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CONTENTS
Vol. 5, No. 1: July 1973
Gail Omvedt - Gandhi and the Pacification of the Indian National
Revolution
Carl Riskin - Maoism and Motivation : Work Incentives in China
Eqbal Ahmad - South Asia in Crisis and Indias Counterinsurgency
War Against the Nagas and Mizos
Gabriel Kolko - The Philippines: Another Vietnam?
David Rosenberg - The End of the Freest Press in the World
Secretary of Public Information - Guidelines for Mass Media
Philippine Social Science Council - Suggested Guidelines for
Philippine Scholarly Journals
Fred J. Elizalde - Propagating the Ideas of the New Society
Richard Kagan and Norma Diamond - Solomons Maos Revolution
and the Chinese Political Culture / A Review
Moss Roberts - Scotts The War Conspiracy / A Review
CCAS and Ezra Vogel - The Funding of China Studies
BCAS/Critical AsianStudies
www.bcasnet.org
CCAS Statement of Purpose
Critical Asian Studies continues to be inspired by the statement of purpose
formulated in 1969 by its parent organization, the Committee of Concerned
Asian Scholars (CCAS). CCAS ceased to exist as an organization in 1979,
but the BCAS board decided in 1993 that the CCAS Statement of Purpose
should be published in our journal at least once a year.
We first came together in opposition to the brutal aggression of
the United States in Vietnam and to the complicity or silence of
our profession with regard to that policy. Those in the field of
Asian studies bear responsibility for the consequences of their
research and the political posture of their profession. We are
concerned about the present unwillingness of specialists to speak
out against the implications of an Asian policy committed to en-
suring American domination of much of Asia. We reject the le-
gitimacy of this aim, and attempt to change this policy. We
recognize that the present structure of the profession has often
perverted scholarship and alienated many people in the field.
The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars seeks to develop a
humane and knowledgeable understanding of Asian societies
and their efforts to maintain cultural integrity and to confront
such problems as poverty, oppression, and imperialism. We real-
ize that to be students of other peoples, we must first understand
our relations to them.
CCAS wishes to create alternatives to the prevailing trends in
scholarship on Asia, which too often spring from a parochial
cultural perspective and serve selfish interests and expansion-
ism. Our organization is designed to function as a catalyst, a
communications network for both Asian and Western scholars, a
provider of central resources for local chapters, and a commu-
nity for the development of anti-imperialist research.
Passed, 2830 March 1969
Boston, Massachusetts
I
i
GailOmvedt
I
!
Carl Riskin
I
Eqbal Ahmad
I
John F. Hellegers
I
1
I
Gabriel K olko
David Rosenberg
Secretary of Public Information
Philippine Social
I
Science Council
I
Fred J. Elizalde
I
Richard Kagan &
Norma Diamond
Moss Roberts
CCAS
Ezra Vogel
CCAS
~ o D t e D t 8
2 Gandhi and the Pacification of the Indian
National Revolution
10 Maoism and Motivation: Work Incentives in China
25 Further Notes on South Asia in Crisis/with an Account of
India's Counterinsurgency War Against the Nagas and Mizos
37 Chloramphenicol in Japan: Let it Bleed
46 The Philippines Under Martial Law
47 The Philippines: Another Vietnam?
53 The End of the Freest Press in the World
58 Guidelines for Mass Media
59 Suggested Guidelines for Philippine Scholarly
Journals
60 Propagating the Ideas of the New Society
Reviews
62 Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: Pye, Solomon and the
"Spirit of Chinese Politics"
68 Watergate International Unlimited: Peter Dale
Scott's The War Conspiracy
Funding of China Studies, Continued
72 Resolution (1972) on Funding of Asian Studies and
Contemporary China Studies
72 Communication
74 The J CCC Boycott: A Necessary First Step Towards
Self-Determination in Asian Studies [1973 resolution)
76 Contributors
Editors: Steve Andors/Nina Adams Managing Editor: Jon
Livingston Book Review Editor: Moss Roberts Staff for this
issue: Helen Chauncey/Betsey Cobb/Mary-Beth Coleman/Bob
Delfs/Steve Hart/Ted lIuters/Hal Kahn Editorial Board: Rod
Aya/Frank Baldwin/Marianne Bastid/Herbert Bix/Helen
Chauncey/Noam Chomsky/John Dower/Kathleen Gough/
Richard KaganlHuynh Kim Khanh/Perry Link/Jonathan
MirskyIVictor Nee/Felicia Oldfather/Gail Omvedt/James Peck
/Franz Schurmann/Mark Selden/Hari Sharma/Yamashita
Tatsuo.
BULLETIN OF CONCERNED ASIAN SCHOLARS, July 1973, Volume 5, number 1. Published quarterly in spring,
summer, fall, and winter. $6.00; student rate $4.00; library rate $10.00; foreign rates: $7.00; student rate $4.00. Jon
Livingston, Publisher, Bay Area Institute, 604 Mission St., San Francisco, California 94105. Second class postage paid at
San Francisco, California.
Copyright Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 1973.
BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
Gandhi and the Pacification of
the Indian National Revolution
by Gail Omvedt
Introduction: Modern India and
Gandhian Nonviolence
Recently in Dhulia district in the state of Maharashtra in
western India an exploited semi-tribal population of Bhils have
mounted a revolt against their wealthy high-caste landlords.
Oppressed by indebtedness, landlessness and unemployment,
harassed with floggings and rapes by landlords, and provoked
finally by the murder of a Bhil farm laborer by armed
landlords in May 1971, the Bhils have mounted an increasingly
intense and organized struggle. They have participated in
conferences calling for cancellation of debts, reclamation of
lands, and minimum wages for agricultural laborers; they have
moved into action including forcible harvesting of crops and
occupation of lands that had been legally theirs before being
expropriated by the landlords. In the 1972 elections which
brought an overall victory to Prime Minister Indira Ghandhi's
Congress party, a boycott in the Bhil areas resulted in only an
8% turnout at the polls.
The struggle in Dhulia is not unique. It is one local
version of the rising class conflict in India between the
landlords and rich peasants who have benefited from recent
technological improvements in Indian agriculture, and the
poor peasants and landless laborers whose position has in
many areas steadily worsened.
l
What is unusual about the
struggle in Dhulia, however, is that the leadership of the
movement has brought together cadres of a Maharashtrian
communist party with an increasingly radicalized local
leadership of the Sarvodaya, the primary "Gandhian"
organization of independent India.
The leader of the Sarvodaya left, Ambarsingh Maharaj
Suratvanti, is himself a Bhil who became known as a
nonviolent social reformer in a semi-religious tradition.
Ambarsingh and others of the local Sarvodaya group have
shifted their emphasis from traditional welfare activities
focusing on schools, health centers, and campaigns against
alcoholism to a recognition of the inevitability of struggle. 2
But the Indian Sarvodaya as a whole has simply reflected
the developing class tensions in the countryside rather than
taking decisive leadership in promoting the demands of the
poor. Although some of the organization's top leaders have
formally recognized the existence of class struggle,
3
the district
and state leadership of the Sarvodaya in Maharashtra in fact
attempted to expel Ambarsingh for his militant actions; when
this failed, the right-wingers themselves resigned. And it is
noteworthy that this occurred in a situation in which the left
Sarvodaya group had moved simply to the stage of advocating
militant but peaceful struggle.
Two closely linked factors appear to be involved in this
Sarvodaya conservatism regarding social revolutionary struggle.
On the one hand, there is a social conservatism arising from
the class background of the leadership, itself a result of the
development of the movement. On the other, there is a
genuine philosophical dilemma of nonviolence: the continuing
threat of violence against poor peasant movements, the
possibility and increasing reality of their militant resistance,
and the necessity of working in such struggles with communist
organizations define a situation in which at every crucial point
increasing radicalism threatens to transcend the limits of
nonviolence.
Is a nonviolent revolution possible? The very question
illustrates the degree to which demands on nonviolence as a
form of action have escalated. Once people have decided to
take revolution, a total change in the social structure leading
to a society of justice and equality, as the goal, it is no longer
enough to argue that nonviolence is moral in the immediate
sense, i.e. that it is the only morally pure form of action for an
individual. It is no longer even enough to argue that it is only
nonviolence which will produce the kind of revolutionary
society we want-since it is obvious to most, at least, that
violent revolutions have in fact led to societies in China and
elsewhere that, whatever their imperfections, represent an
undeniable social and moral advance over the pre-revolution
ary situation. It is necessary now to show that nonviolence is
the most moral form of action at a social level and in the long
run: in other words, that it can be revolutionary, that it can
destroy the violence and oppression of existing social
structures. In terms of the analysis of Max Weber, nonviolence
must be justified in terms of an "ethic of responsibility" rather
than an "ethic of ultimate ends." 4
Up to now, nonviolent activists have responded to such
demands by pointing to Gandhi in India. Gandhi is the hero of
nonviolent revolution. Much has been written about him and
the techniques of Satyagraha; Africans as well as American
blacks have been influenced by the apparent success of the
2
Indian movement. Thus, just as India is sometimes seen as the
"democratic alternative" to Communism, so it is Gandhian
nonviolence that is seen as the alternative to costly, violent
revolutionary war.
Yet we see that the dilemmas of present-day Gandhian
activism in India represent simply a more heightened version
of nonviolent politics in America. Due to the excruciating
degree of poverty and oppression and the failure of economic
development to ameliorate the condition of the rural poor,
revolution appears more of a necessity. And because of the
existence of militant communist organizers-however divided
the Marxist left has been in India it appears infinitely stronger
and more mass-based than in the U.S.-revolution appears to
have greater immediacy. If Sarvodaya workers are to carryon
even peaceful struggle in the areas where it counts, in the
villages and settlements where the rural poor face their
landlords and the police power of the state, they must work in
conjunction with revolutionaries who believe that at some
point violence is inevitable. Thus we are faced with the irony
that in India, where Gandhian nonviolence exercised a stronger
hegemony over the national movement than in any other
movement in the world, it faces even greater dilemmas than
elsewhere in terms of social revolutionary struggle: neither
Gandhians nor socialists influenced by Gandhism can avoid the
contamination of violence, and a nonviolent revolution no
longer appears viable.
The reemergence of the class struggle in India since
independence and the resulting dilemma for Gandhians
suggests that is is necessary to re-examine the role of
Gandhism within India's independence movement itself. It is
necessary to go beyond the reams of literature which focus on
Gandhian techniques or on Gandhi as a person; it is crucial to
look at the social function which nonviolence has served in
India's long and continuing revolution.
The issue should be clearly posed. To the question, "Is a
nonviolent revolution possible?", Gandhians in India and
elsewhere have replied with a firm "yes." Nonviolent
techniques, in other words, have been justified not only in
terms of the "ethic of ultimate ends" put also in terms of the
"ethic of responsibility," the belief that nonviolence can lead
to a revolutionary new society. Behind this belief has been an
ideology that represents the particular Gandhian version of
class harmony, which assumes that there is in some
fundamental way and at some level a harmony of interests
between the contending forces within society, that at some
point the ruling classes will pull back, will refrain from using
their forces of destruction.
This Gandhian denial of class struggle and thus of the
inevitability of violence is in strong contrast with the
arguments of Mao, as stated in his famous report of peasant
movements in Hunan, that "proper limits have to be exceeded
in order to right a wrong, or else the wrong cannot be
righted." 5
If Mao is right (and we would argue he is), Gandhian
nonviolence could achieve one form of success in attaining
formal independence from the British precisely because such
harmony of interests did exist between the Indian elite and
their foreign rulers: the British could pull out and leave the
elite in charge of the system they had constructed with the
assurance that no nationalization of economic enterprises
would take place and that India would not pull out of the
"free world" system. But this harmony did not exist between
Indian workers and capitalists, between Indian peasants and
moneylender landlords, or between the low castes (especially
Untouchables) whose very humanity depended on the
destruction of the caste system and the high castes (especially
Brahmans) who lived off the system. To act on the basis of a
believed harmony that does not exist is to act ultimately in the
interests of the status quo which proclaims that harmony and
which advertises that capitalism (reformed) and Hindu caste
culture (reformed) are ultimately in everyone's best interests.
It is to act in contradiction with reality-and the fact that
Gandhi himself fell victim to these contradictions (assassinated
by a conservative Brahman) should not blind us to the fact
that the Indian people have been victimized by the
unwillingness of their leadership to go beyond "proper limits"
in order to "right a wrong."
The argument of this paper is that the social function of
Gandhian nonviolence in Indian history has been to allow
India to achieve a political revolution (formal independence)
without having a social revolution. Gandhi's control of the
movement was directed not only at achieving independence
from Britain, but also at pacification of the Indian revolution
itself.
Gandhi did not mobilize the "traditional" or
"backward" masses of India into a disciplined national
movement; rather he mobilized masses who were already on
the move into the control of a Congress party dominated by
bourgeois and upper-caste Indians. And it is this conservative
consolidation of the Indian national movement (compared to,
for instance, China's revolutionary consolidation) that has left
the masses of the population still immersed in poverty and
caste degradation.
6
We will look at three aspects of the Indian national
movement. Several misimpressions seem to be rampant among
foreigners (including many scholars) about this long struggle.
First, it is usually thought that Gandhi's role was to arouse the
masses of peasants and workers, who are seen as not only
poverty-stricken but backward and tradition-bound, capable of
being mobilized for struggle only by that unique combination
of traditional Hindu saintliness and nationalist aspiration that
Gandhi offered.
7
Second, it is thought that independence was
mainly achieved by means of the successes of Gandhi's
nonviolent campaigns. Third, Gandhi is thought to have played
a crucial and innovative role in linking social reform (the
abolition of untouchability) with political goals. These issues
will be taken up in turn.
The Indian Masses and the National Movement
When Gandhi returned to India from South Africa III
1915, it was clear that the Indian Congress party was an
organization of the elite-mainly Braham professionals and a
few upperclass merchants, men whose dress, language
(Congress sessions were conducted in English), and style of life
indicated their separation from the masses. Many of this elite
were fervent nationalists who had been driven to militant
actions and terrorism against the British, but mass organization
was non-existent. "A few lawyers and merchants in each
town," was how one old nationalist leader described the
organization of the Congress party up to 1930. There is no
question that Gandhi recognized the need of going beyond this
to identify with the Indian masses in style of life, and there is
no question that in his period of control the Congress party
3
widened its organization, sinking roots in the villages
themselves as well as gaining solid financial support from
Indian capitalists. But that is not the point.
The point is rather than the Indian masses had not
remained apart from the Congress due to their
"traditionalism" and lack of nationalist aspirations. They had
remained apart because they distrusted the Indian elite.
Organizations calling for the abolition of the caste system had
been formed In the 19th century, even before the
establishment of the Indian National Congress itself.
Untouchables and low-caste Hindus had brought their
demands to Congress sessions, and, rebuffed, had retreated
into sullen indifference.
8
By the 1920's anti-caste non Brahman
movements were strong especially in southern and western
India. Where low-caste members gained a significant foothold
within a local Congress organization (as in Kerala), they turned
its attention to caste reform issues such as temple-entry
movements. Where they did not (as in Maharashtra and
Madras) they organized separately and denounced the national
movement, saying that they preferred British rule to Brahman
rule.
We can trace a similar development with peasant
uprisings. The initial disruptions of British conquests and land
settlements caused numerous Indian peasants to lend their
support to the essentially feudalist-led, army-based Revolt of
1857. Then in the last half of the nineteenth century sporadic
peasant rebellions occurred (the Deccan riots of 1875, the
Santhal rebellion, the Indigo cultivators' "blue mutiny") that
had only tenuous connections with the nationalist elite. The
Congress policies of the late 19th century not only had no
relevance to peasant needs but actively opposed attempts of
the government to protect tenants against landlords or
moneylenders. Then in the crucial 1920's, once again, the
resurgence of peasant movements forced attention to their
needs upon the Congress. The noncooperation campaign of
1920-21 was fed by agrarian revolt, especially in Uttar Pradesh
(then the United Provinces) and Bihar and to a lesser extent in
Bengal. Peasant leagues were formed, often with the initial
support of local Gandhian or nationalist leaders and with the
use of Gandhi's name as a symbol, but they quickly developed
their own momentum, showed their ability to maintain an
organization independent of Congress initiative, and turned
their attention to direct attacks on landlords. It was Gandhi's
inability to control such deepening radicalism in the context
of the common interest between upper-class Congress leaders
and the government in dampening agrarian revolt that lay
behind his decision to call off the noncooperation campaign
over the issue of the killings at Chauri Chaura.
9
Finally, the 1920's, in India as in other crucial parts of
the colonized Third World (China, South Africa), saw an
intensification of working class struggle. Wave after wave of
strikes occurred, older reformist labor-welfare leaders were
denounced, and true unionizing began for the first time, often
under communist leadership. It was one of these working class
leaders, A. A. Alve, a Bombay cotton mill worker and
ex-peasant, who expressed most clearly the radicalism and
disillusionment of the lower classes. Speaking of the Congress,
he said,
If its demands from the first are examined, it will be seen
that it is an institution brought into existence in order to
carryon negotiations with the Government on behalf of
India. It will be seen that among the first demands . .. no
demands were made for the peasant and work er class. If the
resolutions of the Congress hereafter are seen, these
demands appear to have been made .. . for the factory
owners, landlords, and some only for the educated class . ..
When the noncooperation movement began, he testified, he
himself had taken part due to belief that workers' needs would
be placed before the people. There was a declaration of rights
for the people at the Karachi Congress session (1931), but
then landlords and industrialists raised an outcry and Congress
promised to protect them: "From this it came to our notice
that the National Congress was not for our welfare." 10
As Alve put it, workers had understood swaraj (freedom)
to mean that moneylending would stop, land would be
cheaper, and oppression by factory owners would cease. In
other words, by the 1920's peasants and workers were on the
move in India, there was a strong and growing force for social
revolution-and the masses interpreted independence to mean
the end of British rule and Brahman rule and the oppression of
moneylenders, landlords and capitalists. The question was not
whether these forces of social revolution would be combined
with the national movement, but whether they would be
combined in a way that allowed them control over the
emerging nationalism or whether they would simply be
coopted by the upper-class and upper-caste elite that had run
the Congress party from the beginning. And in fact Gandhi
whose best friends (as he himself stated) were industrialists
and Brahmans, was the agent of that cooptation.
The Congress under Gandhi did sink its roots into the
villages, but unlike the Chinese Communist revolution which
organized its villages from bottom up with a poor peasant
base, the Indian party mobilized from the top down. Gandhian
adherents and activists at the village level were most often
drawn from the Brahman and merchant castes (the lower-level
equivalents of the Congress top leadership) and from rich
peasants who saw their interests becoming congruent with the
movement. It was simply not natural for them to support
social revolution at either a village or national level. It is
misleading to talk of Indian leaders being corrupted by power
and deviating from Gandhian ideals after independence: the
electoral machine with left-wing rhetoric that is the Congress
today was created during the Gandhian period.
Gandhi's genius was that he really understood what was
necessary in India-but he used that understanding against
social revolution. It was not his religious revivalist rhetoric that
brought in the masses, but the fact that he managed to
identify himself with every single social movement going on in
India at the time, while using this identification to "pacify"
those movements. Thus he helped to form a labor union in
Ahmedabad but emphasized class harmony and the
"trusteeship of owners" 11 and refused to let that union take
part in all-India union federations. He identified with peasants
by leading no-tax campaigns against the Government but
consistently refused to let those turn into no-rent campaigns
against Indian landlords and resisted the formation of
independent Kisan sabhas or peasant leagues. And he
identified with the movement against caste by arguing for the
abolition of untouchability while trying to maintain the
essentials of an idealized caste system and opposing most
independent efforts by Untouchables.
4
Nonviolence and Mass Uprisings
in Indian Independence
Many factors played a role in the long and varied
struggle that finally resulted in formal independence for India:
constitutional agitation, elite terrorism, civil disobedience and
satyagraha, mass uprisings, and mutiny in the armed forces. To
understand the role of anyone of these it is necessary to look
at the total context of the movement. While it is impossible to
give a. full analysis here, it may be argued that all of the
famous all-India independence campaigns under Gandhi's
leadership (the noncooperation movement, the civil
disobedience campaign of 1930, the Quit India movement of
1942) illustrate the ambiguities in practice of Gandhian
nonviolence. In each case Gandhi's efforts at mass
mobilization threatened to arouse energies which he could not
control-energies often provoked by the greater social
radicalism of local leaders. Gandhi's subsequent efforts to
control the uprisings (and his associated reluctance to lead
campaigns that would arouse them) involved a dampening not
only of the forces of social revolution, but of the nationalist
movement itself. At the same time, it was the continuing
threat of real revolt underlying Gandhi's carefully toned
campaigns that stimulated the British in the end to cede power
through negotiations.
A couple of examples might give an idea of the mass
pressures which the Congress leadership, as well as the British,
had to confront. In Satara district of western India, there was
a young man of peasant background, Nana Patil, by profession
a minor village accountant. He was an ardent social reformer,
he taught his wife to read, urged cheap weddings and
supported the nonBrahman movement which itself
occasionally broke into violence against priestly dominance
and landlord power. When the civil disobedience campaign of
the 1930's came along, he became an ardent nationalist,
shouting "Long Live Gandhi!" and taking up the Congress
flag. But as a Gandhian he was distinctly unsatisfactory: his
concern with arousing the people led him to avoid arrest and
his many hair-raising escapes from the police gave him local
renown. He flirted with the idea of armed opposition; as his
biographers put it, "the satyagrahi had become a Maratha
guerrilla. " 12
Though he was arrested several times in proper Gandhian
fashion, he was not in the good graces of the higher-level
Congress leadership. When at one time in the 1920's he was
interned in a particular district by the British, the local
Congress committee refused to give him a minimal three
rupees a month for food. When they slammed the door in his
face, he was forced to seek support from his friends among the
poor, who developed bitter feelings about the upper-class life
style of local Congressmen and self-professed Gandhians who
wanted the masses to stick to their simple diet and not see the
"decadence" of higher living.
Then came 1942 and the rousing call from the Congress
"high command" for the British to "Quit India!" Though
Gandhi and the leadership had only reluctantly organized the
campaign and first conceived of it only in the limited terms of
"individual satyagraha" there was tremendous mass response
throughout India. In Satara district, as in some other districts,
this took the form of a full uprising, including burning British
government buildings, cutting telegraph lines, robbing trains,
and the establishment of a "parallel government" that remains
legendary today. But these mass rebellions were not organized
by the Congress party. Gandhi and other Congress leaders had
been jailed before a civil disobedience campaign could be
launched, and while in jail he launched a 21-day fast protesting
British charges that he was responsible for the violence; had be
been left free, he would have been able to moderate the
movement. 13
Congress socialists did support such activities and in
some cases took part in guerrilla actions themselves, but they
did not organize the rebellion: being mostly upper-class
Brahmans themselves, they had little mass support. The
communists, finally, were isolated from the national
movement by their support of the British war effort at this
time. The mass rebellions were in fact largely spontaneous
peasant uprisings. It was Nana Patil who was the hero of the
"parallel government" of Satara, and its organizers were young
men of peasant background who only later became leaders and
politicians within the Congress or other more left-wing parties
(Nana Patil himself became, after 1948, a communist).
In 1946 another momentous event occurred which
threatened that ultimate mainstay of British rule, the military.
Ratings (servicemen) of the Royal Indian Navy rose in mutiny
and a total strike ensued: 74 ships, four flotillas, and twenty
shore establishments, including four major bases around
Bombay harbor, were under control of the rebels. Strikes
began to spread in the air force, unrest was intensifying in the
army, and the working classes of Bombay took to the streets
to be killed by British guns in the most violent episode of the
independence movement.
But no leadership came forth from either Congress or
communist leaders to support or coordinate the seizure of
military power: the nationalist leaders did not want such a
revolt. As one of the leaders of the mutiny writes,
We had thought that all we had to do after the take-over of
the Navy was to report to the national leaders . .. The
R.l.N. was offered to them as the Indian "National Navy"
on a platter. The leadership would not touch it! It was
shocking. We felt bewildered, dispirited and humiliated. We
had captured the ships alright but where does one find a
navigator? .... When news of the "disturbances" reached
Mahatma Gandhi-he was in Poona then-he casually told
his evening prayer meeting that if the ratings were unhappy
they could have "resigned. "! An unfaltering practitioner of
nonviolence, the Mahatma had tried to teach his followers the
efficacy of his chosen path for aecades and had seen to it
that all those who did not fall in line with him were kept
out of the national liberation movement. Our mutiny smelt
of violence. And that ended all argument. Whether the
ratings were in a position to resign at all was a peripheral
matter. ... 14
The national leaders joined with the British in stating that the
rebellion was not really "political" but only "economic," that
servicemen were concerned only with such minor conditions
of life as the quality of their food. They "reassured" the men
that they would support their "just grievance"-and urged
them to surrender to the British. The organizers of the most
effective revolt against British state power afterwards sank into
obscurity, their contributions unrecognized within indepen
dent India.
The civil disobedience campaigns of the Indian national
movement have been well publicized; other mass uprisings
5
such as the R.I.N. mutiny and the Satara "parallel
government" have remained little known outside of India.
These mass rebellions were spontaneous in the sense of being
fed by deep feelings of oppression on the part of the people
and in not being led by any ideologically organized party.
More important, they threatened more than the British: the
R.I.N. mu tiny was a threat to the state itself and authority
within the armed services, and the peasants of Satara and
elsewhere turned their wrath against Indian landlords and
collaborators as well as British bureaucrats. Thus the way in
which the National Congress leadership sought to direct the
national movement has led many to ask whether Gandhi's
concern to avoid "violence" against human life was not in fact
a concern to avoid mass attacks on elite privileges and the
institutions of authority.
Perhaps they may have come to the latter conclusion
from events in the late 1930's. In 1937 Congress governments
were elected throughout India; in Bombay province this
government was largely under control of Gujerati capitalists
and Maharashtrian Brahman intellectuals, and laws were passed
that were felt to be against peasant and working class interests.
While strikes of workers in Bombay were suppressed by the
police, peasants in many parts of the state held rallies and in
the northern districts a huge march and demonstration was
planned under a mixed leadership of radical local Gandhians
and Communists. Gandhi attempted to stop the march, wiring
the leaders that it was "violence" to oppose their own
Congress government. 50,000 peasants eventually marched,
but their original intention to march on the government office
was compromised to a rally in the market area. IS Gandhi's
attempt to halt the Maharashi:rian peasant march was
consistent with his resistance throughout this period to the
formation of independent leagues of Kisan sabhas, for as the
Congress leaders saw it,
There were the hordes of Kisans organizing themselves into
huge parades marching hundreds of miles along the villages
and trying to build up a party, a power and a force more or
less arrayed against the Congress . ... The flag they chose to
favor was the Soviet flag of red colour with the hammer
and sickle. This flag came more and more into vogue as the
flag of the Kisans and the Communists, and even loud and
repeated exhortations of Jawaharlal Nehru would not keep
it to its place or proportions. Almost everywhere there were
conflicts between Congressmen and Kisans over the
question of the heigbt and prominence of the flag, and the
virtual attempt of the latter to displace tbe Tricolour flag
symbolized the contest between Socialism and Gandhism.
Really it was less of Socialism and perhaps more of
Communism that was gradually permeating the at
mosphere . ... 16
Gandhi as the friend of capitalists and Brahmans,
attempting to pacify and control mass uprisings throughout
India-this is a less attractive picture than Gandhi the saintly
politician, living in slum areas, traveling third class on the
trains, and sweeping out village Untouchable quarters. Yet
both pictures are true and necessary for an understanding of
the role of Gandhian nonviolence in India. Gandhi's fear of
violence was in large part a fear of the chaos he perceived as
threatening the structure of Indian society and the position of
the Indian elite if mass energies were not controlled. 17 I Ie had
no doubt that the Congress ministry was a government of the
people and that the Indian elite could act as "trustees" of mass
interests. The function of nonviolence-the well-organized civil
disobedience campaigns, the image of the social reformer living
among the masses was to make this aspiration believable. And
it was made believable-for a time. Helped out by the
intelligent willingness of the British to compromise with the
Indian upper classes and the failings of communist or socialist
organizers, Gandhi managed to establish Congress as a "mass"
organization linked to village elites throughout the country.
The result was the pacification of the Indian revolution. For a
time.
Gandhi and the Revolution Against Caste
Isn't this a bit unfair to Gandhi? it may be asked. After
all, wasn't it one of his unique characteristics as a national
leader that he linked independence to reform of Indian society
from within by making the removal of untouchability a
primary part of his program? Wasn't he a social revolutionary
in fighting the caste system, the major cultural form of
oppression of the Indian masses?
IJere again it is necessary to look at the Indian context, a
context in which a revolution against the caste system was
being initiated by low-caste non Brahmans and Untouchables
themselves. In fact, at the time Gandhi returned to India, there
were three major ideological thrusts regarding caste.
The first was the orthodox position, which looked on
the caste hierarchy as sacred and urged that it was the duty of
every Hindu to follow the caste profession of his birth. IS The
second position was that of the Arya Samaj, a religious reform
organization with large-scale support of urban and rural middle
castes of northern India. The Arya Samaj urged support of
varnashrama dharma-the four varna categories of brahman
(priest, intellectual), ksatriya (warrior), vaishya (businessman)
and shudra (servant of the other three varnas, i.e. the
masses)-but felt that this system, a creation of the Vedic
"golden age," had become decadent in modern India. It
therefore urged that the thousands of existing castes should
become merged within their appropriate varna category. It also
conducted shuddhi movements by which converts to other
religions and to a lesser extent Untouchables could be
"purified" and brought back to Hinduism. It tended to argue
that in the Vedic age varna positions had been by merit and
not by birth, and the more radical people associated with this
tradition argued that in the modern era position should also be
by merit.
The third position was the revolutionary one and found
its social basis in western and southern India among
nonBrahmans and Untouchables (though an early elite
organization of Bengal, the Brahmo Samaj, had been a pioneer
in social radicalism). Its primary organizational carriers were
the Satyashodhak Samaj ("Truthseekers Society") of
Maharashtra and the Self-Respect movement of Madras. This
position was a radical and equalitarian one, arguing that all
men were equal and that the caste system must be totally
abolished. Since all were equal before God (its more radical
members later took an atheistic position) there was no need
for a priestly intermediary. The organizations therefore
conducted campaigns to hold weddings and other religious
ceremonies without Brahman priests. The most interesting
aspect of this situation is perhaps that the most radical,
6

equalitarian and rationalist position found its mass basis not so
much among the western-educated elites of India as among
village level peasants, contrary to commonly held beliefs about
the "traditionalism" of the Indian masses.
How did Gandhi respond to these great debates
regarding the form of Indian society? It is important to note
that he was responding to them, not developing his position in
a vacuum. The primary source on Gandhi's ideas on caste is a
small book, My Varnashrama Dharma, published by the
Sarvodaya society and available today in bookstores, on Indian
railway platforms, and elsewhere. It contains articles Gandhi
wrote on the subject of caste in his newspapers between about
1920 and 1940; and a good third of these were directly in
response to non Brahman challenges. Many others bear the
mark of an indirect response to the movement against caste.
The position that Gandhi took was somewhere in
between the orthodox one and that of the Arya Samaj, though
he moved increasingly toward the latter. That is, he responded
to the revolutionaries' attack on the caste system as its liberal
defender. He urged that the system be updated, that its
hierarchichal feelings of superiority and inferiority be
abolished. He contrasted a decadent "caste" with an idealized
"varnashrama" system but he urged that the latter be
maintained. Sometimes he took halfhearted steps in the
direction of the notion that varna position should be by merit
and not by birth, but most often he urged that people should
follow their father's professions. Finally, in arguing for the
abolition of untouchability, he urged that Untouchables be
absorbed in the great shudra category-that is, among those
who were the lowest of the four varnas, who were the masses
working for the elite.
19
For Untouchables who were already
involved in movements demanding full human rights this was
an evasion.
Gandhi himself never led satyagrahas for the abolition of
untouchability or for the admission of Untouchables into
Hindu temples. Such satyagrahas did take place beginning in
the late 1920's, and some Gandhians and young Brahman
socialists did take part in them. But their major leaders were
Untouchables and non Brahmans who had emerged out of the
revolutionary anti-caste movements described above. India's
most famous Untouchable leader, the great Dr. B.R.
Ambedkar, always saw Gandhi and the National Congress as
responding to Untouchable demands only out of "political"
motives, a desire to prevent Untouchables from opting out of
the Hindu community. Dr. Ambedkar's book, What Congress
and Gandhi have Done to the Untouchables, should be on the
reading list of everyone concerned with either Gandhi or the
Indian movement.
Ambedkar, in fact, was Gandhi's antagonist in his major
fast over the question of untouchability. This was undertaken
in opposition to the decision of the Government of India to
give a separate electorate to Untouchables, i.e., certain seats
would be reserved to them in the legislatures and only
Untouchables would vote for their representatives. Gandhi saw
this as a major attack on the "unity" of the Hindu community
and threatened to fast to death in opposition. While this fast
took on the connotation of urging caste Hindus to reform
their ideas regarding untouchability (and its compromise was
afterwards seen as radical by the orthodox), in fact it was
primarily against the Untouchables' demand for separate
electorates and primarily against their acknowledged political
spokesman, Ambedkar. (Ambedkar later bitterly remarked
that while Gandhi had always claimed that the Congress was
the only representative of all Hindus, when it came to a
question of securing the real agreement of Untouchables they
turned to him, Ambedkar).
Pressure on Ambedkar to compromise was intense. For
all the moral aura surrounding satyagraha techniques, which
urged that they should win the freely given agreement of
opponents, moral blackmail was in fact the primary aspect of
this fast-to-death by Gandhi. Ambedkar was well aware of the
existence of Untouchables isolated and powerless in villages
throughout India and of the fury that would turn against them
if Gandhi died. He capitulated; a compromise was reached in
the "Poona pact" which gave the Untouchables an increased
number of seats but allowed caste Hindus as well to vote for
Untouchable representatives-and given the numerical
superiority of caste Hindus and the wealth and organization of
the Congress, this meant that Untouchables favorable to
Congress have been invariably elected.
Ambedkar died a bitter and disillusioned man, seeing
Nehru himself as "just another Brahman." His final verdict on
the Congress party, in the raw, rough language of the
non Brahman movement of the day: "Congress is the kept
whore of the Brahmans and merchants." The Untouchables'
temple-entry movements, usually unsuccessful, faded away. In
the end the most militant Untouchables became convinced
that there was no hope for them in Hinduism. Many of them,
under Ambedkar's leadership, converted to Buddhism; others
in more recent times have supported communist organization
of poor peasants and landless laborers. "Untouchability
removal" has continued to be a major plank of the Congress
party, but successes where achieved have been more the result
of direct Untouchable pressure than programs initiated by
Gandhians within Congress.
Gandhi has put forth his ideal for independent India as
"Ram Rajya," the kingdom of Rama, hero of one of the great
Hindu epics, the Ramayana. In choosing Rama as a symbol,
Gandhi no doubt found one that had a great appeal to many
Hindus, particularly in the north. But in south India, the Tamil
heirs of the nonBrahman movement see Rama as an Aryan
conqueror who had colonized and subjugated their people-the
Dravidian native inhabitants of the subcontinent. And in
western India, the Untouchables and non Brahmans I met had
another story from the Ramayana, the story of Shambuk.
Shambuk was an Untouchable boy in Rama's kingdom who
wanted to seek salvation by following Brahman paths of
asceticism and penance. But for an Untouchable to do so was a
sin, an infringement of the law of caste. Because of this "sin,"
a Brahman boy in Rama's kingdom died-and Rama executed
justice and maintained the order of castes by killing Shambuk.
"Who wants this Rama-Rajya?" was the response of
many Untouchables and non Brahmans. And it still is their
response.
This paper is based in part on research on a
peasant-based anti-caste movement carried out in Maharashtra
(western India) between January 1970 and August 1971.
Because of this, my illustrative examples are drawn primarily
from this region, where (in spite of the fact that it is
considered a Congress party stronghold today) some of the
oldest and strongest mass movements of India have taken place
and caste and class conflict was an undeniable fact. As a
7
personal note, it may be added that it is impossible not to feel
some sympathy and attraction for Gandhi, who was trying to
hold together so much that was at cross purposes in Indian
society. Particularly in my early days of research, when I was
reading the files of a nationalist but socially conservative
Brahman newspaper and became aware of the intense hatred
felt for Gandhi by a section of the Indian elite, this was my
feeling. It was only later, as I began to get deeper into the
historical records and closer to the people who had led
militant low-caste movements, people who had opposed and
pressured Gandhi from the left, that my view began to change
and I began to see Gandhi as primarily one of the most
intelligent members of that elite, involved in maintaining its
interests in the very process of leading a national movement
against the British.
NOTES
1. See for instance, Francine Frankel, India's Green Revolution
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), and Hari Sharma,
"Green Revolution in India: Prelude to a Red One?" Frontier, May 13,
20,27, 1972.
2. "The Bhil Movement in Dhulia," Economic and Political
Weekly, February 1972 (annual number); letters from Vasanthi Raman
and Yashwant Chavan. When I was in India, I attended a poor peasants
conference in February 1971 at which a Bhil spokesman made one of
the early appeals for support from the Lal Nishan (Communist) Party.
3. For instance, Shankkarao Deo; the result, however, was a
good deal of turmoil within the Sarvodaya organization; see Sharma,
May 13,14.
4. "Politics as a Vocation," in Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills,
eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1958),77-128.
5. Mao Tse-tung, Report on an Investigation of the Peasant
Movement in Hunan (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967),9.
6. What is implied here is that without Gandhi's particular style
of leadership a more satisfactory outcome, and not simply social chaos
or a more virulent conservativism, would have been possible. Though
there were certainly factors other than Gandhi's role in preventing
radicalization (the repressive powers of the British government,
inadequacies of revolutionary leadership), I do believe the
possibility existed, though there is no space here to develop the
arguments.
7. Two recent works, however, represent a more realistic view;
see Judith M. Brown, Gandhi's Rise to Power (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1972) and Ravinder Kumar, ed., Essays on Gandhian
Politics: The Rowlett Act Satyagraha of 1919 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1971).
8. See B. R. Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done
to the Untouchables (Bombay: Thacker & Co., 1955) and Chapter 8 of
my dissertation, "NonBrahmans Organize Politically" (Univ. of
California, Berkeley, 1973), for some of these developments.
9. See Walter Hauser, "The Indian National Congress and Land
Policy in the 20th Century" and John McLane, "Peasants,
Moneylenders and Nationalists at the End of the 19th Century," both
in Indian Economic and Social History Review, July-September, 1963;
W. F. Crawley, "Kisan Sabhas and Agrarian Revolt in the United
Provinces 1920 to 1921," in Modern Asian Studies 5: 2 (1971); John
Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth Century
Bengal (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1968),224-6.
10. Taken from his testimony in the Meerut Conspiracy Trials;
for a description of Gandhi's role vis-a-vis the Bombay workers, see
R. K. Newman, "Labour Organization in the Bombay Cotton Mills,
1918-29" (University of Sussex Ph.D. Dissertation, 1971), 147-8, where
he notes that during the Rowlett Act agitation Gandhi "privately told
the police he had no intention of bringing the millhands into his
movement 'for many a long day' and he promised to prevent his
assistants from stirring up unrest in the mill areas ... His local
lieutenants at first believed [Gandhi'sl strategy could take in a wide
range of social groups but the riots [following Gandhi's arrest 1 shocked
and disillusioned them. They lacked an organization to control the
workers and could not identify themselves with the economic issues
that were the workers' primary concern."
11. On the "trusteeship" ideology and its conservative
implications see Phyllis Rolnick, "Charity, Trusteeship and Social
Change in India," World Politics, April 1962. "Gandhi affirmed not
only that it was not possible to abolish class distinctions but also that it
was not desirable to do so ... According to [his] interpretation of
trusteeship .. wealth belonged to society as a whole, and it just
happened that some persons were in charge of the use of that wealth
for the whole society-i.e. they were trustees." (446-8)
12. Dr. Uttamrao Pati! and Appasaheb Lad, Krantivir Nana Patil
(Aundh: Usha Prakashan, 1947); biography in Marathi.
13. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York:
Harper & Row, 1950),383-392.
14. B. C. Dutt, Mutiny of the Innocents (Bombay: Sindhu
Publications, 1971), 137-8.
15. Interview, Laxman Mistri; see also Pati! and Lad, Krantivir
Nana Patil, 66-67.
16. This is from the official history of the Congress party by
one of its Gandhian leaders; Pattabhi Sitaramayya, History of the
Indian National Congress, Volume 2, 1935-1947 (Bombay: Padma
Publications, 1949), 73; see the following sections for his description of
Congress efforts to control the peasant movement.
17. Here again it is important, though difficult, to separate
social conservativism (the fear that the masses would attack elite
privilege) from genuine issues of nonviolent revolutionary action (since
unorganized chaos or sporadic violent unrest does not by itself produce
revolution). Gandhi's fear of social chaos led him to limit the
movement, but how much was this an issue of nonviolence? It may be
noted that in cases of uncertainty of outcome, conservatives have
always put their values on "order," and Gandhi's fear and distrust of
the masses contrasts strongly with Mao's comments on the peasant
uprisings in Hunan, also a case of a popular movement over which the
mobilizing force (the Communist Party in this case) had only limited
control. Mao sharply attacked those who criticized peasant excesses:
"In a few months the peasants have accomplished what Dr. Sun Yat-sen
wanted, but failed, to accomplish in the forty years he devoted to the
national revolution. This is a marvellous feat. It's fine. It is not 'terrible'
at all. It is anything but 'terrible.' 'It's terrible!' is obviously a theory
for combating the rise of the peasants in the interests of the landlords."
Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (Peking:
Foreign Languages Press, 1967), 6.
18. This is known as swadharma, "following one's own duty,"
with the definite meaning of a religiously-defined caste duty-and for
Westerners reading Indian literature it is a primary indicator of
supporting caste without openly saying so. Thus for example when
Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi's most revered follower today, urges swadharma
in his book Essays on the Gita, this is the context in which it should be
understood.
19. M. K. Gandhi, My Varnashrama Dharma, (Bombay:
Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1965), esp. 10, 15-16, 30-31, 118-51. For a
slightly different interpretation of Gandhi's view on caste see Dennis
Dalton, "The Gandhian View of Caste and Caste After Gandhi" in
Philip Mason, India and Ceylon: Unity and Diversity (Oxford
University Press, 1967). Dalton argues that Gandhi's interpretation of
varnashrama dharma as something different from the caste system took
on fully radical overtones by 1932 when he criticized restrictions on
interdining and intermarriage, but notes also that Gandhi always held to
the hereditary nature of varna-perhaps the most crucial issue.
I would like to thank Steve Hart and Hari Sharma for their
and criticism (If this paper.
8
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9
Maoism and Motivation:
Work Incentives
In China
by Carl Riskin
Random House, Inc.
Visitors to China invariably comment on the energy and
zeal of the people they met there. Seymour Topping's
impression that "the basic needs of the people are being met
and the foundation is being laid for a modern industrial
country" he ascribes partly to "the energy exhibited
everywhere." 1 Business economist Barry Richman found that
Chinese industrial executives had a "high need for
achievement" and displayed "considerable zeal, dedication,
patriotism ... a deep sense of commitment and purpose." 2
These examples could easily be multiplied.
Yet by now even those whose acquaintance with the
country stops at the name of its Chairman have heard that the
ordinary incentives (as we know them) to work hard and well
have been drastically weakened in China. Moreover, this
alleged Maoist blindness to original sin is generally held
responsible for a record of dismal failure in economic
development efforts. As Edwin O. Reischauer cogently put it:
"I think Mao or else people close to him ... just did not want
to admit that people were people and were going to act like
human beings. That is one of the great failings of communism
everywhere. It has always tried to change people into
something else, and then it finds it cannot."
3
But if Mao ("or else people close to him") has failed in
his understanding of human nature, it follows that all the
Chinese managers with high need for achievement, all the
workers and peasants laboring on, despite the absence of
incentives, are either masochists or uniquely pliant subjects. In
other words, these two commonly held and widely expressed
views of the motivational atmosphere in China conflict with
one another.
Copyright 1973 by Random House, Inc. From the forthcoming book
on China edited by James Peck, Carl Riskin, and Franz Schurmann to
be published by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. in
spring 1974.
In this article, I will argue that the assumptions implicit
in the experts' common wisdom regarding incentives in China
are naive and contradict well known and easily available
materials on motivation and work; that motivation is a crucial
variable in economic development although it is generally
neglected by economists; and that the Chinese approach to
motivation requires us to broaden our treatment of this
concept as well as to understand its links with other variables
such as organization, leadership and the distribution of
political power.
I. CHINA WATCHERS'
PERCEPTION OF MOTIVATION
It is difficult to grasp precisely what the critics of Maoist
incentive practices mean because of the vagueness with which
they habitually state their arguments, as though the latter were
self-evident and did not require careful exposition. Maoist
policies are characterized as obsessed with ideology and with
the use of moral rather than material incentives; these policies
are normally leavened with a sufficient dose of individual
material incentives to keep production going, but during
periods of extreme emphasis upon ideology (such as the Great
Leap Forward) the leavening disappears and morale and
production consequently suffer. Such, I believe, is a fair short
statement of the position of this school.
It is a position however which raises substantial
questions. What is responsible for good (or at least adequate)
work morale during "normal" periods-the material or the
nonmaterial incentives, or both? A separate though related
question is, what mix of material and moral incentives should
be regarded as "extreme" as opposed to 'normal"? I do not
mean that a precise payment scheme need be specified as the
border between these two conditions, but only that it is
necessary to identify an analytical basis for distinguishing
them. Otherwise, the argument reduces to a tautology,
namely, that extreme reliance upon nonmaterial incentives
causes morale and production to suffer, when the "extreme" is
defined as a state in which morale and production can be
observed to suffer.
10
One searches the literature in vain for satisfactory
answers to these two questions. One writer, for example,
asserts that "a minimum of incentives for the peasant
population" consists of location of the basic accounting unit
at no higher than production team level, existence of "free
plots," and functioning of rural free markets.
4
This is fair
enough, being presumably an empirical generalization from the
history of the last twenty years. But it lacks an underlying
rationale, ignores the question of how individual incomes are
distributed for collective labor, and fails to take into account
some well-known disincentives in locating the basic unit at
team level (e.g., that neighboring teams will differ substantially
in level of income per member simply because of differences in
soil fertility, or access to water-surely a cause for grumbling
among poorer team members). Moreover it is sustainable, if at
all, only for the specific conditions of a given historical period.
The most thorough study to date of the role of private plots in
Chinese agriculture concluded that their function would end
when the peasants have acquired "enough confidence that the
collective economy will supply their needs." 5
A common practice of the "pro-pragma" school is to
describe with value-laden adjectives the approach of Chinese
"pragmatists" opposed to Mao, thus implying that the Maoists
oppose these same values. For instance, the pragmatists
apparently recognize that effective management, scientific
and technical skills, and economic incentives are required
for success in economic development and modernization,
6
which implies that the Maoists wish to dispense with effective
management, scientific and technical skills and economic
incentives. Or,
The pragmatists-who doubtless include some of China's
leading administrators and technical bureaucrats-have
apparently been successful in demanding that economic
policies take account of economic realities 7
which implies that the "ideologues"-who have little or no
administrative or technical experience-demand in their turn
that economic policies ignore economic realities. Neither of
these points would be easy to support directly.
The penchant for criticizing undefined "extremes" is
illustrated in such statements as the following:
The anti-material incentive, anti-modern technology
mentality, if allowed full sway, will hinder the growth of
economy in general and of the modern sector in particular. 8
The difficulty with this statement lies not only in what I will
contend below is a mistaken view of the "mentality"
concerned, but also in the meaning of the picturesque term,
"full sway." The only passage offering a more specific idea of
what is being criticized is the following, which refers to "those
periods when the policy gave priority to ideology":
Since the accent was on an egalitarian spirit and
self-sacrifice, wages were not used as a proper stimulant to
improvement of skills and increased productivity. In rural
areas, this egalitarian tendency took the form of foodgrain
distribution on grounds mainly unrelated to either work
input or output. These irrational measures always cause a
drop or stagnation in production. 9
The writer apparently means that when wages are not
structured to stimulate improvement of skills and increased
productivity, skills will not be improved and productivity will
remain dormant; and when foodgrain is distributed in a
manner unrelated to the peasant's work input or productivity,
"a drop or stagnation in production" will ensue. Much of the
remainder of this paper will be devoted to showing that these
statements, far from being obvious on their face, beg most of
the important questions. Suffice it to say for the present that
there is no evidence that workers were not motivated to
upgrade skills during the Great Leap (introduction of
industrial technology to peasants during the "backyard iron
and steel movement" is one of the few generally conceded
virtues of that movement). Moreover, the contemporary
practice apparently widespread in rural areas of distributing
some foodgrain independently of work done
lo
has not caused
the predicted decline in production.
Perhaps the most thorough and specific critique of
"ideological extremism" IS that of Barry Richman.
11
According to Richman,
Ideological extremism in Chinese industrial management
seems to have four key prongs: These are (1) the Reds vs.
expert dilemma or pendulum; (2) material incentives and
self interest vs. non-material stimuli, altruism and
self-sacrifice; (3) "class struggle" and the elimination of
class distinctions; (4) the amount of time spent on political
education and ideological indoctrination. 12
In normal periods, experts are given more authority than Reds,
material incentives hold sway over altruism, class struggle is
muted, and people spend less time meeting and studying
instead of working. In "ideologically extreme" periods, the
opposite propensities dominate.
Richman's approach is unusual in that he finds value in
moderate progress toward the "ideological" ends of these
"prongs." "Management participation in labor at Chinese
factories does appear to have some favorable effects" in
"breaking down" deep-rooted antagonism and resentment
based on "class distinctions between managers and workers,
the educated and uneducated and mental and physical
labor." 13 But in general Richman treats "ideology and
politics," on the one hand, and "economic, managerial and
technical rationality," on the other, as two poles between
which a "pendulum" constantly swings.14 Moreover, he
considers swings to the left of the pendulum to be the greatest
single impediment to rapid industrial progress in China:
The types of constraints-both external and internal to the
enterprise-thus far discussed which tend to hamper
managerial efficiency and industrial progress in China {such
as lack of managerial skills, technical expertise, etc. -CRJ
appear to be but mere midgets as compared to the giant
constraints arising from ideological extremism. 15
Although Richman finds some pragmatic value in the use
of "ideology," more frequently he regards it as a utopian
attempt to fly in the face of "centuries of world history and
experience" by performing the "miracle" of replacing
"material gain" with "pure altruism" as the force motivating
man.
16
Such a description, I suggest, inaccurately portrays the
real problem of motivation in China and the current approach
to solving it.
11
Economics and Human Motivation
Economists are uncomfortable with the subject of
human motivation, despite its importance to economic theory.
Especially since the development of neoclassical economic
theory in the late 19th century, economists have tended to shy
away from serious consideration of the psychological and
sociological assumptions and implications of their work.
17
Instead, they have attempted to paper over the problem by
means of various treatments, which, however, turn out upon
closer examination to have strong and often simplistic
psychological assumptions at their roots.
18
While this may have
been possible in other branches of economics, there probably
would be universal agreement that it has no place in
development theory because it would remove the very essence
of the development process. This is a basic reason why this
sector of economics, unlike any other, has vigorously called
upon the aid of anthropology, sociology, and psychology in a
rare display of interdisciplinary cooperation.
However, the term "depsychologization" is indeed
accurate insofar as it pertains to the failure of economics to
inquire into (or utilize the results of others' inquiries into) the
nature and causes of human motivation lying behind the
choices with which economists concern themselves: between
work and leisure, between saving and consumption, and
between different combinations of goods and services. Instead
of analyzing the increase or decrease of production and growth
directly attributable to differentials in human commitment,
resourcefulness, energy and creativity, economic theorists have
traditionally avoided this problem by assuming given supply
schedules (a supply schedule is a relation between the quantity
of a good or service supplied and the price [or wage] offered
it) of resources, including labor, and then busying themselves
with the problem of achieving the most efficient allocation of
these resources among alternative uses.
There are grounds for believing that in making this
choice, economics has been guilty, by its own standards, of a
cardinal sin: misallocation of professional resources. For
empirical studies indicate that motivational factors are
responsible for incomparably greater variations in actual
economic performance than is allocational inefficiency. For
instance, Harvey Leibenstein concludes upon reviewing several
ingenious attempts in the literature to measure the loss in
national income which arises from misallocation of resources
that "empirical evidence has been accumulating that suggests
that the problem of allocative efficiency is trivial." 19 "Yet,"
Leibenstein continues, "it is hard to escape the notion that
efficiency in some broad sense is significant." This type of
efficiency "in some broad sense"-a major element of which is
"motivation"-he calls by the mysterious title of
"x-efficiency." 20
The dominant motivational component of "x-effi
ciency" is more familiar and less mysterious than that term
implies. It has been observed that "if you have some
quantitative measure of their contribution to the organization,
you will find that the best person in each group is contributing
two, five, or perhaps ten times what the poorest is
contributing." 21 The assumption that a substantial part of
such differences in performance among people doing the same
kind of work reflects differences in their motivation has
generated a voluminous literature on work motivation which
will be briefly touched upon below.
An almost identical case is made by Jaroslav Vanek.
Citing the same kinds of evidence used by Leibenstein, to
establish that misallocation of resources is generally
responsible for only negligibly small shortfalls in output,
Vanek points out that even multiplying these shortfalls many
times would not approach the several hundred percent
variation reasonably attributable to motivational factors.
22
"And yet, let it be noted, the time and concern of economists
devoted to the study of what we have identified here as effort
is of the order of one-thousandth" of that devoted to the
problem of allocational efficiency.23 Apparently, in identifying
man as "most precious" resource, in concentrating upon
activating the "boundless creative power" of the masses, in
urging that "spirit can become matter" and in teaching that "it
is people, not things, that are decisive," Mao has avoided the
economists' misallocation of mental resources, and eschewed
the "trivial" for the "significant." In other words, a key to the
Maoist conception of the development process lies in its search
for institutional forms of achieving the multi-fold increases
associated with human creativity and effort, rather than the
marginal increments associated with achieving optimal
allocation of statically conceived resources. 24
This formulation, of course, leaves open the question
whether Maoist antipathy to individual material incentives, by
contradicting human nature and the requirements of a modern
industrial society, renders the Maoist objectives utopian and
thus impossible to realize. The evaluation of this argument
requires a brief digression into motivation theory, and then the
development of a more adequate (if rudimentary) picture of
work motivation in contemporary China.
II. INSIGHTS OF INDUSTRIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Economists still commonly regard work as an unpleasant
trespass on leisure, necessitated by and supplied only because
of the need to earn income. From the viewpoint of the
worker, work is thus a "negative good," to which "disutility"
is attached, and to overcome this disutility and coax work out
of workers, a more than countervailing amount of "utility"
must be offered them in the form of purchasing power. Since,
furthermore, the amount of "disutility" is assumed to increase
faster than the number of hours worked, whereas the "utility"
per additional dollar of income falls as income increases, it is
easy to see why keeping up work efforts is thought to require a
highly progressive payment scheme.
This theory is not so naive as to assume that "leisure"
(the desired state among workers) consists of sitting around
and doing nothing. Of course people have interests and would
like to be active, but except for the lucky few, such interests
from the viewpoint of the market must be considered
"hobbies." The job of the market is to get people to perform
services that are "demanded," with due regard for the wage
differentials required by different amounts of talent, skill and
training, as well as compensating differentials required by the
varying attractiveness of jobs.
In the eighteenth century, a simpler and more extreme
version of this theory held that workers worked only to avoid
starvation, so that the utility attaching to increments of
income above the subsistence level was zero. In this case, no
increase however large in wages could ever induce more work
12
from a laborer. The more he is paid, the less work he need
perform to earn his subsistence. The moral of course is to pay
as little as possible.
Given what we know about the alienation of workers
from their products in modern industrial environments, the
repetitiveness and monotony of mass production jobs and the
reduction of labor to a commodity in the capitalist market,
the standard view would seem to be a not unreasonable model
for, say, the United States over the last 150 years.
Indeed, perhaps because of its plausibility, it is
approximated by the recently dominant and still influential
"scientific management" school associated with the work of
Frederick W. Taylor. It is worth citing the assumptions of
"scientific management" at some length because of their direct
relevance to the standard view of Chinese practices. They
include the following propositions:
(1) Management is responsible for organizing the elements
of productive enterprise-money, materials, equipment,
people-in the interest of economic ends.
(2) With respect to people, this is a process of directing
their efforts, motivating them, controlling tbeir actions,
modifying tbeir bebavior to fit the needs of tbe
organization.
(3) Witbout tbis active intervention by management, people
would be passive-even resistant-to organizational needs.
Tbey must tberefore be persuaded, rewarded, punished,
controlled-their activities must be directed.
Bebind this conventional theory there are several
additional beliefs-less explicit, but widespread:
(4) Tbe average man is by nature indolent-he works as
little as possible.
(5) He lacks ambition, dislikes responsibility, prefers to be
led.
(6) He is inherently self-centered, indifferent to
organization needs.
(7) He is by nature resistant to cbange.
(8) He is gullible, not very brigbt, the ready dupe of tbe
cbarlatan and tbe demagogue. 2S
I
If these assumptions recall to mind those of the 18th
century, the impression is justified. "It is clear that the
psychologists and efficiency experts of this [i.e., the
Taylorist-CRI period had accepted the attitudes of
management which arose during the early stages of the
Industrial Revolution and these tended to form the
background to all their investigations." 26 These same
assumptions find expression (albeit in less blatant and extreme
form) in the exclusive attention of the orthodox school of
Pekingologists to external, individual, material incentives as if
I
1
these were the sole or at least dominant source of motivation
to be considered.
Industrial psychologists do not deny the efficacy of
external rewards and punishments or the insights of the
"scientific management" school more broadly. Its predictions
are corroborated by many empirical studies.
27
And it is
regarded as having a psychological basis in reinforcement
theory.28 But it is now regarded as based upon insights into a
very limited aspect of human psychology, rather than upon
"human nature" in some holistic sense. Worker behavior
J responsive to direct external stimuli "is not a consequence of
i man's inherent nature," but "is a consequence rather of the
,
I
i
!
1
nature of industrial organizations, of management philosophy,
policy, and practice." 29 The orthodox view of Chinese
incentives derives only from its own particular corner of
"human nature."
Not only is the "carrot and stick" theory of motivation
now rejected as inadequate psychology, it also does badly
when judged against the yardstick of history. The historical
archetypes of Western capitalist development are of course
the classic English or American 19th-century entrepreneurs
who, with creativity, diligence, and frugality which derived
from their Calvinist fundamentalism, accumulated personal
fortunes while they created the Industrial Revolution. "But,"
writes David McClelland, "could their chief motive be profit if
they were expressly denied the possibility of enjoying material
benefits?" 30 Indeed, as McClelland goes on to observe, in both
East and West it has been the ascetic cultural or religious
groups, not the secular hedonists primarily motivated by
achieving high personal consumption, who have established
entrepreneurial credentials.
31
The newer views about work motivation have strong
roots in the famous Hawthorne studies of the 1920's as well as
in the theoretical work of A. H. Maslow.
32
The Hawthorne
experiments are generally credited with the discovery that the
economic functions of the factory (production of goods) and
its social functions ("creating and distributing human
satisfactions among the people under its roof") are
inseparable.
33
From the work of Hawthorne's principal
investigator, Elton Mayo, came conclusions such as: work is a
group activity; it is the primary locus of the adult's social
world; recognition, security and sense of belonging are more
important determinants of morale and productivity than
physical conditions of work; and informal groups exert strong
controls on work habits and attitudes within the plant. 34
Clearly, these insights greatly complicated the game of
bribing workers.
3s
From their initial assumption that "money
is the most powerful incentive," many industrial psychologists
now found abundant data tending to the conclusion that
"money is one of the least important." 36 In one study, 80% of
a random sample of 401 employed men in the U.S. stated that
they would continue to work even if by chance they were to
inherit enough money to live comfortably without working.
37
Clearly, working gives people "a feeling of being tied into the
larger society, of having something to do, of having a purpose
in life. These other functions which working serves are
evidently not seen as available in non-work activities." 38
Evidence was developed which showed that such factors
as enlargement of job variety and responsibility, decrease in
hierarchical control, increase in felt influence over
decision-making, and increased opportunities for informal
interaction all correlated with increased job satisfaction and
decreased turnover.
39
The convergence of such evidence led to
the development of a new school of "participatory
management" theorists. In contrast to their "scientific"
predecessors, they claimed to find in workers "potential for
development, the capacity for assuming responsibility, the
readiness to direct behavior towards organizational goals."
Management's job, according to this school, is to "arrange
organizational conditions and methods of operation so that
people can achieve their own goals best by directing their own
efforts toward organizational objectives." 40
As one would expect of a school which "uncritically
adopt[sl industry's own conception of workers as means to be
13
manipulated," 41 this position rests comfortably on the
unspoken heroic assumption that employee goals and
organization objectives are fundamentally compatible. We
need not accept this assumption in order to agree that the
approach to motivation of the "participatory management"
advocates, in its resourceful methods of maximizing the area
of short-term compatibility, is considerably more sophisticated
than that of the "scientific managers." One writer likens it to
"the difference between treating poople as children and
treating them as mature adults." 42
The orthodox view of Chinese incentives tends, as we
have seen, to depend upon implicit assumptions parallel to
those of the "scientific" managers. Oespite its underlying
premise of class harmony, it is hard to avoid the conclusion
that both the theoretical and the empirical work of the newer
"participatory" school have rendered obsolete the earlier
assumptions as a possible basis for constructing a theory of
work motivation.
III. TWO SYSTEMS OF DISTRIBUTION
Collective Incentives
Treatments of Chinese incentive practices often equate
material with private incentives, and nonmaterial with
collective ones. A grain of truth exists in this confusion, for
personal incentive systems no doubt construct a more direct
relation between individual work effort and individual income
than do collective systems. Slight variations in an individual's
output have a more perceptible effect on his earnings.
This advantage in sensitivity is widely assumed to prove
the overall superiority of personal over collective incentive
systems in motivating work effort. This view is fallacious
because it focuses on only one property of an incentive
system. It is like arguing that the best brush for painting is
invariably the finest. Imagine, for instance, that residents of a
village become convinced that only by working together as a
group can they transform the economy of their village and
significantly improve their living standards, and they similarly
become convinced that individual incentive payments would
create divisions in the group and destroy its cohesiveness.
Under these circumstances, the residents might well opt for a
relatively egalitarian payment scheme, and yet still be
motivated by the expectation of material gain. Nor is it
inconceivable that they would work harder than if motivated
by the combination of individual incentives and the
expectation of smaller overall gains in income. This is precisely
the distinction between the power (or overall effectiveness in
stimulating work effort) of an incentive system and its
sensitivity.
In the above example, the expectation of material gain
motivates people effectively even though distribution is equal.
Such a result, however, depends upon the state of social
consciousness of the members of the collective. To see this
more clearly, let us follow Amartya Sen in stripping the
problem down to its logical essentials in the form of a simple
"game." 43
We begin by assuming that distribution is based roughly
upon need. From the vantage point of each member of the
group, there are four possible situations: (1) he is lazy when
everyone else is diligent (call this situation LD); (2) he is
diligent when everyone else is diligent (DO); (3) he is lazy
when everyone else is lazy (LL); and (4) he is diligent when
everyone else is lazy (OL).
The level of social consciousness of members depends
upon how they rank these situations in order of preference. If
each member is selfish, in that he prefers not to work hard
whether his colleagues do or not, he will rank the possibilities
like this: LO, 00, LL, OL. Notice that although each member
will choose to be lazy given either kind of behavior by his
colleagues, yet each also prefers everyone diligent (DO) to
everyone lazy (LL), since universal laziness would be. ruinous
to all members. Despite the latter preference, it is easy to see
that if each individual is left to make his own rational
calculation, the result must be disastrous universal laziness.
Individual choice leads inevitably to a result which even the
selfish individuals regard as inferior to common diligence
(DD), a state which cannot be reached by individual choice.
44
This dilemma can be avoided by each member simply
reversing his order of preference for the first two situations.
Each now prefers to be diligent so long as the other members
also work hard, but does not want to be taken advantage of by
working hard for the common good while others malinger. In
contrast to the first, "selfish" state of social consciousness, let
us call this one "socialist" consciousness: 00, LO, LL, OL.
Now it remains only to establish confidence in each member's
mind that the others will pull their fair share, and each
member individually will choose to do the same. Common
diligence will be the result.
Of course, if the members of the collective had a purely
"selfless" state of consciousness, such that they each preferred
diligence even if their colleagues were lazy (00, LO, OL, LL),
then common diligence would result automatically with or
without confidence in the diligence of others.
If ideological education and propaganda can persuade
group members that the proper way to behave is
"socialistically" (or better, yet, "selflessly") rather than
"selfishly," even though they remain selfish at heart, then the
result (00) will obtain. This is preferred by all, even according
to their true selfish values, to the result of choice based upon
those values (LL).45 The same result of course follows even
more forcefully if education actually can change true values in
a "socialist" or "selfless" direction.
Where labor is still long, toilsome and difficult, however,
and where its immediate links with livelihood have been
loosened (as when pay is relatively equal), won't there be a
continuing tendency to slack off? Under these conditions, is it
realistic to expect education and exhortation alone to cause
people to behave as if they preferred more drudgery to
less-let alone cause them actually to prefer it? Whether
because of their own experience, or out of deference to the
traditional Marxist (and especially Leninist) skepticism on
such questions,46 the Chinese do not by any means rely
exclusively on education and propaganda.
Given underlying "selfish" preferences, the only other
way of separating individual choices from individual
preferences is to legislate or otherwise enforce desired
individual behavior. If individuals recognize that the legislated
outcome is preferable to the "free" one, they will accept, even
themselves draw up, the legislation. Thus, for example,
individuals will gladly accept a law which makes them pay fair
taxes along with everyone else even though they would
individually prefer not to pay any, if they know that otherwise
everyone will choose to pay none and that consequently there
14
will be no social services. Such an administered solution runs
into serious problems when applied to work motivation. It is
impossible in practice to define standards of reasonable
diligence and creativity for different individuals and then to
enforce them, and difficult even to make the attempt without
alienating workers. As Sen argues, "the feasibility of using
payments according to needs combined with vigorous
supervision of work done is profoundly doubtful." 47 Indeed,
such an attempt during the Great Leap Forward led to serious
problems of "commandism" on the part of cadres, and caused
at least a temporary abandonment of the system of
distribution according to need ("free supply" system).
However, there is a method of supervision which may
avoid this pitfall. If the group is sufficiently small and has
sufficient control of the fruits of its collective labor, then each
member will come to realize that his welfare is dependent
upon the diligence of all other members. In conjunction with a
general social climate favoring selflessness, such perceived
interdependence can lead to the exertion of powerful group
pressure on laggards to measure up to their best potential.
"Vigorous supervision" is thus exercised not through
hierarchic organs of control, with their inevitable problems of
"commandism" and alienation, but by means of a diffused
group morale based on each member's recognition of mutual
interdependence with all other members. When the group's
activities are the principal source of its members' livelihoods, a
powerful material incentive will exist to exert such social
pressure, even if distribution within the group is based upon
need. Describing this form of distribution in Chinese
communes, Arthur Galston writes, "any worker 'goofing off'
hurts his entire production team. You can imagine what kind
of social pressure would be exerted against any chronic
malingerer.,,48 This is a hybrid solution, fusing local (within
the group) egalitarian distribution with the retention of
material incentives to motivate diligent work. It requires a
relatively small group, a method of determining need which
the group members feel is just, and a significant degree of
control by the group over its net income. These requirements
make such a system more suitable to a rural work team, brigade
or commune, or even a hsien factory, than to a national-level
enterprise. Such a system also requires a refined and widely
disseminated method for groups to have recourse to in
handling the delicate problems of group-individual interaction.
Finally, it does not require "selfless" participants, although it
is certainly aided by a cultural climate favoring a high degree
of social consciousness.
Because this incentive system implies a strong tie
between collective output and collective welfare, it requires
that groups which produce more, keep more (which indicates
its affinity to "self-reliance"). Therefore, under this system,
distribution of regional or national income between groups
will tend to be "according to labor" even while distribution
within groups is "according to need." It is the first feature
which explains the continued existence of material incentives
in the face of the second feature.
Having seen how the socialist principle can be retained as
a method of collective distribution while personal income is
distributed according to a different mode, we must recall that
in China personal distribution as well is supposed to follow
socialist lines. Although it still does so to an important extent,
the Chinese have refined the principle of "to each according to
his labor" in such a way as to reward not merely output per se
but desired work behavior. Before discussing China's
distribution practices in detail, we must briefly look into the
logic of the socialist mode of distributing personal income.
Personal Incentives
The socialist principle, "to each according to his work,"
was regarded by Marx as governing the distribution of income
in the early stage of communist society, "as it emerges from
capitalist society ....,,49 By "work" or "labor" is meant the
net value added by each individual worker's labor: "the
individual producer receives back from society-after the
deductions have been made-exactly what he gives to it." 50
Marx was concerned to distinguish this form of
distribution from the one which would eventually develop in
"a higher phase of communist society": "from each according
to his ability, to each according to his needs." 51 Therefore, his
writing separates the two principles sharply. The early
principle is "still stigmatised by a bourgeois limitation,"
namely, that the right of producers to income is proportional
to the labor they supply. Individuals differ in physical and
mental ability and hence supply different amounts of labor.
Therefore, the right to payment according to one's labor "is an
unequal right for unequal labor. " Moreover, even if individuals
supplied equal amounts, they would still differ in their needs,
for one would be married with a family, another single, etc. In
sum, while the socialist principle of distribution abolishes
exploitation, it cannot abolish inequality.
Lenin also drew a rigid line of distinction between the
two principles, arguing that the distribution of income and
allotment of labor among individuals continues under
socialism to be governed by "bourgeois right," and that,
accordingly, "differences, and unjustdifferences,in wealth will
still exist" under socialism. 52
Marx and Lenin saw these two modes of distribution as
characterizing two distinct stages of development of
communist society, and neither attempted to predict the
actual process of transition from one to another. But they left
no doubt that a principal reason for the preservation of
"bourgeois right" under socialism was the inadequate
development of social consciousness and the consequent need
to retain material incentives to stimulate work. For instance,
Lenin argued that the transition to communist distribution
would occur when man's bourgeois compulsion to "calculate
with the stringency of a Shylock whether he has not worked
15
half an hour more than another, whether he is not getting less
pay than another is left behind." 53 Commenting on the
principle of distribution according to labor, Lenin harshly
brought out its motivational purpose: "Also a form of
compulsion: 'He who does not work, neither shall he eat.' "
And on the passage describing the higher, communist
principle, he noted: "Work has become a necessity, there is no
compulsion whatever." 54 Thus, Lenin saw the significance of
the socialist principle to lie in the continuing need under
socialism to use the threat of withholding means of subsistence
to stimulate work effort.
But how long does this need continue, what are the links
between its disappearance and the development of the
economic base, and how is its disappearance expressed in the
evolving system of distribution? These questions, of prime
importance to the actual practice of the socialist state, were
ones which Marx and Lenin did not take up, and the answers
to which Lenin expressly stated "we do not and cannot know"
in advance. 55
Let us look more closely at the motivational features
which grace the principle of distribution according to work
and cause its retention under socialism. There are essentially
four reasons why the productivity of individuals may vary:5
5a
(1 ) differences in the amount of machinery and equipment
per worker.
(2) differences in the amount of education and training per
worker.
(3) differences in natural endowments of strength,
dexterity, or skill.
(4) differences in attitudes toward work, making some
workers more diligent and creative than others.
Abstracting for the moment from the problem of skills
or attitudes that must be inculcated so that workers will treat
and maintain equipment properly, the differences in
productivity due to (I) are explained by the equipment with
which labor works, not by behavior that responds to
incentives. No reasonable, merit-based distribution system
would treat one worker as more deserving than the next
according to whether or not he has a better machine to work
with. Nor will the supply of high productivity workers with
bigger machines be increased if they are paid more.
Number (2) is somewhat more complicated. If the
acquisition of education and training is a private expense of
the worker, then there might be a motivational need to repay
this investment with higher earnings later. Otherwise, there
might be Ii ttle incentive to acquire education and training.
However, as Engels put it, "In a socialistically organized
society, these costs are born by society, and to it therefore
belong also the fruits, the greater values produced by skilled
labor. The laborer himself has no claim to extra payment.,,56
Nor is there any a priori reason to believe, so long as education
is regarded as having independent benefits of its own, that the
demand for an education all of whose costs are borne by the
State would be inadequate unless extra pay were proffered to
the educated. 57
It is likely that in a new socialist society, some skills
acquired in the past will have to be rewarded with incentive
pay in order to be kept in service with reasonably good
morale. This may be necessary even when such skills were
financed by exploitation-related income. But it is difficult to
see why this practice need extend beyond the generation
which makes the transition to socialism as adults.
The third factor (differences in native strength and
talent) is in one sense comparable to differences in land
fertility. From the point of view of merit, there is no more
reason for the fortuitous owner of a six-foot frame or a genius
for mathematics to be rewarded exceptionally, than there is to
so favor the owner of a particularly rich piece of land. With
respect to motivation, the supply of such endowments cannot
be insensitive to incentives, since by definition they are given
by nature and do not develop in response to rewards and
punishments. 58
Nevertheless, the allocation of natural abilities to
appropriate employment is not independent of incentives. An
individual with an aptitude for mathematics, for example, may
fail to make his or her talents available to a job requiring such
abilities if the compensation system in that job does not
reward them. Similarly, a job requiring physical strength may
have to reward the productivity of such strength in order to
attract strong workers, who otherwise could earn as much in
another job without the strength requirement. Thus, in the
absence of a refined system of ascertaining and allocating
talents to occupations in a way that avoids arbitrariness and
alienation, a case can be made strictly on grounds of efficiency
for allowing the market some latitude in allocating abilities.
Natural endowments would be given some differential reward
as a way of ensuring their employment in jobs that can better
utilize them.
Finally, in our search for a motivational basis for the
socialist principle, "to each according to his work," we come
to factor (4): diligence and creativity stemming from attitudes
toward work. Here of course we are on firm ground in
expecting that differential pay will stimulate work efforts.
Socialist man, "morally and intellectually still stamped with
the birthmarks of the old society" (Marx), is indeed likely to
respond to the rough justice of payment according to the
amount of toil, sweat and concentration he puts into his job.
Also, to the extent that training costs must still be born
individually (e.g., in lost leisure for after-hours study), he will
still tend to require the promise of later rewards to make it
worthwhile to upgrade skills.
Of the several causes of variations III labor
productivity,58a then, only those of categories (3) and (4)
justify differences in pay on incentive grounds. The trouble is,
work as measured by the value of a worker's output is but a
rough and imperfect indicator of these two factors, since
differences in output value reflect differences between workers
in the other categories as well (including those discussed in
note 55a), none of which justify differences in pay. Hence a
system of distribution according to work is not a very efficient
system for realizing either allocative efficiency or the
incentives which Marx and Lenin regarded as necessary until
the full attainment of communism. It has the advantage,
however, of being a relatively straightforward system which
does not require delving deeper into the question of the
"worthiness" of individual behavior, with its attendant thorny
problems of who makes such an evalutaion and how.
To isolate natural capability and diligent, conscientious
effort, and make distribution of income depend only upon
these traits, would be no less "bourgeois." It would still entail
the application of an equal standard of right to unequal
individuals. The standard becomes that part of productivity
due to the presence of these traits, leaving aside the residue of
productivity due to other factors. But some workers will not
16
be as strong or talented as others, or will possess talents not
valued by plan or market, and so will earn less. Others, for
reasons of psychology or social background, will not be able to
work as diligently or conscientiously as others, and will earn
less. Moreover, the single worker and the worker with six
children to support will still be unequal under this standard.
However, the standard of capability and conscientious
ness would probably on balance reduce inequality by
eliminating some unequally shared and arbitrary characteristics
as factors determining Income. It would align income
distribution more closely with widely held standards of merit,
and thus achieve a greater degree of acceptability. Yet, by
tying payment more specifically to desired behavior and
needed abilities, without the interference of extraneous and
irrelevant factors, it paradoxically would tend to sharpen
material incentives.
IV. WORK MOTIVATION IN CHINA
We now have before us two systems of distribution,
described in the abstract, both containing material incentives
although in different forms. The first consists of distribution
between collectives according to labor, and distribution
according to need among individuals within each collective. S9
The second is a refined form of distribution according to work
for individuals, with "work" measured by individual
productivity due to ability and conscientious effort.
The Maoist literature, of course, uniformly condemns all
material incentives, without making any of these distinctions.
Just as clearly does this literature insist on adherence to the
socialist principle that payment correlate with work.
6o
Yet as
we have seen, Marx and Lenin felt that the principle of
payment according to work had to be retained in socialist
society precisely in order to provide material incentives to
stimulate work. The Chinese attempt to draw a sharp line of
demarcation between the two principles causes some
confusion, as in the following non sequitur.
We working people have now become masters of our own
country. We are no longer wage-laborers selling our labor
power as a commodity. We work for the building of
socialism, for the complete emancipation of the working
people. Therefore, the wages we now get are no longer the
value or price of our labor power but a kind of distribution
of consumer goods to the workers by tbe state according to
tbe socialist principle- "From eacb according to bis ability,
to eacb according to his work. ,,61
If the premise, "We work for the building of socialism, for the
complete emancipation of the working people," were to be
regarded as a statement of accomplished fact rather than of
aspiration, then the socialist system of distribution to which it
is linked in this passage would be regressive in terms of the
Marxist-Leninist analysis. Because such statements are really in
part ideological exhortations designed to strengthen desired
values in the population, and therefore do not accurately
describe current reality, we must dig deeper to uncover the
actual principles of the incentive system in China.
Urban and rural income distribution mechanisms have
been described in detail by others.
62
In this section, I will show
how recent trends in China's approach to income distribution
seem to have increasingly incorporated the motivational
principles described in Part II, to create a rather complex and
sophisticated overall system of incentives. The evolving system I
seems to permit increasing equality of distribution to coexist
with the retention of material incentives.
I
The Tachai System
For a model of the merit-oriented principle of
I
distribution according to labor, consider the following criteria
for allocating workpoints used by the famous Tachai Brigade:
Higb skills, and abundance of entbusiasm for work, support
from tbe community, bonesty, and a higb dexree of class
consciousness are important. A man's ability or labor power
may be great or small. But if be works witb beart and soul
for the good of everyone he is respected and we will ensure
bim a secure life even if bis labor power is limited. 63
Tachai probably carries to the extreme the concept of
rewarding merit rather than product.
64
But the practice itself is
widely evident. At Hongqiao Commune near Shanghai, the
criteria for workpoint allocation are attitude toward work
(encompassing a range of factors associated with a worker's
ideological level), level of skill, and strength.
6s
At Shashihyu
Brigade in Hopei Province, they are attitude toward labor,
time devoted to labor, quantity of work performed, and
quality of work.
66
At Dragon Well brigade near Hangchow,
they are political behavior, attitude toward work, quantity and
quality of work.
67
Commenting upon the system at Evergreen
Commune, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi writes, "The
calculation is not based on the basic work day, which would
have the effect of stimulating the peasants to work but [would
also have] the flaw of differentiating among them according to
their strength, their age, their technical level. .. .'>68
Everywhere reports from communes indicate practices which
attempt to bring rewards more in line with desired behavior
and to weaken other influences upon income. "Workpoints are
given according to the behavior of each person .... Weak or
strong, all that matters is whether one is able to work." 69
The behavior encouraged within the collective is of
course more than just diligence. It is also "selflessness"-the
subordination of one's individual interests to those of the
collective-as evidenced by a willingness to help others, devote
extra labor and nightsoil to the collective fields in preference
to the private plot, participate in group political, cultural and
welfare activities, etc., all without undue concern for personal
gain or loss. If "selfless" behavior in this broad sense is
encouraged by the use of workpoints, which by their nature
appeal to the desire for self-gain, the contradiction between
means and end
70
may evoke simulations of the desired
attitudes. Chinese criticisms of such superficial behavior as
reciting slogans by rote, talking volubly at meetings without
having anything to say, and carrying the display of Mao
pictures and buttons to extremes, indicate that such a problem
has existed. To the extent that simulated and mechanical
manifestations of desired attitudes are exposed and fail, the
work point system ceases entirely to be an active motivator of
correct behavior. This is because the real goals by their very
nature cannot be measured directly or otherwise quantified. A
worker's enthusiasm for work, willingness to help others, and
political seriousness, for example, cannot be measured in such
a way as to lead him to expect that an increase or decrease in
such measure would lead to a corresponding change in pay.
17
Therefore, the worker is not apt to change his behavior in
response to such an incentive. In sum, the very generality of
Tachai-type criteria of performance weakens the material
incentive element in the work point system of payment
according to behavior.
Nevertheless, the Tachai system remains a "desert"
based system, distinctly different in this respect from payment
according to need. As such it continues to play an important
motivational role, such as the latter system could not play.
This is the passive, reinforcing role of preventing meritorious
behavior from being penalized by losses in work points. 71 There
are basically two reasons why this is so. First, payment strictly
according to work done requires relative evaluations of
different kinds of work. But in agriculture the relative values
of different tasks change continuously with the weather, and
the season, and the course of local development. No
administered price system (such as a detailed workpoint
schedule) can as adequately represent need priorities on the
local level as can the day-to-day perceptions of the local
people themselves (unless the schedule were revised literally
daily!). In the fifties and early sixties, the use of such a rigid
work point schedule resulted in over-supplies of labor applying
for high-point jobs and understaffing of low-point ones.
Attempts to solve the problem by administrative assignment
led to di,wruntlement on the part of the unfavorably assigned
workers. Under the Tachai-type system, however, workers
can volunteer for high priority tasks without worrying about
whether or not those tasks carry work point values which
reflect their importance. In general, under this system, being a
good guy does not imply finishing last, and this weakens the
motive of prudence for not being one.
Second, the attitudes of different individuals are
interdependent. One worker may set an example for others
and inspire them, or may help others to improve their skills
and overcome problems. Or, he may demoralize them by
means of his own behavior. Such "externalities"-to use the
economists' term-create a gap between the worker's
individual, direct contribution to output, and his total social
contribution, including the indirect contribution made
through his influence on others' productivity. There is no way
to measure the latter component; hence any payment scheme
pegged to productivity will tend to ignore it, thus underpaying
the inspiring workers and overpaying the demoralizing ones.
The Tachai-type criteria permit evaluation of a worker's total
social role, and thus enable his interaction with others to be
taken into account-even if only in a general way-when
calculating his contribution.
73
For both these reasons, then, general behavior-oriented
criteria for workpoint allocation lessen the tendency inherent
in the earlier system-and indeed in any more specific
system-for workpoint allocation to conflict with, and thus to
discourage, desired work behavior.
In industry, payment according to work may embody to
some extent the same principles of merit and aptitude as in the
rural communes, but they are harder to detect. Time wages,
the chief method of payment in factories and mines since the
Cultural Revolution, are an imperfect reflector of behavioral
differences of any kind between workers. In state enterprises,
wages conform to standards set by the state and differentiated
by branch of activity. For ordinary workers, the usual pattern
is an eight-grade system, with the top wage averaging two to
three times the bottom one. Each worker is assigned a grade
according to his seniority, skill and function.?4 When bonuses
were still being paid before the Cultural Revolution, they
depended not only upon productivity, but also upon "politics
and aid to co-workers." 75 I have seen little evidence to indicate
whether a worker's assignment to a basic wage grade also
depends upon such criteria, now that differential bonuses are
no longer paid.
76
Therefore, it is not possible to judge the
degree of "merit" reward on the basis of grade assignment
criteria.
The suggestion of merit system comes rather from the
smallness of wage differentials associated with skill and status.
In eight of 38 industrial enterprises visited in 1966, Barry
Richman found that workers were the highest paid employees.
In most of the 38 enterprises, the director's salary was only
twice as high as the average enterprise pay, and this ratio never
exceeded 3 to 1.77 The average ratio of the salary of the
highest paid engineer or technician to the average enterprise
wage, was less that 2.7 to 1.
78
Moreover, this gap has probably
been further reduced since Richman's visit in June 1966. For
example, at Peking No. One Machine Tool Plant, whose chief
engineer Richman reported as getting 180 yuan in 1966, or
some 3.6 times as much as the average enterprise wage (52
yuan), visitors in August 1972 were told that engineers get a
maximum pay of only 120 yuan, 2.4 to 3 times the average
wage of 20-60 yuan.
79
The same visitors found technicians at
the Fangezhuang Pit of the Kailuan Coal Mines in Tangshan
getting only 1.4 times the average wage for pit work (145 yuan
as compared to 100 yuan), while at Shanghai's Construction
Machinery Factory, technicians, cadres, and workers were all
paid the same scale. A major part of the difference between
high and low wages within a plant now seems to be accounted
for by length of service.
Of course, such narrow differentials do not prove that
enterprise pay follows the merit principle, but they do suggest
that premiums due to fortuitous factors such as advantages of
social background have been substantially reduced, which is
consistent with this principle.
The Collective Material Incentive System
Coexisting with the merit version of personal
distribution is the collective material incentive system with
payment according to need within the enterprise. This system,
18

as we have seen, implies a rough correlation between group
productivity and group income, and therefore a system of
distribution between groups pegged to their productivities, if it
is to retain its material incentive feature. It is most evident
therefore in the collective sector. Collectively-owned
enterprises set the level of their wages and welfare funds
according to the level of their net incomes. Since their
equipment is more backward and makeshift than that of state
enterprises and their level of skill lower, the wages and welfare
services which they can generate for their workers is almost
invariably lower than those of the state enterprises. C.C.A.S.
visitors to the Peking February 7 Rolling Stock Plant, for
example, found that regular workers in the main plant earned
twice as much as dependents and women who worked in a
collectively owned metalworking subsidiary "for similar work,
of similar duration, effort and difficulty." 80 American political
economists were told at the K'ung Chiang Workers' New
Village in Shanghai that former housewives now making
flashlight bulbs in the settlement's collective workshops make
only about 30 yuan per month, 30% less than the average pay
of 45 yuan for such work in state factories. This wage will
gradually rise as productivity increases. But within the shops,
the wages of the workers are remarkably similar, with very
little spread between the highest wage (1.1 yuan per day) and
the lowest (.9 yuan per day). The visitors were told
emphatically that the women in this enterprise did not work
for money but to serve the revolution, and it is evident that
whatever material incentives exist there operate through
expectations of increased community benefits.
Yet, despite the adamance of the hosts on this point,
they "also mentioned that during the Cultural Revolution the
workers had demanded and won the right to have enterprise
net income accrue to the neighborhood committee rather than
to Shanghai Municipality, because so little of it had been
returning in welfare benefits to the community.
In the example of K'ung Chiang village's flashlight bulb
factory, we see all the elements of the collective material
incentive system: dependence of wages and welfare fund upon
productivity, resulting differences between enterprises in
incomes generated, relatively egalitarian distribution within
the enterprise, and workers motivated by the expectation of
community development financed by their income. This
system, as it were, transfers the bourgeois character of the
principle "to each according to his work" to a higher level, so
that inequalities occur between groups rather than between
individuals. But it also gets individuals accustomed to working
collectively in an atmosphere of relative equality, while it
retains a material incentive for them to do so.
The resulting inequalities between collectives are
temporarily tolerated because they do not immediately reflect
and aggravate the kinds of class tensions still present in
intra-collective relations. Reduced income differentiation
within groups weakens the tendency for class stratification to
recur, while inequalities between groups cut across class lines
and are less divisive in the short run. Later, however, the
inherent tendency of such a system of "self-reliance" to
generate group and regional differences might well become a
more serious problem for government at all levels.
In the rural communes, egalitarian distribution is evident
in the rejuvenated "free supply" system, reminiscent of-but
more limited than-that of the Great Leap Forward. At
Shashihyu brigade, the most crucial item of all-foodgrain-is
distributed largely without reference to work performed. In
1971, for example, 80% of the total per-capita supply was
distributed "free" of workpoints earned. Visitors are told that
families with more children and less labor power are thus
assured sufficient foodgrains, that public welfare funds provide
an additional such guarantee, and that the brigade in this way
both implements the principle of "to each according to his
labor" and guarantees livelihood for all. Note, however, that
this system abandons the first principle in its strict Leninist
form, "he who does not work, neither shall he eat." Although
Myrdal and Kessle report a similar practice in another poor
North China village,81 just how common it is in the
countryside is still impossible to say.
Yet it is clearly only one part, albeit a dramatic one, of a
more general system of cooperative distribution which has
been developing in the communes. The collective provision of
free education, medical and health care, housing and cultural
facilities, financed in the main out of collective income and
from small premiums assessed on members, is another
important and new component of this system. Thus, funds for
the establishment and expansion of schools, hospitals, clinics,
old age homes, cultural and recreational facilities, increasingly
are coming from the incomes of the local units which they will
serve. In many cases, the new cooperative services are the first of
their kind available to the rural people. By permitting the
teams and brigades to keep enough of their net incomes to
take responsibility for such undertakings, rather than
siphoning off this income in the form of taxes or price
differentials to be reallocated centrally, the state provides the
collective material incentives to spur socialism locally. The
system constitutes, as Arthur Galston puts it, "an unusual
combination of conditions promoting both unselfish,
self.abnegating labor for the good of the group and work for
personal gain." 82
From where are the resources to come for such
ambitious programs? In part from the expansion of production
since recovery from the "three hard years" of 1959-1961. In
part, as already indicated, from the probable decision of the
central government not to keep pace with this expansion in
the rural areas by means of taxation and compulsory state
procurement.
83
Partly from other forms of subsidy, such as the
hsia-fang of experienced technical and administrative
personnel on continuing state salary to the villages, the
circulation of mobile medical teams, the provision of free
technical and scientific advice at experimental farms, the
exchange of experience with advanced model work units, etc.
And partly from the extra income earned through rural
diversification, especially local industrialization. 84
Ever since the Hawthorne experiments, it has been
almost axiomatic in literature on management that providing
workers with greater understanding of the significance of their
work and greater influence over its design and purpose would
stimulate increased productivity. In the Chinese case outlined
above this is accomplished by locating responsibility for
improving the collective welfare and security in the grass roots
collective. Rather than have funds and decision-making
authority flow to a remote central government, most questions
of immediate relevance to the individual's material and
cultural standard of life become subject to his influence as a
member of the collective. It requires no leap of the
imagination to grasp that a farmer might work hard and with
19
ingenuity to enable his work team to produce a surplus with
which a teacher can be paid to educate his children. Nor are
the reasons necessarily purely selfless. What is important is
that the motivation stems from an understanding that the
collective has the means and the authority to make significant
contributions to the individual's welfare, and that the
individual has a significant share of responsibility for
determining the nature and size of those contributions.
In this motivational context, many policies associated
with Mao take on new significance as designed to add to the
means and authority of the collective, as well as to the
psychological disposition of members to exploit them. For
example, the great attention paid to experimentation and
innovation at the factory or village level, to rural
industrialization, and to agricultural diversification and
mechanization, acquaint the worker and farmer with the
possibilities for improvement in his local condition, and create
a heightened tension between what is and what can be.
Together with the movements to visit, study, and catch up
with advanced units, such policies encourage a form of
"demonstration effect" which stimulates savings and ingenuity
even though part of the ultimate motive may be increased
consumption.
Participatory Management in Industry
In industry, as in the communes, a floor is put under
consumption by socially provided goods and services.
Industrial enterprises supply from their welfare funds medical
treatment, dining halls, transportation expenses for workers
living far from the work site, safety clothing, hardship
allowances, pensions and educational expenses. In enterprises
visited by Barry Richman and having such funds, they
averaged 12-13.5% of the enterprise's total wage bill. In one
factory (Canton Chemical Fertilizer) whose welfare fund came
to 13% of total wages paid, Richman was told that some 42%
of the fund went for medical expenses, 15% for trade union
operations, the rest for various educational, recreational,
cultural, insurance, and social security expenses.
85
In
Shanghai's Hutung Shipyard, an amount equal to 36% of the
total wage bill was spent for such purposes in 1971. 86 The
visiting American political economists found the percentage of
the wage bill devoted to welfare more in line with Richman's
observations (12% at the Peking No. One Machine Tool Plant,
and 8.8% at the Shanghai Construction Machinery plant), and
spent on similar undertakings. In addition to such welfare
provIsIOns, rent is heavily subsidized, as are public
transportation and other goods and services deemed necessities
of life by the state.
While the broad range of socially provided goods and
services dulls the negative spur of feared deprivation, the
relative modesty of the maximum income to which a worker
can aspire puts a severe damper on personal income as an
active source of work motivation. Moreover, distribution
policy and the values instilled through education in China both
discredit consumerism as an acceptable mode of behavior and
remove the physical means for realizing it. As Richman points
out, the Chinese industrial employee can clearly afford the
basic necessities and, if a family contains two or more income
earners, it can afford the kinds of semi-luxury items
increasingly produced on a mass scale: radios, sewing
machines, watches, cameras, bicycles. But beyond such goods
there is little to catch the imagination-even one fired by
Madison Avenue:
Cars, modern private homes, TV sets, washers and dryers,
air conditioners, fine jewelry, works of art and rare antiques
are either not available or beyond the financial means of
even the highest-paid industrial personnel. Such items are
typically purchased only by organizations or allocated to
individuals: they are rarely bought by individuals . ... this is
likely to mean that monetary incentives and material gain
lose some of their potency as potential motivating forces. 87
But if substantial portions of income accrue to the
industrial worker, as to the commune member, in the form of
collectively provided goods and services unconnected with
individual work effort, it is not the case that industrial workers
are motivated by the same kind of collective material incentive
system. The individual and collective income of workers in a
state enterprise does not appear to depend greatly upon the
productivity of the enterprise. Indeed, some enterprises accept
planned losses (as a means of subsidizing necessities), which
does not imply that their workers earn less than in profit-making
firms. Wages, as we have seen, are fixed by the state. The welfare
funds, from which collective welfare benefits are paid, are
financed from payments by the enterprise of a fixed
percentage of the total wage fund.
88
However, to a variable
extent, enterprises have been permitted to retain fixed
percentages of their profits, and to use part of the retained
portion for increasing workers' welfare provisions.
89
This
practice, the current status and extent of which is unclear, is
the only obvious way in which worker welfare is tied directly
to plant performance in Chinese state industry. It is clearly a
less important and substantial tie than that which exists in the
collective sector of the economy.
To be an industrial worker in China is still to be in a
highly privileged position, politically and economically. The
industrial worker represents the future, is entrusted with the
most advanced technology, enjoys the best working conditions
and welfare benefits, has the highest wages outside the small
group of very highly paid intellectuals and scientists. The elan
which such a position entails may well substitute in part for
the material incentives which still motivate work in the
collective enterprises.
In the mushrooming local industries at the hsien level,
industrial workers are even more in the position of pioneers,
mastering for the first time scientific and industrial
technology, playing the role of "leading factor" in the
economic transformation of their localities. The hsien is a
small enough unit so that each new item produced, each
increase in output, is not only noticeable but may change
living standards significantly. In these factories, moreover,
working conditions and welfare benefits depend much more
directly than in the larger state-operated enterprises upon
performance and growth, since they must be provided for out
of hsien revenues, the most rapidly growing source of which is
local enterprise profits.
For all these reasons, merely being an industrial worker
probably relieves work of some of its "disutility" and invests
the worker's life with a sense of purpose and participation.
Beyond this, and contributing to the same result, is the
approach to enterprise management which the Chinese are still
in the process of forging.
90
By means of the principles tersely
enunciated in the Anshan Constitution
91
(said to have been
formulated by Mao himself in March 1960), China has been
20
moving toward a system of reduced hierarchical distinctions
between workers, managers, and technicians, in which the
rank-and-file genuinely participates in setting enterprise goals
and overseeing their fulfillment, and in which the enterprise
itself becomes not merely an instrument of production but
also the locus of education, welfare implementation and social
activity.
It is difficult to judge the degree to which Chinese
industrial enterprises today realize these goals. The political
and ideological level of the workforce, not the mechanical
system of procedures, is the crucial variable, and it is not
subject to easy evaluation. For example, a principal method by
which mass participation in factory management is
implemented is the periodic mass meeting at which objectives
are explained and worker opinions collected.
92
At one
enterprise visited by the American political economists in
August 1972, criticisms voiced at such a meeting had actually
caused the enterprise plan to be reformulated. The mere
existence of such a procedure, however, does not
automatically imply the real substance of mass participation.
As Mao put it, "Without mass consciousness and willingness,
any work requiring mass participation is bound vainly to
degenerate into formalism and fail." 93
In the vigorous attacks carried out during the Cultural
Revolution on such "revisionist" practices as "relying on
specialists to run factories," and "concocting rules and
regulations to bind the masses hand and foot," enterprise
management probably was weakened and the importance of
job competence belittled. Recent articles have put great
emphasis on the principle that "any society has to be
managed," and on the need to increase technical and
managerial personnel, "define the scope of managerial
authority," and establish a "clearcut division of work and
responsibility as regards who is responsible for each task or
matter.,,94 Thus, 1972 was apparently a period of
consolidation in enterprise management during which some of
the radical participatory practices which grew up during the
Cultural Revolution were altered in order to strengthen
control and administration.
Whatever the shortrun turns and twists, however, the
longterm trend in enterprise management, as Steven Andors
has shown, has been to experiment with systems of sharing
power and responsibility, in which the job has meaning to the
worker beyond the pay it brings. Accorded a significant share
of responsibility for formulating and implementing the tasks
of the enterprise, for innovating, and for organizing the social
and political life which revolves around the factory, the
worker comes to regard his work to some extent as important
and satisfying. The manifest fairness of the actual distribution
of income helps persuade him to relinquish the need for direct
material stimuli by strengthening his confidence that "no one
else is benefiting more than he is by his own acceptance of
egalitarian and cooperative behavior." 95 All this, it must be
remembered, occurs in a context in which the state industrial
worker already occupies a materially privileged position in
society and is therefore relatively disposed to accept its
ideological goals as his own.
The participatory management system in state
enterprises, whose motivational elements are highlighted above
in rather ideal and general terms, really amounts to a third
type of incentive system. It features neither the close relation
between group productivity and group income of the
collective material incentives system, nor the practice of basing
personal income upon meritorious behavior of the rural
workpoint system. Instead, it depends on the establishment of
an environment in which work becomes an implicitly
important and rewarding part of the workers' lives. As
attempts to implement it come into conflict with the interests
and ambitions of bureaucratic administrators, on the one
hand, and with the orderliness required for efficient planning
and operation, on the other, greater or lesser compromises
occur, reflecting both political and technological conditions.
External and Internal Incentives
Of the three models of motivational systems discussed so
far-payment according to merit, collective material incentives,
and participatory management-only the first embodies
completely external incentives, i.e., incentives stemming
directly from the reward offered.
External incentives can be either material or
nonmaterial. The difference lies only in the nature of the
reward, not in its relation to work. In the case of material
incentives, individuals or groups receive higher pay, cash
bonuses, and the like. In that of nonmaterial incentives, they
get commendations, banners, honorary status, prestige. There
are of course differences in the economic costs of the two
systems, and in the values they seek to instill, but they are
alike in that they both rely upon external stimuli, rather than
upon properties of the job itself, to motivate effort.
Therefore, contrary to outward appearances, the degree
of reliance upon moral incentives per se is not an index of
social consciousness. In fact, the necessity of providing
external rewards, even of a nonmaterial sort, to reinforce
socially desirable behavior, is a measure of the distance still to
be traveled to achieve what Lenin understood by "Communist
labor:"
labor performed gratis for the benefit of society, labor
performed not as a definite duty, not for the purpose of
obtaining a right to certain products, not according to
previously established and legally fixed quotas, but
voluntary labor. . .. performed because it has become a
habit to work for the common good, and because of a
conscious realization (that has become a habit) of the
necessity of working for the common good. 96
21
Internal incentives are the motivating properties of a job
itself. They may flow from the nature of the work, as in the
case of arts, crafts or sports, or from its significance. The boy
who saved Amsterdam by putting his finger in the dike was
neither enamored of the work nor expecting a bonus. He
simply knew the importance of what he was doing. Lenin's
description of Communist labor implies internal motivation.
But internal motivation does not necessarily imply
"Communist labor"; a good craftsman who loves his work may
be oblivious to the needs of his fellows and work for himself
rather than "for the common good."
The collective material incentive system is an
intermediate one, partly internal and partly external. Its
incentive is internal in that the members of the collective
perceive and are motivated by the significance of their labor in
transforming their locality. The link between work and the
anticipated increase in material welfare is organic, not simply a
matter of earning an additional yuan by doing work for
somebody else which has no intrinsic significance.
At the same time, because part of this significance comes
from expected future income, and because part of the
motivation for working is due to the collective morale and the
desire to be well thought of by one's colleagues, the incentive
under this system remains partly external. It is not yet purely
a matter of "conscious realization (that has become a habit) of
the necessity of working for the common good."
The participatory management system of state industries
more substantially internalizes its incentives.
97
In part this is
because industrial workers, among the most privileged
members of the new society and enjoying a high level of
material security, are in a relatively good position to "work for
the common good" without fear of individual deprivation. But
the management system in its ideal formulation also increases
the intrinsic satisfaction to be derived from work. The
movement for scientific experimentation and innovation, the
attempt to create generalists or "all-rounders" who are
competent at a number of tasks, to encourage comprehensive
rather than highly specialized production wherever possible,
and to break down the distinction between technicians and
workers, can all be seen as facets of what industrial
management specialists call "horizontal job enlargement"
(referring in general to an increase in the number and variety
of operations performed on the job). Genuine participation by
the rank-and-file in setting the goals of their enterprise and
overseeing their fulfillment corresponds to what is called
"vertical job enlargement."
Both of these forms of "job enlargement" lead to
heightened work motivation because they provide for
meaningful feedback about job performance (information
about the results of one's work), the use and development of
abilities valued by the worker, and a high degree of control by
the worker over his work goals and the means of achieving
them.
98
The internal incentives of Chinese industry, like the
semi-internal ones of the collective, do not necessarily imply
selfless "Communist labor." It is certainly easy to mistake
them for such, however. If it is observed, for example, that
wage differentials are unusually small and there are no bonuses
or awards, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that people are
being motivated by pure public spiritedness. The alternative
explanation-internal incentives-springs less easily to mind
because it cannot be directly observed and measured. Yet it
appears to be extremely significant in China today.
Finally, work site mechanisms for motivating people
must be evaluated in the context of the general social,
economic, and political milieu in which people live. The degree
of legitimacy enjoyed by the existing social arrangements
(including work arrangements), insofar as this relates to
workers' capacities for identifying with and helping to shape
the goals of their work, plays an important motivational role.
"Participation becomes a farce when it is applied as a sales
gimmick or a device for kidding people into thinking they are
important.,,99 The crux of the issue is whether the basis for a
community of interest between individual goals and
organizational objectives exists or not. If not, attempts to
arrange organizational methods in order to fabricate an
appearance of compatibility will ultimately be perceived as
manipulation by the subjects and will have no significant
motivational impact in the long run.
My emphasis here upon internal motivation and the
metamorphosis of material incentives in contemporary China
is not intended to disparage the evidence of a generally
heightened social consciousness, as captured in the slogans
"fight self" and "serve the people." But I believe it does serve
to put the question of the "emergence of a new Socialist man"
in China into a less idealistic perspective by linking the
qualities being encouraged directly to the forms of social
organization and the distribution of political and economic
power. China is a country in transition. That its motivational
morality should also be in transition is not surprising. As
Chairman Mao has said, "a voyage of 10,000 Ii begins with a
single step," and China's progress in achieving a more
satisfactory basis for motivating its people can justly be
regarded as more than a single step.
NOTES
I am grateful to Perry Link and Mark Selden for close and
penetrating criticisms of an earlier draft of this article. My intellectual
debt to the work of Steven Andors, Jack Gray and Jack Gurley will
be obvious to the reader. None of the above is responsible for remaining
errors of fact or fancy.
1. New York Times, June 27, 1971.
2. Mainland China in the World Economy, Hearings before the
Joint Economic Committee of Congress (Washington, D.C.: U.S.G.P.O.
1967),73,74 (hereafter cited as Mainland China).
3. Mainland China, 22.
4. A. Doak Barnett, China After Mao (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), 18.
5. Kenneth Walker, Planning in chinese Agriculture:
Socialization and the Private Sector (Chicago: Aldine, 1965),93,98.
6. China After Mao, 23.
7. Ibid.
8. C. Y. Cheng, The Economy of Communist China, 1949-1969
(Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, Michigan Papers in Chinese
Studies, No.9, 1971),45.
9. Ibid., 37.
10. See Jan Myrdal and Gun Kessle, China: The Revolution
Continued (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 53-55.
11. See his Industrial Society in Communist China (New York:
Random House, 1969); "Ideology and Management: The Chinese
Oscillate," Columbia Journal of World Business, May-June, 1971;
22
testimony before Joint Economic Committee of Congress, Mainland
China in the World Economy, 50-115.
12. Mainland China. 82.
13. Mainland China. 88-89.
14. See e.g., Mainland China, 66.
17. Higgins, Economic Development, rev. ed. (New York:
Norton, 1968), 309.
18. See Herb Gintis, "Neo-Classical Welfare Economics and
Individual Development," URPE Occasional Paper No.3.
19. H. Leibenstein, "Allocative Efficiency vs. 'X-Efficiency,'''
American Economic Review, June 1966, 392.
20. Ibid. For a more precise notion of the contents of
"X-efficiency," see pp. 406-412.
21. Victor H. Vroom and Edward L. Deci, Management and
Motivation (Baltimore: Penguin, 1970), 9.
22. J. Vanek, General Theory of Labor-Managed Market
Economies (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), 237.
23. Vanek,237-238.
24. The point is eloquently made in John Guriey, "Maoist vs.
Capitalist Development," in Friedman and Selden, ed., America's Asia
(New York: Pantheon, 1971).
25. Douglas M. MacGregor,"The Human Side of Enterprise," in
Vroom and Ded, 307.
26. J. A. C. Brown, The Social Psychology of Industry
(Baltimore: Penguin, 1954), 15.
27. See R. L. Opsahl and M. D. Dunnette, "The Role of
Financial Compensation in Industrial Motivation," Psychological
Bulletin, Vol. 66, 1966.
28. Vroom and Deci, 13.
29. MacGregor, 309.
30. Quoted in Higgins, 299-300.
31. Ibid.
32. See, for example, Maslow's "A Theory of Human
Motivation," in Vroom and Deci, especially p. 40.
H. Stuart Chase, quoted in J. A. C. Bown, 72.
34. Brown, 85.
35. On the question of the objectives of industrial psychiatry,
Daniel Bell has written that Mayo and his followers "uncritically adopt
industry's own conception of workers as means to be manipulated or
adjusted to impersonal ends.... the social science of the factory
researchers is not a science of man, but a cow-sociology."
(Commentary. January 1947, quoted in Brown, 93). Miller and Form
on this point write: "It is also a well-known fact that professors as well
as researchers in 'good' colleges of business administration do not
displease the business community.... These [i.e., Mayo'sl reseraches
were conducted to help management solve its problems. Therefore the
status quo is accepted." (from Industrial Sociology, quoted in Brown,
93)
36. Brown, 187.
37. N. C. Morse and R. S. Weiss, "The Function and Meaning of
Work and the Job," American Sociological Review, 1955, vol. 20
reprinted in Vroom and Deci. 42-57.
38. Morse and Weiss, 42.
39. Vroom, "Industrial Social Psychology," in Vroom and Deci,
92-93.
40. MacGregor, 315, emphasis in original.
41. See footnote 35 above.
42. MacGregor, 316.
43. This part of the discussion is based upon Sen, "On
Economic Inequality" (The Radcliffe Lectures delivered at the
University of Warwick, England, 1972), mimeo, 11()'114. The
terminology is my own.
44. Those familiar with the Theory of Games will recognize this
situation as "the Prisoner's Dilemma."
45. "On Economic Inequality," 112.
46. See, e.g., Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Program," (New
York: International Publishers, 1938), 10; and Lenin, "The State and
Revolution," in Ibid. 79-88; and "From Lenin's Notebook," in Ibid.,
59.
47. Sen, "On Economic Inequality," 111.
48. Arthur Galston, "Life in a Chinese Commune," Hong Kong
Standard. August 25,1972,7.
49. Karl Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Program," 8.
50. Ibid. The "deductions" are for maintenance and
depreciation, net investment, reserve fund for contingencies,
administrative costs. funds for collective consumption goods and
services such as schools and hospitals, and welfare funds.
51. "Critique of the Gotha Program," 10.
52. "The State and Revolution," in K. Marx, op. cit., 79-80.
53. "The State and Revolution," 82.
54. "Lenin on the Critique of the Gotha Program," in Marx,
op. cit., 59.
55. "The State and Revolution," in Marx, op. cit., 85.
55a. Gregory Grossman has called my attention to two
additional sources of differences in productivity between workers.
These are (a) differences in the values of their respective outputs, and
(b) organizational factors-one worker may be less productive than
another because his workshop is less well managed or lacks raw
materials.
The first factor alerts us to the difficulty we encounter in
attempting to apply to workers with different jobs the principle of
distribution according to work. There is no direct way of comparing,
e.g., a day of mechanic's labor with a day of farm labor. If the values of
the outputs are used as the basis for comparison, then the prices upon
which those values are based cannot in turn be founded upon the values
of labor embodied in the respective products, without the reasoning
becoming completely circular. But if prices are not determined by labor
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values, then differences in worker productivity are partly arbitrary, and
cannot be taken as a guide to differences in work done. In practice,
therefore, the principle of distribution according to work can provide a
basis for a wage policy only for workers in closely similar jobs.
The second factor (organizational efficiency) can be ruled out as
a valid basis for differential pay. Neither merit nor incentive
considerations would dictate paying one worker more than another
because his shop is better managed-unless he were also the manager.
But in that case, the reason for the difference would come under one of
the four categories in the text.
56. "Anti-Duhring," (New York: International Publishers,
1939),222.
57. That a small educated elite might successfully seek such
differential pay is a different matter.
58. A. K. Sen, "On Economic Inequality," 117-118.
58a. Including the two discussed in note 55a.
59. Note that the first system contains analogs at the level o(
groups to the arbitrary inequalities between individuals implied by
distribution according to labor. Thus, groups with more fertile land,
better equipment, a more talented or educated membership, will tend
to earn more and grow faster than less favorably endowed groups.
60. See Renmin Ribao editorial, February 18, 1971.
61. "Essential Difference Between Two Distribution Systems,"
by a workers' group in Shanghai's Hutung Shipyard, Peking Review,
No. 32, August 11, 1972,6.
62. See Charles Hoffmann, Work Incentive Practices and Policies
in the People's Republic of China, 1953-1965, (Albany, New York:
State Univ. of New York Press, 1967), and The Chinese Worker,
forthcoming; Barry Richman, Industrial Society in Communist China,
and "Ideology and Management: The Chinese Oscillate," in Columbia
Journal of World Business, VoL VI, No.1, January-February 1971;
Peter Schran, The Structure of Income in Communist China,
unpublished dissertation, Berkeley, 1961, and "Unity and Diversity of
Chinese Industrial Wage Policies," JAS, February 1964; Chen Mae-fun,
"Paying the Peasants," FEER, November 3, 1966; A. Nathan, "China's
Work-Point System: A Study in Agricultural Splittism," Current Scene,
VoL II No. 31, April 15, 1964, and Martin K. Whyte, "The Tachai
Brigade and Incentives for the Peasant," Current Scene, VoL VII No.
16, August 15, 1969; "Constitution of Anshan Iron and Steel Company
Spurs Revolution and Production," Peking Review, No. 16, April 17,
1970; Gerald Tannenbaum, "The Real Spirit of Tachai," Eastern
Horizon, Vol. X No.2, 1971; "Essential Difference Between Two
Distribution Systems," Peking Review, No. 32, August 11, 1972. Many
Chinese articles on the subject can be found listed in Hoffmann's
bibliography.
63. Chen Yonggui, leader of Tachai Brigade, quoted in C.C.A.S.,
China! Inside the People's Republic (New York: Bantam Books, 1972),
169.
64. The "high skills" which are rewarded at Tachai are no doubt
largely the product of after-work study and other forms of self-training,
rather than the result of formal education. As such, they are acquired at
significant personal cost.
65. Ibid.
66. Obtained during visit to Shashihyu, August 18, 1972. See
note 79.
67. M. A. Macciocchi, Daily Life in Revolutionary China. (New
York: Monthly Review, 1972, p. 255.)
68. Daily Life, 246.
69. "Management Should be Based on the Ideological
Consciousness of Commune Members," Chingchi Yenchiu, no. 3, 1966,
quoted in Macciocchi, 247. Several of the quotations in the above
paragraph of the text imply that natural endowments are not properly
subject to reward. I believe that this position, at least in its extreme
form, was a short-lived manifestation of the Cultural Revolution. More
recent articles in the Chinese press strongly endorse the principle of
paying stronger commune workers more for the extra work they can
do, for example.
70. Whyte, 6.
71. To the degree that the criteria include quantity and quality
of work done, of course, workpoints continue to play an active role as
well.
72. The problem of workpoints causing an incorrect allocation
of labor between tasks is discussed in Jan Myrdal and Gun Kessle,
China, The Revolution Continued, 81-82; Tannebaum, 15; Whyte, 3-4.
73. This aspect of the Tachai system of course raises the
political and philosophical problem of how much of the individual's
behavior ought to be subject to scrutiny, evaluation and conscious
influence by the organized representatives of society. This description
of Tachai-type criteria and their properties should not be construed as
an answer to that question. Also, our discussion ignores the question
whether it is feasible to establish methods of evaluating workers,
according to such vague and general criteria, which are neither arbitrary
(if imposed from above) nor divisive (if arrived at through group
discussion).
74. Charles Hoffmann, The Chinese Worker, (publication
forthcoming), Ch. 4.
75. Barry Richman, Industrial Society in Communist China,
318.
76. Richman states that after promotion to grade two, which is
more or less automatic, "there is typically no set pattern for basic wage
increases, which are then based chiefly on skill, experience,
productivity, and general performance, with politics playing a minor
role, at least in relatively normal times." Industrial Society, 803.
77. Industrial Society in Communist China, 804-805.
78. For Richman's entire sample of 38 industrial enterprises, the
average ratio of top pay to mean enterprise pay was 2.5 to 1. For the
14 enterprises in which an engineer or technician was the top-paid
employee, this ratio was 2.7 to 1. Therefore, in the other 24 firms, the
ratio of top engineer's pay to average enterprise pay must have been less
than 2.5 to 1. [Data from Richman, op. cit., 800-802,804]
79. Based upon an interview at Peking No. One Machine Tool
Plant, August 11, 1972, by a group of American economists, including
the author. For additional evidence of a narrowing gap between
technicians and administrative cadres, on the one hand, and ordinary
workers, on the other, see Hoffmann, op. cit., Ch. 4.
80. China! Inside the People's Republic, 189.
81. See their China: The Revolution Continued, 53-55.
82. "Life on a Chinese Commune," Hong Kong Standard,
August 25, 1972,7.
83. See A. Donnithorne, "China's Grain: Output, Procurement,
Transfers, and Trade," Economic Research Center, The Chinese
University of Hong Kong, 1971.
84. The general directions discussed above are documented in
the following sources: Colina MacDougall, "The Chinese Economy: Pie
in the Sky," PEER, No. 26, 1969; Jan Myrdal, China: The Revolution
Continued, esp. 52-56, 75-81, 109-115 and 139-172; Wheelwright and
McFarlane, The Chinese Road to Socialism, (New York: Monthly
Review, 1971); Carl Riskin, "Small Industry and the Chinese Model of
Development," The China Quarterly, No. 46, April-June 1971,
266-273.
85. Industrial Society, 807.
86_ Peking Review, no. 32, August 11, 1972,7.
87. Industrial Society, 809.
8B. Audrey Donnithorne, China's Economic System (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1967), 213.
89. China's Economic System, 164-168.
90. See the excellent discussion of this subject by Steven
Andors in America's Asia, op. cit.
91. "Keep politics firmly in command; strengthen Party
leadership; launch vigorous mass movements; institute the system of
cadre participation in productive labor and worker participation in
management, of reform of irrational and outdated rules and regulations,
and of close cooperation among workers, cadres and technicians; and go
full steam ahead with the technical innovations and technical
revolution." Peking Review, No. 27,1969,3.
92. See, for example, "Shanghai No. 19 Cotton Mill-'Red
Bulwark' of the Great Proletarian Revolution in Shanghai," Peking
Review, No. 16, 1970, 3.
93. "Take the Line as the Key Link and Carry Out Enterprise
Management Well," Hong Qi, No.4, April 1, 1972.
94. "Take the Line as the Key Link."
95. Andors, "The Chinese Factory," mimeo, 16.
96. Lenin, "From the Destruction of the Old Social System to
the Creation of the New," quoted in J. Myrdal, China, 60.
97. To the extent that this system coexists with wages
differentiated according to merit, skill or productivity, it also contains
external incentives. To the extent that the enterprise welfare fund is
tied to profits, it partakes of the mixed character of the collective
material incentive system.
98. Vroom, "Satisfaction: Its Determinants and Effects," in
Vroom and Deci, 93-95.
99. MacGregor, in Vroom and Deci, 317.
24
Further Notes on South Asia
In Crisis
WITH AN ACCOUNT OF INDIA'S COUNTER-INSURGENCY
WAR AGAINST THE NAGAS AND MIZOS
by Eqbal Ahmad
I wish I could begin by thanking Dr. Mahajani for the
compliments she pays me. But the accusations which follow,
including the suggestions that I have echoed Mr. Nixon,
underplayed the atrocities committed by Yahya's government,
and carefully avoided criticizing Mr. Bhutto, seem to indicate
that she does not really believe in my intellectual stature or
moral courage. And I am not inclined to retract any
statements on the ground suggested by Dr. Mahajani, that I
made them under "great pressure" of the "gruelling Harrisburg
trial." Indeed, had I not written under pressure for time, I
would have added to rather than "omitted" the material in the
"Notes."
It is unpleasant to have to respond to Dr. Mahajani. Her
distortions, accusations, and apologetics are easily answered.
But her "Comment" represents the kind of polemic I find
unrewarding. She raises no substantive questions, so it is
difficult to raise the over-all level of dicussion. For this reason,
I ignored her earlier and identical reaction to my interview
with Danny Schechter published in, among other journals, the
American Report, I a courtesy which she apparently mistook
for weakness. (Dr. Mahajani's "Response" appeared in the
American Report, March 10, 1972, under the title "With a
Friend like China Pakistan Needed No Enemies.")
I am responding now because she has done it again and
because, in addition to reflecting her chauvinism, her
"Comment" is representative of the attitude and the
techniques of liberal academics in India no less that the
United States, in which self righteousness based on
information garnered from Western-liberal media masquerades
as a self-proclaimed objectivity. All sources and analysis in
non-Western, particularly Marxist and revolutionary sources
are rejected as untrustworthy. Hence Dr. Mahajani enjoins me
from citing the Peking Review, while she liberally quotes The
New York Times, Newsweek, Time and the World Bank,
obviously presuming these to be "reputable, impartial
authorities." I accept the constriction she imposes, however,
not because I regard the likes of Time Magazine and the World
Bank to be more authoritative than the Peking Review, but
because I feel I must indulge her bias if Mahajani is to be
persuaded by my response.
The judgement on Dr. Mahajani's analysis will be made
by those who re-read my 'Notes' along with her 'Comments.'
For the latter bear little relation to the former. Her major
purpose seems to have been the defense of India and its
Awami League clients, she interprets and cites my statements
only in a manner and to the extent that they provide
opportunities for justifying and extolling the two and, of
course, condemning Pakistan.
Mahajani's fidelity to her government is touching. Even
the U.S.S.R., as India's ally, falls within the scope of her
apologetics. Thus the mention of mass murders in Indonesia
becomes an occasion for noting "for the record that the Soviet
Union recently distributed 75 collies of clothes, food and
medicines to the Indonesian Red Cross." Apparently she
believes this to be a more significant event than the remarkable
fact that the Indonesian army which carried out undeniable
atrocities against alleged Communists and which still holds
without trial more than 70,000 political prisoners was largely
equipped (to the tune of $1.1 billion by the time the junta
began its reign of terror against the PKI) and is still being
supplied by the U.S.S.R.-a "socialist" power.
2
Obviously, she
considers it less important to note "for the record" that
Russia's continued support for the ruthlessly anti-Communist
Indonesian junta, much like its support for the Congress
government in India, is predicated upon the policy of
promoting an anti-Chinese Asian Security bloc which, if fully
realized, would have important bearing on the future of Asia
and the world. 3
I wonder how Mahajani would describe a scholar who,
in referring to the atrocities committed by the Pakistani army,
25
would offer this statement: "I share Dr. Mahajani's righteous
indignation over the massacres of Bengalis. It should be
mentioned for the record that the U.S. government provided
$200,000,000 in aid for the displaced Bengalis, and continues
to be the largest giver of aid to Bengladesh." 4 I hope Dr.
Mahajani is not too blinded by her loyalties to realize that the
similarities between the two situations are more apt than the
contrast between $200 million and "74 collies of clothes."
And now to the specifics: with reference to the Biharis,
Mahajani says that although my concern is "legitimate and
understandable" my account is "'tilted'." I appreciate her
recognizing as "legitimate" a man's concern with the killings,
displacement, and incarceration in camps of his relatives and
friends. But does the word "tilted" have any validity as a
description of my statement on the Biharis? Or is it used, in
quotes, merely to suggest an association with Nixon and
Kissinger-men I consider war criminals?
How is my account tilted? It is noteworthy that
Mahajani does not deny the accuracy of what I wrote. She
criticizes me for not saying things she would have liked said,
irrespective of whether or not they had any relevance to my
article, or any basis in fact. She makes two allegations: One is
that in my one sentence reference to the Biharis being refugees
from Indian "since 1946," I did not explain that they were the
victims of a "holocaust" that had affected others also. She is
correct that the late 1940's (not just 1947-8) witnessed
"mutual massacres" between Hindus and Muslims. Biharis
were not the only minority to have fled their homes in order
to escape killings and rape by the majority. Who does not
know that the colonial transfer of power in India was attended
by widespread civil strife, and one of the largest demographic
movements in history? There is nothing in my article that
suggests a "one-sided massacre of Bihari Muslims." Those are
Mahajani's words, not mine.
She is apparently angry that by failing to underline the
"mutuality" of massacres in the sub-continent I may have left
the impression of "one-sided" massacre of Muslims in India. I
ought to assure her that I had absolutely no intention of
implying that while Muslims were being massacred in 'secular'
India, Hindus were playing holi in 'theocratic' Pakistan. The
'omission,' if it can be so characterized, occured simply
because I saw no reason for a general discussion of the 1946-7
"holocaust" in my article on the crisis of 1971-2. I did not
quite imagine the touchiness of India's apologists, and felt that
it would suffice to indicate, briefly, the special circumstances
which defined our concerns (mine and Saghir's), and the
situation of the Biharis in East Bengal. Hence I had indicated
that being refugees from India they felt strong loyalty to
Pakistan. Being Urdu speaking they were favored by West
Pakistan's bureaucrats and businessmen. Being an alien
minority favored by the ruling class, they were hated by the
Bengalis. They fell between chairs. Hence my conclusion:
"Homeless, Urdu-speaking, hated by the Bengalis, favored by
the West Pakistanis in the East, they were caught in the
middle." If this is what Mahajani calls "sublimate[ingl a
particular community into martyrdom," then I can do no
more than protest her judgement.
Her second objection is similar to the first: that I have
not indicated that the massacre of 10,000 Biharis by the
Awami League vigilantes was "not entirely a one-sided affair."
I have no reason to doubt Peggy Durdin's report of pitched
battles. But would Dr. Mahajani consider the following facts:
A) The Biharis constituted a minority of about I1h% in
East Bengal. And they were essentially a powerless minority.
Neither their economic condition nor occupational
concentration yielded them intluence or power in society. The
large majority being factory workers and petty functionaries,
they had influence neither in the business world nor in the
bureaucracy. They were rarely employed in the armed and
police forces which, in any case, did not intervene to stop the
killing. And no one has claimed that they were armed in those
days. Given this context what does "pitched battles" mean
and what is the point of stressing that their massacres of the
Bengalis were not one-sided either; after all, they are depicted
as heroically fighting for liberation. Mahajani's argument is
familiar, but no more convincing than the similar one made by
apologists for American crimes in Indochina.
B) The killings, one-sided or not, occurred between
March 1 and March 25, i.e., before the Pakistani army had
intervened, and during the period when Sheikh Mujib and the
Awami League had claimed and, through successful calls for
general strike and boycotts, demonstrated their de facto
control over the provincial government including the police
force and over the major cities and towns. Whether their
failure to prevent the killings was due to incompetence or
irresponsibility is a point too moot to be resolved. Nor is the
distinction likely to be meaningful to history, or to the dead
and wounded people. So I should let Mahajani take her pick
between irresponsibility or incompetence.
C) Sheikh Mujib did indeed demand official enquiry into
the killings. He now has the power to meet his own demand
but has not done so. It does not matter, because it will be as
meaningless and self-serving as was the previous official
enquiry.
The government of Yahya Khan carried out an enquiry;
reported the killings of more than 100,000 Biharis and
Bengalis opposed to the Awami League; liberally and
selectively quoted the Western press to reinforce its
contention; and offered this as the primary reason for calling
out the army on March 25.
5
In my article I termed the official
claim as "exaggerated," and rejected the government's
justification for the military intervention on several grounds
including the one following: "... criminality is not a
commercial proposition: one cannot deposit the crimes of one
into the the account of another. The very fact that the
military regime sought justifications for its behavior by
referring to the excesses of the Awami League and the aroused
Bengali masses was a measure of the steep decline in the civic
standards of our army and civil service." And now Mahajani
objects that I do not stress the mutuality and two-sided
character of the massacres and other "affairs" in India and
Bangladesh. The decline in civic standards is obviously steeper
and more widespread than I had suspected.
Dr. Mahajani also makes two assertions in connection
with the Biharis. One, and the more startling, is her statement
that "Now that the Awami League is firmly in control in
independent Bangladesh, it has shown a remarkable capacity
to prevent large scale revenge killings of the Biharis." This is a
shocking statement to come from anyone with the slightest
pretense of interest in South Asia. That a scholar specialized in
the region has made this claim taxes my credultiy. That the
statement was drafted in the summer of 1972 is beyond belief
for by that time the Bangladesh government's complicity in
the atrocities against and massacres of the Biharis was
26
overwhelming.
I should discuss this problem in some detail, because it
has more than academic or polemical interest-for me and
hopefully for those who claim to have honest, humanitarian
concern for the peoples of South Asia. The situation of the
minority in Bangladesh continues to be terrible, and some
expression of international concern might help assure the
survival of these hapless people besieged in the ghettoes and
camps of Bangladesh. Hence, it is important to take a brief
look at the situation as it has developed since December 1971.
For nearly one and a half months following the
"liberation" of Bangladesh, the Western media which had
previously publicized the atrocities under the Pakistani
military government, reported widespread "reprisals" against
the minority peoples. "Reprisals" was the word; eye for an
eye; loot, rape, murder; men, women, and children. The
leading roles were generally taken by the commanders and
units of the Mukti Bahini. The much publicized army of
liberation, whose discipline and heroism were acclaimed by
Mrs. Gandhi, Sheikh Mujib, and Tajuddin Ahmad, had
allegedly turned, in a matter of days, into an indisciplined
rabble, impervious to the command of its civilian
superiors-the government of the Republic of Bangladesh and
Sheikh Mujib, the Banglabandhu whose word is said to carry
the weight of law. "The partisan heroes of yesterday"
lamented an editorial in the Times of London, "are the sadists
and rapists of today or their accomplices.,,6 The "liberating"
Indian army behind whose tanks and armored columns the
frontier Bahini had marched into the interior of Bangladesh
looked on because apparently it was too disciplined to
interfere with the "autonomy" of its ally. And Mrs. Gandhi,
whose powerful army had invaded East Pakistan professedly to
accomplish a humanitarian mission and had obtained the
surrender of Pakistani troops, declaimed any responsibility for
the safety of the tortured minority. The Indian government
did not wish, said the Delhi spokesman, to interfere with the
"sovereignty" of Bangladesh.
Act II of what Mahajani calls the "burlesque of
brutality" opened on December 19, 1971, with the
"legendary" commander Abdel Kader Siddiqui and other
officers of the Mukti Bahini cast in leading roles. The Freedom
Rally at the Dacca Race Course stadium was guarded by
"Mukti Bahini soldiers dressed in an array of colorful uniforms
and heavily armed." 7
Four men, their hands tied, were tortured at length as
they begged for mercy. Then they were murdered. As for their
crime, "none of the leaders of the Mukti Bahini who were
present at the rally could explain the specific charges against
the four men." In thus entertaining a "cheering crowd"
estimated at 5,000 the liberation leaders displayed versatility.
The men were beaten for half an hour from jaws to genitals.
Then they were stabbed with bayonets, also at length,
although the "stabbing was briefly interrupted when the
self-styled General Mr. Siddiqui asked for a bayonet from one
of the soldiers. A Mukti Bahini soldier handed over his rifle
and then propped up one of the bleeding men so Mr. Siddiqui
could make some direct jabs into the chest .... It went on for
10 minutes more." And then the finale: " ... the soldiers
wiped their bayonets, put them away and walked through the
crowd to their vehicles .... A small boy, possibly a relative of
one of the dying men flung himself on the ground beside him.
As the crowd closed in on the dying men, the boy was
trampled."
I have not cited this incident for its shock value, but
because from what I know, I believe it foreshadowed the style
and tone of succeeding atrocities. In the following weeks and
months the 'reprisals' would be general and generally brutal;
and the pattern was similar. Many boys and girls would be
trampled and raped by mobs as the police and armed forces of
Bangladesh, having set the stage for excesses with their
summary reprisals against alleged "collaborators," looked the
other way.
Furthermore, the Freedom Rally at the Race Course
illustrated the special Congress-Awami League style of
commltlng atrocltles. Being liberal, "democratic" and
avowedly moral, they lack the crudeness of military dictators
like Yahya Khan. If one were to judge them by their rhetoric
and claims, they, like the war criminals of the U.S., would
seem to be the most peace-loving and humane among men.
Thus the Race Course rally is reported, by the same Associated
Press correspondents, to have begun with General Siddiqui
calling upon the masses to "preserve calm and discipline and
not to take the law in their own hands." The other speakers
dwelled on the themes of freedom, justice and order. After the
speeches, people led by their leaders prayed for a "peaceful
future for free Bangladesh." This was the prologue to the
drama whose main features were torture, killing, and
trampling.
The epilogue to this saw the Indian army patrolling the
streets to break up Bengali mobs "hours after the executions"
and Indian commanders promising newsmen that "disciplinary
action would be taken against those responsible." That was
just before the Indian government denied its responsibiliry for
the safety of minorities in Bangladesh. It should be stated that
no disciplinary action was taken against the army and civilian
leaders who had committed this crime documented by, among
others, photographers. Similar forgiveness does not extend to
the Pakistanis whom Sheikh Mujib is bent on trying for war
crimes and whom the government of India still holds in prison
in violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention (Article 118,
among others). Nor does it extend to Bengali patriots like
Mukti Bahini's respected Commander J alii, one of those rare
officers who fought the West Pakistani forces in the interior
and hence was a popular figure in his region. He was promptly
dismissed and arrested after he criticized the Indian Army's
transfer to India of the armaments surrendered by the
Pakistanis, as well as of industrial equipment from the Khulna
region.
8
(Commander Jalil's protest had cause. Der Spiegel,
April 24, 1972, reported: " ... India not only helped the new
state of Bangladesh into existence, not only smashed the
Pakistani army in East Bengal, but also destroyed the economy
and communication; Indians also damaged Bangladesh's most
important export industry-jute. . .. the Indians dismantled
the Daulatpar jute factory in Khulna as well as the huge jute
spinning plant at Adamjinagar and transported the valuable
machines to West Bengal.... Today, they explain the
redundancy of the factories by saying they were bombed and
sabotaged by retreating Pakistanis.")
For nearly two months such "reprisals" against the
minority community were reported in the Western press, and
hardly need documentation although I have provided some. 9
Yet world opinion, deeply sympathetic to Bangladesh for the
sufferings the Pakistani army had inflicted upon its people, did
not react. Ascribing the violence to pent-up popular anger and
to the inability of the Awami League government to prevent
the killings, the world suspended judgement. Even concerned
I
27
people, including me, remained inactive in the hope that the
Bangladesh government would end the horrors as soon as its
authority over its own armed and police forces was
established. Since Sheikh Mujib was considered to be the key
to consolidation of the Awami League government and
Pakistan's President Bhutto had released him promptly and
unconditionally, the expectation did not appear to be great.
By the end of February the minority, numbering around
1,500,000, had been driven out of their homes into ghettoes
and camps. The problems of policing, therefore, were
considerably reduced. Yet the massacres continued, although
the international press, sensing the lack of public interest,
nearly stopped reporting them. The pacific claims and liberal
rhetoric of Bengali and Indian leaders may also have had a
reassuring effect on the media. The atrocities in Bengal were
not news any more.
Occasionally, an honest reporter was moved by the
excess of inhumanity and the plight of a seemingly doomed,
beleagered people. Such was the case of Peter Hazelhurst of
The Times (London), whose earlier reports on the atrocities of
the Pakistan army had moved the conscience of mankind, and
had been widely circulated by supporters of Bangladesh.
On May 8, 1972, nearly five months after the Awami
League government came to power in Bangladesh, The Times
published his report from Dacca. It said:
"They [Bengalis] are behaving in much the same manner
as the Pakistanis did during the nine months of repression in
Bangladesh. They have closed their eyes to reality and to the
plight of the 1,500,000 Urdu speaking minority which is living
in stark terror in Bangladesh.
"Non-Bengalis have been hounded out of their homes
into crowded ghettoes. They cannot find employment and
without protection men, women and children are
systematically being slaughtered by fanatical mobs.
".. , Hate, bigotry, and an official cloak of ruthless
indifference has brought Bangladesh to the thresh hold ot pure
and unadulterated fascism."
The details of Hazelhurst's report include the familiar:
government cliches dismiss "the helpless non-Bengali
community as miscreants, collaborators, and thugs." Officials
"who have not bothered to see the ghettoes two miles away
from their offices give the foreign press bland assurances that
the minority community is contented and safe." In the
besieged ghettoes the "miscreants" and "collaborators," the
"safe" and "contented" turn out to be "terrified women,
starving children, the weeping widows whose husbands have
been slaughtered.... Non-Bengalis are pulled out of their
homes almost every day, in most cases in front of the police.
They simply disappear."
According to Hazelhurst's eye-witness accounts,
massacres, rapes, starvation, humiliation, and terror occurred
in camp after camp where these people were congregated. The
oppression is unrelieved because, among other reasons, " ...
the International Red Cross has been forced to hand over
supervision of the camps and distribution of food for the
Biharis to Bengali nationalists belonging to the Bangladesh Red
Cross." "But the Bangladesh Red Cross is completely
indifferent to its task. During many visits to the camps I could
not discover a single Bangladesh Red Cross or government
official. .."
Other reports indicate that the government has been
guilty of more than indifference. For example, a report in Der
Spiege[10 gives a harrowing account of brutalities by a "mob
of policemen, Mukti Bahini, and inhabitants." It says:
"Despite such outbursts of hatred, the Sheikh withdrew the
protective cordon of Indian troops from Mirpur, plundering
Mukti Bahini forced their way into the homes of the terrified
Biharis. When the half-starved Biharis resisted the marauders
incited by Pakistani propaganda, Mujib borrowed a jet trainer
plane from the Indians and had the quarter bombed." (Would
someone be willing to argue that it was not "entirely a
one-sided affair"?)
Like the Der Spiegel correspondent, Hazelhurst, whose
accuracy as a reporter of knowledge of South Asia had until
then not been questioned by Indian and Bengali nationalists,
put the blame for the "deteriorating plight" of the
non-Bengalis "squarely on the shoulders of the Prime Minister
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman." The Banglabandhu has not only
failed to take a "firm stand" on the question of their security,
not only lacked the "courage" to oppose the bigots who
surround him, but in fact has been riding the tide of hatred
and is prone to inflame public opinion. "For instance,"
Hazelhurst reported, "in response to the British mission's
appeal for tolerance, the Sheikh has made a public statement
which can only aggravate the issue." 11 He "called on his
people to launch a movement against the collaborators who
are conspiring with foreign collaborators to undermine the
freedom of Bangladesh." Hazelhurst concluded: "Under the
circumstances the average Bengali would accept this as open
license to hunt down the non-Bengalis. Unless the
international community is able to intervene, these wretched
people will slowly but surely face extermination."
The international community has not intervened. The
"humanitarians" who made so much of Pakistani "genocide"
have not even acknowledged the existence of this human
problem in Bangladesh. 12 The U.S. Senators and
Congressmen-Edward Kennedy, Frank Church, and Charles
Percy among others-who had visited refugee camps in India
and overflowed with humanitarian concern for the plight of
the Bengalis have spoken not a word. They have not even
dispatched their aides to report on the fate of the minorities in
the camps of Bangladesh. The cold war liberals, like Chester
Bowles, whose consciences were so aroused by the excesses of
the Pakistan army, have uttered not a word of protest. Nor
have they joined with philanthropic colleagues in raising relief
funds or proposing solutions for the forgotten minority. And
the professors, among them many specialists on South Asia,
have not investigated and reported the situation, nor taken a
stand on it.
In vain have I appealed to some of the academicians
whom I had met last year in connection with my activities
against the Pakistani junta in East Bengal. The Urdu-speaking
minority in Bangladesh, however deserving of attention on
humanitarian grounds, holds no interest for them, perhaps
because it is a bad political bet. Unlike the Bengali nationalists
of last year, this people has no potential or actual base of
power, and does not enjoy the patronage of a foreign power.
Seemingly forsaken even by Pakistan, to which they had
remained loyal, the so-called Biharis have nothing to offer the
political and academic careerists except the risk of incurring
the displeasure of India and Bangladesh. These same factors
also explain, at least partly, the absence of Western academic
interest in the Nagas and the Mizos-a question to which I shall
return.
Yet, expression of an active interest by a concerned
international community might help settle some of the human
28
and political problems resulting from last year's war and
break-up of Pakistan. There are some 90,000 Pakistanis in
Indian prisons. They are bargaining counters for Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi's plans for a formal Pakistani
acquiescence to India's occupation of Kashmir and the denial
of self-determination to the people there; and they are pawns
in Sheikh Mujib's demagogic strategy to get national unity by
insistence on a war crimes trial. Then there are an estimated
300,000 Bengalis stranded in Pakistan-the military personnel
among them being confined to guarded barracks-hostages for
the release of the Pakistani prisoners. The majority of them are
skilled people whose services Bangladesh desperately needs,
and whose return should not be impeded for the dubious
political strategy and vengeful emotional satisfaction of a war
crimes trial. (In a sub-continent whose recent history has been
marked by "mutuality" of offical and unofficial crimes against
the peoples, a trial of imprisoned Pakistanis for war crimes can
only be an act of vengeance; it will prove only the
vulnerability of the vanquished.) Finally, there is the
Urdu-speaking minority of Bengal whose future hangs on the
willingness of the three governments-India, Bangladesh, and
Pakistan-to see them as symbols of our collective inhumanity.
For, as refugees from India, used and abandoned by Pakistan,
abused and persecuted by Bangladesh, they symbolize our
contemporary condition under the triple malaise of
"communalism," elitism, and nationalism.
Dr. Mahajani would undoubtedly disagree for she
appears bent on portraying India and Bangladesh as spotless,
virtuous nations, even if this requires rewriting history. This
brings me to her second set of assertions about the Biharis.
While affirming that in "1947-8 there was a holocaust of
mutual massacres," she quickly parcels out the blame: the
massacres "began with the Direct Action of the Muslim League
in the Punjab and Sind where Hindus and Sikhs were
liquidated." Persons who are familiar with the recent history
of the sub-continent will re-read her sentence in utter disbelief.
There is nothing startlinf; about her assertion that the
"holocaust" began with the "Direct Action of the Muslim
League." That is a bit of Indian Congress Party historiography
which is known to all and believed by many. This is neither
the place nor the time for me to challenge the Indian
nationalist version of history. But I find utterly shocking the
amendments Dr. Mahajani has introduced in it, for she displays
total disregard for the ethics of scholarship.
Until now, the Congress thesis, however dubious an
interpretation of history, had at least a chronological
consistency, and a reference to actual events. It dated the
beginnings of civil war in the sub-continent with the Direct
Action Day, called by the Muslim League, on August 16,
1946. On that day and for four days following there were
intense Hindu-Muslim riots in Calcutta and many people were
killed. The communal riots of Calcutta had repercussions in
East Bengal, particularly in Noakhali district where for nearly
three weeks the Muslim majority committed violence upon the
Hindu minority constituting some 40% of the population. The
Noakhali massacres were avenged by the Hindu majority in
Bihar in districts-Gaya, Patna, Chapra, Muzzafarpur-where
the Muslims constituted a minority of less than 5%. It was
these riots in Bihar which produced in 1946 the first major
demographic movement of a minority community into areas
where their co-religionists constituted the majority. Since
Bihar bordered on Bengal and the Muslim League ministry in
power there offered them help, some 350,000 Biharis moved
into Bengal during the period of October-December 1946. 13
At the time there were no major riots or killings in the Punjab
or Sind although violence was endemic throughout the
sub-continent. The northern part of India was engulfed by
widespread civil war after the announcement, on June 3, 1947,
of the partition of India. In other words, during the first phase
of the "holocaust," the violence was largely concentrated in
the eastern rather than the northern and western regions of the
subcontinent.
These facts, known to any South Asian over 25, have
until now been used by Indian nationalists to promote the
thesis that the "holocaust" began in Calcutta and Noakhali on
August 16, 1946, with the Direct Action Day of the Muslim
League which was then in power in Bengal. Why then is the
Mahajani version different? It is possible that ignorance of
chronology explains her belief that in "1947-8 ... a holocaust
. .. began with the Direct Action of Muslim League in the
Punjab and Sind where Hindus and Sikhs were liquidated."
But for a scholar concerned with South Asia, this
chronological sleight of hand is difficult to accept as a product
of ignorance. Mahajani's motive in revising the old party line is
explainable in another, less complimentary, way: she is trying
to absolve and rehabilitate India's old enemies who are now its
clients. In ascribing the beginning of the holocaust to the
Direct Action Day, Indian nationalist politicians and writers
had hitherto denounced as criminals and fascists the Muslim
League leaders of Bengal. The chief of the alleged "goondas"
was H.S. Suhrawardy ("Maha-Goonda" was the epithet!),
Prime Minister of Bengal, and the mentor of Sheikh Mujibur
Rahman. The Sheikh, then a fire-brand, and super-annuated
student leader and partisan for Pakistan, was among the
"goondas" alleged to have led the massacres of Hindus. Dr.
Mahajani does not want any facts, past or present, to reflect
badly on India, its clients, and allies. Hence, while maintaining
the old line on how and why the civil war began, she
introduced the fudging of dates and the changes in places
necessary to correspond to India's new "realities." Thus if the
"holocaust" of "1947-8" began with the Direct Action of
Muslim League and liquidation of Hindus and Sikhs in the
Punjab and Sind, the Bengalis are absolved; yet the guilt still
rests on the shoulders of Pakistanis. So much for academic
integrity.
I do not wish to challenge Mahajani's assertion that the
Biharis in Bangladesh have "openly expressed their wish to
return to India, rather than go to Pakistan." If it is true, then
the Indian government's refusal to welcome back a persecuted
people is a measure of its morality. In striking contrast, that
same government provided refuge to a claimed "10 million"
refugees, provided supplies and sanctuary to the frontier
Bahini, and invaded another country-for 'humanitarian'
reasons. And then denied responsibility for the safety of
minorities in the land it had "liberated." Instead of protesting
the parochial double-standard of her government, Dr. Mahajani
sees in the alleged preference of the Biharis for returning to
India "an eloquent testimony to the situation in India where
60 million Muslims have chosen to continue to live." The
theme is familiar: secular India vs. theocratic Pakistan,
democratic India vs. militaristic Pakistan, etc. But this kind of
dichotomy insults intelligence and obfuscates understanding.
India is about as secular a state as is the u.s. non-racist, for
secularism in one, as racial equality in the other, is a
constitutional norm not a political or social reality.
29
This is a complex question which demands detailed
analysis. Here it is sufficient to note that much like the Hindus
in Pakistan (who were concentrated in the East), Indian
Muslims face extreme discrimination and live in fear. For good
reason. Religious riots and massacres have been common in
independent India; and being a small minority (relative to total
population) the Muslims are generally at the receiving end of
them. According to Mr. Ishaque Sambhli, an Indian M.P.,
7,500 anti-Muslim riots had occurred in independent India by
the end of 1967. In 1968, according to the Indian Home
Ministry's annual report, there were 346 such riots. In 1969
the number rose to 5 19. Judging by press reports and
parliamentary debates, 1970 was a particularly bad year;
according to Jyotirmony Basu, M.P., there was one communal
riot every 54 hours. It should be noted that minor skirmishes
seldom get reported in the sub-continent. Hence these figures
indicate serious incidents. In many cases the violence was
widespread, involving many deaths and more atrocities-e.g.,
the riots of Maharashtra (1970), Indore and Ahmedabad
(1969), Ranchi and Sursand (1967), Calcutta, Jamshedpar and
Rourekela (1964), Jabalpur (1961). A few, like the massacres
of Ahmedabad in September-October 1969, and those of
Maharashtra in May-June 1970, had the magnitude of
holocausts.
14
It should be noted also that the provincial
governments and police forces were generally reported to be
indifferent; in several instances the police were alleged to have
joined the killing and looting.
Contrary, obviously, to Dr. Mahajani's belief, the
"partition period" was not the only "dark year in the
sub-continent." And these recurrent riots and massacres are
perhaps a more "eloquent testimony to the situation in India"
than the unrequited desire of the Biharis to return. However, I
have not cited these facts to accuse the Indian government or
absolve the Pakistani. I want only to underline the fact that
the spector of parochial communal hatred still haunts the
sub-continent equally-"secular" India and "liberated"
Bangladesh as much as "theocratic" Pakistan. It has deep roots
and now defines and permeates our politics. It can be
sloganized, explained, or rationalized away only at our peril.
Nothing less than total mutation, a revolutionary
transformation of our social, economic, and political
institutions, will rid us of this evil.
As for my remark on the United Nations, Dr. Mahamani
does me injustice. I did not invest the U.N. with moral
authority, although I wish I had the power to do so. Dr.
Mahajani is right. An organization as abused and flaunted by
its members as is the U.N. can command but meager authority.
In so far as India is prominent among those nations which have
abused and also defied the U.N., it has contributed to the
weakening of the world organization.
As for my statement on the connections between the
C.I.A. and the Awami League and Sheikh Mujib, Dr. Mahajani
does not deny the accuracy of the facts I had cited in order to
point out the bourgeois bias, elitist tradition, Western outlook,
and actual links of the Awami League with vested interests in
West Pakistan as well as in the U.S.A., and not just with the
C.I.A. She counters these facts by saying that Mujib is an
"extraordinarily popular leader" and supporting him would
show good judgement. Since the C.I.A. by definition does not
support "popular leaders" and lacks "sound judgement," it
therefore could not have favored the Awami League. With
such logic on her side, there is little I can do to satisfy her.
There are ample materials available to give one a more realistic
understanding of the C.I.A.'s political preferences and capacity
for sound judgement. Moreover, I did not single out the C.I.A.
as the link between the Awami League and the U.S. Making a
bogey of the C.I.A. is a favorite ploy of third world liberals. I
find equally reprehensible an individual's or organization's
ideological, political or financial ties with other branches of
the U.S. national security bureaucracy and multi-national
corporations. Often the C.I.A. bogey is raised by the very
people who collaborate with it. The government of India is an
example. Prime Minister Gandhi's and her Congress Party
colleagues' denunciations of the C.I.A. are well known. Yet,
for at least a decade they have knowingly, but secretly,
collaborated with the C.I.A. and Pentagon. Project Saphire
Star, for example, begun in 1962, along India's
Tibetan-Nepalese borders, is now more than a decade old. So
are the U.S.-Indian electronic installations which monitored,
among others, the Chinese nuclear tests at Lop Nor in
Sinkiang. These joint projects were still alive in November
1971.
15
I have not been abre to ascertain whether or not the
American intelligence operatives have since bowed out to
make room for the Russians.
With regard to my statement that the Awami League left
the interior of Bangladesh to form a provisional government
and a frontier army in India, Dr. Mahajani either did not wish
to face facts or missed my point. No sane person can blame
another for choosing temporary exile from a repressive regime.
That was not the issue in my article. My point was that no
liberation movement which sacrifices the principle of
self-reliance for the sake of funds and supplies and the safety
of its leaders can possible maintain its sovereignty and
independence. Histories of liberation movements provide
several pointers for evaluating their present and future. Among
these are the following: the overall leadership of a genuine and
self-reliant movement a) does not flee the interior, and if
already in exile, returns to it, after an armed struggle begins;
b) does not create a frontier army; c) does not form a
provisional government until the major goals of the struggle
appear to be near and the enemy begins to seek negotiations;
d) does not depend, especially in the first phases, on foreign
supplies; e) never accepts logistical support from a stronger
neighboring government. My point was that the Awami League
leaders violated all these tenets, and effectively bartered away,
for the sake of their own security and the rapid fulfillment of
their personal and group ambitions, the sovereignty and
independence of Bangladesh. The scene, on T.V., showing the
entry of the Awami League rulers into the capital of
"liberated" Bangladesh symbolized the character of their
movement and their regime. They entered Dacca in Cadillacs
escorted by Indian tanks and armored cars. It is repugnant and
slightly silly to find these men compared with Ho Chi Minh,
Vo Nguyen Giap, and Pham Van Dong-revolutionaries who,
since 1942, have led history's most inspiring struggle for
liberation from the interior of Indochina.
Finally, Dr. Mahajani challenges me to document my
statement on India's suppression of the Naga and Mizo
movements for self-determination. That is a subject deserving
of a separate article. My reply to her is already so long, I shall
have to be concise.
Her question is legitimate: "If there is Indian brutality in
Nagaland, why does it remain unpublicized ...?" The answer is
that the "global press" has not "conspired" to suppress the
news. It has been prevented by the government of India from
covering it. As Gordon P. Means and Ingunn N. Means wrote in
30
Pacific Affairs, "Foreign visitors are only rarely allowed by the
Indian government to enter Nagaland, and then after the most
careful scrutiny to ascertain that neither their interests nor
their purposes are of a political nature." 16
Nagas and Mizos
On the rare occasions when an outsider was permitted a
visit among Nagas and Mizos, he returned with accounts of the
popularity of their liberation movements and horrid reports of
what the Meanses called "draconian counter-insurgency
measures." 17
Two of these "rare" visitors were Gavin Young of the
London Observer and the Reverend Michael Scott. Young was
admitted into Nagaland in 1960-61 by the Indian government,
then briefly euphoric over the presumed success of its
counter-insurgency operations. Reverend Scott, an English
minister of impeccable anti-colonialist record, went to
Nagaland in 1964 as a member of the Peace Mission which
helped arrange an abortive cease-fire. Scott has since been
denounced by Indian officials, the press, and other apologists.
But it is necessary to recall that as an active supporter of
India's independence, he had been a highly acclaimed friend of
the Indian National Congress, and after independence served as
an advisor to the Indian Mission at the U.N. The reports, by
these two eye-witnesses, being the only detailed ones by
outside observers, should be read in full for even a superficial
understanding of the situation in Nagaland. However, news has
just arrived that the visit of a third foreigner has been
THE CHINA QUARTERLY
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Recent Trends in the Chinese Economy
A Factional Model for CCP Politics
The Chinese View of Their Place in the World:
An Historical Perspective
Chinese Press Perceptions of Threat:
The U.S. and India 1962
New Developments in Language Reform
sanctioned by the government of India. Although foreign
missionaries are still banned from predominantly Christian
Nagaland, permission has been granted for a brief crusade by
Billy Graham. 19 In Washington, the concession was
interpreted as Mrs. Gandhi's conciliatory gesture to Richard
Nixon. The evangelist, whose sincere and demagogic preaching
of heavenly salvation in the face of earthly oppression and
identification with the powerful are his most notable
attributes, is likely to be a "safe" visitor to the forbidden
territory.
The armed phase of the Naga national struggle began in
March 1956 after some eight years of peaceful civil resistance
by Nagas to the annexation of their state by India. Since then,
upwards of 4,000 Indian soldiers (not including the locally
raised mercenary police forces) have been engaged in
counter-insurgency operations in a population of 250,000.
20
Reverend Michael Scott reported that at one time India
deployed "between 40,000 and 50,000 soldiers to control a
civilian population of only about 300,000." 21 The lowest
figure yields a ratio of one soldier for 80 civilians (men,
women, and children), the highest of 1-8. As the Peace Mission
which arranged the abortive cease-fire reported to Prime
Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, ". . . . there are few countries
where a state of emergency involving such high expenditure of
military measures in proportion to the population, one soldier
to every eight persons it is estimated, would have been
tolerated so long ..." That was in 1964. The state of
emergency continues, Reverend Billy Graham's planned
evangelical appearance in Nagaland notwithstanding.
January-March 1973
Issue No. 53
Thomas Rawski
Andrew J. Nathan
John Cranmer-Byng
Kuang-sheng Liao, Allen S. Whiting
Constantin Milsky
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31
The ratio of Pakistani soldiers in Bangladesh-some
30,000 in March 1972 reaching a peak of 70,000 by November
in a population of 75 million (the remainder of some 90,000
Pakistani prisoners in India are civilians and dependants)-was
one soldier to every 2,400 civilians at the lowest, and one to
1,050 at the highest. Furthermore, in East Bengal Pakistani
military operations lasted nine months in comparison with the
18 years of Indian military operations in Nagaland, and some
seven years among the Mizos. Unless Dr. Mahajani sincerely
believes that Indian troops in Naga and Mizo territories have
been on a mountain climbing mission, she should not have
considered as "extraordinary" my statement that the
repression carried out by the Indian Federal Government was
"little publicized but more prolonged and no less brutal than
that of the Pakistani junta in Bengal." Since her apologetics
have obscured the issues, I should also remind the reader that I
made that statement not at all to lessen the guilt of the
Pakistani government in Bangladesh, but to point out that our
(i.e., South Asian) governing elites' ideological and
administrative commitment to centralism, inherited from our
colonial masters, has been very costly to the interests and well
being of the people.
The cost of India's operations for the Nagas and Mizos is
not something which can be calculated precisely. What little is
known, however, indicates one of the most ruthless and
genocidal counter-insurgency operations in contemporary
history. Relatively more is known about the situation in
Nagaland. Gavin Young and Michael Scott tell us much about
the intensity and inhumanity of India's military and
pacification effort there. Moreover, the NFG (Naga Federal
Government) by maintaining an office in London has been
able, on occasion, to publicize its charges of Indian atrocities.
These include desecration and burning of churches, torture of
villagers suspected of aiding the guerrillas, destruction and
bombing of villages, rape, murder, and forced regrouping of
the majority of people into "new villages," which the Nagas
consider concentration camps, but which India's pacification
experts insist on calling Progressive Protected Villages. As for
the accuracy of these charges, Gordon and Ingunn Means say
that even "moderate Nagas, however implacably opposed they
may be to the NFG, can also testify to the truthfulness of the
latter's accusations of atrocities on the part of the Indian army
in N agaland ." 22
Although less known, the repression of the Mizos has
been hardly less harsh. Two Indian parliamentarians-Professor
G.G. Swell, MP, and Nichols-Roy, MLA-accompanied by
Professor Martin Majaw Narayan, visited Mizoland, evidently
after a mop-up operation. They submitted a report to the
Indian prime minister on their findings and offered to
substantiate it with photographs and tape-recordings. What
they saw contradicted the "government assertion that the
Indian Air Force was used only for dropping supplies and men
to the besieged security posts and for limited strafing ..." In
fact, the Air Force had bombed even Aijal, the area's major
town, and the bombing was severe and excessive. As a result,
the "economic center not only of Aijal but of the whole
district, the Burra Bazar, was a shamble of cinder and ashes."
As for the army:
Instead of the army assisting civil authority it was the
army that was controlling everything from road traffic to
the movement of private individuals ... Nobody could
move from one place to another without permission, and
this permission was difficult to obtain. The result was that
practically the entire population in the Mizo Hills was
under village or house arrest.. .. More than 75% of the
houses in the villages that we passed through and in Aijal
itself were locked and empty. Very few could be seen
moving about, and these moved silently, cautiously, keenly,
conscious of dangers that seemed to surround them.
The report continues:
One could almost smell fear, suspicion and insecurity
in the air. The Deputy Commissioner [highest official in the
District} did not sleep in bis official residence despite heavy
armed guards but slept in tbe officers mess of the Assam
Rifles Post. Important Mizo leaders [collaborators with
Indian authorities} stayed in their houses and many of
them had resorted to the device of sleeping at different
places on different nights.
The introductory passages of the report, excepted above,
are followed by specific accounts of atrocities-collective
punishments, torture, arbitrary arrests, rapes, official murders,
burning of villages, all the horrors familiar to those who have
studied the worst examples of the contemporary wars of
counter-insurgency. But there are local varIations. For
example, during my research on counter-insurgency in Algeria
and Indochina I never came across anything so symbolic of
official terrorism as here; the entire civilian population
flying the white flag of surrender: "In the midst of this eerie,
silent and fear-laden atmosphere there was a phenomenen that
struck us as curious, the plethora of white cloth pieces or flags
hoisted from houses empty or occupied."
Enough. It is important to underline, though, that the
report I have cited was written by men who fundamentally
supported the Indian government's suppression of the Mizos
and opposed their right to self-determination. They were
appalled only by the enormity of official oppression and
doubted its value. Their report concludes:
It is far from our intention to run down our armed
forces. It is also not our intention to question the
government's right and duty to put down lawlessness. We
do not subscribe to any idea of cession from this
country. ...
But at the same time we wish to submit, with all the
emphasis at our command, tbat tbe unity, integrity, and the
best interests of the country can not be promoted by
allowing the kind of things and atrocities that have taken
place ... It was not the MNF [Mho National Front}
volunteers, with whom the government are fighting a war,
whu had suffered at the hands of our security forces. The
Army has not so far been able to catch hold of them or
break their organization. 23
We do not know what has become of the isolated Mizo
people, their culture and society over the last five years.
India's war on them remains invisible. The Indian government
has refused persistent requests to permit journalists in the area
and remains the only source of information.
24
Occasionally
we get a glimpse of reality. On September 23, 1967, the New
York Times reported that Indian Government spokesmen
brushed off reports of active fighting as "minor skirmishes in a
mop-up operation." It further informed that villages have been
"regrouped" to isolate the guerrillas of the militant MNF from
32
the 260,000 peoJ'le (total Mizo population) and sources of
supply. To this end "villages have been destroyed, crops
burned and one-fifth of the total population, more than
50,000 people, have been resettled in a 10 mile belt next to
the main communication route which runs 200 miles south of
Lungleh."
Obviously, that did not solve the problem. On May 28,
1969, the New York Times reported that four-fifths of the
Mizo people, some 200,000 of them, had been uprooted from
their ancestral villages, and resettled in "Progressive Protected
Villages." They were allowed to farm by day and obliged to
return inside camp at night, their movements controlled by an
elaborate checking of identity cards. Their traditional way of
life was disrupted, and as a result, food had to be "airlifted."
Nevertheless, the Indian pundits of pacification were
optimistic; "miracle seeds" were being tested among the Mizos
and Nagas. By now students of Vietnam, Laos, and Algeria will
have recognized many parallels.
Before I conclude the discussion on Nagas and MilOs,
two facts must be underscored. First, Dr. Mahajani
notwithstanding, India's claim over Nagaland is juridically
questionable. Never a part of India-politically, racially, or
culturally-Nagaland came under the sway of the British
empire after the Anglo-Burmese War of 1824. From then on,
the British respected its autonomy as a self-governing territory.
In the Government of India Act of 1935 (which, when not
specifically altered by the Independence Act of 1947, defined
the "inheritance" of the successor states of India and Pakistan)
the Naga hill district was designated as an "excluded area,"
one beyond the jurisdiction of the Indian provincial and
federal legislatures. Unless India claims the British Empire in
South Asia as its "inheritance," its claim of sovereignty over
Nagaland is at best dubious. Mahatma Gandhi had the integrity
to acknowledge this fact. On July 19, 1947, he assured a
delegation of Naga leaders that "Nagas have every right to be
independent," and that "force would not be employed" to
compel them to join the Indian union. 2S
The second fact is that the Nagas did not start an armed
struggle until they had exhausted all peaceful means of
achieving India's recognition of their sovereignty. For nearly a
decade, delegations of Naga leaders pleaded their case in Delhi.
On August 14, 1947, they declared their independence. To
buy time, the government of India offered a compromise
granting Nagaland autonomy for 10 years. Furthermore,
Article 9 of the Hydari agreement (Mr. Akbar Hydari was then
the Indian governor of Assam) stipulated that at the end of 10
years, the Naga National Council would be consulted on
whether to renew the agreement or whether there was a need
to arrive at a "new agreement regarding the future of the Naga
people." As India's intentions became evident, the Nagas made
peaceful gestures to demonstrate their aspirations. They
requested an impartial plebiscite for self-determination.
Denied this, their National Council held its own plebiscite in
1951 to "remove any possible element of doubt as to the
passionate desire in the hearts of the Naga people for freedom
and independence from India, and ... with a genuine feeling
of goodwill, to avoid any possible injury ... to the reputation
of India...." To no avail.
Later, as a gesture of non-cooperation, the Nagas
boycotted the general elections of 1952-the first that India
forced upon them. That not one Naga sought election and no
one voted was a testimony to the unity of their aspirations and
to the absolute popularity of the Naga National Council-a
representative body which has since been destroyed by the
Indian occupation authorities. (I find this a more impressive
indicator of popular support than Sheikh Mujib's 41% vote,
for autonomy not for independence.) In 1953, the Nagas
carried out a successful popular campaign of civil disobedience
against the occupying government, involving non-cooperation,
tax refusal, strikes and demonstrations. The campaign
culminated in Kohima when thousands of Nagas staged a mass
walkout during a speech by Prime Minister Nehru. 26 In
Nagaland, as in Kashmir, these peaceful gestures of popular
resistance to Indian occupation produced only punitive
measures, rigged elections, and collaborating puppets. Thus the
Naga leaders and their Mizo comrades were driven
underground. The Indian army then came in full force to
destroy the culture, autonomy, and aspirations of a people.
In a sense, perhaps, I was wrong therefore. It is
inappropriate to compare India's record of suppressing the
Mizos and Nagas with Pakistan's criminal repression of the
secessionist movement in East Bengal. This is not so much
because East Pakistan was a part of Pakistan more fully and
formally than is Nagaland of India, nor because the Awami
League had lacked a formal mandate for secession, which the
N.N.C. appeared to command from its people. I do not
consider these to be important enough criteria and have
discussed them only because these legalisms appear important
to Dr. Mahajani.
The comparison is inappropriate on the basis of the
comparative and relative magnitude of the crimes committed.
Some nine million Pakistani soldiers would have had to
uproot-by bombings, forced "regroupings," collective
punishment, and mop-up operations-and put some sixty
million Bengalis in concentration camps, called perhaps
National Rejuvenation Villages, if not exactly "Progressive
Protected" ones, to qualify for such a comparison.
Fortunately for the Bengalis, and for Pakistan, the Pakistani
military junta did not have the power and the resources to
match the magnitude, intensity and length of India's
counterinsurgency effort among Nagas and Mizos. That effort,
I should add, has not yet concluded. Following its "liberation"
of Bangladesh, the Indian army carried out new mop-up
operations against the Mizos, and a new offensive against the
"remnants" of the Naga liberation movement. That the
resistance of these outnumbered and isolated people has
survived so long is a testimony to their yearning for autonomy
and freedom. That the democratic government of India has for
so long committed these crimes against humanity without so
mu ch as a murmur of protest from the Gandhian, pacific,
morally motivated Indians and their western friends testifies to
their crippled conscience, discriminating humanitarianism, and
selective morality.
Dr. Mahajani charges that I have not "gauged" the "real
depth" of Pakistani atrocities in Bangladesh. She also accuses
me of minimizing the actual loss of lives and challenges my
citing the estimate of 250,000 dead. These charges are the
most unpleasant to answer. For one, it is a strange accusation
to direct toward a person who did not wait a day, nor require
evidence of massive atrocities, before actively and openly
opposing the Pakistani federal authority's criminal policy in
East Bengal. Secondly I do not like playing the numbers game
with Ms. Mahajani, or with Time and Newsweek. Finally, while
I do not agree with her accusations, I do accept much of what
Dr. Mahajani says in this regard: That the "capacity of a
modern army to unleash death upon a population IS
33
tremendous," although the "precise number of those
exterminated is difficult to ascertain." Above all, the "killing
of even one person by the governmental forces without a due
process of law detracts from the moral authority of that
government. When killing is done by the thousands that
authority is almost completely destroyed." Very true!
Precisely this kind of attitude formed the basis of my,
and Saghir's, early opposition to the government of Yahya
Khan. Would not Dr. Mahajani apply the same criteria to the
government of Bangladesh whose three military and
paramilitary forces-Mukti Bahini, Mujib Bahini, and Lal
Bahini-have terrorized the Biharis and other alleged
"collaborators" and "Maoists." And would she, her liberal
compatriots, and colleagues also have the good sense and
integrity to apply the same criteria to the Indian government.
and actively protest its criminal conduct in Nagaland, in Mizo
Hills, in Kashmir, and even in West Bengal where thousands of
alleged Naxalites were liquidated, tortured, or jailed, without
due process of law, by the Central Reserve Police at precisely
the same time as the Indian army was "liberating"
Bangladesh? 27
Statistics assume more than moral significance when
used for political ends. We know the political uses to which
Indian and Awami league leaders put the "statistics" of
Pakistani atrocities during 1971. Half a million dead, 10
million refugees, 20 million potential victims of Pakistani
induced starvation were the primary justifications for the
Indian military intervention. Today, much of Sheikh Mujib's
efforts at "mobilizing" the Bengali masses centers on the claim
that 3 million people were slaughtered by the Pakistan army.
This claim also forms the basis of his demand for a war crimes
trial of Pakistani prisoners in India. "My people have been
butchered-not a few hundred, not a few thousand, but 3
million," the Sheikh has declared, adding: "The international
community would never forgive us if we were to let killings,
rape and looting go unpunished." Given their political
significance, these statistics ought to have been subjected to
critical inquiry. Oddly enough, no one questioned them during
1971 and few are doing so now. Hence it is important to
indicate a few facts and raise a few questions.
First, like Richard Nixon (who has variouly accused the
North Vietnamese of a "bloodbath" of 300,000 to 3 million
Vietnamese), South Asian leaders have used statistics as a
weapon of war. Statistics vary widely and change frequently
depending on who is using them, when, and for what purposes.
Thus Pakistan claimed that there were no more than 3 million
refugees in India, Indian claimed a peak of 9.7 million; the
Western press, always accomodating to the demographic
excesses of Asians, rounded the figure off to 10 million.
Similarly with the estimates of death. Sometimes conflicting
claims come from the same source. For example, before
November 1971 Indian and Awami league propaganda had
upwards of 150,000 Pakistani soldiers terrorizing Bengal. After
their surrender India claimed, in April 1972, that there were
no more than 58,000; and now it is said to admit to some
73,000. Sometimes the same person would change his
statistics. Thus Sheikh Mujib, on his release from arrest, began
with a figure of 700,000 dead; and within two weeks
augmented it to 3 million.
28
He has left room for further
increases. In a televised interview on January 16, 1972, the
Sheikh declared: "Yahya Khan killed 3 million of my
people.... We are still calculating and the final figure could be
even more than 3 million . .. "
Secondly, I should note the existence of racial bias in the
treatment of atrocity stories by the Western media and other
opinion makers. The standards of objective journalism, critical
inquiry and investigative reporting do not apply with equal
rigor, if at all, when atrocities are committed by a non-Western
government or organization. When the government involved
happens to be non-liberal but its victims enjoy Western liberal
connections, the reporting becomes especially vivid and
strident. Statistics of dead, displaced and potential victims get
cited with precision and authority, though they are still not
available for Laos, Cambodia, or Vietnam. Interested
politicians, opinion makers, and philanthropic organizations
take up the cause, uncritically accepting and disseminating the
most extreme claims and prognosis. The public is shocked by
renewed evidence of non-white barbarism, and expresses its
outrage and concern with political and financial support. Since
the Western media enjoy a virtual monopoly over news and
analysis throughout the world, these claims become
internationally accepted. lnvariably, after a certain passage of
time and cooling of passions, the earlier claims are
acknowledged to have been grossly exaggerated. Biafra and
Bangladesh fell in this category. The exaggerations concerning
Biafra and the "genocide"of the Ibo people are better known.
On Bangladesh, yesterday's "facts" are just beginning to be
questioned.
Indeed, I myself may have been guilty of exaggeration in
repeating, without attribution, that an estimated 250,000 were
killed in Bangladesh. That was a tribute to the power of
publicity but also a failure, for I should have critically
questioned the facts and accorded the Awami league and
Indian claims no more credence than I did Pakistan's. Several
U.N. employees involved in the relief operations have since
told me that the number of people killed in East Bengal as a
result of Pakistani military and paramilitary operations could
not possibly have exceeded 50,000. The New York Times 29
has reported that some relief workers and diplomats say the
number "might be as few as 25,000."
So far the only independent report on this question has
come from William J. Drummond, Delhi-based correspondent
of the Los Angeles Times. 30 All other reporters have
admittedly recorded the figures claimed by one or the other of
the parties involved. In his careful investigative report,
Drummond said that: "In this reporter's judgment, based on
numerous trips around Bangladesh beginning last December
and on extensive discussions with many people at the village
level as well as in the government, the estimate of 3 million is
an exaggeration so gross as to be absurd." According to
Drummond, a more plausible estimate in the opinion of
"many observers" would be about 25,000. I can only agree
with him that "25,000 deaths by supposedly disciplined
soldiers under the command of officers" is "reprehensible and
worthy of punishment, but it is a far cry from genocide."
Moreover, Sheikh Mujib and Mrs. Gandhi, whose hands are no
less dirty with the blood of innocent victims, are hardly the
appropriate people to mete out the punishment.
The ease with which the Western press, politicians, and
relief organizations accepted India's statistics on the refugees
best exemplifies their racial and political bias. For unlike the
estimates of casualties in Bangladesh, the statistics on refugees
in Indian camps was not difficult to verify. Such verification
was needed for several reasons:
First, a reasonably accurate estimate of the numbers
involved was required for a rational planning of the massive
34
international relief effort. It was even more necessary for
planning for the refugees' resettlement or eventual return.
Secondly, since the refugees constituted the primary
justification for India's involvement and eventual intervention
in a civil war, it is only fair that the avowedly impartial foreign
relief groups and public figures should have made some
attempt to check the accuracy of India's claim. Yet, while
rejecting Pakistani figures as being politically motivated, they
did not see fit to question the political motives of the Indian
government. Thirdly, common sense and past experience
indicated the likelihood of the Indian figure being grossly
inflated. This last point needs elaboration.
If past experience in the sub-continent can serve as a
guide, then the Indian claim of 9.7 million refugees must be
assumed to be inflated even by those who credit the
government of India with the purest of motives. The reasons
for this were too obvious to have been missed by veteran
refugee watchers like Senators Kennedy and Church or the
"philanthropic" bureaucrats of the International Rescue
Committee. First, at each stage of the nine month period when
refugees became a major problem, the Indian government
figures were based on registration and ration-cards issued in
the camps. This is an extremely inaccurate method of arriving
at a moderately reliable estimate of bonafide refugees. During
the 1946-8 period of dislocation, when official and business
venality was less a way of life with us than it is now, the
registration/ration cards are known to have been 15-30%
"bogus," i.e. in excess of the refugees who actually received
the rations. In other words, some 15-30% of the "bogus"
refugees' supplies ended up in the black market.
Secondly, in a sub-continent of the dis-inherited, and
especially in the hunger-ridden eastern provinces, refugee
camps offer what the poor crave most-the certainty of at least
one meal a day, and possibly shelter from cold and rain. Hence
large numbers of local poor become "refugees." When the
local population is linguistically and culturally indistinguish
able from the actual refugees, as was the case of the East
Bengalis in West Bengal, it becomes well nigh impossible to
prevent a large influx into local camps. In 1946, I personally
witnessed the overnight doubling and tripling of refugee
population in this manner. Thirdly, nepotism accounts for a
portion of false registration and ration cards, as extended
families and sometimes entire villages and clans of camp
officials and employees become beneficiaries of relief.
In the circumstances, it is not unreasonable to say that
the actual number of refugees might have been 40-50% less
than India claimed, without raising the possibility of
politically motivated, deliberate exaggeration. But the liberal
faith in India, the no-so-repressed Western belief in the
barbarism of non-Western peoples, and the emotional need to
find an Asian equivalent to America's genocide in Indochina,
precluded a fact-seeking, critical, questioning posture in the
West. What little chance one had of knowing the truth was
destroyed by the Indian government's policy of excluding
international relief workers, including desperately needed
doctors and nurses, from all except the "model" Salt Lake
Camp near Calcutta. That people were reported dying in the
refugee camps for lack of medical help while available foreign
doctors and nurses were prevented from serving them
illustrates the Indian government's priorities during the
conflict over Bangladesh. 31 The international relief
organizations which complied with these restrictions without
public protest, and the foreign visiting dignitaries who lent
authority to Indian claims by repeating them uncritically and
without making any effort at impartial evaluations, must also
bear responsibility for the added human and political cost of
the conflict over Bangladesh.
Dr. Mahajani devotes many of her comments to
denouncing the brutality of the Yahya government. She is
right in her denunciations. But she is also irrelevant, because
there is nothing in my article to suggest a softening of my
attitude toward his criminal government. Her suggestions that
I have "echoed" Richard Nixon and "carefully chosen to gloss
over Bhutto's own role in precipitating the crisis of
Bangladesh" do not deserve response. Those who know my
politics, or have read my meager writings on Pakistan,
including my estimation of Mr. Bhutto's past and present role
in Pakistani politics, would recognize these suggestions to be
mere slander.
Dr. Mahajani obviously finds it difficult to understand
that my loyalty does not parallel hers. It transcends the
official seal on my passport. With the people of South Asia, of
course, I have special affinity. I was born there, and lived
among them in India and Pakistan, in the east as well as north
and west. I consider the political, economic, and social
structures of the three states-India, Pakistan, and
Bangladesh-as being equally inimical to the interest of the
people; the governments equally callous of the sufferings of
the masses, equally cynical in manipulating and failing them,
equally criminal in suppressing the expression of popular
aspirations.
In their determination to maintain the status quo of
injustice, the governing elites of South Asia are ultimately
united. It is true that appearances are sometimes deceptive. In
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35
the dog-eat-dog world of power and profits, the rulers of
South Asian countries make of our lands the battleground of
their competing interests. Yet when faced with a common
threat to their ill-begotten privileges, they unite for the
destruction of revolutionary forces. In April 1971, there was a
striking illustration of this reality. At the height of the
Pakistani Army's repression in Bengal, and pious Indian
denunciations of it coupled with open Indian support for the
Bengali secessionists, India and Pakistan joined in helping Mrs.
Bandaranaike suppress the revolutionary movement in Ceylon.
On April 14, 1971, Prime Minister Bandaraike openly thanked
the foreign nations-identified by the New York Times
32
as
India, Pakistan, the U.S.A., and Great Britain-for their urgent
arms support. An official spokesman in Delhi acknowledged
Indian assistance in Ceylon's "anti-insurgency operations."
Facts about the severity of Ceylonese repression and the
extent of indiscriminate atrocities committed there are now
known. But this is not the last time. There will undoubtedly
be other occasions when the seemingly hostile governments
will be accomplices in crimes against the peoples of South
Asia. The survival and success of the revolutionary forces in
South Asia lie in our ability to unite and forge organic links
across national boundaries to wage a common struggle to end
the reign in inequity, injustice, and oppression.
~ .. - : " .. ~ .. ~ .. ..,
,..,.",,..,...~ ~ -'~ Y " " ~ , . . , . . . ~ , ,
NOTES
1. American Report, December 24, 1971.
2. See New York Times, June 22,1970: November 19, 1972.
3. See: Brezhnev's Address to the Moscow Conference of
Communist and Worker's Parties, June 1969. Gromyko's speech of
Sept. 19, 1969, in the UN General Assembly. For some detail on the
early promotional activities of U.S.S.R., see my article in Africasia
(Paris), October 27,1969.
4. See New York Times, October 4, 1972. By September 1972,
U.S. aid to Bangladesh amounted to $268,000,000.
5. See Government of Pakistan, White Paper on the Crisis of East
Pakistan, August 5,1971; Chapter 1II, 29-43.
6. May 9, 1972.
7. New York Times, December 20, 1971.
8. Le Monde, 20 Juin 1972, "Le Bangla-desh: Est-il Mal Parti?".
9. See New York Times, December 24, 1971; February 6, 1972.
See Washington Post, April 2, 1972.
10. Der Spiegel, April 24, 1972.
11. The reference is to Mr. David Ennals' mission. See next note.
12. An exception: A British parliamentary mission led by Mr.
David Ennals visited Bangladesh last summer. The visit, undertaken at
the request of some constituents in England, sparked the report by
Hazelhurst. Mr. Ennals confirmed the substance of Hazelhurst's report.
However, he sounded two optimistic notes: 1) that the "situation was
not without hope," in that there was a reservoir of goodwill and
humanity among Bengalis; 2) Sheikh Mujib had promised his mission
redress for the Biharis. Ennals concluded that "The test will be whether
he carries out effectively these promises which he made to our
mission." After that, very little is know of the situation, although it
appears that since August and September 1972, mass reprisals have
become fewer while all the other deprivations continue in the camps
and ghettoes. (For David Ennals' view, see The Times [London), May
11,1972.)
13. In 1947-8 more Biharis moved into East Pakistan. At that
time, many Hindus moved out-also fleeing communal conflicts. Other
waves of Biharis fled their home province in 1950, 1953, and 1966
during riots.
14. See: on Ahmedabad, The Sunday Telegraph (London,
December 28, 1969, report by David Lashak, "Holocaust at
Ahmedabad." On Maharashtra see: N. Y. Times, June 14, 1970;
Illustrated Weekly of India, May 17 and May 31, 1970; The Times
(London) July 9, 1970; Hindustan Times, (Delhi), May 17 and May 24,
1970.
15. See New York Times, November 6,1971.
16. Gordon and Ingunn Means, "Nagaland-The Agony of
Ending a Guerrilla War," Pacific Affairs, XXXIX, Nos. 3 and 4
(Fall-Winter 1966-67),291.
17. Ibid.,p.312.
18. See: Gavin Young, "The Nagas-an Unknown War"; The
Observer (London), April 30, 1961; May 4, 1961. Michael Scott, The
Nagas, India's Problem or the World's? (London: Naga National
Council, 1966).
19. New York Times, November 14, 1972.
20. See: Gordon and Ingunn Means, 295; Verrier Elwin,
Nagaland (Shillong: Research Department Adviser's Secretariat, 1961),
58. Gavin Young, op. cit.
21. The Times (London), May 31, 1966.
22. Means, 296.
23. Report submitted to the Government of India by Prof. G.G.
Swell, M.P. and Nichols-Roy, MLA. Mimeograph. Undated (Probably
May 1967).
24. New York Times, April 18, 1965; June 23,1967.
25. Means, 292.
26. For these details see, Gordon and Ingunn Means, Scott, and
Elwin.
27. For a full account of the West Bengali repression in
November-December 1971, see Africasia (Paris) No. 58, January 24,
1972, 33-35. See also Kathleen Gough, "The South Asian
Revolutionary Potential," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Winter
1972, 4: 1,84, footnote 34.
28. New York Times, June 24,1972.
29. New York Times, June 24, 1972.
30. Los Angeles Times, June 11,1972.
31. See, for example, New York Times, October 6,1971: " ...
Some of the [excluded) foreigners have had wide experience in Biafra
and similar crises. Virtually every camp is short of trained people,
particularly doctors.... No one knows how many refugees have died.
The Indian government is said to issue deliberately low death figures in
the belief that the true figures will reflect badly on its program."
32. New York Times, April 15, 1971.
36
Chloramphenicol In

Japan: Let It Bleed
by John F. Hellegers
Editorial Note: This article first appeared in 1971 in japanese.
Since then the total amount of chloramphenicol produced in
japan has declined drastically; the amount of decline between
the 1970 level and the 1972 level is, however, nearly the
equivalent in grams of the total amount sold on the American
market for the same period. While dated in this sense,
however, the piece is still newsworthy for both japan and the
United States.
One morning not long ago an American woman living in
Tokyo woke up with what she took to be flu symptoms. She
went to a local pharmacist recommended by her Japanese
neighbors and received an unmarked plastic and foil packet
containing eight maroon capsules, with instructions to take
one every four hours. She neglected to ask the name of the
drug. Two days later she returned for more capsules and
learned that she had been taking chloramphenicol.
There is nothing especially remarkable about this story
since chloramphenicol (commonly known as "Chloro
mycetin," a Parke, Davis & Co. brand name) is the best selling
broad spectrum antibiotic in Japan. (The term "broad
spectrum" refers to the fact that the drug works well against a
variety of diseases. Chloramphenicol, like tetracycline, has
somtimes been referred to as a "wonder drug.") Like most
antibiotics sold in Japan, chloramphenicol is an American
invention. Parke, Davis put it on the American market in
1949. It won immediate popularity with the medical
profession, who began to prescribe it for everything from acne
to pneumonia. In 1951 the Sankyo Company (under license
from Parke, Davis) introduced it in Japan where its use was
developed even more. In 1950 the Japanese Ministry of Health
certified 142,955 grams for sale. By 1953 the corresponding
figure was 9,361,213 grams. In 1958 it was 21,539,179 grams.
In 1969 the Ministry certified 70,849,359 grams; in 1970,
70,107,000 grams; and in 1971, the last year for which full
data are available, 53,889,000 grams.t An individual ordinarily
receives something between four and ten grams of the drug,
depending on the nature and severity of his illness, although
much larger doses are occasionally prescribed. If ten grams is
arbitrarily assumed to be an average dose (almost certainly a
high estimate) the 1969 total was sufficient to give
chloramphenicol to over seven million people, or about seven
percent of the population of Japan. Another way of expressing
it is that this total was nearly enough to give three standard
250 mg. capsules to every man, woman and child in the
country. By way of comparison, the total certified for sale in
the United States in 1967, a peak year, was 47,860,178 grams.
Since the population of Japan is about half that of the United
States, this means that 1969 per capita usage in Japan was
nearly three times as great.
All this would be a dry recitation of insignificant facts
except for the fact that the drug, to put it mildly, has a
troublesome history of side effects. Dr. William Damashek, a
hematologist who taught, until his recent death, at Mt. Sinai
Hospital School of Medicine in New York City, made this
observation in 1968:
The chloramphenicol story is an upsetting one from several
standpoints: On the one hand, this drug is a great 'broad
spectrum' antibiotic; no question about it. It works just as
well and perhaps better when taken by mouth than many
other antibiotics do when given by injection. On the other
hand, it is at the same time a powerful antimetabolite,
which means a cell poison or a material which interferes
with the growth or proteins, cells, and it has apparently a
particular effect on the bone marrow, which is the chief
factory . .. of blood cell production.
The most notorious side effect of chloramphenicol is a
disease called "aplastic anemia," which Dr. Damashek
described as "a disturbance of bone marrow growth in which
. .. the bone marrow is finally producing something like 1
percent, 2 percent, 10 percent, possibly 25 percent of the
normal number of cells produced." Between half and three
fourths of those who get the disease, he said, die of it. The
course of the disease has been described as follows by Dr. Albe
M. Watkins of La Canada, California, a physician who gave
chloramphenicol in 1952 to his son for a urinary tract
infection. {The description comes from a letter written at the
37
time to the American manufacturer of the drug, Parke, Davis
& Company.)
We noticed approximately 10 days after bis 3-4 days of this
barmless antibiotic, our son was very pale and a blood
count revealed a depression of all components of 50
percent. A repeat two days later was furtber depressed and
petecbial bemorrhages (bleeding under the skin) started.
Our life from here 011 bas been as near a bell all eartb as
you can imagine. Here, a very intelligent, bandsome little
ten year old . .. [is} wondering why be is suddenly so ill,
and bleeding, necessitating eight transfusions in as much
days. He bas bad over 150 sbots of penicillin,
streptom[ycin} , ACTH, vitamins, etc . ...
In 1968 a U.S. Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator
Gaylord Nelson (D.-Wisc') heard from Edgar F. Elfstrom, a
California newspaper publisher whose daughter had died after
taking chloramphenicol.
Anotber thing, we have spoken of tbe torture of a
Chloromycetin death. I hate to describe it, because it brings
back memories tbat I try to forget. But the body gradually
disintegrates. It gets ulcerated all over and tben bleeds to
deatb. And to see a beautiful, healthy body deteriorate like
that is just beyond description.
Dr. Watkins, who appeared with him at the
subcommittee hearing, added that:
I would say a tbird of my son's body was gangrenous before
be died, a tbird of it, black, smelly, terrible. We could
bardly stay in the room. A third of it.
There is considerable dispute and conjecture about the
frequency of aplastic anemia following the use of
chloramphenicoL For many years, according to Dr. Watkins,
Parke, Davis maintained that the incidence was only about one
case for every 400,000 people treated with the drug. But Dr.
Damashek estimated one in 10,000 and Dr. William R. Best of
the University of Illinois puts it somewhere in the range of one
in 20,000 to one in 100,000. In 1967 the California Medical
Association and the State Department of Public Health
reported to the State Legislature that the death rate was one
per 36,118 among those who had received a total of 4.5 grams.
At 7.5 grams, the highest dose for which the study compiled
such figures, the risk of deatb rose to one in 21,671. Non-fatal
complications were not researched. According to Dr.
Damashek, the drug may have a cumulative effect, so that one
dose increases the risk from future doses. Susceptibility to the
drug seems to vary somew hat according to age and sex, with
preadolescent girls being the most vulnerable. It has been
reported that among newborn infants treated for pneumonia
or diarrhea with the drug, the fatality rate is 58 percent.
According to Dr. Best, it does not appear that the incidence of
aplastic anemia differs among ethnic groups. He reports,
though, that in one sample of 346 persons who had the
disease, the 43 non-white patients (chiefly American Negroes,
but including 10 "orientals") tended to have "a much more
benign course than whites, a trend not previously noted." This
comparison may have been influenced by the fact that the
non-white group contained markedly fewer female patients, 43
percent, as compared with 63 percent of the whites.
All of these estimates are admittedly somewhat
speculative. Dr. James T. Weston, State Medical Examiner,
Utah Division of Health, believes that they are also
conservative in stating the risk, and that the actual incidence
of aplastic anemia may well be greater than one case per
10,000. Dr. Weston explains that:
I should point out in all deference to my colleagues that if I
were prescribing Cbloromycetin for a minor respiratory
infection and a year from now it became apparent tbat this
patient developed aplastic anemia, I would be somewbat
reluctant to sign a death certificate on sucb a case as
aplastic anemia, having seen at least two malpractice cases
tbat approached $200,000 awarded in the country [the
United States} in the last several years. Not only do you
lose money on your insurance, but you lose patients tbis
way. So, I think you bave to view any reporting of tbe
incidence of any untoward reaction to a drug with a rather
jaundiced eye, so to speak, and realize tbat it really toucbes
only a small segment of wbat may actually be bappening.
Dr. Watkins concurs on this point. After his son's death,
he undertook a personal investigation of chloramphenicol use
in the United States. "On my two trips across the United
States," he says,
stopping at nearly every university and inquiring in every
good sized town, concerning reactions to Cbloromycetin, I
was convinced of many tbings.
No.1, tbat [inl every case investigated, the victim would in
all probability have survived tbe original illness had tbey
not been given any Chloromycetin.
No.2, tbat I would not gain much information from my
own profession. A doctor in Charleston, W. Va., Dr. William
Thornbill, wbo had lost a 16-year old son with five capsules,
was very belpful, but an internist in California would bave
no part in helping me, saying 'my daugbter is gone. It was
God's will.'
A psycbiatrist in Oregon would not even see me. In all, we
bad records of around 30 physicians who eitber died or lost
a member of their family. I feel convinced tbat many
victims have been signed out as leukemia, and any doctor
who had lost a case tbrough his ignorance and malpractice
would not leave a stone unturned in an attempt to cover up
bis malfeasance.
If chloramphenicol had unique therapeutic properties,
and were used principally for serious diseases which could not
be treated as well with something else, even a one in 10,000
possibility of aplastic anemia might seem a wholly acceptable
risk. But this is not how the product is being used. Even in the
United States, there are experts who hold that it is misused at
least 90 percent of the time, and possibly much more. Dr. Paul
D. Hoeprich, of the University of California at Davis, says that
"I would occupy a middle ground. I would say probably
around 5 percent of those who received it should receive it."
According to Time magazine, chloramphenicol appears to be
superior to other, safer alternatives only in treating psittacosis
("parrot fever"), typhoid and paratyphoid fevers, murine
typhus, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and one form of
meningitis. Time estimates that perhaps three thousand cases a
year of these largely tropical diseases appear in the U.S. But
assuming a ten gram average dose almost four million
38
Americans per year have received chloramphenicol during the
last decade. Time's figures, of course, deserve to be taken
skeptically; it is always difficult to pin down the relationship
between the number of reported cases of any disease and the
number of actual cases. Assuming, though, that the actual
number of cases is ten times the magazine's estimate, less than
one American out of a hundred who received the drug during
these years got it for an appropriate complaint.
In Japan, the medical profession favors chloramphenicol
for three basic indications, typhoid fever, influenza caused by
a bacillus rather than a virus, and cold abcesses that may occur
in connection with such diseases as pneumonia or pleuritis.
Exact figures, again, are not available, but a member of Tokyo
University's medical faculty estimates that all of these
indications together could not possibly account for more than
200,000 cases a year, and that the actual number is almost
certainly much lower. There has been no typhoid fever in
Japan, he says, for several years. Still, it appears that at least
seven million Japanese per year have recently received
chloramphenicol.
Elsewhere in Asia, too, a disproportion has existed
between sales of Chloramphenicol and the incidence of
appropriate diseases. Dr. Damashek observed, in testimony
before the Nelson subcommittee, that:
In some areas of the world, notably in less developed
countries as in the Orient, Chloromycetin is used almost as
freely as aspirin, from my experience there, and without
tbe cautionary recommendations required in this
country . ...
SENA TOR NELSON. Do you find a comparatively high
incidence, tben, of blood dyscrasias [disorders] of various
kinds in those countries where chloramphenicol is used
extensively?
DR. DAMASHEK. Well, tbe physicians I talked with in the
countries I visited seemed to think that the incidence of
aplastic anemia in their respective countries is increasing, is
unduly prevalent. I have a little statement here from an
editorial I wrote a few months ago that talks about this. I
said, 'Thus in Manila ... Dr. Allen Caviles, of the
Pbilippines General Hospital'-one of the largest hqspitals in
Manila, but only one of them, this is only one
hospital- 'informed me that he had observed 71 cases of
aplastic anemia in 3 years.... Another doctor, Dr.
[Tien-tse] Hwang in Taipei, Taiwan, reported that he had
observed 10 to 14 new cases of aplastic anemia annually in
one large hospital, and he thought that the incidence had
been going up year by year. In both these areas,
Chloromycetin had been used very freely for about
everything. '
SENA TOR NELSON. Are the instructions about the
precautions in using it as widely disseminated there as here?
DR. DAMASHEK. I would be inclined to doubt that they
were. I am not sure that they even have any cautionary
statements about the use of chloramphenicol in these
countries.
Similarly, it was revealed by the American press in the
fall of 1970 that the U.S. Department of Defense has been
supporting the chloramphenicol market by buying it in huge
quantities for use on Vietnamese patients-under circum
stances that run counter to sound American medical practice. *
Article 49 of the Japanese Pharmaceutical Affairs law
requires that certain designated drugs-specifically including
chloramphenicol-be sold only pursuant to a doctor's
prescription. Article 84(11) of the same law makes a
pharmacist who dispenses these drugs without prescription
liable for a fine of up to Y200,OOO, or a jail sentence of up to
three years, or both. The Inspection Section of the Ministry of
Health says, though, that only a minimal number of cases, no
morc than a dozen or so per year for the whole country, have
been brought to its attention under Article 49. The Ministry,
moreover, assigns no one full time to the enforcement of this
law. There are 33 inspectors, but all have other duties as
well-as one might infer from the fact that they discover, on
the average, only one violation per man every third year.
Although compliance with Article 49 is reputedly better
than it used to be, it appears that almost anyone who wants to
can get access to chloramphenicol without prescription. In a
random survey of ten Tokyo drugstores, an American was
recently able to buy the drug, no questions asked, in seven. Of
the remaining three, only one declined to make the sale on
legal grounds. One claimed to be out of the drug, and in the
remaining one the investigator was told that non-prescription
sales were illegal, but that the druggist would be happy to
oblige-at a price of Y80 per capsule instead of the usual Y70.
In 1968 the Shufu Rengo Kai [United Association of
Housewives] , a consumer organization composed of Japanese
housewives, made a similar survey of 43 Tokyo drugstores,
including stores located in all 23 of the city's wards. Of the 43,
only six refused to sell chloramphenicol without a
prescription. Twelve stores appeared somewhat reluctant, but
made the sale anyway, and the other 25 showed no hesitation
whatsoever. Often the drug was sold not only without a
warning as to dosage and possible side effects-but without
even an identification of the drug or of the seller. In some
cases it was dispensed in bags containing advertising.
Frequently the customer was permitted to buy as much as she
asked for.
Despite the law, the Japanese system of health care
appears to provide incentives for the unauthorized sale of
prescription drugs. Most Japanese wage earners are members of
group insurance plans. Typically one of these plans pays all of
the wage earner's own medical and drug costs, except for a
nominal charge for his first visit to a doctor. For his family,
the plan generally pays half of such costs. If a man does not
qualify for such a plan, he can get national health insurance,
which pays two thirds of the cost for himself and his
dependents.
Under this system, a druggist has three good reasons for
selling drugs without prescription. First, he can get the money
on the spot, instead of waiting as much as two or three
months for a plan to make payment. Second; he can cheat on
his taxes, since the sale is not recorded. Third, he can boost
the price a bit over the officially set price at which regular
sales are made.
For the customer, the main incentive seems to be
convenience, although a wage earner might conceivably save a
bit on a dependent's illness by bypassing the doctor and
paying the full price of a drug.
Several Tokyo doctors confirmed that illegal sales of
chloramphenicol are, in fact, common. One said that his clinic
39
often sees patients who medicate themselves with an illegally
purchased drug, then come in for treatment only when this
fails to work. Another said, perhaps hyperbolically, that when
this happens in his practice "and we ask them what they've
taken, nine times out of ten it's Chloromycetin."
Apart from illegal sales, the Japanese system very
definitely gives doctors incentives to overprescribe. Medical
fees are low, and the doctors are allowed to supplement them
by selling drugs directly to their patients. But whatever the
reason, whether the sales are legal or not, the amount of
chloramphenicol used in Japan is enough, in the words of one
Tokyo doctor who speaks fluent English, "to drive some of us
up the wall."
Since there has been some suggestion that there may be
racial or ethnic differences in the ability to tolerate
chloramphenicol, it is hazardous to assume that the incidence
or severity of side effects is necessarily the same in Japan as in
the United States. Unfortunately, Japan has not made any
studies that correspond to those commissioned by the State of
California. Most of the current Japanese research on the
disease is being done at Tokyo, Keio, and Okayama
Universities. Experts there collect and analyze data on aplastic
anemia, but none of the experts claims to have even a rough
notion of the total incidence of the disease throughout Japan.
They do, though, agree that the disease is likely to be seriously
under-reported, for reasons similar to those obtaining in the
United States. Like their American counterparts, Japanese
doctors hesitate to report cases of their own malfeasance.
Then, too, they may honestly mis-diagnose cases of aplastic
anemia as something else.
In sum, it cannot be said with assurance that
chloramphenicol is killing Japanese at the same rate at which it
kills Americans. But then, on the other hand, neither can it be
said that the drug is not killing Japanese at this rate. The
startling fact is that a drug notorious in the United States for
having exceptional dangers, and known in both countries to be
heavily over-used, has been freely marketed in Japan for 20
years, even to consumers who ask for it over the counter-and
no one knows the amount of the resulting death, injury and
suffering.
Reports of radal or ethnic differences in ability to
tolerate chloramphefiicol have appeared-and have been
debunked-elsewhere. The New England Journal of Medicine
for November 6, 1969, cohtains a letter from a Dr. William H.
Crosby of Boston, reporting that he had several times
encountered the claim tRat chloramphenicol side effects are
almost unknown among the Jewish population of Israel. Dr.
Crosby said that he could find no scientific basis for supposing
that the rate of side effects among Israelis was any different
from the rate among any other population. Jewish or Japanese
readers might hope that their doctors will refrain from testing
such claims on them.
The relationship between chloramphenicol and aplastic
anemia was known as early as 1950 when medical journal
reports discussed a possible connection. By 1952 the evidence
was so strong that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
briefly barred the product from the American market. A
month lart?r the ban was lifted on the ground that the drug was
useful in the treatment of certain limited diseases. Parke, Davis
was reqUired to add a warning to the descriptive inserts which
go into packages of the drug in the United States.
This episode had a marked short term effect on sales in
the United States. Its effect in Japan was virtually nil. In 1950,
the amount of chloramphenicol cleared for sale with the
Japanese Ministry of Health was 142,955 grams. In 1952 this
figure rose to 2,682,013 grams. In 1953 it shot up to
9,361,213 grams. There was a brief, mild slump in 1954 and
1955, when the figures were 7,114,006 grams and 8,031,840
grams, respectively, but then sales shot up again; the figure for
1958 was 21,539,179 grams.
Apart from 1954 and 1955, the only break in the
upward trend of chloramphenicol sales in Japan came in 1959,
1960 and 1961. In 1959 the total dropped to 8,846,723
grams. In 1961, though, it recovered to 16,679,783 grams, and
then began a long, dramatic climb. In 1964 the total was
32,686,363 grams; in 1966 it was 49,773,444 grams, and in
1969, 70,849,359 grams, more than double the 1964 total. In
every year since 1961, per capita sales of chloramphenicol in
Japan have been greater than in the United States; since 1965
sales have been larger even in absolute terms.
Ironically, chloramphenicol owes much of its enormous
popularity in Japan to the simple fact that it is not penicillin,
whose hazards the Japanese discovered in 195O. In a
well-publicized incident still widely remembered, Dr. Tomoo
Odaka, a professor of law at Tokyo University, died of
penicillin shock. Thereafter, relates a Tokyo University
medical faculty member, Japanese doctors became highly
reluctant to use penicillin, in part because of its perfectly real
dangers. But even more, doctors feared the public's reaction if
they lost other patients to so notorious a drug.
So they then turned instead to chloramphenicol, the
first of the "broad spectrum" antibiotics to be available in
Japan. Chloramphenicol then developed what appears to be an
unassailable popular reputation as the "strongest" of the
antibiotics on the market-a major commercial plus in a
country where antibiotics are sold freely over the counter.
Since chloramphenicol seems not to have killed anyone of
national fame, its popularity has persisted.
Needless to say, chloramphenicol's reputation was
vigorously boosted by its advertisers. Until 1965 the law
allowed packagers and distributors to advertise the product
directly to the lay public, which they did. This practice has
now ceased, and in 1968 the companies added a small warning
to the inserts that accompany packages of the drug, in
accordance with a "notification" issued by the Ministry of
Health. But, points out Dr. Kosei Takahashi, a lecturer in
medicine at Tokyo University, the warning is far smaller than
the one required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,
and it does not appear on the packages which the pharmacists
offer the public-an important point, since so much of the
drug is sold without prescription.
For !lotne reason the Ministry is reluctant to talk about
the wlttniflg, or to explain why the notification was issued. In
March, 1971, a request for an interview on this subject was
made through Lawrence E. Kern, Jr., the proprietor of a Tokyo
literary agency. Koichi Oi, secretary to the director of the
Ministry's pharmaceutical division, responded by asking for
samples of the books and articles handled by Mr. Kern's
agency. After stUdying these for a day, Mr. Oi denied the
request for an interview. The Ministry, explained Mr. Oi,
simply has a policy of not responding to inquiries from the
general public.
In any event, the warning has had no effect on sales, nor
has the Ministry cracked down on the advertising and
40
promotion of the drug, which are probably intense enough to
cancel out even the strongest warning.
According to sources close to Parke, Davis, the amount
spent on promoting chloramphenicol in Japan is at least what
it is in the United States, and probably a good deal more,
because of Japanese business practices, which place a greater
emphasis on gift-giving, entertainment, and special favors.
Until recently it was common to woo customers by giving
them free samples equal in value to 100, or even 200, percent
of their purchases. This practice was terminated in December
1970, following an "administrative guidance" of the
government-which is usually a good deal more energetic in
preserving the stability of Japan's carteIized markets than it is
in protecting the consumer. The problem was that the use of
promotional samples on this scale was unsettling the entire
price structure for the drug.
If, as these sources say, promotional outlays for
chloramphenicol are even greater in Japan than in the United
States, this is an interesting, and heretofore unremarked,
phenomenon. The amount of money spent on drug promotion
in the United States is, by common consent, one of the
wonders of the modern world. Prof. Seymour Harris of
Harvard, in The Economics of American Medicine (1964),
cites a study showing that the American drug companies spend
three times more for this purpose, in relation to sales, than
American industry generally. The size of their sales revenues
makes this even more of an achievement than it might seem at
first glance. In 1961 a U.S: Senate subcommittee chaired by
the late Sen. Estes Kefauver (D.-Tenn.) reported numerous
instances of drugs selling to the public at more than 10 times
the cost of producing them. Nor have these markups declined
since. In 1969 Dr. James Goddard, who had recently retired as
head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,
conservatively estimated the aggregate promotional outlays of
American drug firms at $3,000 per year for every American
doctor. Other observers have since put it above $4,500.
Dr. Takahasi estimates that Japanese drug firms in the
aggregate spend 40 billion yen per year on advertising-four
times what they spend for research. Cooperative doctors who
prescribe heavily are rewarded with color television sets, golf
clubs, and free trips to "medical conferences" at famous hot
springs resorts. Naturally the conferences often turn out to
consist mainly of even more advertising and promotion.
Nor does the influence of the drug companies end there.
Dr. Junji Ishigaki, a widely known commentator on medical
affairs, thinks that even at Tokyo University-the richest and
most prestigious in Japan-well over 90 percent of the budget
for medical research comes from these companies, with the
percentage being still higher elsewhere. As a result, he charges,
the universities fear to hire outspoken critics of the industry,
lest their funds be cut off. In much the same manner the
companies manipulate the scholarly journals of the medical
profession. Their control of advertising and support is used to
reward "friendly" editorial policies and suppress criticism.
Politics is another area where drug company money
exerts an influence. Dr. Ishigaki thinks the companies put well
over $1,000,000 into each election, with most of it going to
local candidates for the Diet. The medical profession, he says,
puts in an equivalent amount or more.
Most of the chloramphenicol sold in Japan is made
elsewhere, then shipped to Japan to be put in capsules and
sold. Parke, Davis, the principal source, has a series of licensing
and other agreements with the Sankyo Company, which does
the packaging and promotional work; Parke, Davis supplies
the drug, assorted "know-how" and the use of its trade name,
"Chloromycetin." From 1952 until 1965 the two companies
also had a "technical assistance agreement," which expired
when Parke, Davis's patents on its method of making
chloramphenicol ran out. (Japanese law, now as then, permits
patents on processes for making drugs, but not on the drugs as
such.) The royalty rate under this agreement began at 10
percent of Sankyo's sales-as compared with an average rate of
four percent for technology imported by Japanese industry as
a whole-and gradually declined over the life of Parke, Davis'
patents.
Needless to say, Sankyo's advertising emphasizes the
trade name "Chloromycetin," which still cannot be used by
competitors. Sankyo tells doctors and other customers that
this name is an exclusive guarantee of quality and
efficacy-although in reality Parke, Davis, selling through
Sankyo, is also the source now of some of the
chloramphenicol being sold in Japan under other labels.
Until 1966, when the American patent on
chloramphenicol as a product expired, Parke, Davis was the
only authorized American seller. In Japan, though, the
company's inability to get a product patent left the door open
for competing manufacturers who could produce the drug
under their own processes. In practice, the sole competitor
that got in through this opening was a German company,
Boehringer, which operates under agreements with
Yamanouchi Seiyaku, a Japanese drug firm. Yamanouchi sells
chloramphenicol under license from Boehringer as "Paraxin."
There is evidence that Parke, Davis did not accept this
competition gracefully. The Kefauver subcommittee reported
that:
Parke. Davis adopted a ... strategy to rid the market of
{such} outsiders. Complaints were filed with the u.s. State
Department. and our embassies abroad made formal protest
to foreign governments on the sale of chloramphenicol by
their nationals. Moreover, upon the prodding of American
companies, including particularly Parke, Davis, the State
Department urged other governments to reverse their
historical position and revise their patent laws to permit the
issuance of patents in the field of drugs.
The State Department today is not altogether certain
whether or not it made an approach to the Japanese
Government, urging it to grant product patents on
pharmaceuticals. Approaches were made to Italy and India,
according to George T. Churchill, assistant chief of the
Business Practices Division, but no record can be found of an
approach to Japan. Mr. Churchill adds, though, that "I am
sure that you will appreciate the fact that the above answers
could not be given in absolute terms. Any further information,
one way or the other, could be found only by an exhaustive
search of Department files that it is impossible for us to
undertake."
Since the Parke, Davis and Boehringer patents have
expired in Japan, about ten other companies have begun to sell
the drug, most of them Japanese affiliates of European
manufacturers. These newcomers, among them, have captured
about 40 percent of the market, selling the drug under such
trade names as "Kemisaechin" (sold by Fujisawa Yakuhin),
and "Microshin" (Takeda Yakunin). Sankyo and Yamonouchi,
whose brand names are better established, split the remaining
60 percent. 41
Until 1961 drug sales were held in loose check by
administrative policy of Japan's National Health Insurance
Plan, which maintained a list of drugs and their rational uses
and used its financial leverage to hold doctors to this list. In
1961, though, under pressure from the medical profession, this
policy was virtually abandoned. The doctors argued that the
government had no business telling them what to prescribe.
But the doctors also had a strong financial interest in
sabotaging the policy, since Japanese law allows them to
combine the functions of doctor and pharmacist, and sell the
drugs they prescribe. If they prescribe more, they can sell
more-and boost their incomes. The drug companies also had a
hand in obtaining this change, although for the most part they
discreetly stayed in the background.
After 1961 it became possible to prescribe
chloramphenicol for something called "suspected pneumonia,"
a category which does not require a firm diagnosis-of
anything. In effect, the drug can be used for common colds,
against which it has no value whatsoever. Dr. Takahashi
reports that since this change, the number of cases of
"suspected pneumonia" has skyrocketed, and chloramphenicol
is now used not only as a cold remedy, but for "headache,
flue, stomach upset, diarrhea, and vague aches and pains of all
descriptions." The reason for this, he says, is simply a matter of
economics, i.e. the profits to the drug companies and (he
doctors. Dr. Takahashi agrees. "It may be true," he muses,
"that doctors shouldn't have to answer to the government for
what they prescribe. But when they use drugs this way they
aren't even answering to science."
The Health and Welfare Ministry has seldom, if ever,
exerted the sane, counterbalancing influence that it might. For
one thing, few of the ministry bureaucrats want to antagonize
companies that are likely possible future employers. Then,
too, Japan's 22,000 pharmacies work to see that the Ministry
restrains its zeal. Dr. Takahashi estimates that if the Minsitry
even bothered to enforce the law requiring prescriptions for
certain drugs, these pharmacies would lose half their sales.
Finally, the Ministry has no statutory power to eliminate fraud
and deception from drug advertising, or to mandate warnings
about side effects. (Its "ministerial notifications" lack the
force of law.) The Ministry's power in this area is limited to
"persuasion." This can sometimes be highly effective in Japan
when it comes from the government-but not surprisingly,
considering the amount of drug company money in politics,
the Ministry has exercised this power only belatedly, timidly
and in extreme cases. "What was the name of that doctor,"
asks Dr. Ishigaki, "the one in the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration who kept thalidomide off the market? Well,
there's no one in the Japanese Ministry like that."
To be sure, a few Japanese doctors have spoken out
against drug company domination of their profession.
Sometimes other groups get involved as well. In 1968, for
example, the Shufu Rengo Kai, the housewives' group, went to
the Ministry to demand greater protection for the
public against chloramphenicol. In the next year the amount
of chloramphenicol certified by the Ministry increased by
more than 2,400,000 grams, probably enough by itself to take
care of Japan's legitimate needs.
In the United States over the past twenty years,
considerably more vigorous efforts have been made than in
Japan to bring the use of chloramphenicol under control. On
balance, though, these efforts have failed, and at times their
history has the appearance of black comedy. In 1959 and
1960 the Kefauver subcommittee examined the chlorampheni
col story in some detail. One product of the subcommittee's
work was a bill which the drug industry bitterly opposed, but
which was enacted in 1962 in the uproar following the
thalidomide scandal. This legislation empowered the FDA for
the first time to require warnings in advertising matter which
drug companies send to American doctors. In 1963 the FDA
required a warning in all advertising for chloramphenicol
which contained therapeutic claims for the drug. Parke, Davis
had no trouble evading this requirement. It simply deleted the
therapeutic claims from its advertising-confining advertise
ments to a picture of a doctor, the trade name
"chloromycetin," and a brief accompanying slogan, such as
"A Name You Can Count on When it Counts." Since this FDA
requirement has been interpreted to apply only to the
advertising of a drug company itself, it was possible in
February 1968 for the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers'
Association to buy eight pages of advertising in the Reader's
Digest, of which two pages were specifically devoted to
promoting chloramphenicol. The advertising contained only
the vaguest warnings, but described the drug as a "broad
spectrum antibiotic," and claimed it to be effective against
"dozens" of complaints. The headline on the chloramphenicol
part of that advertisement gives an interesting insight into the
American psyche: "THERE WAS NOTHING ANYONE
COULD DO TO STOP THEM FROM DYING UNTIL THE
AMERICAN DOCTOR CAME DOWN FROM THE SKY WITH
A NEW DRUG." As often happens in the Reader's Digest, the
advertisement was made to resemble editorial matter.
Although the Kefauver. hearings, like the 1952
suspension, had a temporary restraining effect on American
sales, they rose swiftly again as the publicity receded. In 1961,
the low point of the slump, the FDA certified 27,189,699
grams for sale; by 1967 this total was back up to 47,860,178
grams. In 1968 Dr. James L. Goddard, then head of the FDA,
observed that:
I know of no other drug that has been given the
prominence in terms of warnings to the medical profession
that this drug has over the past 18 years. And yet the sales
indicate it is being more widely used today than ever
before.
In 1967, 1968, and 1969, Senator Gaylord Nelson
conducted a second round of hearings on chloramphenicol. In
the short term, at least, these hearings again depressed sales in
the United States, as did a letter which the FDA required
Parke, Davis to send out in 1969 to every American doctor.
This letter stated, among other things, that "chloramphenicol
is not the drug of [first] choice in any indication." But
according to the July 22, 1968 issue of the F-D-C Reports, a
drug industry newsletter, Dr. Austin Smith, the president of
Parke, Davis, remained confident that "there would probably
be a recovery [of sales] after a reasonable period of time; that
this has been the pattern when the drug has come under heavy
criticism." Senator Nelson reacted indignantly to this
statement, calling it "incredible." "Obviously," he said, in a
speech on the floor of the Senate,
Dr. Smith assumes that through its advertising and
promotional activities . .. the Parke, Davis Co. will go back
to pushing the drug again and that, with time, the medical
42
profession and the general public will cease to be
concerned . ...
In Japan's case, of course, much of the blame for this
lies with the Japanese themselves-with an incredibly trusting
public, with a Ministry and a medical profession that do little
to merit that trust, and with the Japanese drug industry, which
has so completely subverted the institutions that ought to
check and balance it.
But at least as much of the blame belongs specifically to
the makers of chloramphenicol, most conspicuously Parke,
Davis, which regards chloramphenicol simply as a financial
proposition, a drug to be pushed almost casually if the price is
right. One might reasonably wonder why Parke, Davis has
chosen to manufacture and promote this drug, instead of some
safer alternative. The answer is that for 17 years in the United
States (15 in Japan) these alternatives were tied up by other
companies' patents, just as Parke, Davis tied up
chloramphenicol. Because of the patent system, and the tight
sellers' market it fosters, the broad-spectrum antibiotics
business has been one of the most lucrative legitimate
enterprises in the world. In 1966 Parke, Davis grossed
$72,000,000 at wholesale on sales of the drug, with
$25,000,000 of this coming from outside the United States. In
1963 chloramphenicol accounted for a hefty 31 percent of the
company's sales of all products. Now that many of the basic
patents in the field have expired, moreover, Parke, Davis finds
that it has so much money invested in promoting the
"Chloromycetin" brand name, that switching to a safer
product is out of the question.
This account may sound somewhat cynical, but the
record thoroughly bears it out. In 1952, when
chloramphenicol first came under sustained fire from the
American medical profession, the company sent a form letter
to members of its sales force, instructing them on what to say
if a doctor asked about side effects. The letter says that this
matter
should not be introduced unless the physician brings up the
subject or unless you know that he has ceased prescribing
Chloromycetin. Your efforts should all be directed in a
positive direction designed to provide facts which will
induce physicians to use Chloromycetin in the wide range
of infections in which it is effective.
Seven years later, in December 1959, a doctor affiliated
with the FDA, Dr. Ralph W. Weilerstein of San Francisco,
reported to the agency that in his capacity as a practicing
physician he had been visited by two Parke, Davis salesmen, or
"detail men," who had made a number of claims about
Chloromycetin. Among them, in Dr. Weilerstein's words, was
the claim that "there is no more danger of blood dyscrasias
due to Chloromycetin than there would be from any other
antibiotic." A few weeks later, Dr. Charles N. Lewis, then head
of the antibiotics branch of the FDA's Bureau of Medicine,
wrote to Parke, Davis, stating that:
We have had similar complaints from other physicians in
recent months about your detail men playing down or
minimizing the side effects of this drug. This has [also]
occurred at your scientific exhibits at [medical] society
meetings and elsewhere.
The company responded by denying that such
statements had been made under instructions from its main
office, and by asserting that they were, in fact, contrary to
official policy. Pressed on the matter, Harry J. Loynd, then
the president of the company, offered to fire the two detail
men if Dr. Weilerstein's account could be verified.
In discussing the company's promotional efforts, the late
Dr. Franklin Farman, of Lakewood, California, told the
Nelson subcommittee that:
They advocated in the early fifties some 28 diseases for
which the drug could be used safely. This list has been
reduced by pressure from the AMA [American Medical
Association] and the FDA to about three, I mean typhoid
fever and certain types of dysentery and meningitis. But
very subtly Parke, Davis & Co. advertised its use for
respiratory infection. Now, to my mind, this accounts for
the great sale in the United States, because there are a lot of
colds and other respiratory infections.
Over the past ten years, a number of unsuccessful efforts
have been made in the California state legislature to impose
limits on the use of chloramphenicol. In one of the early
hearings, in 1961, a state senator asked Kenneth McGregor,
then a Parke, Davis vice president, whether he would consider
it bad medicine to prescribe chloramphenit:ol for a common
cold or sore throat. According to Edgar Elfstrom, the
publisher of the Fullerton, California Daily News Tribune,
"Mr. McGregor hesitated for quite a while before he answered
and then said it was a loaded question which he did not feel he
should answer."
Mr. Elfstrom's newspaper reported at the time that he
also denied that California Department of Health (lata "show
any correlation whatever between aplastic anemia and the use
of chloramphenicol" (thus taking the position for which Mr.
Loynd had offered to fire the two detail men). Similarly, when
Dr. Leslie M. Lueck, the company's director of quality
control, appeared before the Nelson subcommittee in late
1967, the following colloquy ensued:
SENA TOR NELSON. Now, Doctor, I understand that your
product, Chloromycetin, has been responsible for deaths
resulting from bone marrow disorders, is that correct?
DR. L UEC K. I do not know in what frame of reference you
are phrasing the question . ...
SENA TOR NELSON. Maybe you did not understand the
question. I said I understand that your product,
Chloromycetin, has been responsible for deaths from bone
marrow disorders. Is that correct or incorrect?
DR. LUECK. I do not know in what reference you are
phrasing that question. I know that Chloromycetin, the
Parke, Davis brand of chloramphenicol-
SENA TOR NELSON. Has never resulted in any deaths?
I
DR. LUECK. No, 1 did not say that.
I
-,_1
SENATOR NELSON. Maybe I did not put the question
correctly. Some people have died from the administration , 1
of Chloromycetin. I understand. Will you tell me what you
know about that?
I
43
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44
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DR. LUECK. I understand that Chloromycetin has been
alleged to be related to or associated with some serious side
effects, some serious reactions . ...
SENATOR NELSON. You say you 'understand.' You really
are not sure that any deaths have resulted from this drug?
DR. LUECK. I think there have been instances where some
reactions can be related to the use of Chloromycetin.
SENATOR NELSON. Have you ever read the warning that
your company now belatedly puts in its advertising for this
drug? Here is an ad from the Journal of the American
Medical Association, February 20, 1967: 'Warning: Serious
and even fatal blood dyscrasias, aplastic anemia,
hypoplastic anemia '-and so forth-'are know to occur after
the administration of chloramphenicol.' Were you aware of
that?
DR. LUECK. Yes, sir.
SENA TOR NELSON. That was my question, Doctor . ...
There have been numerous lawsuits in the United States
(although none, apparently, in Japan) against Parke, Davis and
against physicians who have prescribed chloramphenicol.
Almost all of these have been settled out of court, often for
substantial sums. In one which went to trial, Love v. Wolfe
and Parke, Davis, a California court expressly held that even
though the Parke, Davis advertising literature and package
inserts for chloramphenicol contained the government-
report on --
MOVEMENTS
mandated warning, the company's promotional campaign for
the drug was so intense as to cancel out the effect of the
warning.
Outside the United States the company either tones
down the warning to the minimum permitted by local law, or
eliminates it altogether if no legal requirement exists. This
policy has led Senator Nelson to tell a company representative
that:
Any company, drug company or any other kind of
company, that would do that, I would be pleased to indict
on moral grounds . ... Your testimony is that you will meet
the standards of the country in which you are advertising,
not the standards of safety which the witness has testified is
a proper standard-the proper ad which gives the warning
that is put in ads in this country. But in countries where the
people do not know any better, where the country is not
protected by laws, you will tell us that you have no
compunction about running an ad that will fool a
doctor. . .. I would think you would not sleep at night,
frankly, you or any drug company that would do that.
Nor surprisingly, comments from the relatives of aplastic
anemia victims have sometimes been more acerbic even than
this. The experience of losing a daughter prompted one parent,
for example, to write the following:
We lost our almost 16-year-old daughter November 3, 1967
... due to aplastic anemia caused by Chloromycetin, and
my wife and I do not seem to know how to live with it . ...
I would like to ask the president of Parke, Davis several
questions:
(a) If he or his wife watched one of their children die a
little bit each day for 11 weeks with a disease that struck
our daughter like rat poison, if he could still take pride in
his promotional prowess?
(b) How would he or his wife answer this question from a
15-year-old daughter 'Mommy what is happening to me,'
and 'Why is God doing this to me,' on the day that she
passed away?
(c) Could he go back to his office and watch the sales soar
after watching his wife collapse on the hospital corridor
floor?
(d) How would he go home and tell an ll-year-old son he
so longer has a sister . .. ?
(e) Could he watch his wife turn from a happy, beautiful
woman of 123 pounds, deteriorate to 87 pounds and go
back and step up the production of Chloromycetin?
(f) Could he spend 24 hours a day for two weeks at [the
hospital} and return to the factory to see how sales are
coming along? ...
I am enclosing a picture of my daughter; perhaps the Parke,
Davis president would like to study it for a while.
In fairness to Parke, Davis, though, it does not appear
that its ethical or scientific standards have been any lower than
those of the other companies engaged in the chloramphenicol
traffic. Nor, apparently, have its standards differed from those
of the drug industry as a might lead one to
believe that the tragedies that have resulted from drugs like
thalidomide and chloramphenicol are not just isolated
incidents, but direct natural consequences of the way the
industry is run. One of the witnesses before the Nelson
subcommittee was Dr. A. Dale Console, now a practicing
psychiatrist in Princeton, New Jersey, and formerly the
medical director of E.R. Squibb & Sons, one of the best
known and most respected firms in the business. Among other
things, Dr. Console was asked why he had left Squibb. He
replied that:
Since it is almost 12 years since I resigned I have had
sufficient time to reconsider the decision. I cannot count
the number of times the question has been asked nor the
numbers of answers I have given. I believe that the best
answer can be found in my unfinished essay on The Good
Life of a Drug Company Doctor. Toward the end I said:
'These are only some of the things a drug company doctor
must learn if he is to be happy in the industry. After all, it
is a business, and there are many more things he must learn
to rationalize . .. He must learn that anything that helps to
sell a drug is valid even if it is supported by the crudest
testimonial, while anything that decreases sales must be
suppressed, distorted and rejected because it is not
absolutely conclusive proof He must learn to word a
warning statement so it will appear to be an Inducement to
use the drug rather than a warning of the dangers inherent
in its use. He must learn, when a drug has been found too
dangerous for use in this country, he can approve its use in
other countries where laws are less stringent and people
have less protection. He must learn, when a drug has been
found useless on one side of the Rio Grande, it can be sold
as a panacea on the other side and that he is expected to
approve the claims made for it. He will find himself
squeezed between businessmen who will sell anything and
justify it on the basis that doctors ask for it and doctors
who demand products they have been taught to want
through the advertising and promotion schemes contrived
by businessmen. If he can absorb all this, and more, and
still maintain any sensibilities he will learn the true meaning
of loneliness and alienation.'
During my tenure as Medical Director I learned the meaning
of loneliness and alienation. I reached a point where I could
no longer live with myself
NOTES
This article first appeared in Japanese in serialized form as
"Kiseki no kusuri 'kuromai' no uragawa" [The Other Side of Wonder
Drug 'Kuromai'J, in the Japan Socialist Party newspaper, Shakai
Shimpo (April 14, 21, 25, 28, May 1, 5, 12, 16, 19,23,1971; Nos.
1416-1426).
tFor the first nine months of 1972 it was down to approximately
20,000,000 grams.
See James Hamilton-Paterson, The Greedy War (1972) pp.
262-263 ;
Tn June of 1966 AID sent a pharmaceutical expert named
Norbert Tamblyn to South Vietnam to analyze the traffic in
pharmaceuticals. One of Mr. Tamblyn's discoveries was that in the
Fiscal Year 1966 alone the total quantity of antibiotics authorized
and shipped into South Vietnam under AID sponsorship nearly
equal to all the antibiotics used by the Philippines, Til" "md,
Taiwan, Malaysia/Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, and New
Zealand. The combined population of all these countries was then
approximately 101 million people. South Vietnam had a population
of 16 million.
Some seventy percent of these antibiotics were made up of
the drug chloramphenicol, a drug patented and manufactured by
Parke, Davis & Co. The Committee found that 'the lack of evidence
of multiple deaths of severe illnesses because of self-treatment with
chloramphenicol [in South Vietnam} leads to the conclusion that
substantial quantities of the drug were diverted into Communist
control.' Report of the Committee on Government Operations,
February 25th, 1969.
45
The Philippines under Martial Law
46
I
The Philippines: Another Vietnam?
I
by Gabriel Kolko
The historic relationship between the U.S. and the
Philippines today gives an exceptional importance to the
massive economic and strategic . legacy of over 70 years of
American domination of that nation. Apart from its prime
significance to the future of American military power in Asia
after the Indochina debacle, the Philippines is the most
important example of a sustained U.S. effort to transform a
Third World country in its own image. Now, with a martial-law
regime's fate very much in doubt and the U.S.'s economic
investments and military bases all hanging in the balance, the
objective pressures for a potentially open-ended American
commitment to preserve its interests and credibility in yet one
more Asian nation are again re-emerging in a form
substantially more compulsive than those in Indochina before
1965.
The economic stakes for the U.S. in the Philippines
begin with a minimum of $2 billion in investments. This sum,
which averages an 18 percent annual return, accounted at the
end of 1970 for almost four-fifths of the foreign investment in
a country whose oil, manufacturing, commerce and mining
sectors are heavily foreign-owned. In addition, the 1971 trade
between the two nations came to an impressive $835 million.
This comprehensive domination is due largely to the postwar
economic treaties, particularly the Laurel-Langley Agreement
of 1954, which allows Americans alone among foreigners to
possess complete control of a firm in any industry.
To Washington, the 18,400 U.S. military personnel in
two major and six minor bases are "a fundamental element in
the U.S. security posture in the Western Pacific," as one
Administration spokesman put it last June. Subic Bay Naval
Base, the home port of the 7th Fleet, is considered as
"tremendously important," as well it might be. Subic's vast
munitions and repair center makes it one of the prime bases in
the war. From Clark Air Force Base, B-52's are being refueled
in the air, planes are rotating to Vietnam and even flying
directly from North Vietnam back to Clark, and the technicians
do a substantial part of the mechanical work for the air war.
Since 1969 the responsible U.S. authorities have never
denied the role their military forces could play in present and,
above all, future local counterinsurgency operations. "There is
no identifiable conventional force that is likely or capable of
invading the Philippines," Lt. Gen. George Seignious admitted
to the House Appropriations Committee last June. "The
danger in the Philippines comes from smuggling, from
insurgencies, that are of considerable concern not only to the
Filipinos themselves, but to the security of our bases." In the
22 months after December 1967 the U.S. bases served as
supply and support depots, even to the extent of air support
missions with American pilots, in at least nine admitted
instances of anti-guerrilla operations. If the Philippines were
ever to evolve into a new Vietnam, the Administration sees the
formidable equipment and manpower already in place as of
inestimable value, if only because it would not have to take
the politically most difficult step of creating bases. Since
nominal Filipino independence in 1946, in every sense the
U.S. has already systematically intervened in that nation as
part of a normal order of things that began being seriously
challenged during the late 1960s.
Well might American leaders worry about potential
insurgency, for Filipino society is in a prerevolutionary stage
of deepening social, economic and political chaos without
having yet developed a unified opposition.
During its nearly half-century rulership of the
Philippines, the U.S. helped fashion one of the most
inequitable and impoverished agrarian structures in all of Asia,
and an originally spontaneous agrarian revolutionary
movement on the main island of Luzon during World War II
came under superficial Communist control in the form of the
main anti-Japanese resistance, the Huks. With massive U.S. aid,
Manila was largely able to suppress the Huks after the war, but
the concentration of land ownership into fewer hands became
even more pronounced. In 1965 Manila experts estimated that
corruption consumed about one-third of government revenues,
and inflation and the population explosion more than ate up
modest economic growth. The gross maldistribution of wealth
did nothing to mitigate an unemployment rate in 1964 of
about one-tenth of the work force, plus underemployment for
almost one-third of the remainder-peasants who worked
47
perhaps three months a year, or the massive new urban poor
forced off the land to live a lumpen existence in vast slums.
The two main parties, the Liberals and the Nationalists, were
traditionally interchangeable personalities and largely rival
personal cliques drawn from the immensely wealthy tiny
urban and landowning class.
When Nationalist Ferdinand E. Marcos became President
in December 1965, Western papers hailed him as the "last
chance" for stemming revolution in the Philippines. Apart
from the grave economic problems facing him, it was widely
felt that Marcos would also have to please a new class of local
entrepreneurs that had begun to emerge in the postwar
era-relatively conservative interests that wanted more
protection from U.S. domination as well as sufficient
development of a social and economic infrastructure so that
they could themselves profit from the resources of the
potentially rich island nation. These advocates of greater social
rationality were scarcely leftists, but they created an
extremely important new, essentially anti-American imperative
and social force which, along with the agrarian problem,
intersected with the inherited poverty and corruption that
continued to evolve toward social chaos.
But Marcos chose the traditional route of corruption and
inefficiency. Initially a man of moderate wealth, he soon
became one of the ten richest taxpayers on a salary less than
an American postman's, and he and his ambitious wife's family
diversified into every conceivable type of new enterprise his
power made available. He allowed a 1963 land reform law only
to aggravate the conditions of the handful of small peasants
who had tried to exercise its provisions. Unemployment and
underemployment have increased, and this year experts
projected the 39 million population to double in 21 years in a
nation in which estimates of per capita income range from
$140 to $180. With less than half of the taxes of the rich being
chronic inflation and unequal economic develop
ment, in 1971 this agrarian country was forced to import
nearly a half-million tons of rice. The nation's foreign debt,
which was a mere $88 million in 1955, by April 1972 had
mushroomed to $2.2 billion, while debt servicing of the
principal absorbed over 20 percent of export earnings. Beyond
this, most of the debt falls due within the next three years.
Buffeted by fluctuations in world prices for its main exports
and its own ineptness, compounded by the normally great
repatriation of the profits of American investors, the Marcos
government in 1970 and during the first seven months of 1972
ran up enormous balance of payments deficits that only
further put the nation in hock to largely U.S.-owned or
-controlled banks. Perhaps most dangerous of all in mobilizing
the opposition, in 1970 the rate of inflation doubled over the
average of the preceding decade, and that leap was in turn
more than doubled in 1971.
This was the larger structural context Marcos confronted
after his reelection in 1969 in a campaign that is estimated to
have absorbed a good part of the national treasury and
weakened the peso. The challenge to him from the Left
remained remarkably small. The Huks, which for social as well
as economic and other reasons have always retained a small
following in central Luzon, were divided among essentially
Mafia-type social bandits-some of whom had supported
Marcos in 1969-and spawned a political "army" that was
pro-Russian. The Maoists, drawing on the large Manila student
unemployed and alienated, entered the field with the New
People's Army (NPA) and the Communist Party
(Marxist-Leninist) in 1968. In late 1969, U.S. intelligence
thought Manila's estimate of 900 armed men in all these
factions, with their mass base at 30,000 to 80,000 to be rather
high. During the next three years these numbers changed only
slightly.
By far the greater immediate threat to Marcos-and to
American interests-came from the nationalist constituency in
the oligarchy with its quiet distinctive class basis for its
anti-American political rhetoric. Added to this key class was
the emergence of a large and rapidly growing Catholic Left
within the lower clergy and laity in Manila and among the
peasantry after 1968, a major division in a church that
historically had been the bastion of reaction.
Since the constitution forbade Marcos to run for a third
term after December 1973, and his Nationalist party had
already lost badly in the November 1971 congressional
election, by last summer it appeared likely that the normal
parliamentary mechanisms in the Philippines might challenge
American power much sooner than the guerrillas. Marcos
himself, whose only real consistency has been to enrich his
family fortunes, developed no coherent response to his
dilemmas, but was to cater verbally to nationalist sentiment
while in reality pursuing the traditional comprador role of
servicing American needs. Hamlet-like wavering became his
hallmark. Frequent references were made by himself and his
advisers after 1966 to the need for martial law to confront the
problems of society via a melange of agrarian reform and
thought control, but the press and his critics saw these only as
a symptom of his overweening ambition to retain power, and
such threats were not taken seriously enough. In fact,
complete personal opportunism is Marcos' most consistent
personal characteristic, with a pseudo-intellectual cast of mind
which he adjusts to serve his own needs.
Marcos Seeks A Way
Confronted with a multiplicity of unprecedented
challenges as well as a serious opposition, Marcos after 1970
pursued several simultaneous but also quite contradictory
responses-the cooption and repression of his adversaries. Each
of them, by necessity, had quite different but also quite
fundamental and dangerous implications to the United States
in a land in which every major policy necessarily involves
relations with the colonial power.
First, towards the Left and the nationalists he probed to
determine whether the traditional opportunism of the
dissident oligarchy and middle classes might produce a
cooptive solution. This took the form of vague declarations on
such questions as the future of U.S. bases and economic
privileges, the alliance with the U.S. in Southeast Asia, and
even future relations with Russia and China.
In part the new Manila foreign policy rhetoric was a
byproduct of the ambiguities of the Nixon Doctrine as well as
a "ping pong" diplomacy which superficially cast doubt on the
assumptions of SEATO. From late 1971 and until this
summer, Manila officials frequently explored publicly the
desirability of a great powers' guarantee of a neutralized
Southeast Asia which might even result in the end of SEATO
and the elimination of U.S. bases in the Philippines. If Marcos
added sufficient contingencies to his statements to allow him
48
complete freedom to' act-which only caused cynics to suggest
he was merely seeking leverage for greater American economic
and military aid-it is clear that he was also adopting a more
nationalist posture for the moment.
This pose was more apparent than real. With the vast
escalation in Vietnam last spring, the vital role of Clark and
Subic in the war became the focus of an opposition which
began to unify nationalists, Christians and the entire Left
around a common anti-war position. Liberal Senator Benigno
Aquino, Jr., one of the leading Liberal contenders for the
Presidential nomination and scion of one of the main families
in the oligarchy, then took up the issue with the assistance of
other members of the nationalist opposition and, above all, the
press. His charges were made irrefutable by evidence anti-war
U.S. Navy and Air Force personnel provided. Then, in
mid-May, two Air Force men active in the GI anti-war
movement held a press conference in Manila and testified
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, providing
graphic details. Though the GIs involved were all immediately
shipped back to the U.S., Marcos went on the defensive and
wobbled. He had during mid-May publicly accepted U.S.
Ambassador Henry A. Byroade's assurances that the bases
were not being used for offensive operations in the waf, which
violated the 1959 agreement covering their use, but
unprecedented public anti-war opposition during May and
June was not allayed and the press and Liberal opposition
refused to drop the matter.
The bases controversy again focused Marcos' ire on the
press. In a nation of 72 percent literacy, newspapers
potentially playa unifying and educational role unparalleled in
perhaps any other Third World nation because the biggest
dailies and weeklies largely belong to nationalist oligarchs
opposed to Marcos' commitments to the U.S. The press
political role was therefore of immense significance, for it
gladly exposed official chicanery and lies.
At the beginning of June, Marcos' aides began publicly
calling for vague revisions in the existing base agreements, and
even the return of some of the vast tracts of land attached to
them-which neatly skirted the issue of the use of Clark and
Subic in the war. Then, on June 12, Marcos released a
declaration which raised the whole question of the future of
the bases but avoided taking any position by simply asking for
"a deep and speedy review of the bases and other military
agreements as well as the Laurel-Langley agreement...."
Speeches of this sort, both American experts and Filipino
nationalists concluded, were designed merely to improve
Manila's horse-trading position on economic aid.
As part of his new exploration of foreign policy options,
Marcos at the end of 1971 had mentioned the need to open
greater contacts and trade with Russia and China, and shortly
thereafter sent his powerful wife off to Moscow and his
brother-in-law to Peking. Mrs. Marcos herself last May initiated
a Philippines-Soviet Friendship Society, of which she is
honorary chairlady, and in June official Soviet commentators
were publicly praising Marcos' shift away from "a one-sided
political orientation." Many cordial high-level exchange visits
took place over this past summer, and Moscow's enthusiasm
fOf Marcos' nationalist utterances became more audible as it
ignored the question of the fate of the small underground
pro-Soviet Communist party. Talks focused on trade and the
establishment of normal diplomatic relations. Although China
refused to go nearly so far, it too welcomed a semi-official
Filipino economic delegation last July.
Both publicly and privately, U.S. interests saw the trend
as profoundly disquieting. "We could wake up tomorrow and
find a revolt under way-under the banner of nationalism,"
one "Western official" in Manila told u.s. News and World
Report last May. This challenge reached alarming proportions
on August 19 when the Philippines Supreme Court handed
down several decisions which struck a profound blow at the
I
t
whole web of past and future American investments. The
rulings invalidated the Laurel-Langley Agreement provisions
allowing full U.S. ownership of land, natural resources and
public utilities, and demanded that American ownership be
I
sold off or reduced to 40 percent by the time the treaty
expires in July 1974. Worse yet from the U.S. viewpoint, no
foreign directors might sit on the boards or manage such firms.
The decisions, which were appealed and remained vague
regarding compensation or possible means of circumventing
them, were allegedly to affect less than one-quarter of U.S.
investment, but Americans rightly saw it merely as a prelude to
more nationalist legislation to follow.
Apart from what it meant to the existing penetration by
the U.S., the new rulings smashed the single most important
past and future American interest, as well as the politically
most potent one-petroleum. One-fifth of U.S. investments in
the Philippines are in oil marketing and refining, and since the
late 1960s exploration throughout the islands and offshore
areas has greatly intensified, with the promise of discoveries
now considered excellent. Walter J. Levy, the U.S. industry's
most famous specialist in Third World oil legislation, in 1969
personally drew up a secret recommendation to the Marcos
government that would have thrown open future oil
development to U.S. capital, but the Congress refused to pass
new petroleum legislation, and last May nationalist political
leaders and the press began to make much of Levy's role in
Marcos' contemplated measures. The press had even begun to
investigate reliable charges that the Marcos family itself has
major oil development interests and ambitions, and yet
another fortune to gain.
This equivocal juggling of foreign policies, which gained
him time during which to attain his main goal of further
enriching his own family and clique, inevitably had to exhaust
itself when the question of the retention of Presidential power
required a solution, and it came to a head this summer when
catastrophic floods, with an estimated damage of over $300
million, threw the already teetering economy into a tailspin.
Prices in Manila increased over one-quarter in one month, and
the issue of the national foreign debt owed to largely U.S.
interests joined with the critical need for additional food
imports. "Time is growing short for the Philippines to make up
its mind exactly what changes are going to be made in its
business relationship with the United States," the
businessmen's well-informed and costly The Asia Letter wrote
in mid-September. "There's been lots of talk and plenty of
table pounding going on about what alterations should be
made."
Marcos since 1971 had probed coopting the nationalist
movement and rhetoric and found it unprecedentedly
intransigent, but at the same time he serviced the U.S. in the
typical comprador role. Essentially, Marcos had lost control of
the nation's economy and the people's commitments. By last
September all that was left to him was even greater
dependence on the U.S. and the more systematic utilization of
the repression and violence he had also increasingly applied
49
after 1970.
Marcos and his closest advisers had often since 1966
discussed the possibility of martial law and an end to the
nominal parliamentarianism that had always misruled the
Philippines. Until 1971 few believed he would actually take
the step. Moreover, the 60,000-man army retained an
apolitical reputation which was undeserved. The military,
despite a portion of it that is "apolitical" or even also in parts
touched by nationalism, is potentially the U.S.' most reliable
and powerful ally today. In the two decades after 1950 it sent
8,700 of its personnel to the U.S. for training, including 153
of its most senior officers. Virtually the entire police force was
retrained and reorganized by U.S. police experts and funds in
the years immediately after Marcos came to power. No
instrument of repression in all of Asia was ever so completely
Americanized. Brig. Gen. Fidel Ramos, the head of the
notorious Philippines Constabulary, is a West Point graduate
and a Fort Bragg-trained parachutist. Marcos' executive
secretary, Alejandro Melchor, is an Annapolis graduate. If the
military appeared dormant, the fact remains that in 1958 some
Filipino officers, working with the CIA and American
military advisers, had begun planning a coup until their plot
was uncovered and the entire matter hushed up to avoid
obvious mutual embarrassment. It only remained for
circumstances to activate this liaison once again.
Marcos' advisers admitted at the end of September that
martial law had been studied for "a long time," to quote the
New York Times, but this is scarcely surprising. On August 21,
1971, nine people at a Liberal Party rally, including senatorial
candidates, were killed by two grenades while many more were
wounded. Marcos, blaming the Maoists, suspended habeas
corpus until last January and arrested over a hundred
opponents but never charged anyone with the crime. From
that date onward Marcos repeatedly played up the
"Communist threat," openly linked Aquino and the Liberal
nationalists to it, and further deepened public skepticism and
hostility toward himself. Beginning last March, petty
explosions became common, with bombs being "uncovered"
in the Congress and Foreign Affairs Ministry in July and
August. On July 5th Marcos' authorities claimed to have
discovered a boat that had been loaded with arms from an
undisclosed foreign power intended for the Maoist New
People's Army-an affair which again reduced his credibility.
The pattern remained the same: "Communist" plots and
actions in which no one was hurt or captured were used to
justify some decisive action to rid the nation of that menace.
Marcos ar.d his advisers were drafting amazingly public
plans. At the end of August, amidst new charges that the NPA
was infiltrating squads into Manila and more harmless
explosions, Marcos and the Indonesian Defense Minister met
to confcr on "internal subversion." "We are playing and toying
with democracy," Marcos told the press regarding the talks.
"We need a blood bath," the New York Times' Manila reporter
quoted one of Marcos' prominent Senators. On September
12th Marcos told the press that the military "feels it could be
easier for them to meet this threat if they can utilize some
kind of authority other than ordinarily authorized ... and we
are studying the matter." The next day Aquino publicly
revealed that Marcos had drawn up but not yet signed a plan
to place greater Manila and twelve cities under military
control. Three days later Marcos accused Aquino of having
conspired with the head of the Maoists, Jose Maria Sison, to
form a united front. Amidst rISIng protests and more
convenient bombings, on September 21st, according to an
undenied report in the San Francisco Examiner, Marcos and
U.S. Ambassador Byroade met for two hours and "Marcos
promised to protect a $1 billion American economic stake in
the Philippines in return for a tacit U.S. approval of his
declaration of martial law." The next day Marcos signed all the
necessary documents, citing an alleged ambush against his
Defense Minister-in which no one was scratched or
apprehended-as the ostensible excuse. At the end of
November, however, Marcos publicly claimed that God himself
had given him signs to take the fateful step.
Marcos R ides A Tiger
Marcos' proclamation of martial law on September 22
reflects the contradictions in Philippines society as well as the
issue of convenient falsehoods regarding the danger of the
Maoists which became his main staple after 1969. It
immediately became apparent that Marcos would be no
ordinary dictator. Twice Marcos insisted "this is not a military
takeover," and that martial law was sanctioned in the
constitution. But "a state of rebellion exists in the
Philippines," and he would arrest "those directly involved in
the conspiracy." Though he made some reference to crime and
corruption, as well as the need to "reform the social, economic
and political institutions in our country," the thrust of
Marcos' statement dealt with the alleged 10,000 regulars and
guerrillas of the NPA and their mushrooming growth over the
past year.
Marcos' first action was to close the press and radio save
for the small sector of it he owned or controlled, suspend the
high schools and universities, and systematically arrest the
mainly nationalist opposition. Aquino, Ramon Mitra, Liberal
floor leader in the Senate, and Senator Jose Diokno were
among the first mentioned, but soon the leading editors,
publishers, and journalists of the largest dailies, the Manila
Times and Manila Chronicle, as well as the major nationalist
weeklies, were also known to be in prison camps that Marcos
filled with leading Liberal party members and nationalists of
every tendency among at least 8,000 rounded up. At the
beginning of December nearly 100 of these personalities,
including Mitra, were released but kept under military
supervision. Tight censorship has been imposed on all the
media. The police caught relatively few of those in any faction
of the organized Left, for they were not the primary objective
of the repression.
In terms of political changes, Marcos immediately solved
the question of his having to leave office at the end of 1973 by
introducing an amendment in the new constitution, and he will
have "legal" authority to stay on for as long as he desires after
the constitution is ratified by a rigged referendum January
15th. Making much of private arms and crime in the streets,
his forces rounded up thousands of guns and quickly lowered
the high crime and personal violence which prevails quite
naturally in a sea of poverty.
Apart from petty puritanism regarding sexual themes in
media, Marcos' "New Society" campaign against corruption
among government officials consisted of a purge of the
bureaucrats his opponents had managed to appoint during
preceding administrations. Foreign journalists noted that the
main change was in increasing the power of the military over
50
the political structure in the name of a punctilious
constitutionalism, and that, in effect, Marcos was in the
contradictory position of "reforming" a society in which since
1965 he had been heavily responsible for the accumulated
corruption, nepotism and social-economic chaos he was now
decrying.
By the end of October Marcos was forced to admit that
"we thought we would be fighting [the Communistsl up to
the end of October. Thank God, we're not." What had
happened to his main justification for martial law? In fact, the
NPA may have roughly 1,000 men permanently in the field,
but not much more than that. General Ramos at the end of
October himself admitted that the alleged 10,000 guerrillas
operating with 1,000 NPA regulars fight only occasionally.
The "state of rebellion" Marcos cited on September 22 came
at a time "when", as he confessed at the end of October, "the
Communist rebellion could not yet organize a massive frontal
attack against the government." The NPA problem, foreign
specialists in Manila agreed, was hardly a real threat, and at the
end of November Marcos claimed it had been eradicated. After
a quite inept assassination attempt against his wife on
December 7, he shifted his emphasis to alleged Rightist plots
to kill him.
The Maoists are but one current in a much larger
movement of opposition to Marcos whose objective potential
for important, even revolutionary, changes in Filipino society
is far greater than the capacity of the presently organized
opposition combined. While the Russians have continued to
support Marcos because of his diplomatic and trade overtures
toward the U.S.S.R. and past nationalist utterances,
commenting publicly on the events since September 22 with
admiration, the pro-Soviet Filipino Communists have already
largely broken with them and taken a stand for unity against
Marcos. These elements will either genuinely transcend the
divisions which largely define the world Left elsewhere, and
which have been artificially imposed on the theory and
conduct of both Communist factions, or they will be
destroyed individually.
But today Marcos faces no large armed opposition, and
during October he began once more to concoct more
allegations of plots to seemingly justify the new order,
claiming for the first time that the years-old Moslem
insurgency in Mindanao was linked with the NPA. But even as
he invented resistance, Marcos' regime embarked on steps to
galvanize it in reality, planning the removal of about 50,000
peasants from 120 villages in northeastern Luzon so as to
isolate the 500 NPA forces concentrated in that area. Hence
the beginning of the repression which is the mobilizing
precondition of inevitable mass peasant resistance.
Despite his constant claims to be "obsessed with
reform" that had yet to touch the political structure of the
Philippines, it became immediately apparent that the new
order consisted of an alliance between Marcos' private clique,
which has virtually no domestic social base and is dependent
on the U.S. for survival and gain, and a military structure that
is surely going to appear more durable for America's purposes.
Among Marcos' first acts after September 22 were promotions
for a number of officers, pay increases for all of them, and
higher living allowances for the lower ranks. "We mean
business and the President means business," Army chief of
staff Romeo Espino declared as the main shift in power was to
increase the military's strength at the expense of Marcos'. This
equation of the authority of the military with that of Marcos
exposed a new reality whereby a facade of constitutionalism
was being used to mask the military's ascendancy. On
November 6, Defense Secretary Juan Enrile gave a prepared
speech in which he made plain that "If the situation arises ...
that our civilian sector is unable or unwilling to carryon the
job of pushing through the reform program of the President,
the military will have no alternative but to take over the job,
even if it would involve taking over purely civilian functions."
How serious the military threat is depends largely on
how they really view the much more profound developments
in the economic sphere, for which martial law and repression
were but the means toward a more enduring end. The divisions
within their own ranks, should any exist, could prove decisive.
Marcos, in any event, is neither a reformer nor predictable, and
the corruption they ostensibly decry was Marcos' handiwork.
Boxed in by the compounded economic and social results of
seven years of his misrule and nationalist opposition, Marcos
decided to lean on the military and the U.S. to find a new
balance of forces by which to save his fortunes. But while he
needs the military to rule now, the latter can do very well
without him. The crucial issue is how the U. S. will decide to
relate to both these constituencies.
Martial Law And The U.S.
It will remain for future historians to determine the
Nixon Administration's role in the days immediately before
and after September 22 and precisely how much pushing and
pulling occurred on both sides. Suffice it to say, regardless of
its role in the genesis of martial law, the U.S. was immediately
made its largest beneficiary. Apart from the undenied report
of the Marcos-Byroade meeting on September 21, Marcos'
executive secretary conveniently arrived in Washington the
next day. The State Department a few days later merely
disclaimed any foreknowledge of the proclamation, said that it
would not interfere with the events and reassured everyone
that relations with Manila remained excellent. It surely knew
what was to occur before the 21 st, and that claim-probably
among others-is certainly false.
Marcos, in any event, paid his immediate obeisance to
U.S. interests when he called in Tillman Durdin of the New
York Times and outlined his "economic reforms" in terms
entirely reassuring to U.S. investors. He would greatly modify
or reverse the August Supreme Court nationalist rulings
regarding U.S. property and managerial restraints, grant oil
exploration rights on favorable terms, and U.S. economic
"relations established by previous contracts" would remain
untouched.
Domestically, however, Marcos preferred stressing the
theme of land reform, and his media censors cut his pledges to
American companies. But even land reform, which much more
deeply affected the properties of his nationalist opponents in
the traditional oligarchy, has turned out to be largely
propaganda to mitigate his more material role in servicing the
U.S. The complicated preconditions for an actual transfer of
land titles, and the vast cost of generously compensating
landlords, quickly evoked universal skepticism as to Marcos'
real intentions, recalling the earlier failures of the 1963
agrarian reform laws. Still, during October the U.S. assigned
AID advisers, with hints of later U.S. funding, to the land
51
reform proJect.
If Marcos was vague about internal reform, he was very
'Ilcclfic about new concessions to the Americans and the
consequences to Washmgton if it did not support him. The
Ph Ii 1ppmes needed money to save the existing order. "The
American government is the leading power in the world. Of
necessity. it has a very strong influence on all the sources of
help, and it is itself a source of aid, And agam I say it is our
hope, it is our belief, that the government will understand that
there IS no other way out of the mess in which the Philippines
has fallen. There is absolutely no other way--unless they
accept a Vietnam-type solution," "We do not want any
\'ietnams m the Philippines," he again reminded the
Americans publicly on October 9th regarding the most
sensitive of all analogies. "If they [U.S.l don't help now, it
will be more expensive later," Defense Secretary Enrile said
dUrIng September. "They have as much stake in our survival as
a nation as we have. Things could turn out as badly here as
they did in Cuba,"
Along with the threats came more bait regarding foreign
investment and political stability, On October 3rd Marcos
announced a new foreign investment decree aimed mainly at
attracting oil and mining capital, but it is also a boon to
virtually every sort of foreign investor. A systematic oil service
contract law, which would allow Filipino interests such as the
,\1arcos family to share in joint ventures, was established on
terms more attractive than those in Indonesia. "Interest in
Philippine Islands exploration," Oil and Gas Journal reported,
"is beginning to perk up." All capital gains and stock transfer
taxes were greatly reduced, and the August Supreme Court
decisions were virtually scrapped, During October, frequent
official statements welcoming foreign capital and the
continuation of American bases only warmed the atmosphere.
As one U.S. oilman on the scene reported the mood, "Marcos
says, 'We'll pass the laws you need -just tell us what you
\vant.' "
As a bonus in the non-economic sphere, on October
16th three American civilian organizers among the unusually
strong GI anti-war movement at Subic and Clark bases were
jailed by Marcos police at the request of U.S, Navy officials,
and after a week were summarily deported.
Given this encouragement, U.S. businessmen in Manila
freely expressed their preference for the new order, but they
were less certain it was a durable solution likely to produce a
stable long-term investment climate. "The reaction among
businessmen is one of cautious optimism," the president of
Mobil Oil Philippines admitted. "Something drastic had to be
done. If martial law will instill some discipline and solve the
law and order problems, the temporary loss of freedom of
speech is not important," The Japanese were a bit more
reserved: the "reforms" pleased them and they were ready to
extend some new but small and restricted commodity loans to
the Philippines Central Bank, but the Tokyo Foreign Ministry
freely admitted that it was not at all confident that Marcos
could win the cooperation of the Filipino people,
Even some U.S, firms were skeptical of Marcos' personal
future, much less of his pretensions of being a reformer. His
corruption, especially in recently getting Ford to buy land
from his family and friends, was noted publicly. The sinking
economy, with its inflation, remains a dubious investment risk.
The army's role still remained a gnawing doubt, and whether
the absence of mass resistance during the first months would
continue much longer was also of concern to U.S. investors.
Had a maelstrom of profound crisis rather than a "New
Society" begun?
In effect, is it too late to save an already terminal social
and economic order whose vast problems already have
paralyzed society, and which would only squander more
money? Marcos' aides in October came up with a four-year
development plan which required an astronomical sum of
$400 to $500 million a year from official foreign loans and
grants, with private investment added to it-sums comparable
to existing economic aid to the Thieu regime. Amounts of this
magnitude for an administration whose record evokes no
confidence are not quickly produced. These questions caused
U.S. business and possibly Washington-to pause before
actually providing Marcos the capital his sinking economy
needs quickly in vast quantities, and so Marcos embarked on a
quite new line in the hope of shaking loose the support he
seeks.
On November 9 Marcos added a clause to the draft
constitution which allows the next national assembly to decide
whether the Laurel-Langley agreement should be continued
after it expires in July 1974 or whether the economic
nationalist decisions of the Supreme Court ought still to be
implemented, His Secretary of Commerce and Industry let it
be known that the nationalist course in 1974 might indeed be
possible. American businessmen on the scene saw it as a shift
from the strategy of enticements to one of simultaneous
threats, with Marcos by the end of November changing his
emphasis whenever it suited his audience's preference.
Publicly, Washington remained silent, and while we shall not
immediately know everything it has surely done privately,
indications will be forthcoming soon enough. For its stakes are
vast.
Marcos' most recent departure proves once more that he
is an unstable puppet for the U.S., and scarcely a sufficient
nationalist for a Filipino people certain to enter the picture
eventually. For the U.S., the real danger today is mainly
genuine nationalism rather than socialism, with the threat of
the Left being conjured up merely to confront a force that is
potentially almost as costly insofar as the legacy of American
bases and economic privileges is concerned. Hence the Nixon
Administration is now on the horns of a dilemma: if it backs
Marcos it will further alienate the nationalists and radicalize a
portion of them, while the peasants and urban workers will
certainly be much more easily mobilized by the various Left
groups under the pressure of the economic and social chaos
likely to prevail regardless of the amount of support it gives
him. It cannot, at the same time, coopt the whole nationalist
opposition-though portions of it surely still have a
manageable price-because the past months have made the
future destiny of the Philippines irreversible. But Washington
will not quiescently watch its economic and military position
go down the drain after 70-odd years of controlling the
Philippines, and so it may very well shift its backing from
Marcos to the generals. Apart from their own capacities to
rule, which are minimal, or even their ideology and unity,
which is a serious question mark, the Philippines army is one
of the smallest and poorest in Asia and a weak reed for
Washington to lean upon. If Marcos is an extremely uncertain
bet to save American control over the Philippines, his
successors on the Right are even more unpredictable.
In fact, the U.S. is already played out in the Philippines
in terms of indigenous options, which means we are entering a
pre-Vietnam situation in which it must again aspire to
52
accomplish with American men what has eluded its local
costly and horrible as Vietnam. But unlike Vietnam, the
dependents. They are already there, in great part as a hedge
magnet of far greater tangible economic and strategic interests
against precisely the situation the U.S. now confronts. And
almost prejudges the American decisions when the issues are
that is an invitation to another disaster for the Filipino people
confronted-as inevitably they must be. Today we are on the
and the U.S., one which over time could prove as protracted,
threshhold of a potentially terrible new crisis in Asia.
Reprinted from Commonweal, February 1973, with permission. Commonweal.
The End of the Freest
Press in the World
by David Rosenberg
On September 23, 1973, the Philippines ended its long
experiment with Western-style democracy. On that day,
President Ferdinand E. Marcos proclaimed martial law
throughout the country and according to Henry Kamm (New
York Times, October 30, 1972) conferred upon himself
"virtually absolute power."
President Marcos rapidly began to dismantle the
superstructure of constitutional government which had been
transplanted to the Philippines under American colonial rule.
This included, most notably, a Senate and House of
Representatives in the legislative branch, a President and his
cabinet in the executive branch, and a Supreme Court at the
head of the judicial branch-all complete with separated
powers and checks and balances.
Many observers have claimed that the transplant never
really succeeded in the first place. There was, in fact, ample
evidence of economic inequalities, electoral violence, graft,
corruption, and other "anomalies" in government. Filipinos,
however, could point to another institution outside the official
machinery of government to support their claims of
democracy, the existence of a free and highly outspoken press.
Before martial law, the Philippine press served several
vital functions in national politics. The press had long provided
an arena for national politics. The press had long provided an
arena for national political debate and a recruiting and training
ground for national leaders. Many politicians have been
journalists at one time or another in their careers. The press
also served as a guardian of the public interest by scrutinizing
official policy and behavior. This role was especially important
given the nature of Philippine party politics. Although the
Philippines has long had two major political parties, there has
never been any significant difference between them in terms of
ideology or issues. Party politics has been highly personalized
and pragmatic, if not opportunistic. Party loyalties have been
very weak and party-switching very common. For all these
reasons the press assumed the vital role of the "Loyal
Opposition" in Philippine democracy.
All this changed drastically on September 23, 1972,
when President Ferdinand Marcos proclaimed martial law
throughout the country. At the same time, he also brought an
end to freedom of the press in the Philippines by closing down
almost every newspaper, radio, and television station in the
nation and by jailing his editorial critics. According to
President Marcos, all his actions were necessary to combat the
"worsening state of rebellion" caused by various "subversive
forces in Philippine society." Both moves were unprecedented
in Philippine politics, and apparently took many people by
surprise. But it has since become clear that President Marcos
had been preparing for martial law for a long time. There is
also considerable evidence to indicate that he had also been
53
getting ready to silence the press for a long time. These two
developments are in fact closely related.
In the Philippines, politics in the press reflects politics In
society. The elite factions who dominated the mass media
were the same as those who dominated the rest of the country.
Freedom of the press was not safeguarded by any
constitutional provision or legislative statute, least of all by
any set of professional norms. It was effectively guaranteed by
a stale-mated competition among elite factions. As long as no
single faction dominated the others, the stale-mate persIsted.
Freedom of the press resulted by default, not by design. The
eVIdence suggests that President Marcos attempted to break
that stale-mate, not to quell a communist insurgency, but
rather to stay in power. In order to stay in power, he had to
silence his opponents' protest, shut down every newspaper,
radio and television station except his own, and imprison his
most outspoken critics.
The First Report of Martial Law
What appeared to be the precipitating factor of martial
law was the "ambush" or attempted assassination of Secretary
of Defense Juan Ponce Emile as he was riding home on Friday
evening, September 22, 1972. Ilis car was shot up, but Emile
was unhurt. In fact, he wasn't even in the car. He was
following behind in another, unmarked car, along with his
bodyguards. Martial law was announced about six hours later,
at 2:00 a.m. the following morning.
This "ambush" came after a series of "mysterious
bombing attempts in the Manila area" (Tillman Durdin in the
New York Times, September 24, 1972). The bombings
damaged the Manila City Hall, the Quezon City Hall, the
constitutional conventional hall, a few other public buildings
and even some department stores. These incidents were cited
by the Marcos administration as evidence of increasing
communist terrorist activity.
But both the assassination attempt and the bombings
remain "mysterious." Most of the explosions took place at
night; few people were injured.. Two suspects apprehended at
the scene of the constitutional convention hall explosion
turned out to be army officers in civilian dress. They were
carrying sacks of communist literature and said they were "on
a mission." They were sequestered the next day by higher
military authorities over the oblections of former President
Diosdado Macapagal, Chairman of the Constitutional
Convention, and Marcelino Veloso, Majority Leader of the
House of Representatives. To date, neither the police nor the
military have been able to find any suspects or even witnesses
to these alleged communist terrorist attacks.
In the meantime, we have learned that the martial law
decree was actually signed and was being implemented several
days, and possibly weeks, before the ambush. In his September
23 "Statement on the Declaration of Martial Law in the
Philippines," President Marcos said that he signed the decree
on September 21 and that "clearance was granted at 9:00 in
the evening of the 22nd of September,"-about one hour after
the attempted assassination of Defense Secretary Enrile.
Since neither Congress nor the courts were consulted on
the decree, President Marcos presumably delayed his clearance
in order to alert his police and military forces to begin the
implementation of martial law. General Fidel Ramos, chief of
staff of the Philippine constabulary, said that his military
commanders in the provinces had already received their
54
instructions-to take over the powers of government from the
elected governors and mayors-long before September 23.
According to General Ramos, they were only waiting for the
"go-ahead signal" from the president. In some areas, most
notably the province of Isabela, the military had already been
exercising the "powers of government" despite the objections
of the elected authorities.
Many Filipinos had suspected and expected the eventual
imposition of martial law. Their belief that it was not a sudden
decision but a carefully prepared move was confirmed by
Cornelio Villereal, the Speaker of the lIouse of
Representatives, who said in Tokyo on September 25 that
The imposition of martial law had been studied for a long
time ... and tbe ambush of Defellse S'ecretary Enrile
actually had no connectioll witb President Marcos's
decision.
Similar reports from both opponents and proponents of
martial law followed, 'Until finally, in late October, President
Marcos told a Newsweek reporter that he had begun making
preparations as early as January 1970. In the Newsweek
interview he said:
The first symptoms of a rebellion appeared with riots and
demonstrations in January, 1970. After that, I consulted
with the Justice Department and the military, and a think
tank was set up . ... A set of cOlltingency plans evolved.
The first category involved the quelling of any disorder or
rebellion by the troops; the second category pertained to
tbe president's power to suspend babeas corpus, and the
third, to tbe declaration of martial law.
So martial law was on the President's mind for at least
two and a half years before it was declared. Ilis attempts to
silence the press, however, began much earlier.
The Marcos Administration and the Press
In 1966, his very first year in office, President Marcos
sent to Congress a bill to create a Public Information Office.
The office would centralize the public relations activities of
140 government branches and offices; it would handle all
incoming inquiries and all outgoing releases; it would further
establish its own news agency to collect information and its
own publishing and broadcasting facilities. The new office
would be headed by the President's then press secretary, Jose
D. Aspiras.
The President asked Congress for 2.9 million pesos to
fund the Public Information Office (a sum which was about
four times as much as his predecessor, Diosdado Macapagal,
had spent on "pr" during his last year in office).
Presidents Garcia and Macapagal had made similar press
control proposals, although on a smaller scale. Predictably, the
press vehemently opposed all three attempts and Congress
rejected all three of these bills.
But President Marcos was especially persistent. What he
could not gain through legislative mandate, he achieved by
internal reorganization. Later in 1966 he placed the National
Media Production Center under the jurisdiction of the
Malacanang Press Office and then changed its name to the
Public Information Office. The NMPC was started as a USAID
development project. It was supposed to turn out materials for
vanous national development programs and to train
government personnel in the use of communications
equipment. But by 1969 most of its 4.3 million peso budget
was directed toward the president's re-election campaign.
Early in 1969, President Marcos again sought
Congressional approval for a Department of Public
Information. This time his bill passed the House, but was
killed in the Senate. Congress did approve, however, an
appropriation of 5.7 million pesos for the NMPC for fiscal year
1969-70, the election year. In the election campaign, it is
estimated that President Marcos spent 10 times as much on
print media publicity as did his opponent, Senator Osmena,
the Liberal Party Candidate.
The major turning point in Marcos' policy toward the
press came shortly after his re-election in November 1969.
Until the beginning of 1970, President Marcos still enjoyed
considerable approval from the press. He had won re-election
by a very wide margin and expected widespread support. But
he was in no position to fulfill his many campaign promises.
The government treasury was nearly exhausted and a team of
examiners from the IMF had arrived to prescribe emergency
measures. In order to satisfy the government's international
creditors, Marcos had to devalue the peso and institute a
national austerity program.
On January 16, 1970, university students demonstrated
against these measures at the gates of Malacanang, the
presidential palace. The President's Guard reacted violently
and several students were shot and killed. Another
confrontation followed on January 20. Students were joined
by striking workers in a mass demonstration against the
Marcos government. Again there was violence, reported widely
in the mass media.
President Marcos very much wanted the press on his side
in this confrontation, and he went to great lengths, and
expense, to win them over. He invited the publishers to a
luncheon after the January student-worker demonstrations,
and asked for their cooperation and support. But the
publishers did not, on the whole, acquiesce. Joaquin P. Roces,
head of the Manila Times Publishing Company, remarked, "We
still have in our ranks a number of dedicated aggressive
reporters whose allegiance is to the truth." Many prominent
journalists supported the students and the workers. They also
charged Marcos with gross financial mismanagement which
they attributed to election bribery. Most offensive to these
journalists was what they saw as a heavy-handed effort of the
President to "capture the press." Relations between the
President and the press deteriorated very rapidly after this. It
is ironic that President Marcos, after applying more resources
to public relations than ever before, after winning an
unprecedented re-election campaign by a record vote, became
so unpopular so fast, at least on the editorial pages. He reacted
with. bitter disillusionment. One quote is especially revealing.
At one of the annual Gridiron dinners of the National Press
Club in Manila, he complained that:
You elect a President, award him the mantle of
authority, make him the symbol of sovereignty of the
people, and after that-you shoot him down with every
weapon you have.
He went on to accuse his critics-in the same speech and in a
number of subsequent public confrontations-of being
"whiners, time-wasters, fault-finders, skeptics, nihilists,
defeatists, naive, uninformed, inveterate gripers, and
insufferabl y arrogant."
The press responded with a pooled editorial which
appeared under the same banner headline in every major
newspaper. It was "An Appeal to the President" to crack
down on graft and corruption-in government. Then the
conflict went beyond verbal exchanges and took a more
threatening turn. Quintin and Rizal Yuyitung, publisher and
editor of the Chinese Commercial News, were abruptly
deported to Taiwan on charges of spreading communist
propaganda. The charges were hardly credible. The newspaper
was published in Chinese; it had a very small circulation, and
its publisher, Quintin Yuyitung, was hardly subversive. To the
contrary, he was president of the prestigious Manila Overseas
Press Club. The only evidence the government offered was an
Associated Press news item on Mao Tse-tung, which was
carried by several Manila newspapers. Finally, the government
announced that the Yuyitung brothers were not actually
deported, but rather extradited by the Taiwan government.
Following these events, in March 1970, the
administration made its own publishing debut with
Government Report, a weekly distributed free of charge from
the office of the President. Few people outside the
government read the paper. But its very first issue carried an
ominously clear banner headline: "Can Publishers Foment
Disorders?" The new weekly complained that "the national
press can no longer be trusted"; that "the government has very
little chance of being heard these days"; and therefore the
government had to tell its own story.
These charges and counter-charges polarized relations
between Marcos and his critics. Hopes for an independent and
professional media began to fade. Journalists found it difficult
to maintain any objective neutrality. "You can only be very
friendly or very hostile to Marcos," said one newspaperman.
"If you're friendly, then the other newspapermen accuse you
of being bought; if you're hostile, then Marcos accuses you of
lying."
Polarization shortly led to the concentration of media
ownership and the formation of "multi-media" or "tri-media"
networks. The "ilustrado" families who comprise the national
oligarchy have long subsidized media outlets in order to
defend their major economic interests. They have since
realized that the mass media have tremendous potential, not
only in defending their larger economic interests, but also in
aggressively seliing their products, their candidates, their
interests and their politics. The Soriano family acquired the
Radio Mindanao Network and the Inter-Island Broadcasting
Network, in addition to its daily newspaper, the Herald, and
other print media holdings. The Elizalde family added the
Manila Broadcasting Company and the Metropolitan
Broadcasting Company to its major newspaper holdings, the
Evening News and the Sun. By far the largest multi-media
network was controlled by the Lopez family through the
ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corporation. At last count it included
4 television stations, 2 television relay networks, 20 radio
stations, and 24 micro-wave relay stations, as well as its major
daily, the Chronicle.
That was in the private sector. In the public sector
President Marcos placed the Philippine Broadcasting Company
and the Radio-TV-Movie Office directly under his office. The
Voice of America was acquired by the NMPC and renamed the
Voice of the Philippines. And the budget of the NMPC went
up from 9.1 million pesos in FY1970-1971 to 12 million pesos
55
in FY 1971-72. Close friends of the Marcos family also
acquired a radio network and began a daily newspaper to
further represent administration policy.
Polarization within the media was paralleled by a similar
process in national politics. This had the unanticipated effect
of unifying several diverse groups in common opposition to
President Marcos. The national elite of the opposition Liberal
Party joined with agrarian reformers, workers, and students in
a coalition of nationalist reform. They accused President
Marcos of neo-colonialism and received overwhelming popular
support in the Senate by-elections of 1971.
President Marcos, in turn, began to perceive all
opposit.ion and criticism as a direct challenge to his authority
as. preSident and therefore subversive. In order to put down
this threat to national security, he found it necessary
to stay m power and silence the opposition.
There were three ways in which President Marcos could
have stayed in power: One was to change or amend the
constition. If that failed, his wife-Imelda Romualdez
Marcos-could run for president after his term expired. If that
failed, he could rule through his emergency powers under
martial law. President Marcos attempted all three methods.
The first premonition of what was to come came in
August 1971, when someone-stili unknown-attempted to
assassinate the entire leadership of the opposition Liberal
Party at a mass rally in Plaza Miranda. President Marcos said
that communist terrorists were behind the grenade bombings.
that the Philippines was "in imminent danger of
mvaSlon, msurrectlOn, or rebellion," and then suspended the
writ of habeas corpus. There were some strong protests to this
loss of civil liberties, but the Supreme Court upheld the
President's actions. Looking back on this incident, many
observers consider this affair a "trial balloon," a dress rehearsal
for martial law. Shortly thereafter, a number of high-ranking
government officials started getting army commissions
another indication that something unusual was happening.
In May 1972 a national political scandal hit the
newspapers when one of the delegates to the constitutional
co.nvention, Eduardo Quintero, accused the Marcos family of
brIbmg convention delegates. According to Quintero, the
Pres.ident wanted the constitutional convention to adopt a
parhamentary form of government with a much stronger chief
executive in the position of prime minister. He also wanted to
run for that office and stay in power while doing so.
His proposal ran into very stiff opposition, and it
became increasingly likely that the whole constitutional
referendum would go down to defeat. This development seems
to have bolstered the long-standing rumors that the president's
wife Imelda would run for the presidency if the referendum on
the constitution were defeated. As a result, a "Ban Marcos"
Movement started, with the widespread support of the press.
In July, Senator Jose Diokno warned that the President had a
third alternative for staying in power: the imposition of
martial law. Senator Diokno's allegation was denied by the
administration, but suspicions remained. By the end of August
1972, the national political situation was highly unstable.
Then several events occurred in rapid succession which led
directly to martial law. These events have not received much
notice in the foreign press.
The first was a Supreme Court ruling that:
Citizens of the United States and corporations and
business enterprises owned or controlled by them can not
acquire and own ... private (agricultural) lands in the
Philippines; and all other rights acquired by them under the
Parity Amendment will expire July 3, 1974.
. The court's decision did not change the stipulated date;
It had been anticipated for a long time. However, there was
(and continues to be) some ambiguity about how much and
how soon American firms would have to reduce their equities.
If thiS ruhng were enforced, it would mean that American
firms would have to sell their lands or reduce their share of
ownership to 40% of total equity by the 1974 deadline. As
combined American investment is estimated to be somewhere
between $2 and $ 3 billion, the ruling caused quite a stir.
Immediately afterwards, a number of American corporate
flew to Manila to confer with the president.
Promment among them were the representatives of the oil
industry, which is by far the largest American interest in the
islands. It is estimated that Esso, Mobil, Caltex, Gulf, and
Getty have a combined investment of $400 million in the
Philippines.
We still don't know exactly what happened at these
conferences in. early September. American influence during
thiS CrItical perIod has not been fully ascertained, but there is
considerable circumstantial evidence to suggest that President
to American investments in exchange
for fmanclal and pohtlcal support for his continued rule.
Shortly thereafter, the oil companies peti tioned the Oil
Industry Commission for a price increase. Raising the price of
Oil under such circumstances would have been a provocative
move. Oil prices had been raised twice in two years and on
each occasion there was a nationwide transportation strike.
The President then announced that in light of recent
military intelligence he was again considering suspending what
he then called the "privilege" of the writ of habeas corpus, for
the second time in two years. The announcement came on
September 11, 1972, his 55th birthday, during a conference of
provincial governors, mayors, constabulary commanders and
other military officials. The stated purpose of the meeting was
"to promote closer cooperation and collaboration (between
military and civilian authorities) particularly in meeting peace
and order problems." Defense Secretary Enrile assured
reporters that "martial law is out of the question."
But on September 14, 1972, Senator Benigno Aquino of
the Liberal Party revealed that a plan for imposing martial law
was already being implemented. Under the code-name "Oplan
Sagittarius" the Philippine Constabulary was scheduled to take
full control of the Greater Manila area by November, two
months later. Like the earlier warning of Senator Diokno, this
was also denied by the administration. President Marcos
assured Congressional leaders that he would first consult with
them before making any decisions on martial law. He did not.
In the final week before martial law was declared,
internal security forces were fielded in the metropolitan area;
Marcos certified several bills to strengthen the
military; seven military officers were elevated to the rank of
general (bringing the total to thirty-nine); a contingency plan
for martial law, entitled "Oplan Sagittarius," was declassified;
President Marcos accused Senator Aquino and other
opposition Liberal Party leaders of "conspiring with
communists in a common plan of propaganda, logistics, as well
as armed support"; over fifty political activists were arrested;
the constitutional convention hall was bombed; the increase in
oil prices was approved; and transportation workers prepared
56
to strike.
Meanwhile, In the constitutional convention, the
so-called "anti-dynasty" or "Ban Marcos" Resolution was
narrowly defeated. Another resolution was introduced whIch
would extend the President's tenure indefinitely as temporary
Prime Minister of a transitional National Assembly. Congress
found it prudent to adjourn. It never met again.
The culminating event was a rally in Plaza Miranda on
Thursday, September 21. The rally was called by Senator
Diokno, chairman of the Movement of Concerned Citizens for
Civil Liberties. The MCCCL was an ad hoc coalitIOn of over 30
civic, religious, labor, student, teacher, and political activist
groups formed to protest the suspension of the writ of habeas
corpus a year earlier. The MCCCL's secretary-general was
Eddie Monteclaro, presIdent of the National Press Club. The
prinCIpal speaker at the rally was Senator Aquino, the chief
surviving Marcos opponent in the Liberal Party. lie accused
the President of attempting to impose martial law, of
instigating the rash of bombings, of increasing foreign
intervention in the economy, and of raising domestic prices.
About 20,000 people attended this rally in Plaza Miranda. It
had national radio, television, and press coverage. The next
day Senators Aquino, Diokno, and Mitra were taken Into
custody. Secretary of Defense Enrile escaped hIs "ambush"
and, by 2 :00 a.m. the following morning, martial law had been
proclaimed. In the following few days, a number of oppositIon
leaders were arrested: senators, congressmen, constitutional
convention delegates, journalists, writers, professors, students,
labor union leaders, peasant union leaders, the leaders of
almost every other institution that had opposed Marcos. There
were no specific charges entered for any of these arrests.
However, the President did issue a statement that the
government would arrest anybody who
had consciously or unconsciously taken part in tbe
conspiracy against the government, given aid and comfort
to the forces of insurgency and subversion, and bave eitber
directly supported, or aided and abetted the subversion of
our established values and traditions.
Marcos accused the press specifically of publishing
"rumor-mongering, inflammatory, and libelous news-items and
commentaries." It can probably be admitted that there were in
fact a lot of "rumor-mongering, inflammatory, and libelous"
journalists in the Philippines. But those journalists who landed
in jail were generally among the most respected and the most
professionally responsible ones in the country. They were both
influential and critical. These journalists did not accept the
administration's claim that communist terrorists, or the Huks
or the NPA (New People's Army) were responsible for the
bombings, or for the attempted assassination of Secretary
Enrile, or for the mass assassination attempt on the Liberal
Party leadership in Plaza Miranda the previous year. There is
still no conclusive evidence to suggest that these attacks were
instigated by communist terrorists. Henry Kamm reported
that "The perpetrators of tlie attacks have never been
discovered, although all available evidence has convinced
authoritative sources that they were connected with
established political figures rather than with the Communists."
(New York Times, October 30, 1972.)
Since martial law was declared, a number of other
disturbing developments have been reported. The
constitut IOnal convention has opened the way for Marcos to
remain In power indefinitely, whether as president, prime
minister, or some combination of the two. Marcos himself
opened the door to foreign Investment and he has even
indicated that the Parity Amendment will not terminate in
1974, but will be extended beyond that date. It seems likely
that the recent gradual trend toward "Filipinization" of the
economy will be reversed.
The government has stepped up its counter-insurgency
campaign in Isabela province and abllut 50,000 villagers are
being re-settled in order to "isolate 1he guerrillas." There are
also some indIcations of increased American support for these
operations m terms of equipment. advisors, and airborne
reconaissance and support missions. (These are reported in
detail in the Pbilippine Informatioll Bulletin, a new bimonthly
publIshed by the American Friends of the Filipino People in
New York City.)
So far, these developments have not been reported in the
controlled Philippine press. It seems unlikely that Filipinos
will hear or read any more than their government wants them
to on "sensitIve" Issues. ThIS can be attributed to the
creation- at long last, after three unsuccessful attempts-of a
Department of Information.
Secretary of Information Francisco "Kit" Tatad now
preSIdes over the newly created Department of Information,
the Presidential Information Office, the National News
Service, and the Bureau of Broadcast. I Ie has stated that the
government will be able to provide all the "necessary,
accurate, straight news of positive, national value."
What does all this say about politIcs and the press in the
Philippmes? It IS significant that only one major publisher,
Joaquin Roces, was arrested at the outset of martial law. lie
was the only publisher for whom newspaper work was a
central concern and not a sideline. He was the one who had
most to lose from the end of freedom of the press, and
consequently he was the most strongly opposed to President
Marcos' policies. This is not the case with Elizalde, Soriano, or
Lopez. In fact it is difficult to see how the president could
govern WIthout the cooperation of these powerful families.
Their political, economic, and managerial resources are still
considerable. Eventually, they may be permitted to resume
their media activities, if they accept the provisions of the "new
socIety." In thIS sense, the Philippine media will become
"mobilIzed" or "nationalized" like most other Southeast
Asian media; it will become an institution dedicated not to
freedom of expression, but to the service of national policy
and the preservation of political power.
r'o

'-.

';-" ",

57
GUIDELINES FOR MASS MEDIA
Department Order No.1
In accordance with Letter of Instruction No.1, dated
September 22, 1972, pursuant to proclamation No. 1081
dated September 21, 1972, the following policies and
guidelines for the news media are hereby prescribed:
1. Newspapers, radio and television shall print and
broadcast accurate, objective, straight news reports of positive
national value, consistent with the efforts of the government
to meet the dangers and threats that occasioned the
proclamation of martial law, and the efforts to achieve a "new
society" as set forth by the President and the
Commander-in-Chief of all the armed forces of the Philippines.
2. Unless otherwise specified, no newspaper, radio or
television program may carry any editorial OpInIOn,
commentary, comments or asides, or any kind of political,
unauthorized or objectionable advertising. The so-called shall
not appear in any newspaper, and its equivalent shall not be
broadcast either by radio or on television.
3. No extraneous material of any kind may be inserted
in any sports or entertainment story or any like material.
4. Expressly prohibited are:
a. Materials that tend to incite or otherwise inflame
people or individuals against the government or any of its duly
constituted authorities.
b. Materials that undermine the people's faith and
confidence in the government or any of its instrumentalities.
c. Materials that are seditious, not based on facts, or
otherwise without definitely established and well-identified
verifiable sources, or based on mere allegation or conjecture.
d. Materials that downgrade or jeopardize the military
or the law enforcement authorities, their work and their
operations.
e. Materials that abet, glorify or sensationalize cnme,
disorder, lawlessness, violence.
f. Materials that destroy or tend to destroy public
morals as well as morale.
g. Materials that foment opinions and activities contrary
to law.
h. Materials that sow or generate or tend to sow or
generate fear, panic, confusion, ignorance and vulgarity among
the people.
5. Informative foreign news items may be printed or
broadcast by the local media but in no case must any foreign
news be printed or broadcast which puts it in the same
category as any of the expressly prohibited materials
enumerated above.
6. Similarly, no news material or opinions emanating
from abroad may be disseminated by any wire agency to any
Philippine recipient which is of the same type as any of the
prohibited materials enumerated above.
7. The same rules apply to foreign correspondents,
whether based in the Philippines or not. No foreign dispatch
will be filed from the Philippines which impugns, discredits,
questions or criticizes any positive effort of government, the
government itself or any of its duly constituted authorities.
Nor will any dispatch be filed which speaks unfairly or
inaccurately of the Philippines or the Filipinos.
8. In all cases, materials for publication and broadcast in
the newspapers, radio, and television shall be cleared by the
Department of Public Information. Similarly, all foreign
dispatches and cables shall be cleared by the department.
9. Any correspondent filing his dispatch shall be held
accountable for any alteration in any dispatch that has been
cleared, should any such alteration occur in his copy when it is
finally published or broadcast.
10. Foreign correspondents as well as local media men
shall be properly accredited by the Department of Public
Information, upon presentation of their proper credentials and
documents. All media men, foreign as well as local, shall at all
times behave themselves with decorum.
11. These rules may be amended or modified, without
prior notice.
Guidelines for cameramen, photographers of all media,
local and foreign:
1. They may take pictures of:
a. Normal city life
b. Interviews with authorized officials and officers
2. The following are restricted to cameramen and
photographers:
a. Military installations, camps, facilities, etc.
b. Military operations
c. Malacanang grounds and premises
d. Airports and ports
Proper authorities are instructed not to allow shipment
of film materials not accompanied with written authorization
from the Department of Public Information.
Department Order No.2
In accordance with Letter of Instruction No.1, dated
September 22, 1972, pursuant to Proclamation No. 1081,
dated September 21, 1972, the following policies and
guidelines are hereby prescribed in connection with the
operation of printing presses in the Philippines.
1. No printer may print any newspaper, periodical,
newssheet, pamphlet, leaflet or publication for mass
dissemination of any kind without prior written authority
from the Department of Public Information.
2. No printer may print any text of any kind that falls
under any of the prohibited items under Department Order
No.1, pertaining to news media coverage.
SECRETARY OF PUBLIC INFORMATION
DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INFORMATION
Manila
25 September 1972
... .. .....

FROM THE PHILIPPINES DAILY EXPRESS
(MARCOS' OWN PAPER), SEPTEMBER 26,1972
58
SUGGESTED GUIDELINES FOR
PHILIPPINE SCHOLARLY JOURNALS
by the Philippine Social Science Council
The Philippine Social Science Council wishes to submit
to the Department of Public Information its suggestions for
guidelines in the special area of scholarly journals. It does this
in the belief that the Department of Public Information will
welcome these suggestions from a body representative of those
who are intimately concerend with such publications.
Assumptions
Beyond this belief in the openness of the Department of
Public Information to suggestions from this special sector of
the nation's citizens, there are several assumptions which
underlie our formulation of these suggested guidelines. They
are the following:
1. The New Society is a reformed civilian society; it is
not the result of a military takeover;
2. Freedoms will be curtailed only insofar as the
well-being of the nation shall clearly make this mandatory;
3. In a civilian regime such as ours, the exchange of
positive ideas and factually-based opinion, when responsibly
conducted among those specially trained for this
function- even where they touch on the current status of
government programs-performs a beneficial service for the
nation;
4. A traditiona1 medium for the exchange of such ideas,
information, and opinion-especially important relative to
national development-is the scholarly journal;
5. In these journals (such as listed below
l
), the nation's
scholars write for their own restricted numbers in a manner
that is self-critical, moderate, objective, and courteous.
Suggested Guidelines
Because of our assumption that in the New Society
freedoms will be restricted only insofar as national security
makes this action clearly mandatory, and because of the
restricted, self-critical, and moderate nature of scholarly
journals, we suggest that for the latter there be special
guidelines quite different from those announced for mass
publications (Department of Public Information Orders Nos. 1
and 2). Our basic insight is that if that canons of scholarly
writing are observed, there will be no need for the burdensome
tasks of political censorship.
The guidelines are the following:
1. Authors of articles in Philippine scholarly journals
will be expected to conform to the best traditions of
their disciplines.
2. In particular, such authors will:
a. Write responsibly; that is, use moderate
language, support significant statements with
commensurate proof, state clearly the limitations
of their study, and allow for alternative
interpretations of findings:
b. Write courteously; that is, show due respect for
colleagues, readers, and those individuals and
institutions about which they write;
c. Write positively; that is, where evaluation of
some kind is made, it will be helpful in tone, not
destructive, and (where this is appropriate)
positive suggestions for improvement may be
made.
3. Editors of scholarly journals will in the exercise of
their editorial function assist authors to achieve the goals
under guidline 2. above.
4. Authors and editors who follow these guidelines will
be considered to make a positive contribution to the
nation's welfare.
5. Where a decision must be made as to whether or not,
or to what extent, an author or editor has followed these
guidelines, this task will be entrusted primarily to
scholarly peers.
Suggested Procedures
In the implementation of the above guidelines, the
Department of Public Information may wish to consider the
following possible concrete measures. We offer them because
they impress us as combining simplicity and efficiency.
1. Let the Department of Public Information,
preferably with the advice of the Philippine Social
Science Council, form a special committee of
social-science scholars, chaired by a high-ranking civilian
member of the Department. This committee will have
the following tasks.
a. To determine the official guidelines for
scholarly Philippine journals;
b. To process applications made by journals
wishing to be officially designated scholarly
journals for purposes of the Department of Public
Information. The guidelines will be applied to the
past performance of each journal, as well as to
articles presently being prepared for publication.
c. To recommend that approved scholarly journals
be given general permission to be printed and
published without further antecedent censorship.
2. Let the Department of Public Information act onthe
recommendations of the special committee, giving
temporal priority to those journals with issues in press or
ready for press. For approved journals this actions will
include:
a. Issuing to the journal's publisher and/or editor
a permit for its printing and publication, perhaps
upon receipt of a certification from the publisher
and/or editor that the guidelines for scholarly
journals will be observed;
b. Issuing the permit in such a way as to make it
clear to printers that they are free to accept the
job of printing the journal.
3. Let the Department then form a review committee,
similar in composition to the special committee in
paragraph 1 above (it may even be of identical
composition). The review committee will have the
59
following tasks:
a. To consider new (or renewed) applications for
the official status of scholarly journal; [sic1
b. To review from time to time the scholarly
standing of an earlier approved journal;
c. To make appropriate recommendations to the
Department of Public Information.
October 4, 1972
APPENDIX
THE PHILIPPINE SOCIAL SCIENCE COUNCIL
The member associations, through their presidents,
annually elect the members of the Executive board, who in
turn elect officers from among themselves. Each member
represents a particular social science discipline. For the year
197273, the Board members are the following: Alfredo V.
Lagmay (psychology), Chairman; Frank Lynch, S.J.
(anthropology), Vice Chairman; Cristina P. Parel (statistics),
Secretary-Treasurer; Eufronio }\1. Alip (history), Rudolfo A.
Bulatao (sociology), Mercedes B. ConcepcIOn (demography),
Armand V. Fabella (economics), Gloria D. Feliciano
(communications). Emy P. Pascacio (linguistics), Loretta M.
Sicat (political science), Abelardo M. Samonte (public
administration), and Nathaniel Tablante (social work).
The PSSC .,. is supported by the National Science
Development Board, The Asia Foundation, The Ford
Foundation, and the Fund for Assistance to Private Education.
The PSSC Executive Secretary is Dennis G. Teves, who holds
office at the PSSC's new quarters at 53-C Alejandro Roces,
Quezon City (telephone: 99-97-64)....
I PhilIppine SOCIOlogical Review, Philippine Journal of
Linguistics, Philippine Journal of Psychology, Philippine
Economic Journal, Philippine Statistician, Social Work,
Journal of History-all sponsored by the Philippine Social
Science Council; others are Philippine Studies, Asian Studies,
IPC Papers, Silliman Journal, Sulu Studies, Samar-Leyte
Studies, Economic Research Journal, Philippine Journal of
Public Administration, Philippine Social Sciences and
lIumanities Review, Historical Bulletin, Journal of East Asiatic
Studies, Philippine Geographical Journal, the Journal of
Agricultural Economics and Development, Journal of General
Education, and Philippine Journal of Communications Studies.
This list is not exhaustive but illustrative.
China Books
Literature from China & Vietnam
Poems of
Mao Tse Tung & Ho Chi Minh
Subscription to Chinese Literature
Monthly Magazine $3.
Request t'ree catalogue.
Open: 9-6 MS
CHINA BOOKS & PERIODICALS
2929 24th St SF 94110 2826945
PROPAGATING THE IDEAS OF
THE NEW SOCIETY
by Fred J. Elizalde
If the New Society is to bring about a new positive
outlook on the part of society as a whole towards the Filipino
nation and its government, then a radical shift away from the
previous syndrome of cynicism, apathy, and pessimism so
evident in the old society must be undertaken. Following
Deutsch's concept of 'social mobilization, there are two
distinct central stages to the process:
1. the stage of uprooting or breaking away from old
settings, habits and commitments; and
2. the induction of the mobilized persons into some
relatively stable new patterns of group
membership and organizational commitment.
In short, mobilization of the people-the first stage-is
followed by reintegration-the second-by some form of
unifying, self-dignifying and reintegrative ideology. In this
latter case, perhaps the chief battle against Communism will be
on the grounds of Nationalism.
The weaknesses of the old society must be exposed: the
underlying forces which were working against the very system
of liberty and democracy which allowed them to exist.
Confusion and anarchy were nurtured and used by forces of
the left to work against the Republic, a vicious syndrome that
would lead inexorably to an eventual defeat of the very same
democracy under which the Chinese Communist-inspired
totalitarian left was able to exist. Many of the cherished
"settings, habits and commitments" of the old society were
therefore beset by an internal decay, a cancer which would not
only lead to their own downfall but to the collapse of the
overall system as well. An elaboration of this point has already
been given in President Marcos' book Today's Revolution:
Democracy.
Reintegration of the people into the New Society would
require a thorough elaboration of its philosophy and spirit.
Required here would be a comprehensive refutation of
Marxism-Leninism (hereafter referred to as Chinese
Communist Imperialism) and the presentation of alternative
ideas and values. This New Society philosophy could then be
spread through a voluntary education program which would
necessarily use posItive reinforcement and non-aversive
conditioning as its methods since the objective here would be
minimally effective and, in the long term, to produce a new
group of committed, intelligent and creative opinion leaders
rather than mechanistic parrots who would be even
detrimental (the most obvious example of this is the failure of
the Japanese propaganda efforts during World War II). It
would be therefore essential that the spirit of the New Society
be transformed into a positive motivating force which would
therefore elicit voluntary self-generating support from the
leaders and, by involvement, from the public for the New
Society.
60
I
The implementation of this continuous program could
start with the current situation. Martial Law is a new
experience and therefore will produce a large measure of
anxiety and fear of the unknown. This generalized Angst can
be channelled through discrimination training (e.g., via media)
so that two categories of behavior are established: correct
lawful behavior which will be fully protected and encouraged
by the government versus illegal, punishable behavior which
will be fully suppressed. These basic categories can then be
amplified through behavioral conditioning so that the
principles, precepts, activities and ideology of the New Society
are attached to the former category and the flaws of the old
society attached to the latter.
An example of this would be in the front against Chinese
Communist Imperialism and its dummy organizations. The key
here would be Filipino nationalism as a positive aspect of the
new society. The new society will be "classless": the only class
is the New Filipino. Chinese Communism espouses class hatred
in order to divide the Filipino nation and instill antagonism
and anarchy. Therefore the true Filipino is he who works, for
example, for land reform and the removal of agrarian conflict.
The Traitor-the modern Makapili-is he who attempts to
disrupt land reform and thereby create class antagonisms
which would favor Chinese Communist Imperialism.
Organization and Programs
1. A "think tank" for elaboration of the ideology of the
New Society should be created. Possible name: New
Society Research Bureau.
2. A "New Society" ideological dissemination center
should in coordination with the "think tank" creatively
transform the concepts of the New Society into a
socially motivating force. This should be done by:
a. The voluntary education of opinion leaders using
behavioral conditioning methodology and modern
techniques such as visual aids, etc.
b. The education of key groups in the society such as
peasants who will receive the benefits of land
reform.
In this case the participating peasants, concurrent with
their adoption of the new role of small farmers, should be
imbued with the nationalistic and ideological aspects of the
New Society to fully immunize them against Chinese
Communist Imperialism thus ensuring that the Communists
are deprived of a mass base among the peasantry.
c. The student population. If the national
educational program is reoriented towards a
mass-base literacy campaign coupled with a heavy
emphasis on useful trades, skills and sciences, then
the New Society philosophy should be woven into
the fabric of the subjects taught.
d. The education and guidance of persons involved in
the creative arts such as the movies, T.V.
production, radio dramas, etc.
In the above cases individuals from this center can be
assigned to other sectors of the government in a fashion similar
to the assignment of political cadres in Socialist regimes. Thus
the department of education could have New Society experts
assigned to the department handling art and culture, etc.
Possible name: New Society Development Bureau.
Both the above bureaus could be functionally merged
into a single Research and Development Bureau.
I
Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars
i
,

Statement of Purpose
We first came together in opposition to the brutal
aggression of the United States in Vietnam and tu
the complil'ity or silence of our profession with
regard to that policy. Those in the field of .\sian
studies bear responsibility for the consequences of
their research and the political posture of their
profcssion. We are concerned about the present
unwillingness of specialists to speak out against the
implications ot an Asian polin' committed to ensur
ing American domination o( l1luch of ,\sia. We
reject the legitimacy of this aim, and attempt to
change this policy. We recognize that the present
structure of the profession has often perverted
schobrship and alicnated many peopk in the field.
The CC\S secks to develop a humane and knowl
edgeable lIndersLll1ding of l\sian societies and their
efforts to maintain cultural integrity and to con
front slleh problems ,IS pm'erty, oppression, and
imperialism We reali.(c that to be students of other
peoples, we must first understand our rclations to
them
The CC\S wishes to create
prcvatling trends in scholarship
often spring frolll a parochial
and senT selfish interests and
alternatives to the
on Asia \\'hich [()o
ndtuLd perspectivc
e\:pansionisl11. Our
organi/ation is designcd tn function as a catalyst, a
comll1unicltions network (or both j\sian and West
ern scholars, a pro\'ider of central resources for loctl
chapters, ;Inc! a community for the dcvelopment oj
anti-imperialist research.
I j'dSS1"{ tLlI'd, 28-30, 1969, /:ostoll /
I
t
!
f
61
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost:
Pye, Solomon, and the
'Spirit of Chinese Politics'
REVIEW ARTICLE ON RICHARD SOLOMON'S
MAO'S REVOLUTION AND THE CHINESE POLITICAL CULTURE
by Richard Kagan and Norma Diamond
Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture
structurally is two books. The first (parts I and II pp. 1-159) is
a discussion of Chinese psychological characteristics based on
the author's 1966 dissertation for MIT, The Chinese
Revolution and the Politics of Dependency: The Struggle for
Change in a Traditional Political Culture. The second (parts III
and IV pp. 160-526) is a competent if somewhat narrow
think-tank piece written in 1969 on the Hundred Flowers, the
Great Leap, and the early phase of the Cultural Revolution.
In the first "book," Solomon constructs a psychological
model of the Chinese personality around the concepts of
"dependency" and "orality." This model, he argues, finds
expression and reinforcement in a number of traditional forms
and practices active in modern Chinese political culture.
Solomon then posits an "anal" Mao struggling against the
traditional forms.
It is evident from the predominantly scatological tone
of Mao's humor-ridicule of those who would assert their
authority in the time-honored Confucian manner through
"the power of the word" as but issuing faeces and "ill
winds,"-that "anal" themes have a particular emotional
weight in his perception of the world. In his efforts to
evolve a new style of political leadership he seems to be
reacting against the "oral" characteristics of the traditional
political culture, which he symbolizes most vividly in the
dangers for the Party of "sugar-coated bullets. " (p. 520)
Finally, Mao's opposition to the use of material
incentives in motivating people for national development,
his general concern with the loss of revolutionary vitality
that will come with increased consumption on the part of
both Party cadres and population, and his stress on the
need to develop self-discipline through such physical
62
"struggle" as swimming in the teeth .of winds and waves,
indicate a determination to overcome the "oral"
characteristics of the traditional political culture. Mao
might be said to be an "anal" leader seeking to transform
an "oral" society. (p. 521)
Solomon contends that all political activity in China can
be explained with reference to the struggle between
"traditional orality" and Mao's "anality." With this thesis the
author seeks to integrate the two "books" and lay claim to
originality, academic authenticity, and comprehensiveness. It
is the primary purpose of this review to examine the "Chinese
personality" Solomon has constructed and to show that (1) it
is a fabrication; (2) the projection of certain traditional
cultural forms out of that personality is a kind of
reductionism; and (3) the think-tank analysis in the second
"book," whatever its merits by the criteria of Pekingology,
does not flow from or validate the analysis in the first "book."
In addition, the book is politically important because of
its novelty, apparent and real, in the field of Asian Studies,
and because of the political function of the book itself and its
author. The study follows the tradition of the writings of the
missionary-diplomat Arthur Smith 1 and the government
advisor-M.l.T. professor Lucien Pye.
2
Yet it purports to go
far beyond them by employing allegedly sophisticated social
science and psychological techniques in order to study and
define the Chinese character. Nonetheless Richard Solomon's
study remains within this genre of national character studies.
Such studies, inescapably bound to paternalism and 19th
century superiority complexes, take as their object, groups
whose opposition touches off deap-seated hostility, contempt
and fear in the people trying to convert, rule or destroy them.
All too often the scholarly motive of understanding behavior is
involved with the political motive of controlling behavior. The
descriptions of national character which emerge from this
pursuit are almost always vulgar and patronizing, based on
series of anecdotes or on culture-bound religious or
pseudo-scientific assertions about human nature. In Solomon's
study, the Chinese are said to have a half-formed personality,
and hence are not able to properly express hostility. They are
ambivalent towards authority and not independent. They have
a stunted emotional makeup. Their men are therefore always
children. The women are just left out altogether, or are the
implied objects of male sexuality. (If Chinese men are
children, who for Chinese women are "real men"?) This is
argument "ad hominem" writ large, the hallmark of the
psycho-cultural genre.
Since the field of Chinese Studies does not have a
significant number of competent works in psycho-cultural
history, Solomon's book commands attention by default and
is looked to for guidance. In this respect, its novelty is
genuine. Its faults will be recognized but granted as those
arising from its innovative nature. Many students of China will
use the book either because nothing else on the subject exists,
or because advertisements and promotions of its authority
abound. Solomon himself has been attached to Henry
Kissinger's staff since 1971. Though we do not know
specifically what Solomon's contribution has been, we can
safely assume that his ideas as expressed in his book find a
receptive audience in high councils of government.
Solomon's welcome in the government is due to his
working political assumptions about China and the nature of
revolution. The Chinese Communist Party is viewed as an
administrative elite, not as a revolutionary organization; and
the focal point of all political activity is held to be Mao's
relation to the Party and to the intellectuals, not the relation
of the Party to the peasant and laboring masses. Perhaps they
take comfort in the implication that if national character-and
the political culture that is defined by it-is the key to
understanding the ups and downs of the Chinese revolution,
then traditional cultures are unchanging and revolutions in
traditional societies are short-lived abberations, brought on not
by the reality of social injustice but by the manipulation of
certain weaknesses. For Solomon, these weaknesses are
psychological.
Because of the popularity of both psycho;cultural
studies and national racial stereotypes,3 we must carefully
explore the research techniques and methodology which are
the means for drawing the stereotypes of the book. Solomon
uses interviews and Thematic Apperception Tests (TAT) as his
research techniques to probe the psychological bases of the
Chinese personality and culture. Parts One and Two of the
volume lean heavily on interviews with refugees in Hong Kong
and Taiwan, conducted in the early 1960's. Here and there,
the interview findings are supplemented by references to the
anthropological-sociological literature in order to create the
impression that an established disciplinary basis supports his
own discussion of Chinese personality. But for reasons that
will appear below, Solomon's reference to this literature fails
to marshal academic authority for his own very tendentious
findings.
The interview, first of all, has a strong social class bias in
favor of the upper-class intelligentsia and military elite. All
older members of the sample had a traditional private
schooling in the Confucian classics; they represent the
remnants of a traditional elite who were at most 5% of the
population-yet they constitute one-third of Solomon's
sample. Younger informants who were college graduates under
the KMT constitute the next third of the sample, although this
level of education was achieved by less than 1 % of the
population. Most of the remainder of the sample had high
school educations, again something of a rarity in pre-1949
China. Only 10 out of the 91 informants had just an
elementary school education, and none are illiterate. Over 80%
of the Chinese population was illiterate before 1949.
Solomon explains this weighting in favor of the elites of
a past order by saying that this high level of literacy was
needed in order for the respondents to fill in questionnaires by
themselves. These criteria may be very convenient, but
certainly not very useful for sampling techniques. Moreover,
Solomon proceeds to explain the Chinese revolution on the
basis of this sample without discussing the role of elites in
relation to the peasantry. Though he is frank about his
sources, they are the basis for sweeping generalizations and
conclusions, but Solomon never admits the elitist nature of his
sample and refuses to recognize the contradictions between
the sample and the universality of his claims. He tries to have
it both ways-to base his analysis on a study of the elites and
yet to claim that they represent, and sometimes even are
members of, the peasantry and working classes.
Most of Solomon's informants worked in various
capacities in the Kuomintang government or in the Nationalist
army. Few of the informants come frpm the peasantry.
Solomon sometimes admits this, but on occasion his ascription
of class background is definitely misleading. On page 100, for
example, we are presented with quotations from a young man
whom Solomon describes in the text as being "a semi-literate
. .. of peasant background." Yet in the appendix this
individual is clearly identified as a clerk with a high-school
education whose father was a hsien-chang (county head) under
the Kuomintang. To use the term "peasant" so loosely as to
include all those who have any connection with agriculture,
including landlords, is perhaps a bit too much, even for
convenience's sake.
Solomon's straining to encompass representatives of the
lao-pai-hsing (common folk) appears in the appended
biographies as well as in the text. Informant H-16, we are told,
comes from a "poor peasant family" yet the very next line
makes it clear that this is not so. His father seems to have been
at least a middle-peasant and possibly a very wealthy one in
terms of land holdings. The informant himself was sent to a
university to study sociology. Similarly, the father of
informant T-27 is presented as a "poor farmer" (is this
supposed to be different from a "poor peasant"?), but one
who lived in an extended family of over thirty persons ...
hardly the living style of poor peasants/farmers! More
confusingly, the biography goes on to reveal that other
members of the same household, notably his grandfather and
father's brother, were wealthy. At the age of 14, he was
appointed Ii-chang (head of a unit of 100 families), and before
he was 21, he became a hsien-chang (county head). But this
amazing political career surely is explicable only by assuming
great wealth and power within his household, sufficient to
post an adolescent boy into a position normally held by the
middle-aged. Yet when this particular informant is quite
verbose about bad feelings between households and patterns of
avoidance between them in order to forestall trouble, Solomon
naively takes the man's "insights" at face value. But who
63
would want to divulge their quarrels to this pubescent official
and his family? Without bothering to put his informant's views
into the particular social context from which they spring,
Solomon reaches all sorts of conclusions concerning the
unwillingness of Chinese to extend "their range of social
interactions beyond a close circle of known and trusted
individuals." (p. 103)
It must have been called to Solomon's attention by one
of his astute behaviorist advisers that his sample was a little
topheavy in its selection of former members of the elite. He
gets around this by a curious argument: He claims he finds no
difference in values between his Confucian-classics educated
older men and his younger men educated under the (pre 1949)
modern system. (p. 92) We are hardly surprised, since his
younger men are in a sense the sons of his older men,
representing the same social strata. In some instances, his
younger men are also the students of his older men, and they
must have learned their lessons well or they would not be
refugees available for interviews in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
One need not have memorized Confucius to assimilate the
values of a conservative and privileged elite. The homogeneity
of this elite, across generations, is irrelevant to a discussion of
the Chinese population at large. Most people were not
educated at all. It is patently absurd to argue, as Solomon
does, that the similarity between elites educated in two
different (types of) schools proves a similarity between the
educated and the illiterate masses. (On question of culture see
F. Mote's review,jAS, November 1972.)
Why doesn't the author interview some people who
really come from peasant and worker backgrounds and who
have not been exposed to formal education? Granted, such a
process is a bit more time-consuming. The illiterate can't fill
out the questionnaires by themselves, and they may need more
persuading and encouragement in order to go along with the
odd requests and queries of a Western social scientist asking
questions about things beyond their experience. Solomon's
reason for this obvious weakness in his study is really
extraordinary. He explains that the illiterate lack the
"sufficient social poise" for being interviewed (p. 92).
Solomon has thus introduced a new dimension into the criteria
for the selection of informants and at one stroke has absolved
researchers of any need to learn to communicate in new ways
with those of different educational backgrounds. The burden
is on the informant to be literate and sophisticated-to have
ingratiated him/herself in the ways of the interview world. It is
an elitist approach that insults not only unapproached
informants, but the reader's intelligence as well, and ignores
the technique of such important works as Myrdal's Report
from a Chinese Village or Hinton's Fanshen-not to mention
the past hundred years of anthropological research.
Perhaps because Solomon feels that his 91 informants
support each other, he feels free to draw on but a few of them.
His favorite, T-9, is cited ten different times to provide
evidence for generalizations and major theoretical points. T-9
is a college graduate from a large wealthy family; his father
was an official of the Ch'ing dynasty. The next most common
source quoted is T-18, occasionally touted as a worker. It
turns out, however, he worked mainly in a labor reform camp
before he made his escape to Taiwan. His grandfather and
father were both teachers of the Classics, and he himself had a
picaresque career as soldier, wine-shop owner, and
worker-by-default. Other frequently cited informants include a
college graduate employed in the Ministry of National Defense
in Taiwan, a former KMT judge, a military academy graduate
who served as a military instructor for the Nationalist Army, a
former colonel in the Nationalist Army, and an adopted son of
a wealthy family who ended up teaching in the KMT's police
academy. How representative they are of the majority of
Chinese is very obviously questionable, but even more
important is how representative they are of the revolutionaries
whose lives have been transformed? Because of class
background and pre-1949 activities, the people in Solomon's
sample would probably have no access to power in present-day
China. Solomon's subjects are more relevant to an
understanding of the lower-echelons of the Kuomintang elites
and the operation of the Republic of China on Taiwan, yet this
sample is the basis upon which Solomon endeavors to
characterize the People's Republic.
Recognizing that interviewing the elite may not be
enough evidence, Solomon does turn to sociological literature
for confirmation of his generalizations. He picks his
sociologists with care, however, omitting authors who discuss
class distinctions in prerevolutionary China. No reference is
made to the famous 1946 article by Fei Hsiao-tung on
differences between the peasantry and gentry4 in which Fei
argues cogently that a person's locus in the social structure
determines his behavioral patterns and the values to which he
or she has access. Fei sees differences between the peasantry
and the elite, a theme which is also discussed in F.L.K. Hsu's
Under the Ancestors Shadow (Anchor Books, 1967). Solomon
ignores Hsu.
Morton Fried
5
is cited only selectively and his discussion
of class difference in family relationships is not referred to at
all, perhaps because it contradicts Solomon's underlying thesis
of total homogeneity. Fried provides what Solomon totally
lacks: a specific discussion of family relationships within
different classes. The father-son relationship in a peasant
family is warmer, more affectionate and more mutually
reciprocal than in a merchant family. And the relationship in a
merchant family is more congenial than in a gentry family
(Fried, pp. 46-55).
But even Fried's discussion of kan-ch'ing ("good
feelings") is mangled by Solomon. Fried details how
kan-ch'ing operates in non-kin relationships to regulate in a
customary way the payment of rent (Chapter IV) or the
adjudication of legal cases (Chapter VO. Kan-ch 'ing works for
and against the parties to these conflicts, and provides a modus
operandi for compromise between the two parties to a
non-personal and socially unequal relationship wher<:by both
feel more comfortable with the obvious inequality. From this
viewpoint, the term can be translated as influence or more
broadly "leverage." For Solomon's schema however,
kan-ch'ing defined as "emotions" or "feelings" is a purely
personal relationship in which the superior tries to oppress and
the subordinate to "eat" up or swindle. When authority is
weak, it is taken advantage of and leads to unruliness. When it
is too strong, it leads to oppression, pent-up aggression and
dependence. With such insights into the day-to-day dynamic of
oppression, Solomon then makes these social devices which
make life temporarily livable into the permanent psychological
characteristics of the Chinese people. But even a poor illiterate
farmer knows not to confront his landlord every day with
threats of retribution if he knows what's good for him.
The "village study" most favored by Solomon is Martin
Yang's A Chinese Village: Taitou (Columbia University Press,
1945). But Solomon has apparently neglected to read the
64
introduction which explains that this is a modified exercise in
the study of "culture at a distance." Yang describes his book
as memories of the village where he lived until old enough to
attend high school. Afterwards he visited there for a few days
each year to see relatives, but never actually did any
interviewing or research in the community. The work itself is a
valuable document of rural village life seen in retrospect
through the eyes of an educated member of a leading village
family, but much of the material is reminiscence, not
methodical observation. Yang has never represented the book
as a field-research document, but Solomon does. Rather than
using Yang's material as supplementary recollections of an
elite boyhood, he views it as a statement of typical experience.
Solomon is particularly impressed by Yang's description
of the boys' behavior in the village school. Whereas Yang
makes it clear that this was a four-year school, usually started
by age five or six and usually finished by age ten, Solomon
prefers to believe that he is dealing with much older
youngsters. Yang's description of the children letting off steam
in the teacher's absence is taken by Solomon as a scene of
"undisciplined adolescence" (p. 87), and he makes a great
point about how onerous the school discipline must have been
for adolescents:
. .. the first few years of instruction were devoted to the
blind memorization of sound patterns. It seems most likely
that the process of subjecting students in the full physical
vigor of adolescence to the rigorous demands of
memorization of lengthy texts, or reproducing hundreds of
complicated characters by brush within the squares of a
copybook, was a powerful disciplinary experience in
controlling impulses to take action or vent emotional
frustration. (p. 91)
Even if the curriculum and teaching methods in these schools
left much to be desired in the eyes of proponents of modern
education, it does not seem to be a special trait of Chinese
youth to dislike the artificial discipline engendered by formal
schooling or the artificial beauty of their written language.
Finally, from the interviews themselves, we are never
offered a sense of the range of answers to various key
questions (surely there must be some variation, some
paradoxes) and the frequency of different modes of response.
Instead, we are repeatedly given those responses that Solomon
decided wcre most typical on various points. Thus, a military
instructor is quoted on the subject of unconditional obedience
to one's superior (p. 115) and the need for law and order (p.
151); a former propagandist for the Central News Bureau
(Nationalist) is quoted on the need for universal education so
that "everyone's point of view is the same. . .. If everyone's
opinions are not the same it can lead to quarreling and
confusion" (p. 153); a newspaper editor turned popular writer
discourses on the need for reading books as a means to
self-cultivation and control (p. 90). The responses are perhaps
"typical" for the social niche that the speaker occupies, the
vocation he pursues, and the experiences he has had, but there
is little evidence that they are typical in any meaningful
analytical sense. This type of generalizing from what are
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65
obviously somewhat special cases gives the reader the uneasy
feeling that Solomon started with certain hypotheses about
Chinese behavior and then instead of testing them, stretched
the material to fulfill them.
The "obedience" of the data to these preconceptions
may have arisen, moreover, from the interview arrangement
and format. An informant in an interview is in a situation of at
least implicit coercion. The factors of subterfuge, deception,
humoring, etc. would seem too large to be compensated for
completely. Did any informants openly criticize the
interviewer or refuse to answer? Did any of them evade the
question only to have their indirection or imprecision taken
for a reply to the interviewer-not as hostility to or discomfort
with the interview? Having worked with American street gangs
and refugees from China, we have observed that informants
tend to speak in stereotypes-not unlike parents evading a
child's probing questions about sex. Many months, if not
years, are required to get answers that are not designed by the
interviewees' expectations of the interviewer. Even Fried, who
lived for over a year in Ch'uhsien found some informants
unwilling to divulge certain information. Is is possible that all
of Solomon's 91 informants can be treated with equal
credibility? How does one determine which one is honest and
which not? How can they all support the very same
hypothesis? Did they?
The technical format of the interview also may shed
some light on the uniformity of replies. The main tool for
Solomon's interviews was a variation on the Thematic
Apperception Test (TAT) Pictures. The nine pictures that he
used are reproduced in Appendix 4 (pp. 538-40). His
interviewees were asked to make up stories for each picture.
The selection of TAT pictures concentrated on the theme of
the relation between conflict and authority. They dealt with
parental, military, and state authority, and with generation
and family conflict. Of these pictures, only picture number 4
corresponds either to the Murray standard set or to those sets
that have been modified for use in foreign societies. The
standardized sets are both more ambiguous and more
comprehensive, dealing with a variety of life situations.
Solomon has nowhere told the reader if he has
rigorously standardized his TAT. Until these pictures become
standardized, the reactions to them are problematical. Nor has
Solomon run the series through a control group to find out
whether main themes run across group lines, or to find out the
main secondary themes and the limits and extent of the
variations. As a result, we do not know whether his
conclusions from his TAT are in actuality an artifact from the
sample, or general themes shared by all groups.
Solomon insists that his 91 informants of different ages,
professions, and class backgrounds are essentially homo
geneous in their apperceptions. By a controlled standard, this
would be hard to prove. At several points he suggests a
cross-cultural control by giving similar tests to American
college students. Naturally, he finds differences. But he uses
these differences as proof for his conclusions on China. What
we witness here is the thoroughly unjustified research
technique of using one set of non-standardized tests in another
culture. Conclusions are then drawn from these two unknown
variables.
Finally, Solomon does not take into account that
"major criticisms lodged against the TAT over the past two
decades concern the scanty evidence that has been provided
for its reliability and validity.,,6 Rather, Solomon chooses to
add whatever he can find to support his thesis regarding the
existence of a Chinese characteristic of political dependency.
Solomon's presentation of the TAT cards and his
interview are structured to become a self-fulfilling prophecy
regarding Chinese hangups to authority. The TAT cards are
focused on the theme of conflict and authority and they thus
will elicit responses about how one behaves in a conflict
situation. The first two or three cards will consequently cast a
"halo effect" on the rest of the cards and result in an
unnatural consistency. The interview schedule shows a callous
disregard for the order of presentation, and exhibits a total
lack of sensitivity to the informant. To begin the interview
Solomon asks:
What kind of person was your father/mother?
What did you admire most about your father/mother?
Then after this careful preparation he plunges into the third
question:
Naturally, no one is without faults.
What would you say were you father's/mother's weak
points? (p. 257)
This abrupt beginning can not but have an overflow effect.
Thank God he did not give his interviewees nine pictures about
sex and question them about their sexual problems or we
would now be assured that the key to Chinese politics is not
oral-anal tensions but sexual ones!
If Solomon's informants, procedures and findings all are
suspect, then how do his major thesis and conclusions on the
psychological basis for the Chinese national character stand
up? He advances the proposition that the Chinese are
politically dependent, and therefore express great anxiety
before authority, are ambivalent about hostility, and can be
motivated politically only by exacerbating and channeling
their pent-up aggression.
The convenient ease with which he reaches these
conclusions stem methodologically not only from the built-in
biases and prejudices of his information gathering process
described above. They arise also from the simple fact of his
having excised from his analysis any consideration of the
political positions and values of the people involved-be they
members of the precarious KMT and refugee elites, or be they
peasants. Prior to its revolutionary mobilization, the
peasantry's political position of relative powerlessness, vis-i-vis
the authorities, was an elementary fact of daily life. As Ngo
Vinh Long has pointed out, commenting on a characterization
of the Vietnamese peasantry based on the same
"psycho-cultural" approach as Solomon's, "Certainly [the
peasantryJ would avoid conflict with a superior force, for the
simple reason of self-preservation." 7
The Chinese peasants' strategy was related not to their
psychological dependency, but to their self-interest. They
would turn on the bandits or the KMT soldiers whenever they
were threatened by them and had sure prospects of eliminating
that threat. This may be a personality trait, but it is certainly
not unique to the Chinese. In any specific account of village
life, one is struck by the resourcefulness of peasant stratagems
for survival. Using a whole host of artifices and ploys, they
tried to prevent the gentry from being totally exploitative. The
latter stayed on top not because of the political dependency of
the peasants, but because of the local gentry militia, national
armies, foreign arms and advisors, and an exploitative
economic system.
66
l
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of Solomon's
celebration of political dependency is his litany that only by
arousing the peasant's aggressions can Mao mobilize the masses
for political activity (pp. 522,523). This is nothing more than
the old saw that Mao came to power by manipulation of a
restive and frightened peasantry. Solomon has embellished this
by hypothesizing that Mao based himself on a demonic insight
into the psychological vulnerability of the politically
dependent Chinese population. He thereby hoodwinked the
Chinese into a social revolution that they would never have
chosen, and that they support only because of continuous
manipulation. Thus "aggression" is understood as correctly
sublimated when it means acceptance of an unjust social order,
and as incorrectly expressed when directed against that order.
What Mao did was to expose the aggression at the core
of the rural feudal and urban imperialist social system.
Through organization, peasants were enabled to direct
outward their hatred of that aggression, pitting hatred against
its proper targets, rather than inward on themselves. That the
revolution affected people emotionally and derived its strength
from human emotion is undeniable.
Solomon's theory of political dependency is founded on
his theory of traditional orality. His intuitive search for the
"common denominator" of Chinese traditional character at
times reaches absurd lengths, as when he argues for the basic
"orality" of the Chinese by lumping together peasant
memories of hunger and death by starvation in a passage taken
from Myrdal (p. 48) with memories of warm evenings around
the meal-table in a wealthy peasant home (p. 43) and the
existence of the great culinary tradition of China (p. 42). He
might have discovered that the "great culinary tradition" is as
foreign to the Chinese peasantry as it is to the taxi-driver in
Hoboken. But never mind: Solomon is determined to prove
that the Chinese are "oral," fixated at an infantile stage of
psycho-sexual development, and any reference to food will be
served up in a smorgasbord argument to prove this. Carried
away by a flash of insight into the field of linguistics, he
clinches the argument by pointing out that the Chinese word
for population,jen-kou means "people-mouth," and that when
unhappy the Chinese Chih-ku (eat bitterness). Wonderful ...
and in English we speak of a family having "too many mouths
to feed" or we "count heads." We speak of "eating crow" or
"eating one's heart out," or "swallowing anger," without the
phraseology being regarded as evidence of "oral fixation" in
the American national character.
Throughout the book Mao's earthy language is cited to
bolster the psychological argument that" 'anal' themes have
a particular emotional weight in his [Mao's) perception of the
world." (p. 520) The analysis verges on the ridiculous when it
links the term fang-p'i ("to break wind") with the term
chieh-fang (to liberate) because both terms have the character
fang (to let go).
Solomon seems also to want to point out how different
the Chinese are from us, and just about everyone else. At
times, cultural universals are presented to us as uniquely
Chinese, as when he fastens on the thought that the Chinese
must learn kinship terms in order to function in the
community and identify their status vis-a.-vis others (p. 107).
Granted, the complexity of kinship systems varies from
culture to culture, but the Chinese are by no means
overburdened with the world's most complex or difficult
system-it is highly descriptive in its terminology and quite
clear cut. Solomon sees it as a burden, and finds it odd that
certain types of behavior are attached to kin-status, i.e. you
I
talk differently to your grandfather than you do to your
kid-brother. Indeed, he seems to have confused this universal
,
phenomenon with the "rectification of names" and elevated
f
Chinese kinship terminology to a lofty philosophical level.
In a similar vein, we are given, on p. 110, a
pseudo-linguistic variant on the old prejudice that the Chinese
t
do everything backward or opposite from us: we are told by
Solomon that the term ch'eng, which he defines as sincerity,
i
actually has the opposite meaning for the wily Chinese. When f
they say sincerity, they really mean hiding one's true feelings
and going through the socially correct behavior. Solomon is I
wrong on two counts. For one, ch'eng in its colloquial
compound usages means "honesty" and"frankness" and just
that: it indicates a speaking out of one's real feelings even to
r
I
,
the extent of treading on the sensitivity of others in order to
be true to oneself. And secondly, doing the socially correct
i
thing or the polite thing is not defined by the Chinese as a !
form of "sincerity": it may sometimes even be labeled as
hypocrisy, or if well meant as a form of consideration for the
I
feelings of others, a value shared in any number of societies.
What is most peculiar about the picture of Chinese I
!
society that Solomon presents is that is is made up only of
males for no women were interviewed, on the grounds that !
only recently have women entered political and social life.
t
I
g
How Chinese families perpetrated themselves and carried out
daily activities without women is a perplexing question. But
surely in a society where only a tiny percentage of children
had schooling and where males were involved only minimally f
in child care, it was the women who were the primary
I
socializers for those years of a child's life when basic attitudes
toward authority, aggression and means of gratification are
instilled. Women also embody the values and attitudes of the
society even when certain roles are closed off to them.
The thoughts, experiences, and values of the male
segment of the former elite tell us a great deal about that
former elite, but little more. The thoughts, experiences and
values of the male segment of the former elite who found it
impossible to adjust to a changing society and chose to
emigrate tells us a great deal about that segment of the refugee
population but little more. At best, the first section of the
book gives us insight into those who formerly staffed the KMT
civilian and military bureaucracies: their attentiste mentality
not surprisingly betrays some dependency. It gives us little
insight into those over whom power was exercised, and into
those who rejected this style of life and consciously chose to
become revolutionaries.
Solomon's study is, thus, in the same tradition of
"non-communist manifestos" as W.W. Rostow's (also of MIT)
Stages of Economic Growth. He specifically denies the social
and economic dialectic in favor of the psychological: " ... this
study stresses as the 'dialectic' in China's national development
not the conflict of classes but the tension between established
patterns of culture and personality and the new values and
behavioral norms which Mao Tse-tung sees as the basis for the
reconstruction of the world's largest political and economic
community." (p. 6)
Equally narrow is Solomon's conception of the Chinese
tradition. The "patterns of culture" referred to are merely a
threadbare twentieth-century remnant of the moribund
Confucian literati tradition. Absent is any form of
Taoism-elite or folk- Buddhism, peasant traditions, traditions
of protest, etc. More significant, Solomon acts as if the
67
tradition remained intact up until 1949 or the present. Has the
pattern since the Warring States continued unbroken
throughout the period of the 20th century warlords?
Solomon's sallies into traditional Chinese culture
resemble the forays of the barbarians or the despoliations of
the museum piece gatherers. He has done no little violence to
the sanctity of the original context of his data, whether it be
historical materials or linguistic data. He has culled an
extremely random group of materials, some central, some
peripheral, not the epitome of the Chinese tradition. He
reduces the complexity and variety of the traditional culture
to a non-organic set of citations just as he reduces the
complexity and variety of the Revolution to a set of artificial
psychological constructs.
Conclusion
Solomon's book cannot be corrected by improvements
in methodology, historical causation, or language ability. Even
if his sample were better chosen, even if they were broadened
to represent peasants, workers, women, et. a!., even if he
standardized his tests, and even if his psychological analysis
was refined, he would still come out at the same place. For our
more basic criticism of Solomon is not methodological but
epistemological-what he defines as reality.
Traditional approaches to Chinese society have fallen
into two distinct categories: studies from the bottom up and
studies from the top down. The former approach has been
pursued by missionaries, social anthropologists and other field
workers who stress the local decision making, the political
decentralization, the democratic processes, and monotonously
cite the Chinese saying, "Heaven is high, The Emperor is far
away." The latter, top-down approach has been dished up by
political scientists, ex-communists, and government officials
who stress the authoritarian personalities of Chinese rulers, the
despotic nature of the government, and the mediating role of
the intelligentsia (gentry). The title of Richard Solomon's
work, Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture,
announces his adherence to the top-down approach. The
Revolution belongs to Mao, and China's Political Culture
belongs to the males, the literate, the intellectuals and the
Party.
In reading the political analysis in the second part of this
book, we cannot help but believe that the book is a treatise on
China's vendetta against its bearers of some
hallowed political culture. The work focusses on Mao's
manipulation of the Party, his struggle against other Party
elites, and his utilization of the psychic problems of the masses
for his own purposes.
When applied to Chinese history, the approach of the
national character school ends up with a clearly conservative
position: it paints a picture of a traditional China which is
more unchanging than the actual historical experience
demonstrates. It also forces a false juxtaposition between a
monolithic and super-constant tradition and a small
psychologically dissatisfied band of foreign-trained revolution
aries (or semi-bandits) who challenge the wisdom and order of
the past. Thus, the contemporary problems of imperialism and
feudalism which the Chinese faced become subordinated to
Mao's attack on a civilization 4000 years old. It is this attitude
which seems to allow Solomon license to wander at will
throughout the domain of Chinese history, language, and
psychology for his examples. Traditional China is "oral,"
Mao's China is the opposite-or at best the next stage-"anal,"
but both are either infantile or juvenile. Neither is mature.
Solomon's attempt to dovetail a personality-group study
with an analysis of elite decision making seems to disdain any
concern with what ideas and values motivate the rulers and
make them, in the eyes of the people, authentic leaders. This
faulty approach exacerbates the racist dehumanization of the
Chinese, which has been with us since the 19th century.
Perhaps there is assurance in this for a very concerned
and frightened elite that revolution in China (and Vietnam,
and by implication anywhere) was a unique success in the
manipulation of a politically dependent population. The
answer that such an analysis suggests to this elite is to
out-manipulate the manipulators, and when that fails, as it
must, there is a ready-made justification for political
repression in the guise of saving society from sick people. At
least Mr. Solomon is working for the right people, but that is
about all that can be said of his political analysis.
NOTES
1. Chinese Characteristics (1899).
2. The Spirit of Chinese Politics.
3. Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the
Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972) has "benefitted"
from Solomon's model of national character analysis.
4. "Peasantry and Gentry: An Interpretation of Chinese Social
Structure and its Changes," American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 52,
pp. 1-17.
5. Fabric of Chinese Society (New York: Praeger, 1953).
6. Benjamin Kleinmuntz, Personality Measurement: An
Introduction (Homewood, Illinois: Dorsey Press, 1967), p. 311.
7. "Fizzle in the Lake," a review of Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in
the Lake (Ramparts, January 1973).
INDOCHINA INFORMATION - A new series of
pamphlets from Britain to keep abreast of the
continuing war in Indochina.
No.1 The Weapons of Imperialism, An illustrated guide
to the technology of imperialist warfare, by the ISC
Technology Group
20p 50 cents
No.2 The Truth About Thieu, by Peggy Duff
15p 30 cents
No. 3 The British Press and Vietnam, a careful analysis
of conscious and unconscious bias in the "liberal" press,
by the ISC Media Group
25p 50 cents
The ISC - Indochina Solidarity Conference - is a
broadly-based anti-war movement in Britain which
combines research with action. All these pamphlets are
available at the above prices, which include overseas
postage, from ISC, 101 Gower Street, London W.c.l.
Discount for bulk orders is one-third.
68
Watergate International
Unlimited:
Peter Dale Scott's
'The War Conspiracy'
by Moss Roberts
\
I
I
Peter Dale Scott, Professor of English at the University (1) Air America, Inc., formerly Civil Air Transport
of California at Berkeley, has pieced together a masterpiece of (CAT). This paramilitary airline is the CIA's largest proprietary
crime detection which may be considered a counterpart to I.F. in Asia. Scott examines its historical roots in the KMT and the
Stone's Hidden History of the Korean War. His book, The War China Lobby and traces its role in unofficial war operations in
Conspiracy, significantly deepens and sharpens the Indochina in the late fifties and early sixties.
methodology of "power structure research" and becomes in (2) Laos. Scott recounts how in 1958 the CIA forced
the end a major scholarly contribution to the study of polarization within the legal neutralist government, driving the
contemporary U.S.-Southeast Asian foreign relations and the Pathet Lao out of the parliament and into rebellion. This set
politics of revolution in the region. Scott's findings should the stage for the "phony (North Vietnamese) invasion" of
decisively affect conventional academic treatment of this August 1959. Scott also presents evidence that the CIA
subject matter, even if his hypothesis of conspiracy ultimately engineered the coup of April 19, 1964, and then brought
proves flawed. bombing units into action over Laos as a prelude to the
Scott's hypothesis is this: intelligence units and certain bombing of North Vietnam which began four months later.
military command stations normally act strictly on orders of (3) The Tonkin Gulf Incidents. On August 4, 1964, U.S.
and on behalf of the national security leadership, the planes bombed North Vietnam in retaliation for alleged naval
president, his foreign policy advisors, and the secretaries of attacks on U.S. ships. Scott gives reasons for doubting that the
Defense and State. However, at significant times and in attacks occurred, based on his analysis of the electronic
significant ways, some military intelligence units appear to communications between the field and the White House. He
have operated against the national security leadership as war also discusses the possible relevance of the newly integrated
provocateurs. By usurping a policy-making initiative, however forward Pacific strategy finalized at the Honolulu Conference
temporarily, such units cross into a realm legally defined as of June 1964.
conspiracy. When a pattern of such trespasses can be (4) Provoking China and Russia. Scott shows that
establisned-recurring rather than isolated instances-Scott between 1966 and 1968, under the Pacific Command
terms it a "process of conspiracy" or bureaucratic conspiracy.
(Commander-in-Chief, Pacific-CINCPAC), the bombing of
Scott uses this concept to probe the dynamics of the foreign
foreign vessels in North Vietnamese waters coincided with
policy command structure, and to pose what is in his view the important diplomatic peace efforts and may have been
strategic question: are all agencies in the military under the intended to undermine those efforts. Scott's analysis will be
firm control of an integrated national security leadership or
presented more fully below.
have elements in the military developed an independent (5) The Pueblo Incident. Scott draws comparisons with
dynamic, in coordination with domestic right-wing forces, to similar intelligence gathering missions such as the U-2 episode
the extent that they have been able at critical moments to and the Tonkin Gulf episode of 1964. He examines the
preempt the tactical and even the strategic initiative? possibility that forged intelligence data was remitted to
The subjects Scott brings under investigation-some of Washington to provoke "hard" decisions.
which have never before been examined by established (6) Cambodia and Laos. Scott analyzes the invasions of
American scholars in the field-are as follows: 1970 and 1971 a< a means by which U.S. military planners
69
effected the transition from land war envisioning quick victory
to technological air war envisioning stalemate.
(7) The opium distribution system. Scott discusses the
symbiosis between the CIA and the local trafficking groups:
growers enjoy protection and transport facilities of CIA
personnel or mercenaries in return for their participation in
counterinsurgency actions.
(8) The Pentagon Papers. In a brief epilogue Scott
suggests that the Papers may have been edited to exculpate the
intelligence agencies, perhaps the primary war instigators, and
portray them instead as the neglected voice of caution and
realism.
Scott's analysis of the bombing of the Turkestan is
worth recapitulating at length, as a sample of his investigation
procedure. The episode illustrates strikingly the way Scott
inches forward inductively, seeking to surmount the
difficulties and deficiencies of his data and light a candle, as he
says, where a floodlight is needed.
THE BOMBING OF THE TURKESTAN
On June 2, 1967, at a sensitive and fluid moment in
U.S.-U.S.S.R. relations, when there was a chance that a
convergence of the powers' interest in de-escalating the
war-bound Middle East might extend to Indochina, two U.S.
planes bombed the Soviet freighter Turkestan in the North
Vietnamese harbor of Campha. The next day, June 3, the U.S.
Government countered the Soviet complaint with a denial. A
Tass account three days later, however, ruled out an accidental
attack. Crucial data which well might have decided between
the opposed claims-the flight film from the planes' gun
cameras-was intentionally destroyed by the pilots'
commanding officer. On June 18, the U.S. Government
reversed itself and apologized to the Soviet government,
admitting that a third plane may have hit the Turkestan
accidentally.
What strikes Scott as curious, in the first place, is that
the U.S. Government broke with its custom of ignoring or
officially denying charges of attacks on Soviet bloc ships in
North Vietnamese waters by taking, on the day of the raid, the
unusual step of announcing that CINCPAC was being asked for
a report as the basis of the official reply. By publicly referring
to this procedure, it would seem that "Washington was
professing its own ignorance of what actually happened in
Campha harbor [going so far as to identify] one of its own
officials, Admiral Sharp [CINCPAC], as the man who would
be responsible for the forthcoming reply." (p. 84) Was there
an unseen conflict between the White House and CINCPAC?
The denial of June 2, based on CINCPAC's report,
specified that only two targets, a road and an anti-aircraft site,
both over three miles from the ship, had been attacked. Since
the veracity of the report falls with the apology of June 18, it
remains to be asked only whether it errs or lies, and to whom.
Scott seeks the answer in the following passages of the report:
Admiral Ulysses S.C. Sharp, commander-in-chief, U.S.
Pacific Command, has completed his investigation into the
allegations by the Soviet Union that U.S. aircraft bombed
the Soviet ship Turekstan, in the port of Campha in North
Vietnam. The conclusion of the investigation is that no U.S.
aircraft bombed or strafed the Soviet ship. There is
absolutely no evidence to confirm the Soviet allegation.
Having stated his findings, the report then proceeds to make
what Scott calls a "curiously elaborate distinction":
The pilots of the aircraft which attacked the road reported
that they observed the bombs impacting on tbe road
segment. Flight film taken by the aircraft attacking the
anti-aircraft sites (sic) confirmed that the ordnance from
that flight detonated on target . .. (p. 85)
Scott observes (1) that the careful distinction made
between the reported and the filmed attacks indicated
CINCPAC's awareness that the flight film had been destroyed;
and (2) that the change to the plural, anti-aircraft sites instead
of site, suggests that the "third plane" rationalization used in
the June 18 apology was being prepared. (Ultimately the
erroneous denial of June 3 was ascribed to the loss of the
flight film and not to a third and unknown flight in the area.)
Scott suggests that these fine distinctions in the report
rule out simple error because they imply knowledge which
belies the conclusion. ~ u t whom is the report intended to
deceive? The distinctions could not have been made for the
benefit of the American people (a simple lie would have
sufficed), nor for the benefit of the Russians (who would have
immediately asked about the missing flight film). It looks to
Scott as if the report was made for the superiors in Washington
who called for it, and the distinctions perhaps made to conceal
the intentional nature of the raid, if not the raid itself.
Admittedly, the scant evidence ("As yet little is known
about the attack, but from this little it is clear that much
remains to be told" [po 80]) does not convict CINCPAC of
wilfully making an unauthorized attack on a Soviet ship. But
the significance of the episode and the plausibility of Scott's
reading of it are increased as he establishes two contexts for it:
(1) U.S.-U.S.S.R. diplomacy in the spring of 1967; and
(2) the overall bombing pattern of foreign vessels in North
Vietnamese ports.
In the spring of 1967, with the Arab-Israeli war in the
offing, U.S.-Soviet relations were under extraordinary stress.
On May 17, the commander of the Sixth Fleet said that "the
continuous build-up of Soviet naval strength is a significant
threat aimed directly at the Sixth Fleet." (p. 92) On June 2,
the day of the raid, Under Sec. of State George Ball saw
emerging from the Egyptian blocade of the Gulf of Aqaba
"the most serious confrontation between the U.S. and Russia
in five years ... since October 1962." However, these
developments coincided with certain optimistic signs: trade
agreements and treaty negotiations were nearing completion,
the Consular treaty had just been ratified, and Aeroflot flights
to New York were anticipated. "More important, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff first made it public on May 3 that they were
pressuring McNamara for an anti-ballistic missile system ...
and it was clear that McNamara was still resisting this
pressure." (p. 92)
Now, during this very time CINCPAC (Admiral Sharp)
was conducting a campaign to have bombing restrictions on
North Vietnam lifted. From December 23, 1966, to April 18,
1967, President Johnson had forbidden the bombing of central
Hanoi and Haiphong. But i!1 mid-April Sharp persuaded
Johnson to removed this restriction and on April 17 held a
press conference at the Pentagon to stress the importance of
continuing the bombing. On April 23, Sharp received clearance
to bomb the previously unathorized targets. However,
On the eve of the Turkestan incident, it appeared that the
achievements of Admiral Sharp's Washington campaign
70
were all coming unstuck. On 30 May, after the "hot line"
had been activated for about a week {re: middle east}, the
{Manchester} Guardian's Washington correspondent report
ed that "American pilots have once again been ordered not
to bomb the North Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and
Haiphong. Informed sources, who disclosed this today, did
not indicate how long this period would last" ... On 17
July the Guardian indicated that "the decision to 'go
further' to meet the Russians on the question of bombing
has already been taken. " At the same time, two Frenchmen
named Aubrac and Marcovich were en route to Hanoi,
bearing the first known American message to the North
Vietnamese in six months. ... As has happened so often in
the history of this war, their arrival in Hanoi on 21 July
coincided with yet another "hump" in the bombing of the
Hanoi-Haiphong areas. (pp. 95-6)
A corroborating account in u.s. News and World Report
(June 12, 1967) and the subsequent revelation that "Hanoi, at
least, was placed off-limits from 23 May to 15 July 1967" add
weight to the Guardian reports. We have no unquestionable
authority for thinking that Haiphong or Campha were also
off-limits on June 2. The fact remains, however, that according
to the June 22,1966 cable from the Joint Chiefs to CINCPAC,
"No attacks lare] authorized on craft [merchant shipping]
unless U.S. aircraft are first fired on and then only if clearly
North Vietnamese." This was an operative order when the
Turkestan was bombed. Thus Scott's judgment stands: that in
the context of U.S.-Soviet contacts in the spring of 1967, the
bombing of the Turkestan, if not a purposeful act by
CINCP AC to abort peace negotiation, was at least "a
dangerous weakening of civilian and political restraints on the
conduct of the war, wherein dangerous improprieties by U.S.
officers have been allowed to go unpunished." (p. 90)
Scott then proceeds to establish a second ring of
circumstances to reinforce his interpretation:
The chief issue raised by incidents like the bombing of the
Turkestan is not whether these attacks resulted in
terminating a peace threat, but whether this was their
intention. That these attacks were so intended seems much
more likely if we turn now to a large body of evidence not
yet considered, the political context of all the other known
u.s. attacks on foreign shipping in the Tonkin Gulf It will
then be distressingly apparent that every known instance of
these "accidents" has fallen into the same pattern of
threatening a diplomatic channel opened at that particular
time in the search for peace. (p. 96-7)
Scott dramatically demonstrates this point by a series of
correlations so consistent that he feels compelled
to apologize for the chart's superficial neatness: it is not
intended as a total explanation of its subject. As I am
sympathetic to the "patternless" approach to history . .. I
can only wish it exhibited one or two prominent loose
ends. (p. 97)
What Scott has discovered is that although the ports
were regularly raided throughout 1966-1968, the damage to
foreign ships is not random in pattern, but rather tends to be
concentrated on the ships of precisely those nations most
active at the given moment in the diplomatic search for a
negotiated settlement. (p. 100)
For example, (1) in April 1966, when a Polish diplomat
was in Hanoi in connection with a secret peace initiative called
"Marigold," the Beniowski, a Polish ship, was bombed-the
first recorded attack on foreign shipping in North Vietnamese
waters. (2) On August 29, 1966, a week before the U.S. and
Chinese ambassadors to Poland "were scheduled to hold their
first meeting in six months amid reports of a new American
effort to discuss the Vietnam situation with Peking," two
Chinese ships were bombed and strafed, according to a Peking
report. Presumably as a result, at the Sept. 7 meeting the
Chinese ambassador
took the unprecedented step of releasing publicly a long
resume of u.s. provocations against China and Vietnam
(the 130 previous Warsaw meetings had been conducted
with the highest degree of confidentiality). Two incidents
in particular were singled out as evidence of American bad
faith: the 29 August attack . .. and an attack the preceding
28 May . .. "(p. 101)
(3) A third bombing with diplomatic implications concerns the
Rumanians, whose Premier Maurer went personally on a secret
mission to Hanoi and Peking in late 1966. Ai this time not
I
only did the Chinese report lethal attacks on their fishing
boats, but in the unprecedented December 13 and 17 raids on
!
t
downtown Hanoi, American rockets hit three adjacent
embassies: the Chinese, the Polish, and the Rumanian.
In all, Prof. Scott counts some 15 incidents in the period
April 1966-J anuary 1968 in which attacks in the Tonkin Gulf I
,
against vessels other than North Vietnamese had significant
~
diplomatic implications.
I
Having established this context for the bombing of the
,
Turkestan, Scott draws his chapter, "Provoking China and the
USSR," to a close with the following conclusion:
,
Though the "accidental coincidence" hypothesis might
explain one or another of the incidents that we have
reviewed, it can hardly erase the recurring pattern that
emerges from all of them . .. the timing of these attacks
I
i
suggests that in general they were politically inspired; and
deliberately timed to diminish the chances of peace
I
talks . ... (105)
I
!
!
In the fall of 1971, on the pretext of "protective
reaction," General John Lavelle, commander of the Seventh
i
Air Force, ordered air strikes against the Democratic Republic
of Vietnam. These attacks, according to Jack Anderson's
column of June 21, 1972, caused Le Duc Tho to break off
secret talks with Kissinger in November 1971. Anderson writes
that "the general instructed his pilots not to report after these
raids that there had been 'no enemy action.' Washington,
therefore, didn't know from reading the reports that the raids
had been unprovoked." Anderson then alludes to the
Aubrac/Markovich mission of 1967. Kissinger had sent them
to Hanoi in an effort to get a dialogue going. "But they
couldn't persuade [DRV's Mai Van] Bo to sit down with
Kissinger, because the peace offer had coincided with the
bombing of Hanoi." .
The hearings on the Lavelle affair conducted by John
Stennis' Senate Armed Services Committee, if the transcripts
are ever made available, should shed much light on Scott's
theses. Meanwhile, however,
General Abrams also testified . .. that he knew nothing of
the secret peace talks . ...
71
The connections between the November raids and the
peace talks have not been explored in the secret Senate
hearings thus far, but they may be. (New York Times, Sept.
18,1972)
The Lavelle affair, together witt the bombing of the
French miSSIOn in Hanoi in October (when the
"peace-at-hand" agreement was reached), may give second
thoughts to those who think that Nixon has coopted the right
with his new diplomacy.
* * * * *
Among the several critical approaches to the problem of
imperialism, the author's particular line of interpretation, the
theory of conspiracy, cuts somewhat of a middle course
between theories of economic determinism and ruling class
dominance (e.g., Kolko, Domhoff) and theories of an
independent national security bureaucracy (e.g., Melman,
Barnet).
On the strength of his case studies, Scott, citing Gabriel
Kolko's The Roots of American Foreign Policy, challenges the
view that the foreign policy leadership is basically cohesive in
its goals and that decision making is therefore centrally
controlled by that elite. For Kolko, business constitutes the
center and defines the process.
Businessmen and their political cohorts have defined the
limits within which the military formulates strategy,
extending their values and definitions of priorities over
essentially docile generals Not a mythical
"military-industrial" complex but civilian authority and
civilian-defined goals are the sources of American foreign
and military policy. ... To understand this essential fact is
also to reject conspiratorial theories . .. " (p. xiii)
Scott's reply is that "the recurrence of intelligence
conspiracies is a fact, not a theory; and this fact challenges the
assumption that there exists in America a single-minded
national ruling class "(p. xxii) By exploring this
disagreement we may attempt to define Scott's position with
respect to other anti-imperialist scholars.
In Kolko's description of the post-1945 world scene, the
U.S. policy decisions are made by an integrated national
security leadership that supervises diverse and widespread
corporate investments overseas and sustains a balance of
regions and interests without any significant centrifugal
tendency. Differences within the elite o v e ~ priorities are purely
tactical. Within this broad picture, Kolko sees in American
policy in Indochina a logic which flows from the presumed
consensus of the leadership during the two decades after World
War II. This approach is intended as a direct challenge to C.
Wright Mills' theory of a separate military elite that controls
policy.
Scott, on the other hand, does not seek to deny the
systematic involvement of all interests and forces dominating
foreign policy in the imperial will to power. Rather, he
attempts to observe, under high magnification, the tactical
contradictions of the imperial policy implemented under
stress. His method is painstakingly empirical, with a low
theoretical profile, reaching only occasionally and partially
towards the scale of model from which Kolko works-models
which are not constructed to deal with the "footnotes of
history." To the empiricist these models may seem remote and
even perturbingly secure, and the conclusions reached too
predictable. For example, in his e ~ s a y in Volume 5 of the
Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers, Kolko states that: "In
the light of the imperatives of postwar American imperialism,
and the men at its helm, the choice [of escalationl was
foreordained." (p. 10)
In a sense, then, Scott's differences with Kolko could be
considered more a matter of method than theory, that is, a
difference that derives from the very subject matter each deals
with: broad policy lines vs. specifics of implementation in
short time frame and narrow area focus. Working along the
exterior of a vast body of classified documents which could
either prove or disprove many of his arguments, Scott develops
a case that is necessarily circumstantial. Consequently, his
interpretations are hypothetical. For example, when field
tactics such as bombing of foreign vessels seem to run counter
to the national security decision makers, Scott proposes that a
part of the Pacific Command or the intelligence apparatus is
defiantly striking out on its own. However, another plausible
line of interpretation, a la Kolko, might run as follows: The
U.S. Government uses various levels of force and diplomacy to
achieve its objectives; sometimes these measures are open,
sometimes covert, and sometimes the chain of command may
break down to the extent that overzealous local decision
makers take actions which they perceive to be contributing to
the more general goals set out for them, even if those actions
have not been specifically approved.
We might be tempted to dismiss Scott's reading of the
events in the field as interesting but improbable, or simply
unverifiable, were it not for his effort to demonstrate a
political-economic formation in the U.S. capable of
backstopping an independent aggressive field diplomacy and
alienated from the consensus Kolko describes. Scott's quest
for such an interest group is an important attempt to identify
those right-wing groups that have remained elusive in most
analyses. He outlines a pattern of Pacific-oriented corporate
interests represented on the Board of Directors of the Air
America Corporation, the CIA's largest proprietary in Asia and
supplier of pilots and planes for many unofficial military
rrusslOns in Indochina. Pan Am Corporation (whose
commercial monopoly of the Indochina route rescued its
fortunes) was the source of most of Air America's executive
cadre; and the controlling bloc of stock in Pan Am is held by
the Rockefeller-dominated Chase Manhattan Bank. In
addition, Scott points out other firms in electronics and oil,
operating to great profit in Indochina, whose leadership
intersects with the intelligence leadership. The author seems to
be intimating that these elements, with Air America's Board of
Directors as the focus, add up to a survival of the China Lobby
through the sixties. Perhaps this is the mysterious force
stalking the Pentagon Papers against which the liberal war
planners always allege they fight for "more rational" options.
However, it is one thing to identify an interest group and
another to demonstrate its influence on foreign policy. The
connections Scott makes are provocative but hardly definitive.
The very fact that Air America/Pan Am is tied to such mighty
interests as Rockefeller's and Lehman's would be taken by
Kolko as evidence that the operational contradictions remain
explicable within the broad picture. After all, historically
speaking, the school of counterinsurgency was promoted by
the Rockefeller Brothers' Panel Two Report, the Gaither
Report, etc. to reverse Eisenhower's budget-wise nuclear-only
defense policy.
For Scott, the operational alternatives within imperial
policy seem to represent fundamentally opposed sectors of the
72
elite and thus acquire a history-changing potential. Yet Scott's
findings may actually complement rather than contradict
Kolko's, for both believe that there are powerful economic
interests determining and benefitting from the war. It would
thus seem logical to contrast the two together with such
"power structure" analysts as Seymour Melman and Richard J.
Barnet, both of whom deny the primacy of the economic
motive.
In his Pentagon Capitalism, Melman places himself
among a group of theorists (Heilbroner, Galbraith) who
describe with alarm the convergence of public and private
institutions. "It is no longer meaningful," writes Melman, "to
speak of the elites of industrial management, the elites of
finance, and the elites of government and how they relate to
each other." "The elites have been merged in the new
state-management." (p. 13 and p. 1) Melman contributes to
convergence theory by describing the "new managerial control
institution in the Department of Defense." (p. 13) He finds
that "the creation and operation of {the new
state-industrial-management] marks an essential alteration of
American economy, government and society," (p. 16) namely,
that the autonomous bureaucratic will to power, an inherent
drive to maximize the scope of decision making, supplants the
old-fashioned quest for profit. The growth of this irrational
force suffices for him to explain why a seemingly
unprofitable war can be waged in a nation given over to profit
making.
Richard Barnet, in his Intervention and Revolution, also
sees the bureaucratic juggernaut as determinative:
Classic theories of economic imperialism, which view the
state as an agent of the most powerful domestic economic
interests, underestimate the independent role of the
national security bureaucracy, which in the United States
has taken on a life and movement of its own. (p. 17>
Barnet does, nonetheless, take account of the economic
motive, but as a result rather than a cause: "Once the
commitment is made, however, military services, banks, oil
companies, and insurance agencies quickly enlist
(Washington Plans an Aggressive War, p. 214)
It is not my purpose here to resolve the debate between
the economic and bureaucratic determinists but to raise the
following question with respect to Prof. Scott's book. Why
does Scott introduce his book as a critique of Kolko when
Melman or Barnet seem to be more natural adversaries? The
answer may lie partly in Scott's political outlook. Concerning
Kolko's views Scott writes, "From such arguments it is all too
easy to conclude that the rest of us do not have the means or
institutions to oppose this class." Its drive toward war then
appears to Scott "inevitable and unopposable." This is hard to
face. Scott retains considerable faith in Congressional inquiry
and judicial review and refers his case frequently to these
powers. On the one hand, the hope seems to be that if the
drive to war is not of the whole class but only a portion, then
perhaps the system can restore itself by ejecting the diseased
portion. On the other hand, the very occasional character of
Scott's appeals to "law and order" suggests an underlying lack
of conviction that Congress and the courts can do more than
apply tactical checks. One comes away from Scott's book
deeply pessimistic; the prospect is that international
gangsterism will grow and thrive under the present
accomodating order.
We must bear with these ambiguities and seek to resolve
them, remembering that Scott has produced a work of
exploration, not a definitive study which draws on a body of
established research by a community of scholars. Since Asian
scholars have scrupulously ignored these problems so far, the
surface has hardly been scratched. As Scott tells us, "There is
material in the sources for a hundred critiques more profound
than what I have written." But there is no small irony here.
Although trained in political theory and political science,
Scott has been teaching in the Department of English for some
six years. Thus he is both unfettered and isolated. A
path breaking study of the Second Indochina War such as he
has made could not have been researched and written within
the field of Asian studies as it is presently organized, funded
and intellectually oriented.
Nor will Prof. Scott now be invited, on the strength of
his accomplishment, to a center of Asian studies at a major
university and endowed with the means to develop with his
students those "hundred critiques more profound." For the
research funds in the field are controlled by non-academic
agencies which interface with governmental policy and
intelligence agencies. This circumstance has caused Southeast
Asian societies to be treated as objects to be managed,
modernized, and equipped with elites, while critical
consideration of these societies' ties to private corporations is
stifled. Scott has the freedom to do the heretical reverse: to
study the managers and modernizers on behalf of those to
whom he dedicates his work, "The people of Asia, and above
all ... the victims of the American war conspiracy."
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy
G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? See also his essay in David
Horowitz, ed., The Cold War and the Corporations
Richard J. Barnet, Intervention and Revolution. See also his essay in
Ralph Stavins' America Plans an Aggressive War and his new book
Roots of War.
Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism
CIIINA SLIDES NEEDED
I am putting together several filmstrips of color slides
on China for elementary and junior high school
students. Need several hundred on subjects such as
commune life, health care, schools, women, sports,
city life.
Will be able to pay for the slides used (around $10
each).
Contact:
Orville Schell
P.O. Box 182
Bolinas, CA, 94923
tel: (415) 868-0419
73
The Funding of China Studies, Continued
ON FUNDING OF ASIAN STUDIES AND
COMTEMPORARY CHINA STUDIES, PASSED AT
CCAS RETREA T, CR YSTAI, LAKE, ILLINOIS,
AUGUST 28-SEPTEMBER 1, 1972
BOYCOTT SSRC/ ACLS
Since 1969, CCAS has been investigating the influence
of the Ford Foundation on the Asian Studies field. Our
present findings (see the Summer/Fall 1971 issue of the CCAS
Bulletin) show that Ford used its financial and political power
to create and shape the field to serve the ends of policy and
intelligence agencies. The means by which this centralized
control is exerted is the Social Science Research Council
(SSRC) and the American Council of Learned Societies
(ACLS). To date, the evidence for these conclusions has been
overwhelming. The burden of disproof rests on the SSRC and
ACLS, which have consistently denied reasonable requests for
further research in their files.
Since CCAS is involved in an on-going political struggle
against this external control of the field, we call on our
members to show their solidarity, and urge other students and
teachers to support us, by refusing to cooperate with the
research strategies of the SSRC/ACLS committees such as the
Joint Committee on Contemporary China OCCC). Their
conferences, their grants and their honoraria should be
boycotted until free examination of the SSRC/ACLS
documents (consistent with appropriate respect for personal
privacy) overturns our present conclusions.
We urge graduate students and, above all, faculty to do
their utmost to find alternate sources of funds and to develop
alternate research strategies in support of this struggle so that
control of intellectual and financial resources will be returned
to their proper place: the university, faculty and students.
COMMUNICATION
October 30, 1972
To the Editor:
In view of the wide disparities between public utterances
and private discussions of all types of officials in recent years,
it is easy to sympathize with the view that more information
should be discl0sed from the private discussions surrounding
the funding in the China field.
When these issues were first raised, a number of us on
the Joint Committee on Contemporary China at first hoped
that since we had nothing to hide, the problem of trust could
be solved by making our files universally available. In the
course of our discussions, it soon became clear that the Joint
Committee could not continue to operate effectively if this
were done. The basic reason is that a number of our programs,
and especially grant-giving programs, require private estimates
of individual talent, and that in order to arrive at these
estimates we need confidential evaluations from a wide variety
of people in the field. Were these people to feel that materials
from our files could be open to the public, we could no longer
expect to receive these honest evaluations, and we could not
make meaningful decisions.
We then decided to commission a paper by George
Taylor, a member of the Joint Committee from the beginning,
to recount with candor:. all the basic decisions and the basic
approach reached by the Joint Committee over the years. This
report was completed and made public. We further offered to
meet individually with a variety of people concerned about the
funding issue. A number of interested people took us up on
this offer, and it is with some disappointment that I must
report that our explanations were not fairly reported to large
numbers of concerned people.
A wide gap in perspective separates those who have
served on the Joint Committee on Contemporary China and
the perspective of our most severe critics. The views of the
most severe critics are well known through the publications of
CCAS. From our perspective as JCCC members, we are
devoting our time and efforts without any financial
compensation and without any personal reward for the
development of a field, to make more materials and more
facilities and more funds available for young people of all
political persuasions who are interested in seeking information.
Not only do we serve on the Joint Committee without any
financial compensation, but there is a standing rule which has
not been violated that no member of the Joint Committee is
eligible to receive funds from the Joint Committee. Although
all of us on the Joint Committee are from major research
centers, there is also a standing rule that only ten percent of
our research grants each year can go to people at major
institutions. In our view we are striving to increase
opportunities for independent scholars and we have never been
subjected to government pressures, directly or indirectly, for
specific research or any other matter.
If one is interested in getting a picture of how much the
JCCC has been influenced by government policy, I suggest
they go through the lists of our research project titles and the
published works of the recipients of our grants. It should soon
be obvious to an observer that the concern of our recipients
has been far more with basic research than with work that has
any immediate implications for government action.
In recent years, to my knowledge, there has been only
one meeting between the JCCC and the U.S. government
agency concerned with foreign area research, the FAR. The
initiative for this meeting was from Dr. John Lindbeck, then
the head of JCCC, for the purpose of exploring whether funds
from various parts of the federal government could be
available for open research without any "mission relevance" so
as to help in the funding of the China field. The answer at the
time was in the negative, and therefore no positive action ever
resulted from this meeting. No proposal of research topics
74
from the U.S. government was ever discussed at any meeting
I
I
of the JCCC. Foundation funds (especially the Ford
Foundation) and the JCCC has played an important role in the
development of research centers, libraries, and research
I
I
training programs. Foundations have played an important role
in the building up of research facilities that provide
opportunities for everyone that were not available before, and
any person who refused to look at materials or to work at
I
centers financed by these foundations would be depriving
himself of a wide range of data that would seriously hamper
!
1
his scholarship.
We are in a period of declining financing for the China
field. Those of us who are in tenured positions in established
universities have no financial worries for ourselves. However,
I
those of us who feel some responsibility for making our

I
,
facilities available for new generations of graduate students
and new generations of researchers would only ask that our
critics who have already enjoyed these facilities accept some
responsibility for seeing that they are continued so that others
may benefit from them. Uninformed and massive attacks on
research centers, libraries, and grant programs may have the
effect of reducing opportunities for language and area studies
I
for those in the future. If erroneous notions are being
perpetrated by the leaders of the China field, they are
perpetrated not because of secrecy but because we share
notions that are part of a more general ethos. Unlike many
government officials, our views are readily available in
published sources. I suggest that critics attack these ideas while
preserving the facilities which ensure that wide numbers of
!
people will have access to the best information available well
into the future.
Sincerely,
1
!
Ezra F. Vogel
Harvard University
The JCCC Boycott: A Necessary First
Step Towards Self-Determination
in Asian Studies
RESOLUTION, CCAS CONVENTION, CHICAGO,
MARCH 29-31, 1973
I
The CCAS has called a boycott of the conferences,
grants, and honoraria of the Joint Committee on
Contemporary China OCCC). This group, sponsored jointly by
the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the American
I
Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and funded by the Ford
I
Foundation, has dominated and shaped both the intellectual
I substance and the organizational structure of the field of
China studies in the U.S. A preliminary analysis of both that
1
organizational and intellectual dominance was made in the
Special Supplement of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian
i
,
!
1
Scholars in the summerfall 1971 issue. Since publication of
I
that supplement, efforts have been made to pursue the study
further. The boycott is a response to the way in which those
efforts have been received by the institutions involved.
I
The main points of criticism made in the Special
I
Supplement can be summarized in four points:
(1) The ]CCC is the dominant organization in the China field
in terms of its power to award research grants, fund
conferences, and hence significantly influence the career
patterns of individuals within the field. It operates free from
any critical review by the profession under the auspices of the
SSRC whose top leadership has long been oriented to concerns
of governmental policy rather than academic development per
se. Yet it was established under the SSRC with a dubious
mandate.
(2) The JCCC has engaged in uncertain, and even covert,
liaison with various government agencies whose interests were
primarily and profoundly political, and the discussions which
took place concerned matters affecting the entire field.
(3) The JCCC has shown a serious disregard for academic due
process and for the vital principle of open substantive
discussion. This calls into question its claim to offer academic
leadership to the field.
(4) The ]CCC has received and allocated funds without
reference to the needs of the field as determined by a
representative procedure in an organization like the AAS,
where democratic participation is at least theoretically
possible. This last criticism applies to other SSRC and ACLS
central committees in a variety of fields as well as in Asian
studies.
A brief explanation of these four points follows:
(1) The ]CCC was originally set up at the Gould House
Conference in June 1959. Sixteen professors, as well as
representatives of RAND, the State Department, and the Ford
Foundation, met to organize a new national committee to
"raise the standards" of Chinese studies. When it came to a
vote on the one truly divisive issue-should the AAS or the
SSRC sponsor the new committee-those voting were
overwhelmingly (9-2, 7 abstentions) in favor of AAS
sponsorship. The alternative, SSRC sponsorship, was rejected.
Yet this decision was reversed by a very questionable
procedure after the conference had ended. Thus, removed
from the professional scrutiny of any but a small group of
essentially like-minded colleagues, the members of the JCCC
conducted their business as an exclusive group. Token
opposition from individual JCCC members could not weaken
the group's hegemony over the field. Members are appointed
by the SSRC in a manner unknown to and independent of the
profession. JCCC decisions on grants and conferences are
subject to no critical by the profession. Thus, with
no clear mandate, avoiding an open relationship with the
profession, the JCCC has presumed to set standards for the
field and to represent and define "quality."
(2) If the JCCC was distant from the profession it was very
much in touch with the thinking of Ford and SSRC managerial
personnel-all of whom are/were active exponents and/or
practitioners of governmental policies. To varying degrees they
bring to the academic world a concept of service to the state.
From the beginning the JCCC worked closely with
75
governmental agencies. In 1960 the]CCC sponsored a project
called "Scholarly Communication with Mainland China." This
project was conducted with funds whose origins were not
disclosed. It involved compiling dossiers on the political
sympathies and attitudes of individuals from seven foreign
countries who had visited China. The findings were made
available by the ]CCC to "various governmental agencies" for
their own purposes. The same findings were not released to the
members of the profession in their original form and context.
The first major overt activity of the ]CCC was to
convene in 1960 a conference on the Economy of China. After
the conference, a sister committee under SSRC, the
Committee on the Economy of China, was formed. The
Director of Research for the Committee was the same man
who had brought CIA funds to the Center for Chinese Studies
at Berkeley, on a covert basis, for study of the Agriculture of
Communist China. Some of the work begun at Berkeley was
carried forward by the Committee. This case illustrates how
political control of an academic field goes hand in hand with
artificial growth stimulated by over-allocation. Ford gave the
committee 910,000 dollars and it awarded grants on a
"contract" basis, that is, it did not respond to proposals
initiated from the profession but stipulated research categories
beforehand. In the end the grant proved so disproportionate that
(;oatributors
Eqbal Ahmad is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in
Washington.
Norma Diamond teaches anthropology at the University of
Michigan.
Fred J. Elizalde is from a wealthy Filipino family; recently he
gained fame for protecting a tribe of stone-age people found
on the island of Mindanao.
John F. Heliegers is a lawyer with the Environmental Defense
Fund in Washington.
Richard Kagan teaches history at Hamlin University, St. Paul,
Minnesota.
Gabriel Kolko is professor of history at York University,
Toronto.
Gail Omvedt teaches sociology at the University of Cali fornia,
San Diego.
Carl Riskin teaches economics at Columbia University.
Moss Roberts is professor of classical Chinese language and
literature at New York University.
David Rosenberg teaches political science at Middlebury
College, Vermont.
Ezra Vogel is professor of social relations and director of the
East Asian Research Center at Harvard University.
upwards of $250,000 remained unspent.
In 1965 and again in 1968 the] CCC established contacts
with the Foreign Areas Research Coordinating Group (FAR),
an agency of the federal government representing several
intelligence and policy planning units within the civilian and
military bureaucracies. The nature and substance of those
contracts remain unclear, and CCAS has rquested
documentation to clarify the situation, and establish the
degree of receptivity on the part of the ]CCC to the research
interests and priorities of FAR agencies.
In 1964 the ]CCC convened its biggest conference on
the Government and Politics of China, the Greyston
Conference. The research categories advanced by ]CCC
members at this conference seem to have reflected those
worked out two years before at State Department intelligence
unit meetings in which the ]CCC chairman participated. The
Greyston Conference itself was set up on the initiative of
RANDI]CCC member A.M. Halpern in a memo to the SSRC
dated November 1963. We have sought this document made
available to the profession. It has not been released.
At the 1970 convention of the CCAS, Prof. John
Fairbank responded to a request that the records of the ]CCC
be opened by suggesting that a three-man committee be
chosen to go through the files of the ]CCC. However, at its
spring meeting that year, the ]CCC rejected Prof. Fairbank's
modest proposal, even as another ]CCC member, Prof. Ezra
Vogel, was vouching for the need for the ]CCC to be more
open about its deliberations.
(3) The ]CCC has made gestures in the direction of academic
due process, but they remain simply gestures whose purpose
seems to have been to avoid rather than deal with the
substantive issues. After rejecting Prof. iiairbank's proposal,
the ]CCC commissioned Prof. George Taylor, the first
chairman of the ]CCC, to write a history of the ]CCC.
Although Prof. Taylor scarcely alludes to the controversy over
the ]CCC, no full-dress history of an SSRCI ACLS committee
had previously been attempted. Prof. Taylor's history,
unashamedly self-congratulatory, was first published in the
AAS' Professional Review (Fall 1971). Unfortunately, other
people with a different view of the ]CCC have been prevented
from examining the source materials to which Prof. Taylor had
access. Thus the need for an impartial critical review of the
]CCC remains. In offering to the profession Taylor's history as
a sufficient response to criticism or as a substitute for an
inquiry, the ]CCC violates a basic principle of academic
procedure: the open testing of hypotheses and conclusions
through exercise of the critical facilities. Such an attitude can
only reinforce doubts about the manner in which the ]CCC
convenes conferences, awards grants, and in general offers
academic leadership to the field.
(4) In allocating funds for scholarly pursuits the ]CCC can be
regarded as but a single component, however important, in a
complex of institutions, including other SSRCI ACLS
committees, the Ford-funded university-based centers and
institutes, and the AAS itself.
At the 1971 Business Meeting of the AAS, Prof. Moss
Roberts moved to have "an independent standing committee
of the AAS (including CCAS) ... undertake a complete and
thorough inquiry into the ]CCC, the SSRC, and the East Asia
Division of the Ford Foundation." The motion was passed.
The committee created pursuant to the passed motion
76
did not, however, address itself to the historical problems
outlined above, but rather to the future development of
Chinese studies, on the assumption, rather rare for academic
people, that the past was separable from the present and the
future. Operating at a time when funding in the Asian studies
field was being rapidly and drastically cut back, the
Committee on the Future of Chinese Studies soon found itself
outflanked. Established as a subcommittee of the AAS' China
and Inner Asia Regional Council (CIARC), the Committee
hoped to provide input into the decision-making process at the
Ford Foundation. Ford, however, did not seem to look with
favor on the request of one member that Ford hold off its
decisions on funding until the committee could complete its
own investigation and make its own suggestions. This was the
greatest inroad made by an AAS representative committee on
funding decisions. Soon after, Ford granted the East Asia
SSRC/ACLS Committees 1.3 million dollars while the centers
and institutes were cut back and other regional programs left
in danger of withering on the vine. Ford's decision will commit
ample funds for the airplane fares, restaurant and hotel bills
and incidentals necessitated by conferences, and will provide
some funds for established faculty. It does little for many
graduate students and those now seeking employment.
The dislocation now being suffered by many graduate
students and young professors can, in large measure, be
charged to mismanagement and artificially stimulated growth
by groups like Ford, SSRC etc. whose primary interest is not
academic development per se. The withdrawal of funds is as
much the consequence of political decisions as the infusion of
funds over the past 15 years. But the profession has had
precious little influence over those decisions.
As long as the political, academic, and financial direction
of the field is determined by small groups unaccountable to
the field and sponsored by agencies oriented to government
service, there can be no self-determination in the field and of
the field. In addition, the mainstay of academic freedom, free
exercise of the critical faculties, is weakened. The JCCC is not
the whole problem but it is highly representative of it. The
CCAS boycott is an important and correct beginning for the
reforming of the profession. For it not only draws the line
against the JCCC's past practices but also points the way for
the creation of new institutions in the field.
I
S.bserlptlon
BULLETIN OF CONCERNED
Regular
Outside of North America
Full-time Students
Libraries/\ nst itutions
Sustaining Subscriptions
Strcet
/ip ('ode
ASIAN SCHOLARS
One Year Two Years
$6 $11
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For changes, plea,>e include n/d' ~ ! d J r e s s with Lip
code. Send to. Bulletin, 0\)4 Mission St., room
1001, San Francisco, 9-H 05
THE ASSOCIATION FOR RADICAL EAST ASIAN STUDIES is a group of teachers, students and activists in the field of East
and Southeast Asian studies. Its aim is to promote radical, socialist and anti-imperialist activities within this field. One of
AREAS' main activities has been publishing material and analyses on east and southeast Asian issues. Over the past two years we
have published the following titles:
Laos 15pp.
Submarine Colonialism 14pp.
The Nixon Doctrine 48pp.
Japanese Imperialism Today (soon to be published by Penguin) 79pp.
China's Foreign Policy 21pp.
Indonesia's New Order 28pp.
A Report from South Vietnam 20pp.
Three Articles on the Korean Revolution 66pp.
Hong Kong: Last Stronghold of British Imperialism B2pp.
The next two which are currently in preparation are on the Philippines since Martial Law and lntroduction to the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. Of the titles listed above, only the bulletin on Hong Kong is still in print and may be
obtained from AREAS. The other bulletins may be obtained on microfilm.
Library Subscription rates (which include postage and packing):
British Isles: 5 p.a.
Overseas: 7 p.a. (or the dollar equivalent).
Address: AREAS Office, 6 Endsleigh Street. London W.c.1. AREAS
How Can
Vietnam
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Nearly 15 million
dead, wounded and
refugees. Three times
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as in World War II.
How can they stand it,
and fight back?
Helen Lamb's answer
begins with the earliest
history of Vietnam and
chronicles the
extraordinary heroism
of the Vietnamese in
their many struggles
for independence.
$10.
Vietnam's
Will to Live
Resistance to
Foreign Aggression
From Early Times
Through the
Nineteenth
Century
by Helen B. Lamb
At your bookstore or order
directly from
Monthly Review Press
116 West 14th Street
New York, N.Y. 10011
Add sales tax where applicable
and 20 for postage and
handling.
The thirdIndochina war?
UEven the most cynical reader will be shocked by Prince
Sihanouk's remarkable account of what the CIA did
over the years to his country. The continuing tragedy of
Cambodia, here set forth clearly and compellingly, has
been caused by American intervention and no reason
able person can read Sihanouk's book without feeling a
sense of national shame." -RICHARD A. FALK
"Of all contemporary world leaders, Norodom Sihanouk
is perhaps the only one who speaks of world affairs with
the freedom of a football champion discussing the per
formance of his team. This book perfectly reflects his
militant humor and combative spontaneity."
-JEAN LACOUTURE
AlA valuable and intriguing commentary on internal de
velopments in Cambodia and the American role in
Southeast Asia _. _ His interpretation of current history
t
..
II
cannot fail to enlighten those who are concerned with
what may lie ahead." -NOAM CHOMSKY
g
o
it
THE MEMOIRS OF PRINCE
NORODOM SIHANOUK
MY WAR
WITH
THE CIA
AS RELATED TO
WILFRED BURCHETT
Illustrated with photographs
$7.95, now at your bookstore
PANTHEON.
Bancroft Library. Reprinted from ASIAN WOMEN.
GLAD DAY PRESS Oruersof SOor more (each item) 4CYi; oll(except*)
Terms CASH
--'':c. 308 Stewart Al'enue
Postage & Handling - I.ess tha n S 1.00, add 25C
Ithaca, New 14850 More than S\.OO,add 20%
Jon Van Dyke:
Peter Dale Scott:
Noam Chomsky:
BaIUling Garrett:
T. D. Allman
Ngo Cong Duc:
Browning & Garrett:
Neilands, Westing,
Orians, & Pfeiffer:
C. Kahin &
D.G. Porter:
George Kahin:
Wal ter LaFeber:
Cornell C.A.S.:
Indochina
Resource Center:
Tom Engelhardt:
Fred Branfman:
John W. Dower:
Feroz Ahmed:
David Shoenbrun:
Eqbal Ahmad:
tPrisoners of War in Vietnam.................. 2S
Cambodia: Why the Generals Won ............... IS
Air America: Flying the US into Laos ......... 10
Cambodia .................................... 20
Destroying Laos ............................ 2S
In North Viet-Nam .......................... 1S
Cambodia Takes Up the Gun .................. 5
r Ana tomy of a Coup ............................ 10
The New Politics in Saigon
that Nixon Ignores ........................... 10
The New Opium War ........................... 10
tNot Since the Romans Salted the Land
(Chemical Warfare in Southeast Asia) ......... 35
The Administration's Bloodbath Argument ...... 10
tConsequences of the Invasion of Cambodia .... l0
tThe Indochina War .......................... 20
tFact Sheet on Viet-Nam .................... lO ea.;$4/l00;$12/S00;$22/l000
tFact Sheet on Cambodia .................... 5 ea. ;$2/100;$8/S00;$1S/1000
tFact Sheet on Laos ......................... 3 ea. ;$1/100;$4/S00;$7/1000
Air War in Indochina ........................ 3 ea.;$1/100;$4/S00;$7/l000
Air War: The Third Indochina War ............ $1.50; 10 or more $1 ea.
+Ambush at Kamikaze Pass ...................... 30
t +Laos: No Place to Hide .................. 3S.
+Asia and the Nixon Doctrine ................ 25
+The Crisis in Bangladesh............... 25c;:
Vietnam... and Beyond ..................... 20c;:
Counter-Insurgency ................. 20c;:
Revolutionary Warfare
and Counterinsurgency................... lac;:
*Indochina War Packet (Contains all of the items marked t) .. $1.00 or $60/100
+Reprinted from the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars

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