main remains a very moot point. But the real issue is the controversy which has been at the heart of Chinese politics since the end of the first decade of Communist rule. Which path should the Chinese revolution take? Put in a somewhat over-simplified form, Mao and his followers believed that progress towards the goal of Communism should be continuous, that "class struggle ", with its attendant political upheavals was the only way to ensure that the revolution would not grind to a halt. He feared that unless senior party cadres, intellectuals and factory managers were regularly pushed off their perches and believers in his "mass line" were brought to power, then the bureaucracy would entrench itself and China would lose its revolutionary thrust. The vision was a romantic one but it left China with a stagnant economy, a country riven by factionalism and, on his death, in a state of near anarchy. His successors have had to recognise that for all the progress which China made particularly in the years up to the early 1960s, in the last decade it has begun to fall behind.

CONFIDENTIAL