First Published: The Call, Vol. 5, No. 28, November 15, 1976.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The Guardian newspaper, which tries to cover its revisionist political line with an increasingly transparent disguise of “China friendship,” takes a stand no different than the imperialists and social-imperialists in reporting on recent events in China.
In a series of articles beginning October 27, the Guardian attacks China and the Chinese Communist Party and slanders Chairman Mao, Chou En-lai and the Chinese people. Editor Jack Smith analyzes events in China like every other bourgeois journalist who hates the struggle of the working class and hates to see the capitalist-roaders smashed.
In a direct attack on the new party leadership headed by Chairman Hua Kuo-feng, Smith characterizes the current struggle as a bourgeois power play between “left,” “middle” and “right” forces. Smith says that the charges made by the CCP against the “gang of four,” including their attempt to usurp party an state power were “unconvincing.” Trying to hide the crucial significance of the CCP’s statements that the four were “capitalist-roaders” and “capitulated to imperialism,” Smith says that the charges are “devoid of political content,” “sexist,” and “personal vilification.”
Echoing hopeful reports of bourgeois China watchers along with his own wishful thinking, Smith predicts that China will stop taking class struggle as the key line: “Premier Hua and the consolidated party center,” he says, “ ... consider national unity and development key to stability and progress.” But this is not the line of Premier Hua and the Communist Party of China who, in speeches and articles nearly every day since the death of Chairman Mao, have continued to stress class struggle as the key link in building socialism.
The line that stability and unity are on a par with waging the class struggle is the revisionist line of the defeated capitalist-roader Teng Hsiao-ping and of the Guardian itself. Since the Cultural Revolution, the Guardian has consistently attacked the revolutionary mass struggle in China, painting it as “disruptive,” and detrimental to production. China cannot develop production, says Smith, “by grasping revolution alone.” But the great lesson of the Cultural Revolution was that grasping revolution is the only way to promote production in the interest of the working class. It is the class questions of “production for whom?” and “disruption of which class stability?” that the Guardian attempts to blur and confuse.
Smith also repeats and embellishes the worst bourgeois slanders of the greatest leaders of this struggle, calling Chou En-lai and Mao Tsetung “protectors” of capitalist-roaders in the party. “That Chou before his death had supported Teng, and that Mao had protected the left (meaning the “gang of four” – ed.) ... is fairly obvious,” says the Guardian.
But what is really obvious from statements is that Chairman Mao, far from “ protecting” the gang of four,” criticized and warned against conspiring and factionalizing over a period of several years.
What is the Guardian’s purpose in spreading all this slander and confusion? As with their centrist stand on Angola, capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union and other questions, the Guardian is trying to blur the difference between socialism and imperialism; between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and between Marxism and revisionism. They are hoping that, by doing this, they can pass off revisionism more easily.
The Guardian’s stand on China is just one more piece of evidence showing how the centrists are defenders of revisionism and an enemy of the Marxist-Leninist movement.