Chinese communism turns seventy.

CHINESE COMMUNISM TURNS SEVENTY

IN A Confucian society, the sixtieth birthday is celebrated most joyously and ostentatiously, for it is taken as denoting true maturity, and presaging further attainment--largely because the sage Confucius declared some 2,500 years ago: "At sixty, I saw all things with perfect clarity."

Pre-eminent among the societies shaped by the teachings of Confucius is China, which this month marks not the sixtieth, but the seventieth anniversary of the birth of its Communist Party. The last major political party that is unabashedly both Marxist-Leninist and totalitarian nominally exercises strict authoritarian control over the last major nation that is avowedly totalitarian.

The reality is, however, spectacularly different from the appearance. Peking celebrated the Party's sixtieth birthday a decade ago with great panache. In that portentous year, 1981, however, the Communists also repudiated the infallibility of Marxism-Leninism. The Party organ, the People's Daily, declared that the doctrine did not necessarily provide an answer to every economic, social, and political problem human beings faced.

As intended, that disavowal freed the Peking regime to experiment with modified free-market measures to replace the pathetically inefficient command economy China had built on the Soviet model. These measures worked well in both agriculture and industry--rather too well for the comfort of the Communist Party.

The problem is that one cannot be a little bit Marxist-Leninist, not if one expects to retain supreme power. Repudiating the universality of Marxism-Leninism eroded the authority of the Party center, just as questioning the spiritual tenets of the Anglican Church has eroded the authority of that hierarchy. In both cases, doubts among the faithful have hastened the erosion, but it began at the top.

Not solely because of the Chinese disavowal of the doctrine's infallibility, but, significantly, after that disavowal, the bureaucratic Marxist-Leninist parties of Europe crumbled--and with them the repressive regimes they had imposed. Led by that redoubtable cunctator Mikhail Gorbachev, diehards are striving to prevent the withering away of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. But wither it will.

Only the Communist Party of China, it seemed for a time, stood firm against the tide of decline. Its deeds were abhorrent, none more than the deed that demonstrated its contempt for the Chinese people and its disdain for the good opinion of mankind: the massacre in Tiananmen Square of students and workers demonstrating for no more than a voice in their own governance. But those merciless measures appeared to work.

The small clique of octogenarians who dominate the Chinese Communist Party hailed their victory over "the counter-revolutionary forces." They obviously believed that brutal application of armed force, followed by an equally ruthless and totally public campaign of terror against dissidents, had preserved their power and their privileges intact. Yet the spirits of the Communist Party are today almost as low as they were in 1927, when the vestiges of the Party's regiments took to the hills to escape the Extermination Campaigns of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists.

Only today, there is far less likelihood of a comeback. As Mao Tse-tung reputedly said, the people are the ocean and Communists are fish swimming in that water. The ocean of the Chinese people is today an inhospitable environment for the Communist fish. Most of the Chinese people hate the brutality of their unelected leaders--and despise the Communist Party for its incompetence.

Unlike fish, dynasties do not rot from the head, but from the edges. First the extremities go, then the vitals, and finally the head. Today in Communist China the extremities are going. Within the next decade, the head, too, will go. Once the wicked old men die, the Party will never be the same. At most, it will for a time resemble the Imperial Court in the dying decades of a corrupt Confucian dynasty. It will still exist amid much state, but it will exercise very little influence over the vast nation.

In the Beginning

THE END the Communist Party is now approaching was implicit in its beginning. Seventy years ago this month, 12 men, none over 32, sat down in the muggy heat of Shanghai to charter that Party. The grandly named Inaugural Congress of the Communist Party of China convened on the second floor of a small house in the French Concession, probably on July 9 rather than July 1, the date now officially celebrated. The Communist International in Moscow, which provided the essential funds, also sent two representatives to guide the infant Marxist movement: a Dutchman whose nom de guerre was Maring, and his Russian assistant. But they were effectively excluded from the deliberations of the Congress.

The Chinese delegates were all soft-handed intellectuals. Almost alone, Mao Tse-tung, the junior delegate from Hunan Province, was not a student-leader. But neither was he a member of the working class or the peasantry. His father was a well-to-do farmer, and the young Mao had been employed as a clerk-assistant in the library of Peking University. The acting chairman of the Congress, Chang Kuo-tao, who was later to break with Mao, was also the son of a prosperous father.

None of those young men possessed more than the most rudimentary knowledge of Marxism, for the only canonical work translated into Chinese at the time was The Communist Manifesto. Yet those tyros in revolutionary conspiracy were so self-confident that they kept the Comintern's representatives at a distance far greater than arm's length. A special session convened solely to allow the foreigners to speak was broken up after ten minutes by a squad of French Concession police--and all the delegates fled. The concluding session was held on a luxurious houseboat on a holiday lake some distance from Shanghai. The foreigners were not invited.

Although men like Mao Tse-tung and Chang Kuo-tao subsequently acquired a sketchy knowledge of Marxism-Leninism, they always kept Moscow's envoys at a distance. Gold and arms they would accept, but hardly ever advice.

Despite power struggles, schisms, and constant attacks by the Nationalists, the Communist Party stumbled toward power over China. Yet, notwithstanding the Marxist bias in favor of the working class, the Communist revolution was little different in its tactics, even in its strategy, from a hundred other revolts of the countryside against the cities during the awesomely long course of China's history. All had promised redistribution of the land and lower taxes.

Like previous conquerors, the Party was mightily assisted by the complacency and corruption of its enemy--in this case, the Nationalist government. The Communists were also greatly assisted by the turmoil created by the Japanese invasion in the 1930s--and by the gullibility of foreign, chiefly American, reporters and readers, who hailed them as patriots animated by reformist zeal.

So they were. They were also a good deal more. Although the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party never mastered the convolutions of the muddled and flawed doctrine they professed, they believed themselves to be dedicated Marxist-Leninists. And they behaved as such.

In the international arena, that meant that China, with its hundreds of millions of people, invariably sided with the Soviet bloc. As Mao declared shortly after the People's Republic was proclaimed in Peking in 1949, China "leaned to one side." America might have tried harder to persuade the Chinese that their course was unwise, but such an attempt would probably have made very little difference in the face of Mao's zealotry--and world conditions.

The Chinese entered the Korean War to "resist American aggression." Later, they assisted the North Vietnamese greatly with arms, ammunition, technicians, labor battalions, and propaganda. In both cases, the Party believed that it not only was demonstrating "fraternal Socialist solidarity," but was also protecting China's frontiers. Even promoting worldwide revolution by guerrilla armies was considered an act of self-defense, as well as a doctrinal necessity.

That challenge to all existing order affronted not only the capitalist world, but even the orthodox Soviet bloc. China began to feel herself isolated. In the 1970s, a pathetic undertone was apparent in the defensive assertion plastered on walls throughout the country: "We have friends everywhere in the world!"

Forcing History's Hand

MAO TRIED to force the hand of history at home as well as abroad. Not once but twice he threw China into total convulsion, attempting to create by deliberate action the idyllic society Karl Marx had envisioned as the final, natural flowering of the inevitable process of history.

Mao first sought to create the earthly paradise by means of the Great Leap Forward in Agriculture and Industry, with the attendant establishment of the Great People's Communes in which everyone would lead a truly "communal" life--that is, non-individual, non-familial, and non-propertied. Finding that human selfishness and cantankerousness balked him of that goal, he determined to create a new type of human being, a kind of secular Marxist saint, through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Having destroyed every vestige of the old society, including the People's Government and the bureaucratic Communist Party itself, those youthful saints would spontaneously enter into the Marxist paradise.

Famine and conflict, instead, arose from those utopian enterprises. Perhaps twenty million Chinese died as an immediate result of Mao's visions. Further, the cohesion of Chinese society was shattered, as was the productivity of both agriculture and industry. Faced also with international hostility, a powerful group within the Communist Party had decided, even before Mao's death in 1976, that fundamental reforms were necessary.

Those quasi-free-market reforms were set in train amid much conflict, which led, among other consequences, to the imprisonment of Mao's fourth wife, Chiang Ching, and finally to her suicide. By 1989, despite continuing conflict and horrendous inflation, it appeared that the Communist Party had set China upon a road from which it could not turn aside. Strains were apparent, and the atmosphere was markedly less free than it had been the preceding year: too many "stubborn old bones" either resisted economic reform or believed that liberalization of the economy could proceed within the old authoritarian political structure. Nonetheless, the Party and the nation were clearly moving together in the same direction.

Then the timorous old men saw that their authority, which was identical to the Party's authority, was threatened. They therefore crushed the students' and workers' movement for democracy with tanks and machine-guns in Tiananmen Square and deposed the liberal Secretary General of the Communist Party. Instead of stability and the revival of Party control over China, that violent suppression has been followed by instability and the further weakening of Party control.

"There does not seem to be anyone in China ready to forget or . . . to forgive," one authority wrote recently. As Qiao Shi, a senior member of the Politburo, confessed with despair in April: "The people have many grievances against us, some virulent."

An attempt to placate the people's anger has also failed. A Communist Party whose membership is now an unwieldy 49 million (some 4.5 per cent of the population) was to be purged of malefactors who preyed on the people. Yet less than 1 per cent of Party members have been punished or reprimanded. Clearly, the Party center cannot enforce its will on its branches in the provinces, much less on the Chinese nation.

Morale: Near Zero

THE PEOPLE are simply not impressed by the public show of reform that acknowledged faults like corruption, incompetence, and sloth but did nothing serious to correct them. Nor was morale restored or discipline tightened within the Party by a series of major conferences to exhort activists in areas as diverse as propaganda, organization, and finance. Moreover, the level of support for the Communist Party among workers and farmers, not to speak of the essential intellectuals, has never been lower.

Workers are demanding that their compensation be tied to their enterprises' profits. With state enterprises, still by far the largest segment of industry, sustained only by government subsidies, their dissatisfaction grows. The prime mover of China's burgeoning economy is "rural and township enterprises," which are, in effect, privately run.

In the countryside, where farming is once again a family business, Party members are resigning in order "to practice religion." The Communist Party and the Marxist-Leninist doctrine, which once prevailed absolutely, are no longer strong enough to keep either true believers or opportunists in line. Although the resignations may stem more from insecurity than from piety, they are the starkest defiance of the Party's traditional hostility to "religion and superstition."

Provincial leaders have not abandoned the Party. They still assert themselves within the Party structure, at least formally. However, the more prosperous provinces--led by Ye Xuanping of Kwangtung Province, abutting Hong Kong--have refused to accept the master economic plans cast in Peking. Even local units of the People's Liberation Army, despite a recent reorganization, are more closely attentive to the voices of local authority than to Peking. Such is the traditional Chinese pattern, especially when a dynasty is dying.

No Chinese regime has been able to impose the will of the capital for an extended period on the entire vast country and its great population. "Tian gao, huangdi yuan," declares the ancient folk saying--"Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away."

The Point Is Power

WHAT IS the Communist Party of China if it is not the nexus of power, the hub of a system based upon the oxymoronic Marxist-Leninist concept "democratic centralism"? Marxism-Leninism, after all, revolves on one central pivot: power--the conquest of power, the extension of power, and the preservation of power. Yet the Communist Party of China is failing to exercise power effectively.

Within its limitations, the China policy of the Bush Administration is hastening the trend. There is no practical point in isolating China as a moral leper. Greater contact with the outside world, by whatever means, inevitably "corrupts Marxist purity with foreign bourgeois pollution," as Peking has said, and, further, weakens authoritarian control of both the economy and the administration. Yet, the effusive exculpation heaped on the Communist Party of China by the Bush Administration tends to make the selfish leadership more confident and to discourage the reformers, as well as the dissidents.

The Administration should make a clear distinction between the Chinese people, who merit all our help, and the Communist Party, which merits little but contempt.

Mr. Elegant's latest book, Pacific Destiny (Crown), has just been published in paperback (Avon).