What's the Difference?

CHINA

On Christmas Day 1947, Mao Tse-tung, China's taciturn Communist boss, addressed a 10,000-word message to the party which was a windy but valuable present to the world. When the full text of the message recently reached the U.S., it proved to be a clear answer to the old propaganda line that Chinese Communists are different.

Mao gave some helpful and revealing hints on Communist strategy (which, he claimed, was winning China's civil war):

"First strike scattered, isolated enemies, later powerful ones. Concentrate absolutely superior forces. . . . We are inferior, taken as a whole, but we hold absolute superiority in every section. . . ."

To characterize the enemy, Mao coined a new phrase which, even by Marxist doubletalk standards, was a verbal monstrosity: "a comprador-feudal, state-monopoly capitalism." By that he meant the big holdings of the big families, which must be annihilated. For smaller capitalists, he had familiar wooing words: "It will be necessary to permit the existence for a long period of the . . . broad petty bourgeoisie and middle bourgeoisie [under] a democratic coalition government." Several hundred words later, he qualified: ". . . This united front . . . must . . . be under the firm leadership of the Chinese Communist Party."

Mao confessed that, like the French and Italian Communist Parties, the Chinese party was suffering from "impure working style" because of its size (it now has 2,700,000 members). "Many landlords, rich peasants and lumpen-proletarians* have slipped in [and] lord it over, bully and suppress the people. . . . It is necessary to reorganize and purify the ranks. . . . [We must] grasp the science of Marxism-Leninism. . . .

"The Communist parties of nine European countries have organized an information bureau and published a summons to battle. . . . All anti-imperialist forces of the Eastern countries should also unite."

In plain English, that meant the prospect of a Far Eastern "Cominform."

* A German Marxist term meaning, roughly, burn proletarians.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.