China denies move to capitalism

I should say – in fact I will say – that if there were two stories that hit most Americans this week both in the newspapers and on the box, one had to do with the political economic health of China and the other with the physical health of you and me.

I'm thinking of stories that, as the old commentators used to say, give you to think. Not the stories that are the bread and butter of the tabloids, the ones that tickle or assault the emotions. Of course, like the rest of the world, we've been thrown into despair by the famine in Ethiopia and other parts of Central Africa and the hijacking in Tehran has once more stirred Mr George Shultz, the secretary of state, to announce that terrorism must be fought with force, without saying exactly how that's to be done, especially since the essence of terrorism is that it's unannounced and you don't know who's doing it.

How, then, are you to take up arms against an unknown enemy who acts without an ultimatum? The best we've been able to do so far has been to put up concrete fortifications around likely targets, like the barricades that now deface the approaches to the lovely façade of the White House. We hear that the Pentagon is next and, considering the enormous acreage of that five-sided Department of Defense, the defence of it is going to be quite an undertaking. Chances are, I should guess, that a thoroughly protected Pentagon would begin to look as formidable as the famous Maginot Line, the proud bulwark of France's defence which the Nazis never did try to attack, finding it simpler just to go round it and put its builders in chains.

Well, as I say, the first big story which was hailed by the most thoughtful commentators as a piece of unsullied good news was the extraordinary leader editorial, printed last week in Peking's People's Daily, which is the official voice of China's Communist party. Let's just look at the gist of it without cutting it or otherwise taking tasty sentences out of context. We have to remember that only eight years ago, the solid, down-the-line disciples of Mao Tse-tung, the true Marxists, the gang of four, accused the leadership of China of embracing the treacherous enemy, capitalism. These dreadful charges were met with shocked denials. What was happening, the leaders said, were certain necessary modifications of the true faith, but make no mistake, Lenin, Marx, Mao Tse-tung were still the gods and Marxism the only true faith.

Well, last week's editorial in the People's Daily was such a shocker that our raciest, certainly the intellectually liveliest of our newspaper pundits, Mr William Safire of the New York Times, started his piece on it with this remarkable sentence: 'Put yourself at the turn of the millennium and look back 15 years! What event in 1984 most affected the history of the world?' He listed the usual guesses – Reagan's second landslide, the famine in Africa, the unpredicted decline and the price of oil, the Russians bogged down in Afghanistan.

'But when it comes to world history,' he wrote, 'the big event of 1984 was surely the rejection of Marxism and the embrace of capitalism by the government of one billion Chinese.' Now, the gist of that remarkable Chinese editorial was this. Marx died one hundred years ago. There have been tremendous changes since his ideas were formed, so we cannot use Marxist and Leninist works to solve our present-day problems. Times are changing. To go on clinging to those original principles would be naive and stupid and our historic development will surely be hampered.

This certainly would be an alarming piece if it had appeared in Moscow. Mr Safire points out that there's a nationwide campaign going on in China to track down and punish smugglers, embezzlers and other sharp practices among a class of people who are cheating the new capitalists in ways all too familiar to us. Mr Safire wonders if this battle against corruption isn't just as much a purge of the old gang, the loyal Marxists who resent or detest the new capitalism. Could be. But that's a plunge into the deeps of Chinese internal politics that, at present anyway, I suspect we are powerless to fathom.

Mr Safire's conclusion is more of a warning than a cheer. 'If', he suggests, 'China succeeds in just feeding itself with a market economy, the neighbouring Soviet system will be shown to be a failure. The entire Russian leadership will be threatened internally and if the Soviet Union cannot stop the Chinese turnaround politically, the threatened men of the politburo may think they're forced to do it militarily. That way lies World War Three. It may turn out that our major peacemaking task in the next century will not be between us and them but between them and them.'

Now, we go to West Berlin and a commentary from a lady who's been on the front line of international reporting, at least for 40 years – 39 years if you want to be exact, when I well recall the regular appearance of this beautiful girl at the busy press conferences in San Francisco, during the founding conference of the United Nations, was enough to upset the concentration of strong men and diligent reporters.

Her name is Flora Lewis and she's been, for many years, the chief commentator on international affairs of the New York Times, also flitting untiringly from Paris to London, to Warsaw, to Brussels, to Washington, to ports of call in the Middle East, in Africa, wherever. She is, I suppose, the best-informed roving reporter in our language. She's never flip. She is often sombre.

Well, for once, she was if not ecstatic, at least exhilarated by that same news out of Peking. She was not spinning shrewd thoughts in a vacuum, she was in West Berlin and she talked to Communists from the eastern bloc who had been, the week before, at the annual symposium of international deep thinkers in Aspen, Colorado and she reported that several of them, reading the Peking editorial, were left speechless.

A Polish official made it very plain that the editorial would not be reprinted in Poland. Miss Lewis' familiarity with Communist officials of several stripes or nations led her to remind us that while Communism varies in its practices, not even the Yugoslavs have ever questioned the official dogma and that the Russians dare not because they need it to justify their power. They're frightened of losing control without the ideological security blanket that covers their brute security forces.

She does believe that for Peking to say flatly that old shibboleths must be brushed aside, in thought as well as in practice, creates a terrible problem for Moscow. She notes that the Chinese leader, Mr Jiang, could make this daring leap into avowed capitalism because he has already suffered physically, as well as politically, for being a heretic. The Russians have no heretics among their leaders and if any of them had come forward and said that Marx and Lenin were old hat – these are my words – they would, in effect, admit that they'd done wrong or behaved 'incorrectly', the chilling word for backsliders who are promptly sent off into the wastes or the psychiatric hospital or Outer Mongolia.

Miss Lewis concludes, 'If Peking's efforts succeed, the next Soviet leadership will have to take note. It's much too early to throw away arms but, for once, there is some really good news.'

I don't remember in, say, a quarter century of reading Miss Lewis that she's ever come forward and announced anything so cheerful or blunt as 'really good news'. But now, just while we were raising our glasses to the audacity of Mr Jiang and no doubt the chairmen of international conglomerates were smacking their lips over the prospect of welcoming Peking into the global fold, now there appeared an inconspicuous dispatch from Peking, a dispatch from Reuters, which was filed on 10 December, a couple of days after Mr Safire and Miss Lewis had finished and dispatched their copy.

When I read it, I couldn't help wondering what changes, what amendments, to the general joy they would both have considered if they'd written their pieces now instead of then. What happened seems plain enough. The Chinese, having heard of the happy outburst throughout the capitalist world, called in the foreign press and announced that the People's Daily had gone too far.

The tone of this reproof is limp with typical Communist understatements like 'The editorial was flawed' and 'incorrectly reported a speech by the Communist party's chief without checking the official text' – such language must be producing shudders or what Americans used to call conniption fits among the Chinese editors who did the reporting. What has happened or will happen to the man who wrote the People's Daily editorial does not bear thinking about.

The Chinese officials maintained that what the party chief had said in addressing a gathering of provincial propaganda officers was, 'One cannot expect the works of Marx and Lenin to solve all of today's problems'.The Peking editorial had said, 'to solve today's problems'. It reminds me of the fatal omission of the definite article in that United Nations' resolution calling on Israel to withdraw from occupied territories, instead of 'the' occupied territories.

Well, if these officials would take the trouble to rebuke their own editorial writer, it's pretty clear that they never meant us to put on his piece the jubilant interpretation we've given it. The correction was followed in the Reuters piece by a comment from several Western diplomats in Peking which, at the moment anyway, appears to have put the snuffer on the two little candles of comfort and joy lit by Mr Safire and Miss Lewis.

They – our men in China – said that even in its original, uncorrected form, the Peking editorial was not breaking new ground, but only expressing more firmly ideas that Chinese leadership has been voicing since 1978. So there! We're left to wonder whether the Chinese weren't nudged into the correction by the Russian ideologists on their borders.

Well, it was nice while it lasted. I see I never did get round to the big story about your health and mine. It belongs, anyway, much more fittingly to Christmas and, for once, I know what I'll be talking about next week before I sit down to ponder.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.