Chinese Foreign Policy

Barbara Barnouin, Yu Changgen, Barnouin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136172151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1998. In this study what is proposed here is first of all to examine the effect it had on the very functioning of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and how the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, of which the country had become a victim, spilled over to this highly elitist and prestigious Ministry. In summary, it focuses on the chaos that engulfed the institution.

1

THE MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

The Cultural Revolution, a political movement of unprecedented intensity, penetrated the administration and the Party from the political centre in Beijing down to the level of townships throughout the vast territory of China. All of the most important economic sectors, industries and communications were affected by the Revolution, and even the rural areas close to the cities did not escape the movement. Since, at central government level, the Revolution was particularly pronounced the Chinese Foreign Ministry, one of the most prestigious and elitist ministries in the country, was also deeply involved in these developments.¹

The Cultural Revolution in the Foreign Ministry mirrored the events as they unfolded on the national scale. It can be divided into several stages. The first stage – from June to the end of 1966 – was directed by the Ministry’s Party committee under the leadership of Ji Pengfei and Chen Yi. It began with the campaign ‘to sweep away all demons and devils and eradicate poisonous weeds’. According to the then-prevailing political line – introduced in Mao’s absence from the capital by Liu Shaoqi – work teams were used to carry out the campaign. But these work teams did not last long, for they were withdrawn on the orders of Mao, who claimed that they had suppressed the masses and thus had carried out revisionist policies. The major issue at that stage was not so much the utilization of work teams; they had been employed in most previous campaigns and their activities had become common practice. Rather it was the definition of the targets of the campaign which had become the fundamental problem. While Party committees in general – and the Party committee of the Foreign Ministry as well – focused their criticism on a large number of average cadres – thus following what was later termed the Liu-Deng line – the Maoist line was to emphasize criticism of high-level cadres. In January 1967 Chen Yi, the Foreign Minister who had failed to implement Mao’s line earlier, was forced to make self-criticism.

Following the example staged by the Shanghai rebels, the second stage was inaugurated by the ‘seizure of power’ by the Ministry’s rebel organization in January 1967. This power seizure consisted essentially in taking over, from the Party committee, the right to lead the Cultural Revolution in the Ministry. Since a number of factions developed at ministerial level, the question of who represented the truly revolutionary faction soon became a matter of contention. This was also the period of Chen Yi’s second self-criticism which the revolutionary Left requested after Chen’s involvement in the February Adverse Current. This stage lasted until October 1967 when Zhou Enlai declared that the rebels in the Foreign Ministry had connections with an ultra-leftist and criminal association called the May 16th group.

From October 1967 till 1971 (the third stage), the Cultural Revolution in the Ministry was led by the ‘Committee of great unity’ which at first grouped the three rebel factions (two of them conservative) at the Ministry. The Committee was soon dominated by the conservative factions which, with the assistance of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), carried out the campaign ‘to purify class ranks’ from 1968 onward.

In the fourth stage, beginning in 1971, the Party committee resumed its functions. It continued the campaign to purify class ranks with its different facets and also directed the campaign to criticize Lin Biao, Confucius and Zhou Gong (Zhou Enlai).

The First Stage

In late 1965 and early 1966, the Cultural Revolution was in its preliminary stage. It was directed primarily against the Beijing literary establishment headed by Peng Zhen, a powerful Politburo member and the Mayor of Beijing, who had promoted a relatively liberal atmosphere in the fields of literature and art. Mao disliked these developments, viewing them as a manifestation of bourgeois ideology. He instigated the official criticism of a number of literary works which, in his view, were representative of bourgeois degeneration. Debates about literary works and their political significance were taking place in many intellectual circles. The writings of Wu Han, Liao Mosha and Deng Tuo – all three members of the Beijing municipal party committee – which the official propaganda considered as works incompatible with socialist ideology, were widely criticized; and a number of popular films such as Early Spring, Sisters of the Stage, Shop of the Lin Family and Besieging the City were subjected to increasingly defamatory attacks.²

The discussions about literature and films were, however, not confined to literary circles. They were also taking place in government and other institutions, including the Foreign Ministry, where the entire personnel became involved in deliberations about the socialist nature of certain works of art. This was not unusual, but was part of the Chinese political culture where ideological campaigns tended to affect most work units. In the Foreign Ministry, literary works became required readings for everybody, and films shown in the Ministry’s auditorium had to be viewed by the entire staff. In follow-up meetings the works were critically examined as to their socialist value. In their early stages these discussions remained relatively ‘academic’ without immediate political repercussions.³

Work team policies or Fifty days of White Terror

In May 1966, a significant change of style occurred in the Ministry’s debates. It was directly linked to the adoption of the ‘May 16th circular’ by the Central Committee, a document criticizing the relative moderation of the campaigns hitherto conducted in the name of the Cultural Revolution. A Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG), headed by Chen Boda, was established with instructions to give the movement an ideological and political turn geared towards the elimination of all ‘anti-socialist and bourgeois’ tendencies among academics and in the literary world.⁴ Moreover, the Cultural Revolution should not be confined to these areas but apply to other parts of society where, as Mao expressed it, a large number of representatives of the bourgeoisie and of counter-revolutionary revisionists had ‘sneaked into Party, government, army and various cultural domains’.⁵ In the Foreign Ministry, the campaign began to take a different form. According to the newly introduced policy, it moved from literary criticism to the stage of ‘linkage with the realities of the Ministry’. At first it was not clear, to the majority of the Ministry’s personnel, what this linkage might consist of and, in view of this uncertainty, most of the staff preferred to adopt a cautious attitude.⁶

Before long the new, more radical, orientation of the revolution became clear. On 25 May, a big character poster appeared on the campus of Beijing University, fiercely attacking the university’s president Lu Ping and the Beijing municipal Party committee for ‘sabotaging the Cultural Revolution’. The poster which was openly praised by Mao as the ‘first Marxist-Leninist big character poster’ was broadcast over the radio and published, on 1 June 1966, as a People’s Daily editorial with the allegorical title: ‘Sweep away all oxen, ghosts, snakes and spirits’. An attack on such an important Party committee was extremely unusual, but, due to Mao’s support, it became a nation-wide event paving the way for more ample criticism of the Party establishment in general. However, Party leaders at all levels failed to grasp the significance of the message which was, in fact, directed against them. Their first reaction was to search for ‘representatives of the bourgeoisie’ within the Party, but not necessarily at leadership level. This was also the case in the Foreign Ministry. On 6 June, all Ministry staff was invited to participate in a mobilization meeting where Ji Pengfei made the major speech emphasizing the practical implications of the slogan heading the People’s Daily editorial and especially the necessity to uncover ‘representatives of the bourgeoisie’ among the Ministry’s personnel.

The rank and file among the Foreign Ministry staff had a different interpretation of the new policy trend. Encouraged by the poster at Beijing University a number of young staff members began to criticize certain leading members of the Ministry’s staff, denouncing what they perceived as their bureaucratic style of work and their bourgeois way of life. A big character poster signed by 44 young people from the translation team under the general office of the Ministry created a sensation by enumerating a large number of ‘facts’ which revealed the ‘decadent’ style of life of some of the leading officials, including some ambassadors. Moreover, it accused them of acting as arrogant overlords in their relations with subordinates. Echoing the ‘May 16th circular’, the poster concluded that a ‘privileged stratum had been established within the Ministry’.⁷

Dismayed by this attack on the Party leadership, Ji Pengfei and the Party committee responded with outrage. After their reaction had filtered through to the Ministry personnel numerous posters appeared in support of the leadership, denouncing the previous poster as ‘poisonous weed’. A work team composed of members of different departments was sent to the translation department to ‘examine’ the 44 authors. They thus became the first targets of the Cultural Revolution within the Ministry.⁸

At the same time, the Cultural Revolution in the Ministry – still under the direction of the Party committee – began to seek out a small number of persons in leadership positions as targets of criticism. Of the three persons who were thus singled out two were vice ministers: Wang Bingnan – former ambassador in Warsaw who had conducted the Sino-American talks – and vice minister Chen Jiakang – former ambassador to Cairo. Both were accused of having neglected ideology in their work and of having adopted a bourgeois style of life. The third was the director of the Institute of International Relations, Meng Yongquan who, according to his critics, had promoted revisionist concepts in international studies. The two vice ministers escaped the fate of being labelled as ‘capitalist roaders’. Instead, they were considered to have committed serious mistakes, which was a much lesser offence. Meng Yongquan, however, was judged more severely. In the heady atmosphere of revolutionary radicalism prevailing at the Institute of International Relations he was labelled a revisionist.

On the whole, the campaign against high officials in the Ministry remained relatively low key. But for the majority of the Ministry staff the situation evolved differently. As the campaign to ‘sweep away all monsters and to eradicate all poisonous weeds’ began to gather momentum, it became a campaign of mutual attack. In order to avoid being chosen as targets themselves, people felt compelled to prove their loyalty to the Party and their willingness to participate actively in the movement. Thus they began to compete with each other in the task of discovering other people’s political mistakes. Everybody’s attitude towards the socialist system and towards socialist policies over the years became subject to scrutiny.

Big character posters proliferated all over the Ministry’s premises, carrying detailed reports on what their authors had been able to discover. As a result people became exposed in many different ways. Some were accused of having criticized the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in the early 1960s. Others were found to have opposed such basic ideological principles as ‘putting politics in command’, or of ‘being both red and expert’. Even the private sphere did not escape the scrutiny of others. In this connection, a few illicit liaisons and other instances of sexual misconduct were discovered. Only a short time elapsed before each department had uncovered political offenders who were examined and criticized until a decision could be taken as to whether they still ‘belonged to the people’s ranks’ or had become ‘enemies of the people’. It is important to note that during this campaign, although it was relatively short-lived, the foundation was laid for future conflicts. The atmosphere of mutual suspicion created among colleagues and the fear of harassment by random accusations, all this encouraged by the Ministry’s Party committee, undoubtedly contributed to the enthusiasm which was later aroused by Mao’s demands to attack the Party apparatus itself.

Criticism of the Liu–Deng Line

Mao, after his return to Beijing on 18 July 1966, criticized the manner in which the Cultural Revolution had hitherto been carried out. He was particularly opposed to the work teams that had been dispatched to numerous departments and work units and to their way of operating. In his view, the work teams had become the instrument of bourgeois reactionaries who had followed a revisionist line by suppressing the masses rather than mobilizing them. Many people who had aired their views against the Party leadership had been treated in the same manner as during the anti-rightist campaign of 1957 and had been unjustifiably labelled ‘sham leftists and real rightists’. In Mao’s view, the masses should not be repressed; they should be encouraged ‘to educate and to liberate themselves’.

As a result of Mao’s formal condemnation of work team policies as a manifestation of the bourgeois reactionary line, all work teams were hastily withdrawn in early August 1966.⁹ At the same time, the Cultural Revolution became increasingly radical. The new trend was confirmed during the 11th Plenum of the Party Central Committee convened in the first half of August 1966 to adopt the Decision of the Central Committee of the CCP Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a decision which was later known as the ‘16 points’.

Until the end of 1966, criticism and repudiation of the line represented by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping which, according to Mao, had suppressed the masses became the order of the day. As a result, those who had been persecuted by the work teams became again the first and most important group to stage a rebellion against their superiors. Soon they were joined by others who wanted to respond to Mao’s claim that ‘rebellion is justified’.¹⁰

The 11th Plenum had serious repercussions on government institutions. During the Plenum, Mao had brought forward his big character poster, ‘Bombard the Headquarters’, accusing Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping of having established a ‘bourgeois headquarters’ within the Party. With the demotion and later the fall of Liu and Deng, and the upgrading of Lin Biao and the Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG), the hierarchical order of the leadership, the process of decision-making and the role of government institutions changed considerably.

The first victim of the Cultural Revolution was the Central Committee propaganda department. Mao had condemned it as the ‘palace of the King of Hell’.¹¹ Soon it was paralysed and its external propaganda operations were taken over by the CCRG, with the Xinhua News Agency and the People’s Daily as the main instruments for the promotion of their policies. The second organization paralysed due to Deng Xiaoping’s fall was the Central Secretariat. Its functions were taken over by the CCRG in February 1967.¹²

In the Foreign Affairs System¹³ under the State Council, the situation was even more serious. Under Liu Shaoqi’s work teams policy, which was at its height in June 1966, the State Council Office of Foreign Affairs and its political department had dispatched eight work teams to several institutions and schools of the foreign affairs system. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent seven of these teams to its schools and subordinate institutions. Some of them had applied a rather vigorous treatment to those who had tried to ‘make revolution’ by attacking the leading cadres in their institutions. This was especially the case of the work team led by the deputy head of the State Council office of foreign affairs, Zhang Yan, who operated within the Commission of Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries and of another, headed by the vice minister of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Liu Xinquan, who handl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• 2 Perceptions, Ideology and Decisionmaking
• 3 Revolutionary Diplomacy: Spill-Over of the Cultural Revolution on to International Affairs
• 4 National Security Policies
• 5 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index