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

wage dispute

wage dispute

The opposition to the "Rebels" supported higher wages and the correction of wage disparities while the"Rebels" opposed money incentives and urged greater output (2). Part of the student campaign agninst Liu Shao-chi may be due to opposition to the trade union movement of which Liu is head. The call for the "cultural" revolution" included a cell for no interference with production, which meant in practice a ban on all strike action. The view some have have taken (3) that the movement to establish paris Commune organisations in the larger cities would give some power to independent action to wage-earners seems ill-founded. In fact these led to a mifitarisation of labour and the breakdown of the divlsion of labour (4). It is interesting that the longest-lived commune was in Shanghai where we have already noticed its consequences. Workers did during the cultural revolution act independently, as a defensive measure against a movement to limit wage claims and the rights of the trade unions, but these defensive actions, quickly thwarted usually by Peoples Liberation Army units, can hardly be labelled "revolutionary". The first vietim of the Glorious Proletarian Revolution, was the proletariat.

Behind the crisis of Chinese Communism, temporarily resolved in a precarious equilibrium by a Red Guard movement (whose claim to power is a claim on the future rather than on the present and which has now accomplished only a purge of part of the Yenan genera tion to leave power with the unpurged remainder) is problem of Chinese economic backwardness.

The Party's division is, as it always has been, between those of its cadres who are "red" advocating work mobilisation through revolutionary enthusiasm and those who are "expert". urging technological shophisticatiob before ideological parity.

In a still ovrrwhelmingly peasant society, it is not the "expert" but the ideologue who can engineer national unity and while this is so the Red Guards or some equivalent will remain politically necessary to the present regime, though at the cost of a still greater depletion and demoralisation of China's "experts" which will delay the march to an industrially developed society.

The conflict between the "reds" and "experts", between Mao and Liu, is irresoluble within the present framework of Chinese society, except by the common ruination of the contending factions.

The Red Guard movement represents the most extreme form this conflict has taken, the most all-out drive for "red" hegemony China has yet seen and points to an exacerbation of conflict which imperils Chinese Stalinism.

Only a step into an internationally planned community can save China, and the Chinese variant of Stalinism from the schisms that threaten to tear her apart.

Footnotes

(1) People's Daily, 19 May 1957. quoted by peng shutse in "Background of Chinese Events" in George Lavan [ed.] Behind China's Great cultural Revolution (Merit Publishers, New York, 1967.)

(2) Neale Hunter, "Port in a [unclear: sto]" Far Eastern Economic Review, 22 June 1967.

(3) Pierre Frank in Lavan, op. cit.

(4) Aleacandra Close "Tarnished Ideals" Far Eastern Economic Review, 23 February 1967.