330. Memorandum From Alfred Jenkins of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow)1
SUBJECT
- Developments Behind the Reinforced Bamboo Curtain
For several weeks developments have moved very slowly on the Chinese mainland—or so it has seemed. We cannot be sure, because many of our sources have dried up. Wall posters are fewer and are uninformative (the Red Guard authors have been packed off to the countryside), Red Guard newspapers have disappeared, and foreigners are no longer allowed to receive provincial newspapers. Mail is being more carefully censored, and the populace is shunning travelers (Tab A).2 We used to receive through the British 500–600 local newspapers per month. We now receive none, and only two papers from the Capital.
The October Central Committee Plenum was obviously designed to be a watershed between the destructive and constructive periods in the Cultural Revolution. (Both periods were promised when the movement began.) The Party is to be rebuilt under Army supervision, with “new blood” from the workers and peasants joining the revolutionary cadres. A completely revamped educational system under control of workers and peasants is to keep the revolution pure.
[Page 721]The forced dispatch of swarms of school age youth to the country-side for “worker experience,” however, has produced resistance from the students, their families, and the hapless peasant hosts, who complain of extra mouths to feed without compensatory work input.
Meanwhile, there are signs that some sort of Great Leap Forward may be in the offing. We are receiving a growing number of reports of the curbing of private plots and other types of private sideline production, of the increase in size and authority of production brigades, and of changes in the work point system in the direction of income equalization (Tab B).3 Spiritual elan is again to be the substitute for material reward. The Cultural Revolution was designed to make this possible, but resistance to a new leap is likely to be intense.
Mao’s basic problem is fairly obvious. While there are times when ideological motivation may serve as the prime mover of a country seeking modernization, no predetermined, fixed view of an environment can hope to cope with the galloping modern world, which is so variable in so many of its elements.
China’s immense social forces moved chiefly through Mao for about a decade. But constant stimulation is proving to be no substitute for pragmatism, and the basic eclecticism of Chinese society is bound to assert itself. Mao is anti-urban (he speaks rapturously of “the quality of village life,” much like a Taoist sage) at a time when urbanization is inevitable. He is anti-intellectual at a time when “knowledge is power” to a degree unique in history. China’s leader is now largely in confrontation with the social forces of his country, which have striven uncertainly for a century toward modernization.
So far Mao has sufficient power, however, to make another try. In doing so he is now manifesting in extreme form a classical trait of the visionary with a corner on ersatz truth: pathological secrecy, coupled with fear of contamination from the outside. This will give us added problems in following developments.