标题: 1959.12思想改革。中国的意识形态重塑 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-7-23 00:25 标题: 1959.12思想改革。中国的意识形态重塑 Thought Reform: Ideological Remolding in China
HARRIET C. MILLS, who teaches Chinese at Columbia, has spent twenty-five years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, she graduated from the Shanghai American School, went to Wellesley College, and took an M.A. at Columbia. She returned to Peking in 1947 and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship. She was arrested in July of 1951, confined in the prison for counterrevolutionaries, and not released until October, 1955.
By Harriet C. Mills
DECEMBER 1959 ISSUE
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BY HARRIET C. MILLS
FOR the past ten years the Chinese Communists have been conducting the greatest campaign in human history to reshape the minds of men. No other Communist or authoritarian state, not even the Soviet Union, has ever equaled the scope and intensity of the Chinese Communist effort.
The Chinese Communists believe that thought determines action. Thus, if 650 million Chinese can be brought to think “correctly,” they will act “correctly” along lines the Chinese Communist Party considers essential for the creation of its version of a socialist China, to become at some distant date a Communist society in a Communist world.
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The Chinese Communists are attempting to remold the mind as well as the face of China. Their approach combines standard techniques of the authoritarian state with a system of their own invention. Like any authoritarian state, the People’s Republic of China has the power to enforce its edicts and protect official ideology by absolute control of education and all regular mass media. A vast supplementary network of village radio receivers and loudspeakers, housetop megaphone recasts, and door-to-door agents of oral propaganda carries official news, slogans, rousing songs, and propaganda skits to the illiterate in remote rural areas. In the familiar pattern of modern authoritarian societies, the whole population is thoroughly organized. Virtually every individual belongs to one or more mass organizations built around his age, residential, trade, or professional group.
However, the Chinese Communists are well aware that, effective as such regimentation may be in conditioning habits of action and response, it does not necessarily achieve genuine reorientation. They know that only if people are truly persuaded of the justice and correctness of the Communist position will they release their spontaneous creative energy and cooperate, not from necessity but from conviction. To accelerate this persuasion the Chinese Communists have developed group study, or hsüeh-hsi, in which everyone must participate — peasant, ex-landlord, city dweller, artisan, worker, peddler, merchant, housewife, producer, industrialist, even the political prisoner. Group study is a unique means for achieving critical rejection of old ideas in favor of new ones and a powerful weapon for ideological remolding.
Two main lines of experience have gone into group study, one Chinese, one Communist. During their twenty-odd years as guerrilla fighters, the Chinese Communists stumbled, through necessity, on one basic element of what is now group study. In teaching uneducated peasant recruits to use weapons, obey commands, live together, and protect the country people, the Communists gradually found that small discussion groups were the best way to make sure each man understood not only how but why. These small groups went patiently over all questions, objections, or countersuggestions until the best method had been found and agreed upon. To the peasantry, on whom the army depended for support and cover, the Communists likewise explained their rural improvement program, rent reduction, land redistribution, public health, and literacy. Thus, they persuaded the peasants that it was to their advantage to cooperate in resisting Japan or the Kuomintang. The high morale of the guerrilla areas justified the Communists’ approach.
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The second objective in group study — namely, the study of Marxist theory and the discipline of criticism and self-criticism — has long been standard practice in Communist cells around the world. Out of the gradual fusion of these two traditions — Chinese persuasion and Communist dogma — contemporary group study has evolved as the ubiquitous working mechanism of thought reform in China.
TODAY every office, factory, shop, school, cooperative, commune, military or residential unit in China is divided into ostensibly voluntary small study groups of about six to twelve persons. Under elected leaders, approved by the authorities, these groups are required to meet regularly to discuss government policies, Marxist theory, or whatever has been mapped out for discussion by the central Party and government organs directing the nationwide group-study program. The function of these small study groups is to persuade members of the validity of the official position by bringing their thinking into line with that of the Party. Complex interplay of psychological and personal factors gives the technique its special character and power.
First, the study group is official. The leader represents and reports to higher authorities. Every member knows that evaluation of his thinking as reactionary, backward, bourgeois, apolitical, progressive, or zealous materially affects his future for better or for worse.
Second, everyone must express an opinion; there is no freedom of silence. In a small, intimate group, whose members know each other well and work and sometimes even live together, it can be very embarrassing to express an incorrect idea, yet over a long period it is virtually impossible to dissemble.
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Third, parroting theory or the official line is not enough. Nor is mere intellectual acknowledgment of the reasonableness of the stipulated position sufficient. The important thing is to apply correct theory so as to discredit one’s previous incorrect conceptions so thoroughly in one’s own eyes that one gladly discards them and accepts the new. It is not sufficient for one to come to the genuine intellectual position that landlords were bad for China, yet maintain that not all landlords, one’s father or a friend, perhaps, were bad. This proves unresolved sympathy with the old order. Nor can one honestly believe that America had been aggressive in China and yet feel that the U.S. system of elections is more democratic than China’s. This proves insufficient understanding of the nature of the capitalist-imperialist system, which, if predatory abroad, could hardly be benign at home. Likewise, it proves unresolved pro-Americanism, which by extension becomes general sympathy with the West and therefore hostility to the Communist Party in China.
For an intellectual to admit that labor — mental and physical — is the origin of all wealth, the root of all progress, and yet be reluctant to participate in an allotted span of agricultural work proves he still retains elements of bourgeois prejudice against manual labor and is therefore still bourgeois. Raising the level of one’s political consciousness through group study is considered a lifelong process. Not even Mao Tse-tung is beyond improvement.
The weapon the group uses is criticism. The ideas of each member are criticized by the others against the correct standard. In this way, everyone is forced actively to apply that standard to someone else’s problem and is not permitted simply to receive it passively. The individual who is cooperative, who satisfies his fellows that he is really examining and gradually modifying his views, is “helped” in a quiet, reasoned, and friendly manner, for his attitude is good. One who stubbornly insists on maintaining his original position, who says, if not overtly, at least in effect, “I know all your arguments, but I still think I’m right,” is treated as an enemy of the group, subject to intense, prolonged criticism of his attitude as well as his thoughts. Helping him may even take the form of “struggle” or verbal assault (tou-cheng), a humiliating combination of loud criticism interlarded with sarcasm, epithet, and — very rarely — with minor violence. It involves ostracism by, but not escape from, members of his study group and even the threat of public verbal assault before several small groups or an entire organization. Nor can the one being helped find solace among other friends or relatives, for in China a thought problem is serious. Everyone must help to solve it. No one ventures to prolong the agony by dangerous sympathy.
Self-criticism is as important as, if not more important than, criticism. One cannot merely reveal his thoughts. He must detail convincing reasons why he thinks they are wrong. Only thus, it is argued, can he avoid continuing to think and therefore to act in the old, incorrect way. If his fellows feel his self-criticism is genuine, though not profound, they will — again with reason, quiet, and friendliness — help him to see more deeply into his problems. If, however, they feel his self-criticism is a ruse adopted to ward off criticism, the offender will be vigorously helped and, if necessary, subjected to verbal assault until his fellows are convinced that he has begun to see the light.
WHAT are the factors which tend to make group study, tense and painful as it often is, effective? First, there is the essential human need to belong, to achieve and maintain emotional balance. To be unprogressive in China is not simply a political verdict; it is social suicide as well. Second, the constant repetition of correct ideas and particularly the application of them to the public analysis of one’s own and others’ problems mean that one is forced to give them detailed scrutiny. The Communists are conscious of the value of this. “From habit or pretense,” they say, “it may become real.”Third — and this is all too often neglected by outside observers — is the crusading idealism, the strong moral note, that runs through all discussion of political, social, and economic steps. Since it is obviously right that China should be made new and strong to assume its long overdue place as a major power, it is right to collectivize so as to mechanize and increase agricultural production. It is right to be Spartan and not demand higher wages so more effort can go into new plants, right to report opposition to the Party that is bringing medicine, schooling, and security to half a billion peasants, right to resist the “aggressive designs” of the United States in Korea, right that women should be emancipated. Fourth, there is the universal knowledge, as the highest spokesmen of the Party have frankly admitted, that in the long run no course but the correct one is open. Attempts to avoid the tensions of group study by tacit compact to go through the routine or to stick to pleasantries are blocked not only by the fact of the leader’s relations with the authorities but by the ever-present possibility that some member, whether motivated by genuine change of heart or by a selfish attempt at winning official favor, might report the group. Thus, there is tremendous pressure both to fall in line and to want to fall in line.
Most important of all, however, is a sense of nationalism, a patriotic pride in China’s new posture of confidence and achievement. That China, which in 1948 was economically prostrate under runaway inflation, maladministered by a weak and corrupt government totally dependent on American aid, incapable of producing motorcycles, much less automobiles, can now fight the United Nations to a draw in Korea, maintain the world’s fourth largest air force, produce trucks, jet planes, even establish a nuclear reactor, is an intoxicating spectacle to the Chinese. This pride, in turn, has generated a remarkably effective and spontaneous code of public honesty, courtesy, and civic sense unknown in the old China. To be asked whether an incorrect idea is really worthy of the new China can make one feel guilty. Thousands have asked themselves, “What right have I to disagree with those who can achieve so much?” As a professor of English, remembering China’s internal disintegration and international humiliation, explained to me in the spring of 1951, “Now we can again be proud to be Chinese!”
This man, a master of arts from Yale, had taught in an army language program at Harvard during World War II and knew and liked America. No left-wing enthusiast, he was slow in making up his mind about the Communists in the early period of their power, but as they brought the country under control, licked inflation, improved material conditions in the universities, and dared abrogate the unequal treaties, he proudly identified himself with the new China. For him, group study was stimulating. He looked on it as accelerating the weeding out of his undesirable bourgeois liberalism and promoting the growth of new socialist thinking. He had once enjoyed Animal Farm, but by mid-1951 he rejected 1984, though his wife, a graduate of an American university in Shanghai, did not.
The valedictorian of the class of 1948 at the same university — the last class to graduate before the Communist take-over — was a brilliant student of international affairs. His English was good, his French and Japanese serviceable. His burning idealism had led him as a high school student into Christianity. Later, at the university, it led him into the student movement, which, in the last years before the fall of the Kuomintang, was dominated by the left. For months after the Communists came in, he was deeply troubled. His patriotism thrilled to the assurance and vitality of the Communists. Other aspects of his being cringed at their attack on habits and patterns of thinking which he subscribed to, including his Christianity.
One hot summer day he came to see me. “I have studied and studied,” he said, using the Chinese term hsüeh-hsi, “and thought and thought. I have begun to feel there is more good in the Communist Party than in the Christian church. If I can satisfy myself on this score, I shall join the Party.” Shortly afterwards he told me that he had. “Now that you are a Party member,” I asked, “do you think group study is still worth your while?” “Oh, yes,” he replied, his eyes burning with infectious enthusiasm, “it is indispensable.”
Group study can even be exhilarating, particularly for those who, having been heavily criticized or struggled against, admit the error of their ways and are readmitted to the fellowship of the group. My good friend, a young former YWCA secretary, is only one example. Daughter of a Japanesetrained optometrist, she had graduated from the Catholic University in Peking about the end of World War II. A Protestant, she went to work for the YWCA and soon became close to young American students and diplomatic personnel who returned to Peking after the war. Transferred away for a while, she returned to Peking in early 1950 and joined the Central Relief Agency of the People’s Government. She was miserable. She welcomed the material advances of the Government but felt that the price, in terms of regimentation, controlled thought, required group study, anti-Americanism, and the like, was too high. “I will go anywhere in the world,” she used to remark, “where there is no group study.”
Intrinsically honest, my friend’s reservations about the regime were all too obvious. She could not fit into, and was therefore cut off from, the mainstream of Chinese life. Her Chinese friends pleaded with her to reconsider her attitude, particularly her relations with me, since by early 1951 I was known to be under suspicion. Her Western friends, knowing there was little possibility for her to leave China, were forced to urge her to compromise. But she remained fiercely loyal to her standards and her friends. For this she eventually landed, on my account, in the same prison cell with me.
In prison, as outside, she soon won the respect of wardens as well as prisoners for her honesty and courage. She did not pretend. Her kindnesses to me, whom the Communists had arrested as an American spy, were unobtrusive, but if discovered she courageously admitted them. For the first time in her life, she met people from many walks of Chinese life, people who, unlike herself, were uneducated, had had no contact with foreigners, people who were wholly and completely Chinese. Some had accomplished amazing things against incredible odds. She began to see a new dimension to her native land, to feel its hope lay within itself. She no longer felt that China was somehow inferior to the West. She began to discover her Chinese identity. But her habits of mind, her desire to look at both sides of a question, to undertake impartial inquiry, her reluctance to be regimented, and particularly her loyalty to her old friends died hard, and she was on one or two occasions briefly struggled against.
The result which I watched was a sort of catharsis. Her point of view changed, and with it her evaluation of past friends and associations. She remained as courageous, fair, and honest as ever, but her frame of reference was new. The joy and good feeling within the cell group that had helped her were enormous and vital. The helpers rejoiced at a black sheep brought home. She rejoiced at the psychological relief of having achieved spiritual integration. Very positive feelings of identification with and gratitude toward the small group and the larger society beyond followed.
FROM time to time, all means of state propaganda, including the group-study mechanism, focus the thinking of the entire nation on specific economic, political, or ideological questions in great campaigns or movements. These campaigns are building blocks in the monolithic orthodoxy which the Communists are determined to erect. Roughly, they fall into two categories. The primary purpose of one type is to discredit some existing idea, group, or system inimical to Communist ends. The second category aims to explain some program about to be enacted or some theory the Communists feel must be universally understood.
Campaigns usually begin with a series of articles and editorials in newspapers. Since newspaper reading is a political obligation in China and items of the day are often taken up in study groups, a subject which has received more than usual attention will begin to be discussed. Thus, a demand is created for further study, for which the materials and instructions are soon forthcoming. The campaign, which may last several months, is launched.
When the aim is to discredit, the initial articles will be exposés of the evil to be attacked. Some person, group, or catchword is made into a symbol. Every organization, office, factory, school, military unit, and so forth then embarks on an intense campaign of its own to find examples within its ranks. If concepts like bureaucracy, commandism, extravagance, timidity, and the like are under fire, flagrant manifestations of these are certain to be found in every organization, and most individuals will confess to similar tendencies in themselves. Serious offenders are required to examine their thoughts to uncover what causes them to act thus. Those whose examination is unsatisfactory are brought before a public meeting of the organization, which may turn into a struggle meeting. Depending on the nature of the campaign, the offense, and the outcome of organizational help, they may be remanded to a period of reflection, supervision, special full-time study, or, in serious cases where criminality is involved, to prison, where intensive thought reform and punishment are combined. The aim is redemption through criticism. Mass accusation meetings administering summary justice to landlords and counterrevolutionaries were used, particularly in the early years of the regime, in connection with campaigns to educate the public.
In campaigns like those against counterrevolutionaries, it is not suggested that every organization harbors a traitor. However, each study group will discuss not only the facts as presented by the Government but also what sort of thought could have produced such actions. The group will then proceed to look for traces of the same in themselves. Thus, a campaign against counterrevolutionaries provides education along many lines. Showing how counterrevolutionaries serve the exploiting classes raises the whole issue of class and the nature of the class struggle. Betrayal of the common good, as embodied in the state, by counterrevolutionaries becomes an object lesson in the meaning and duty of citizenship; enemies of the state, be they friends or relatives, must be reported. The difficulty of ferreting out counterrevolutionaries emphasizes the need to cultivate a high level of political consciousness. Promulgation of the statutes for dealing with counterrevolutionaries dramatizes the fact that harsh treatment and death are reserved for those who do not repent and reform. For those who confess and are penitent, there is leniency. So, too, the 1957-1958 anti-rightist and rectification campaign was used to educate the nation still further on the correctness of the Party in all things. Criticisms voiced during the Hundred Flowers period earlier in 1957 were refuted and discredited. A new movement to give one’s heart to the Party followed.
Campaigns of explanation put the major emphasis on the Communist theory which makes impending economic or political changes both inevitable and just. A few movements, like the early campaign for the Stockholm Peace Appeal or the current Hate America campaign, are basically ideological in intent, unrelated to any impending change. Others, like the famous Resist America, Aid Korea movement, are designed both to discredit and to mobilize.
Physical labor plays a major role in thought reform in China. Invoking Marxist insistence on the dignity of labor as the origin of all value and wealth, the Communists strive to counter strong traditional Chinese scorn for manual labor. They are determined to negate a fundamental tenet of Chinese thinking formulated by Confucius 2500 years ago: “Who works with his mind rules; who works with his hands is ruled.” Reform by labor goes hand in hand with reform through study in the rehabilitation of prisoners and landlords. In Peking political prisons, the right to labor comes only after a certain level of reform through study has been achieved.
Intellectuals, city office workers, and government cadres, merchants, capitalists, and students have long been urged to do voluntary labor on weekends and holidays. In a tremendous attempt to break down prejudice toward labor and increase appreciation of the leadership of the proletariat, during the past couple of years there has been regular assignment of large groups for extensive periods to agricultural and factory work.
HOW effective has ideological remolding been? No simple answer is possible, for it varies with and within different segments of the population. The Communists stress that thought reform is a long, arduous task which has just begun; even in theory, the perfect mentality which needs no reform must wait on a perfect society.
Particularly in the early years of the regime, the degree of organization for indoctrination through study differed sharply, from very loose among the peasants to very tight in well-defined bodies, like offices, factories, schools, and the military. Once the cooperatives were set up in the countryside, more intensive group study became possible, bringing peasants in many ways very positively into the pattern of national life. But, as a recent official summary admitted, many peasants did not clearly grasp the relation between the state, the cooperative, and the individual household; some still harbored “individual and group exclusiveness, which disregard national and collective interests.” Some well-to-do peasants sabotaged or competed against the cooperative and resisted state grain policy. Unless a high level of political and social consciousness can be developed and maintained among the peasants, it is possible that, as communes are set up and proprietorship becomes more impersonal, they will be no more interested in working for the commune than they were for the landlord but will save their best efforts for their recently guaranteed private plots.
Among workers, the Communists claim — and reports tend to confirm — the ideological situation is generally good. But the influx of other than working-class elements into the labor force has led the Communists to call for a drive to help workers “recognize that they must, under the leadership of the Communist Party, constantly raise their own social consciousness . . . develop the excellent tradition of working hard, maintain the noble character of being just and selfless, work hard in production, save, and economize.” Note that the word “raise,” not “reform,” is used, because under the theory that makes workers leaders of any Communist revolution, workingclass mentality is, by definition, correct.
Resistance to ideological remolding has been strong among what the Communists call the “bourgeoisie” and the “bourgeois intellectuals.” Both are very broad terms. “Bourgeoisie” covers roughly all private business above a one-man show, and well-to-do peasants. “Bourgeois intellectual” means not so much egghead as all students, technicians, and specialists beyond the high school level, scientists, professional men, and university personnel. From the beginning, the Communists, realizing that these groups, who generally had had the largest stake in the oid order, would prove most troublesome, have given special attention to their reform.
Destruction of the bourgeoisie through the reform of its members has been declared a basic tenet of the revolutionary program. Thought reform, therefore, involves turning them into willing pallbearers at their own funeral. The 1951-1952 Five Anti Campaigns (against bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on government contracts, and leakage of government economic secrets), designed to discredit the irresponsible selfishness of production for private profit, greatly weakened the economic position of the bourgeoisie. For many months they were required to study, examine, and confess with special intensity the errors of their thinking and conduct. Since 1953, a body established to deal with the bourgeoisie and pave the way for their compensated integration into the socialist economy has conducted thorough ideological education, urging the need to abide by law, the acceptance of socialist transformation, the teachings of Mao Tse-tung, and patriotism. The group has continually organized the bourgeoisie for participation in patriotic and social movements. But though the bourgeoisie did not resist the socialist transformation of 1956, they have not been reformed, at least in areas touching on their economic role. The Communists candidly state that the majority have come to realize there would be no way out by opposing the proletariat. But they admit that most of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intellectuals “are unwilling to accept the leadership of the proletariat and the Communist Party.”
Most difficult of all to refashion have been the higher intellectuals — scientists, professors, and the like. They have the knowledge and the skills which the Communists lack and need, but have little patience with Communist dogmatism and interference. Communist policy toward this strategic group in the past decade has consistently aimed at securing most effective utilization of its knowledge. Zigzagging steadily toward this goal, the Communists have now attacked, now united, now criticized. Meanwhile, they are recruiting their own Red intellectuals, but have not yet had time to train a new group both Red and expert.
The importance and recalcitrance of the intellectuals, largely Western-oriented and often American-trained, have subjected them to more intense and sustained reform than that applied to any other section of the population. Like everyone else, they have gone through a decade of group study. As many came from landlord families, they were sent to the countryside during land redistribution, an experience which for the most part appears to have decisively reformed their attitude toward landlords. Participation in such activities as the Resist America, Aid Korea campaign and the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association was supposed to help change their sympathy with the West to admiration for the Soviet Union. It is hard to assess just how successful these moves have been, but it should be noted in passing that the hardening American position toward China in the last ten years has not encouraged America’s sensitive and nationalistic friends there and has unwittingly played into Communist hands.
After two years of gentle courting, the Communists stiffened the ideological remolding of the intelligentsia in late 1951. Thousands were concentrated in special centers for reform, and the group study of others was greatly stepped up. The hard line continued into 1955. By 1956, the Party had become seriously disturbed by the negative response of the intellectuals chafing under brusque dogmatism, the arrogance of ignorant cadres, and time-consuming group study and public meetings. Chou En-lai, admitting errors in handling intellectuals, estimated that only 40 per cent actively supported the regime. Relaxation followed. The Government materially improved living and working conditions of the intellectuals, treated them with polite respect, urged them to speak out — even to criticize — freely and frankly. The intellectuals were grateful but wary.
Finally, after more than a year of gentle prodding and watchful waiting, the Hundred Flowers of criticism bloomed wildly for one brief month from May 8 to June 8, 1957. One after another, intellectuals delivered scathing attacks on monolithic Party power, the identification of Party and state, the sham of coalition government with minor parties, the incompetence and arrogance of Party cadres. Intellectuals complained of high but powerless posts, of the damaging effects of Party interference with education and research, and of something not limited to Communist societies — denial of access to research data for reasons of security. They questioned the infallibility of Marx-Leninism. They called the Party incompetent to lead in science, education, and the arts. They declared that Party bureaucratism is worse than capitalism. Forceful as the criticisms were, they were not aimed at the overthrow of the Government. Rather, they aimed at making it genuinely democratic, with democratic safeguards and a sharing of political power. The intellectuals in essence demanded a separation of Party and government, of Party and technical endeavor.
Communist response was swift. Critics were automatically identified as rightists, and rectification campaigns were launched. In late 1957, prominent critics were forced to make public confessions and were dismissed from office, but apparently not imprisoned or executed. Lesser voices confessed and repledged their support of the Party. Nineteen fifty-eight brought a new and, in many ways, unprecedentedly rigid orthodoxy. In January, 1959, a high official concluded that the intellectuals were dragging their feet, generally tired of self-remolding.
Because tired and resentful intellectuals do not release their full creative power, the tack in early 1959 has veered once again toward persuasion. Many dismissed in 1957 were reinstated, although there have been recent indications of a new tightening up. “We must conduct long, recurrent, patient, delicate, and persuasive education.”At least another decade — perhaps much longer — will be required, Party spokesmen emphasize, because bourgeois intellectuals are not just those left over from the old society whom the attrition of time could remove; men trained recently have acquired the same outlook.
WHAT of the future? Mao Tse-tung has declared that there will be regular rectification campaigns. “Thought reform,” he says, “is a protracted, gigantic, and complex task. As the struggle will continue to experience ups and downs, we shall have both tense and slack moments during our work and shall have to proceed in a zigzag.”
To say that the Communists have not made complete Marxists out of the Chinese is not sufficient grounds for concluding that in the eyes of the Chinese people they have failed or that volcanic discontent smolders under the surface, straining to erupt. Certain expectations generated by a decade of Communist accomplishment will persist; certain attitudes have been permanently reformed by Communist education. The sense of national pride and dignity, the expectation of honest and efficient government will continue. Through group study and the experience of manifold collective living and working, the Chinese have become and will remain conscious of the interrelationship of various social elements. They may not agree with the Communist interpretation, but gone is the day when, in Sun Yat-sen’s phrase, China was like a sheet of loose sand with no sense of cohesion. The thirst for modernity, for ordered, planned, and accelerated economic development by all levels of society, cannot be quenched. The farmer, who may not like the regimentation of the commune, desires not so much return to his unprotected position in the old order as more freedom to utilize for his personal profit the advantages which land redistribution, peace, market stability, and government technical assistance in seeds and fertilizer have brought. He wants to have his cake and eat it too.
Public demand for adequate health and welfare systems, for education will not abate. The shopkeeper, who may not be too happy about being socialized, nonetheless appreciates the fact that his son can finish school, and, with ability, even college. The woman who objects to placing her child in a state nursery so she may be freed for labor is still grateful for the genuine improvement in public health. As the Hundred Flowers movement showed, opposition and bitter criticism in many areas are not so much a demand for the return of the old order as for the revision of the new, under broader, not exclusively Communist leadership.
Observers recently back from China report that the crusading spirit of idealism and sacrifice so prevalent in the early part of the decade is gradually receding. There is a rising desire among the people for more material benefits now. Ironically, the Communists are trapped by their own success. Spectacular strides toward industrialization have unleashed tremendous, if premature, expectations, which the Communists will have to deal with both in their economic planning and their group-study program.
To date, success of group study has depended to no small degree on its invocation of moral and patriotic appeals. In the future, these may not be enough. If the system is to continue to be effective, the Communists will have to find a new focus for thought reform or resort to more pressure. How the inventors of history’s most potent mechanism for ideological reform meet this challenge will be an important story of the next decade.
思想改革。中国的意识形态重塑
在哥伦比亚大学教中文的HARRIET C. MILLS在中国度过了她生命中的25年。她是长老会传教士的女儿，毕业于上海美国学校，就读于韦尔斯利学院，并在哥伦比亚大学获得硕士学位。她于1947年回到北京，获得了富布赖特奖学金。她于1951年7月被捕，被关在反革命分子监狱，直到1955年10月才获释。