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The Tenth Party Congress: The Power Structure and the Succession Question

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Richard Wich
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Extract

There were several peculiar features of the Chinese Communist Party's 10th Congress, held from 24 to 28 August 1973, which in themselves introduce the question of the purpose of the Congress. One of the oddities, as measured by the CCP's previous practice as well as that of other ruling parties, was that there was no prior announcement or Central Committee plenum setting the stage for the Congress. The first official announcement was a press communique issued on 29 August, the day after the Congress closed. Another surprising feature was the unusual brevity of the Congress, which lasted only five days. And even that short time was not totally devoted to Congress proceedings; a ceremony marking the opening of a tricontinental table tennis tournament drew a full turnout of currently active leaders on the evening of the Congress's second day. More strikingly, the Sinkiang regional party chief, Saifudin, who was to be elected an alternate member of the Politburo at the plenum held two days after the Congress, was present at his distant home base to attend the Sinkiang trade union and women's Congresses while the national Party Congress was in session. He may not have missed very much: unlike previous congresses, no speeches were reportedly made other than the official Central Committee documents submitted on the first day.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 58 , June 1974 , pp. 231 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1974

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References

1. The 10th Congress was only a fifth of the length of the previous one. It was also much shorter than the October 1968 plenum (19 days) and the August-September 1970 plenum (15 days).

2. The Congress documents are in Peking Review, 7 September 1973.

3. Altayskiy, M., “What the Maoists are hiding from the people,” Literaturnaya Gazeta, 10 10 1973Google Scholar , in Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Report: Soviet Union, 17 October 1973, Cl–12.

4. People's Daily, Red Flag, and Liberation Army Daily, “Commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Communist Party of China,” in Peking Review, 2 July 1971, pp. 5–21.

5. The Party has also waxed quantitatively, the Congress disclosing a membership figure of 28 million as compared with the official figure of 17 million before the decimations of the Cultural Revolution.

6. In a significant appearance several weeks after the Congress, Li was the ranking leader at the opening ceremony of “the 1973 national shooting invitational tournament,” identified by Peking as the first nationwide shooting contest since the Cultural Revolution. Such a tournament is symbolic of a return of the army to concentrating on military skills and a retreat from political duties, and is reminiscent of the type of military tournament for which the former PLA Chief of Staff, Lo Jui-ching, was denounced during the Cultural Revolution. Lo and Lin Piao clashed over the relative priority of professional military skills and the political uses of the army.

7. The constitution says that “a number of necessary organs… shall be set up to attend to the day-to-day work of the party,” but an identical provision in the 1969 constitution did not herald the reinstitution of a secretariat.

8. FBIS: People's Republic of China, 27 August 1973, A3.

9. Shortly after the Congress Chou led a turnout of leaders that read like a rollcall of officials who had been under sharp attack during the Cultural Revolution but were now in good standing as Central Committee members. Following Chou and Politburo member Chi Teng-k'uei the list of leaders attending a Sino-Japanese table-tennis exhibition on 11 September went as follows: Ch'en Yun, Li Fu-ch'un, Teng Hsiao-p'ing, Nieh Jung-chen, Ulanfu, T'an Chen-lin, Li Chingch'uan, and Liao Ch'eng-chih.

10. See especially the 29 September 1973 editorial in People's Daily and Liberation Army Daily, “Organize the militia well,” in FBIS: People's Republic of China, 1 October 1973, B 10–12. The use of a joint editorial in the Party and army dailies underlines the intention to assert Party control.

11. Wen Hui Pao and Liberation Daily, “The radiance of the Party brightens the road to the battlefield,” in FBIS: People's Republic of China, 16 October, C3–4.

12. Peking Review, 7 September 1973, p. 5.

13. FBIS: People's Republic of China, 13 September 1973, Al.

14. Or, as a colleague exclaimed when I read him NCNA's dispatch, “Why, he has already moved in I”

15. FBIS: People's Republic of China, 24 September 1973, A 10.

16. For a description of the television coverage and text of the announcer's narration, see FBIS: People's Republic of China, 28 September 1973, Al.

17. The political report and constitution adopted at the 9th Congress are in Peking Review, 30 April 1969.

18. It is interesting to note that in contrast to the continuity stressed between the 9th and 10th Congresses, Chou's report contains a negative reference to the 8th Congress: the rejected political report for the 9th Congress submitted by Lin and Ch'en Po-ta contained “the same revisionist trash” that Liu Shao-ch'i and Ch'en had “smuggled” into the 8th Congress resolution.

19. Peking Review, 10 November 1967, pp. 5–8.

20. The September 1971 issue of Red Flag carried an important exegetical reading of Mao's 1940 work “On Policy” to provide what amounted to a rationale for negotiating with the United States as a means of isolating the main enemy, the Soviet Union. The article contains a sharp attack, which may have been aimed at Lin, on those who formulate revolutionary tactics according to revolutionary sentiment rather than using the flexible tactics strongly defended in the article. The article's insistence against substituting feelings for policy suggests that Lin may have appealed to ideological and moral sentiments in opposition to Peking's opening its doors to the United States. “A powerful weapon to unite the people and defeat the enemy,” Red Flag, No. 9 (1971)Google Scholar , in Selections from China Mainland Magazines (Hong Kong), 71–08, pp. 1–9Google Scholar . The article was reprinted in People's Daily on 17 August 1971 and two weeks later disseminated internationally by NCNA.

21. An article published a few months after the 10th Congress, in the December 1973 issue of Red Flag, stressed the importance of grooming new leaders to succeed Mao's revolutionary generation. While acknowledging the value of veteran cadres, the article insisted that the search for new talent should be given priority over seniority and that seniority should not be given improper emphasis. Wang Hung-wen's ascent leaps to mind in this context.

22. After the 10th Congress the line of attack on Confucius acquired a sharper focus centring on the analysis and defence of Ch'in Shih Huang-ti's harsh but progressive role in suppressing reactionary forces. On 24 August, the first day of the Congress, NCNA belatedly carried an article attacking Confucius from the 7 August People's Daily by Professor Yang Jung-kuo (author of a similar article in the December 1972 Red Flag). On the same day NCNA also belatedly carried a report on an entire page of People's Daily devoted to the importance of pressing on with language reform by phonetic romanization of the Chinese characters. One of the post-Congress articles focussing on Ch'in Shih-Huang-ti drew an analogy between that emperor's role in unifying the Chinese language and current efforts for language reform. The article, in Kwangming Daily on 25 September 1973, cited opposition to language reform on the ground that it represents “servility to things foreign,” a charge that ideological purists (or those making use of ideological considerations for their purposes) might make against Chou's policy of closer relations with the West, particularly the United States.