TNAG-1623-FCO40-2237-Relations-between-Hong-Kong-and-China-1987 — Page 87

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7. The true pattern, I believe, is that there are - and always have been - three schools of thought, or tendencies, in the Chinese Communist Party. I would label them utopian, bureaucratic and humanist. The utopians were represented during his lifetime by Mao Zedong.

For them, the revolution was a moral drama, with - at bottom - a moral purpose: to create "new socialist man" They were the heirs not so much of Marx as of the utopian socialists scorned by Marx, and, in China, of the Taipings and behind them of innumerable peasant rebels who were inspired by millenarian dreams. The bureaucrats were represented during the 1950s and the 1960s by Liu Shaoqi. For them, the revolution was a matter of creating the right conditions for rapid material progress. They stood for the commissar more than the leader; party building more than the mobilisation of the masses; planning more than inspiration; and expertise just as much as "redness". They are good Communists; and, in contemporary China, their attitude towards the acquisition of technology and management skills from the West is parallel to the attitude of the moderate reformers at the Qing court towards their acquisition in the 1880s: "Western learning for use; Chinese learning as the core.' The humanists were represented by many writers and academics who were labelled "right-wing elements" during the 1950s and were attacked again during the Cultural Revolution. They are represented today by the three men who were disgraced during the winter for encouraging, or allowing, the students to demonstrate. For them, the purpose of the revolution was to set people free: to give freedom from poverty and ill-treatment to the peasants and workers, but also to give freedom to think, write and speak to educated people.

8. On some matters, the utopians and the humanists are nearer to one another than to the bureaucrats. One such matter is "democracy". Both set more store by popular participation in decision-making, and in the choice of leaders, than do the bureaucrats. Another is economic decentralisation. Both are much more in favour of giving power to the "localities" to set targets and make plans than are the bureaucrats. Both, indeed, are less enthusiastic, though for different reasons, about the whole business of planning. Philosophically, however, they are as far apart as are communitarians and libertarians in the West.

9. The Cultural Revolution was a tremendous struggle between the utopians and the bureaucrats. The utopians won battle after battle, but in the end lost the war. The conflict which is now latent is between the bureaucrats and the humanists. It is wrong to see those who argued most strongly for a campaign against "bourgeois liberalisation" Chen Yun, Peng Zhen, Yang Shangkun, Bo Yipo and Wang Zhen successors of those who supported Mao and then (to use the

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as the

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colloquialism) got out in front of him during the Cultural Revolution. All those I have named suffered during the Cultural Revolution. and Yang were two of the first to come under attack, at the beginning of 1966. Peng, I am told, has apologised more than once to writers and artists for his inability to protect them when their turn came. No; these people are bureaucrats; and if Deng says that he faces opposition from them "on the left", it is because the old left, or "ultra-left" of the utopians has been disarmed, or at least silenced.

CONFIDENTIAL