by Anwar A. Khan
China was our foe for a very long time. We shall never forget what Mao Tse and Chou En Lai’s China did to our hapless people and Bangladesh in 1971 when we were fighting life and deathskitters against the bestial Pakistan’s military junta and their equally brutish local mango-twigs, particularly Jamaat-e-Islami gangsters, to attain our own homeland. Bangladesh was born on 16 December, 1971.
Even the Peking Government cast its first veto on 25 August, 1972 in the Security Council to bar Bangladesh from membership in the United Nations.
China was among the last countries to recognise independent Bangladesh on 31 August, 1975, four years after its birth when KhondokarMoshtaq Ahmed and his confederates usurped power after brutally killing Bangladesh’s Founding Father – Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. This temerity is irremissible under any setting.
So, we should condemn the Chinese government in the most corrosive language. We must also be very careful in building our relationship and foreign policy with China.
In retrospect, we find in the 1970s China’s foreign policy had important historical antecedents. On many occasions during the 20th century, the world revolutionary movement did not handle the contradiction between the defense of the socialist state and the promotion of revolution correctly. After World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, as revolutionary struggles in many countries were defeated and the worldwide struggle for socialism became confined to one country, the Soviet Union, the CPSU became overly cautious in its promotion of and support for bold revolutionary moves throughout the world.
Beginning in the 1930s, overestimating bourgeois nationalist forces, and underestimating revolutionary communist forces—peasant and proletarianbecame the norm, and defense of Soviet socialism trumped the advance of the world revolution for decades to come.
China in an unjust or unfair manner opposed Bangladesh’s People’s Liberation War in 1971, and it also designedly denounced the formation of Bangladesh as a marionette state of India and the Soviet Union. In fact, it was China’s boogeyman like bugaboo. These positions objectively lent support to the comprador regimes of Iran, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, and undermined the work of genuine revolutionary and Maoist forces in these countries.
Still, there is strong evidence that Mao’s views diverged sharply with Deng and Zhou after 1973. Mao on the one hand, and Deng and Zhou, on the other, drew different conclusions on how to apply the “three worlds” to the international situation. While Mao advocated tactical unity in some areas with the U.S. in order to deal with the so-called Soviet threat to China, after 1973 Deng and Zhou sought to implement a strategic alliance and political understanding with U.S. imperialism.
This took the form of the fully developed “Three Worlds Theory.” It is outright astonishing how a friendship was developed by a socialist country like China with the world’s enemy number one and anarrogant imperialist force like America!!
With the U.S. imperialists still the dominant power in most of the world, this was a serious error and had a deeply disorienting effect on many Maoist forces around the world. By 1973, Mao had come into sharper conflict with Premier Zhou in both domestic and foreign affairs. Zhou had steered the national campaign to repudiate Lin Biao into a campaign against "ultra-leftism." Mao saw this as a backhanded attack on the Cultural Revolution and moved to quash this direction.
Mao was convinced that this was an unrealistic assessment which also departed from his perception of the world as being characterised by “san da yishen” (three big and one deepening), that was “big upheaval, big splitting, big reorganisation and the deepening of the revolutionary struggle.” Mao called the Foreign Ministry's memoranda “shit papers,” and ordered Wang and Zhang to learn some foreign languages so they would be able to judge matters for themselves. “If it goes on like this,” Mao added, “the Ministry will surely become revisionist.”
Mao also refused to read the Premier's speeches on foreign affairs. Zhou responded to Mao's criticisms by declaring that he was responsible for the Ministry's errors and that these mistakes “have to do with my political thinking and my style of work.” In November 1973, Mao took issue with Zhou's statement to Henry Kissinger on the issue of Taiwanthat it could be solved either by force or by peaceful means.
Mao's view was that there was only one possibility, and that was to fight. Mao accused Zhou of being afraid of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and convened a session of the Politburo to criticise Zhou. This position was justified by historical parallels to World War 2, when the Soviet Union made an alliance with the Western imperialist countries against German imperialism.
This line was not simply a necessary tactic to defend socialism in the USSR, but was a general analysis of imperialism and strategy imposed on the international communist movement by the Soviet leadership through the Comintern. Just as in the China in the 1970s, this line of identifying one bloc of imperialists as more dangerous than an opposing bloc encouraged class collaboration on the part of communists in the U.S., France, Italy, and Britain, as well as in their colonies, such as, India, Algeria and the Philippines.
As Zhou came under sharp criticism, a leftist group came to prominence in the Foreign Ministry, led by five young women. Mao made two of them, Nancy Tang and his niece Wang Hairong, his principal liaisons with the Foreign Ministry. They succeeded in removing Chen Yi's successor, an ally of Zhou, as Foreign Minister. There were other indications of sharp struggle in the CCP over foreign policy. At a Politburo meeting in October 1973, Jiang Qing and Deng locked horns over the policy of buying ships from the imperialist countries for China's merchant fleet. Jiang criticised this as an example of a “slavish comprador philosophy,” and pointed to the Fang Qing, the first ocean-going cargo ship designed and built in China, as a symbol of Mao's policy of self-reliance and national independence.
During this period, Mao’s health declined rapidly. The mass campaigns that he had a hand in launching from 1973-1976 were focused on consolidating what had been won during the Cultural Revolution and preparing the ground for future struggles to defeat revisionism and stay on the socialist road. Significantly, it was only after Mao died in 1976, and his supporters were suppressed, that the revisionist leaders of China were able to attribute the Three Worlds Theory to him. Thus, there was a back and forth struggle over the conduct of foreign affairs in the CCP in the years before Mao’s death, but it rarely came out into the open.
The puppets were honoued in Beijing for their contributions to so-called the struggle against Soviet hegemonism. In 1975, the Chinese government supported the U.S. and South African-backed UNITA in the Angolan civil war in the name of defeating the Soviet Union's attempts to gain a strategic foothold in Africa through its support for the MPLA. In the Middle East, China's prior support for revolutionary movements was reversed. Chinese aid to revolutionary forces in the Gulf States was dropped in favour of diplomatic ties with Oman.
Another sign of this reversal of Chinese foreign policy was a speech by Foreign Minister QiaoGuanhua in 1975 in which he said that China was reconciled to the existence of Israel as a "fait accompli." After a U.S.-led military coup in Chile in September 1973, the Chinese Foreign Ministry recognised the Pinochet regime. Look at their deliberately violating accepted principles of right and wrong! While pro-Soviet forces in the U.S. are quick to jump on China, they don’t tell a much more important part of the story. As the U.S. moved to undermine Chile's "socialist" President, Salvador Allende, it received indispensable assistance from the pro-Soviet Chilean Communist Party.
Revisionism, whether shaped and carried out by Soviet or Chinese hands, revealed its betrayal of the people. Thus, the counter-revolutionary developments in Chinese foreign policy in the mid-1970s were a direct outgrowth of the Three Worlds Theory and the revisionists in the CCP who spawned it. This threw many Maoist parties and organisations around the world into a tailspin, from which most never recovered.
The Revolutionary Union (which became the RCP in 1975) deserves credit for its efforts to oppose this trend. It politically exposed the support of the “Maoist” October League (OL) for U.S. imperialism and its puppet regimes, and did not rely on Peking Review for finding its compass on international events.
Some lessons for today: There are much from which new generations of political activists who have grown to political maturity in the past three decades can learn about the historic achievements of China’s foreign policy during the Maoist era. China’s political and military aid to revolutionary struggles in Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines, Palestine and many African countries; the millions throughout China who demonstrated in solidarity with the Black liberation struggle in the U.S. and France’s May 1968 revolt; the boxes of Red Books that brought socialism and Mao Zedong. But when it came to the just cause of Bangladesh’s People’s Liberation War in 1971, China’s stance was purely against the moral principle.
-The End –
The writer is an independent political observer based in Dhaka, Bangladesh who writes on politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs
Post a Comment