In 1964, Chinese newspapers reported that … in major cities like Shanghai and Peking, and even in distant provinces such as Shensi and Shansi, numerous young people were going about with long hair, pointed shoes and tight trousers. … Other aspects of western culture also found favour with a section of Chinese youth at that time. … These young people had become ‘degenerate, disaffected’ and politically unreliable.
By and large, the children of former capitalists did not follow the western fashion; they were always suspect, and so could not afford to expose themselves in this way. And, in fact, it was the young people with socially acceptable class affiliations – above all, the sons and daughters of senior functionaries - who flaunted their bourgeois and western tastes. (1)
We’re still examining the possible contribution of the international (first world labor aristocracy) theory of the productive forces to the defeat of socialism in China. In Part 4 the guts of this bourgeois ideology was shown to be the bogus promise: forget class struggle and you’ll get to live like amerikkkans, like the richest people on earth. Then in Part 5 we spotlighted the mayor of Beijing, Peng Zhen, as pushing a revisionist, capitalist restorationist line which was in fact dependent upon the international TOPF for its efficacy. We said there that Peng’s line indicated some significant buying into this fallacy of first worldism amongst the Chinese masses – otherwise international TOPF-based lines such as Peng’s would have no hope of gaining traction.
That analysis was all quite reasonable but its end assertion – that the ideology of first worldism was probably widespread amongst the Chinese masses – was still mainly a product of logical conclusion rather than factual examination. The italicized article above, however, appears to provide concrete historical evidence of that same conclusion, at least within a particular section of the Chinese people. The “degenerate, disaffect” youth depicted in the Chinese news reports were not aping the reactionary culture of Chinese feudal lords or even that of Chinese capitalists. They were emulating “ordinary” first world labor aristocrats, “ordinary” rich amerikkkans. So yes, those 1964 reports do appear to be some confirming evidence that to some significant degree first world labor aristocrat thinking was prevalent in China.
But perhaps this love-amerikkka ideology was anomalous in China, a brief flirtation with the international TOPF confined to this particular section of the people.
Not so. Take a look at just one extremely influential sector of Chinese society, education. This is then Vice-Minister of Education, Tseng Chao-lun:
For the past hundred years, American imperialism has not only been carrying out the most blatant sort of military, political, and economic aggression, but, what is far more pernicious, it has always employed a small part of the spoils derived from the Chinese people for the establishment of missionary schools … in an attempt to achieve the spiritual enslavement of Chinese children and youths through the dissemination of poisonous pro-America, revere-America, and fear-America sentiments. (2)
Complementing the cultural aggression of the amerikan-sponsored schools within China was the bourgeois schooling of Chinese educators in the first world itself.
In 1922 China adopted the American system of education. From then onwards her university teachers received a “bourgeois” education, either in China or – in the majority of cases – in the USA or Europe. These university teachers then trained the secondary and primary school teachers. As a result, nearly all Chinese educationalists came to acquire a “bourgeois” mentality: they admired the “bourgeois” culture of America and Europe for its economic, technological and scientific advancements, and its political freedom. (3)
At the time of liberation, then, the Chinese educational corps was in fact awash in love-amerika ideology. And so much so that two years after liberation the Deputy Minister of Education, reporting on the “pro-America, worship-America, fear-America mentality” of Chinese teachers, would state frankly that
… not a small number of teachers in higher educational institutions are still preserving strong European-American reactionary capitalist-class thoughts, especially a tendency to worship the American Capitalist class. Even now they still stubbornly worship the mode of living of the Anglo-American capitalist class, especially the so-called “American way of life.” They admire American wealth (they do not see the poverty of the American working people) … (4)
Let’s remove the parentheses from that last statement: They admire American wealth – they do not see the poverty of the American working people. Of course not. The “American way of life” so worshiped by China’s educators was not that of the amerikkkan super-rich and the yacht club set but that of “average” amerikan “workers,” the majority of whom, we’ll continue to point out, were among the world’s richest people – there was no poverty to be seen. It’s absolutely critical to understand this about China’s educational corps. Their own “education” in the first world had not taught them a longing to be big capitalists squeezing the lifeblood from their “own” first world populations of subsistence-living proletarians. They learned “only” the longing to live like the “regular folks” of those first world populations – that was the “American wealth” and “American way of life” of their ideological aspirations. The Chinese educational corps, across the board, had acquired, and were intent on disseminating, nothing more or less than first world labor aristocracy ideology. They were thoroughly infected with the lie of the international theory of the productive forces.
So, far from being anomalous, those “degenerate, disaffected” Chinese youth in 1964 were symptomatic of a much more widespread first world labor aristocracy cancer in Chinese society, extending at the time of liberation at least throughout the nation’s educational ranks.
To be sure, the first worldism prevalent in China was not the only reactionary ideology inherited by the People’s Republic from the old society. Feudalism had prevailed for thousands of years. China’s bureaucrat capitalism had been around for a hundred years. But, we will argue in Part 5c, the ideology of the first world labor aristocracy was a viciously powerful reactionary vehicle for accomplishing the restoration of capitalism in China, and it was an ideology that the Chinese communists not only failed to combat, but in fact promoted.
(1) Hsia, Adrain. The Chinese Cultural Revolution (New York), p.69.
(2) Tseng Chaolun, ‘The Disposal of American-Subsidized Schools is the First Task on the Cultural Front Now’ in Stuart Fraser (Ed) Chinese Communist Education: Records of the First Decade (Nashville, 1965), p.98.
(3) Hsia, p.38.
(4) Chien Chun-jui, ‘The Key to Reform of Higher Education’ in Stuart Fraser (Ed) Chinese Communist Education: Records of the First Decade (Nashville, 1965), p.123.
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