Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Student's Newspaper. Volume 31, Number 3. March 19 1968

[introduction]

"Neither proletarian, nor cultural, nor a revolution". In these words Isaac Deutscher, perhaps the foremost modern historian of Stalinist and post-Stulinist Russia summed up his assessment of the Chinese Great Proletarian Revolution shortly before his death last year.

The path of the revolution, from its beginning in Shanghai and Peking to its present slow phasing. out, has confirmed Deutscher's estimate.

For seventeen years, from 1949 until the first rumours of the "cultural revolution" in 1956. the rulers of generation were men of one generation—the Yenan generation.

The leading officials of the Party and the state, the senior civil servants and the most important party cadres were those who had marched with the Communist Eighth Route Army in the arduous Long March to Shensi to escape Kuominang encirclement in the mid-thirties or, if they had not joined the Communist Party during this major test of its ability to survive, had co-operated with the Party during its sojourn in Yenan after the Long March.

This generation had not only ruled China since 1949, but its rule had not been marked by any major break in continuity. The inner-party purges of post-1917 Russia and the power struggles in the Russian Politburo after the death of Stalin, had no equivalents in China Whatever conflicts over policy had occurred among the Chinese Communist Party leadership had been kept close secrets; moveover, with only two important exceptions (Peng Teh-huai and Kao Kang) none of the secret clashes or confrontations had led to the dismissal or porging of a Party leader.