The Chinese CC continued, “Contrary to your attitude, the Communist Party of China and other fraternal Marxist-Leninist Parties show great admiration for those Marxist-Leninists who have rebuilt revolutionary parties of the proletariat. It is our unshirkable proletarian internationalist duty to maintain close ties with them and to give firm support to their revolutionary struggle. We did so before, we are doing so now, and, however you may revile us, we will continue to do so in the future and do it more and do it better.”[60]
Evolution of International Maoism
For about a decade and a half after these proclamations of support for those Communist parties that would follow the Chinese model, the Chinese party continued to encourage such Maoist organizations.
One U.S. State Department source reported in 1969: “The divisive effect of the Sino-Soviet dispute on local communist parties levelled off in 1968. Only Syria joined the ranks of the 20 other already split parties. … The alignment of 87 parties… in the Sino-Soviet dispute as of December 1968 shows several changes from 1967. Of the ruling communist parties only Albania continues to line up with Peking; North Vietnam seems to remain neutral, while Cuba, North Korea, and Yugoslavia have now been joined by Romania as parties adopting positions critical of both sides; the rest have remained more or less pro-Soviet. Among non-ruling communist parties, pro-Chinese or leftists with strong pro-Chinese tendencies are still the larger communist group in Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Peru and New Zealand. On the other hand the tiny Malagasy Party has switched to a pro-Soviet position. The position of the Indonesian Party remains unclear. The Reunion Party has moved away from Moscow, and the Indian Communist Party (M/L) has moved away from its proChinese position. Both have joined the Japanese, Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian parties in maintaining a stance of critical independence. … For nine parties no statement of position has been reported; most of them are small groups operating either underground or in exile.”[61]
The Chinese party encouraged those parties that sided with it in a variety of ways. It brought their leaders to China, where they were received by leading figures in the Chinese party, up to and including Mao Tse-tung himself. It gave frequent publicity to statements by and articles about these parties in the Peking Review, the New China News Agency, and in various Chinese party papers. It provided them with material for use in their own publications. It is to be presumed that it gave at least some of these parties financial support over and beyond the cost of trips of their leaders to the People’s Republic.
However, these are two important things to note about the relations of the Chinese party with its counterparts in other countries. One of these is that in spite of the article from the Italian paper that we have noted, the Chinese never in fact sought to establish a functioning Maoist Communist International. There was never, so far as we have been able to ascertain, an international congress of the Maoist parties, in Peking or anywhere else. The contacts of the Chinese party with its confrères always remained on a bilateral basis, party to party.
One leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States attributed this failure to at least two factors. One was the unwillingness of the North Vietnamese party to participate in any such international organization, desiring as it did, during the Vietnam War, to remain neutral in the Sino-Soviet quarrel. The second factor was that the Chinese had always looked upon their own experience as being something unique, not necessarily applicable in other countries.[62]
Although the Chinese withdrew from the organizations controlled by Moscow, they did not attempt, with one or two possible exceptions, to maintain any rival international front organizations as rivals to those dominated by the Moscow-line Communists. They did not establish a rival to the World Federation of Trade Unions—perhaps because the lack of trade union strength of the Maoist parties was so obvious. Nor did they organize rival international youth groups, women’s groups, lawyers’ organizations, or “peace” groups.
The second thing to be observed concerning the more than a decade and a half in which the Chinese encouraged the formation of Communist parties in their own image was the fact that the zigzags of Chinese foreign policy and domestic developments were very disconcerting for the foreign Maoist parties, and tended to develop splits within International Maoism. Although the foreign Maoist parties seemed to have little or no trouble accepting the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which so shocked the Non-Maoist Communists, many of them did have difficulties adapting to frequent shifts in Chinese foreign and domestic policy in the 1970s.
The first such event was the rapprochement of the Mao Tse-tung regime with the United States, symbolized by the visit of President Richard Nixon to China early in 1972, and constantly expanded thereafter. This resulted in the first major defection from the International Maoist ranks, that of the Progressive Labor Party of the United States and its counterpart in Canada, and may have contributed to splits in Maoist parties in Peru and some other countries.
The Sino-Albanian Split
The second major event that disconcerted International Maoism was the purge of the so-called Gang of Four, right after the death of Mao Tse-tung, which was for all practical purposes a repudiation of the Cultural Revolution, and the adoption by Mao’s successors of economic policies tending toward the reestablishment of a market economy. An American Maoist group, the Revolutionary Communist Party, jumped ship at that point, but more important, those post-Mao changes led to the alienation of the Albanian Party of Labor and a substantial number of hitherto Maoist parties in solidarity with the Albanians. That situation was further complicated when the Albanians began to attack not only Mao’s successors but Mao himself, which led to further splits within the ranks of what had been International Maoism.
As early as 1973, Nicholas C. Pano reported, “There was little doubt that President Nixon’s visit displeased the Albanian leadership. While the Albanians did not publicly criticize the Chinese on this score, they made their feelings known in a variety of way.”[63]
In the years intervening between Nixon’s visit and the death of Mao Tse-tung, relations between the Chinese party and government and those of Albania appeared to remain friendly, in spite of whatever reservations the Albanians may have had about Chinese foreign policy. However, after Mao’s death, Sino-Albanian relations deteriorated rapidly.
Nicholas C. Pano wrote, ”Hoxha and his associates had become distressed about developments in China following the death of Mao Tse-tung in September 1976, when Hua Kuo-feng aligned himself with the ‘pragmatists’ and moved against the ‘radicals.’ … Hoxha viewed this Chinese move to the right as a potential threat to his domestic position, since it could have led to demands that he pattern his policies more closely after those of the Chinese and, perhaps, that he rehabilitate some of the victims of his purges of the mid-1970s whose views were in some respects similar to those of the new Chinese leadership.”
61
62
Interview with Carl Dix, national spokesman of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States, in New York City, December 15, 1992.
63
Nicholas C. Pano, in