They would have the power to control the people’s lives and bend the people’s will. “But after living in Communist China for the past seventeen years, I knew that such a society was only a dream because those who seized power would invariably become the new ruling class. So I thought the Proletarian Cultural Revolution was just one of an endless series of upheavals the Chinese people must learn to put up with.” Mao Zedong believed that political campaigns were the motivating force for progress. The people would have a few months or a few years of respite until the next political campaign. Sooner or later, when it had gone too far, corrective measures would be taken. The Cultural Revolution seemed to me to be a swing to the left. Thus the words and actions of a Communist Party official at the lower level were valid for a limited time only. What was right yesterday became wrong today, and visa versa. When a policy changed from above, the standards of values changed with it. The real difficulty was, of course, that a state-controlled economy only stifled productivity, and economic planning from Beijing ignored local conditions and killed incentive. Then these very corrective measures went too far and had to be corrected. When things went to extremes and problems emerged. This, I thought, was why the government's policy was always changing, like a pendulum swinging from left to right and back again. It seemed to me that socialism in China was still very much an experiment nad had no fixed course of development for the country had yet been decided upon. “Since the very beginning of the Communist regime, I had carefully studied books on Marxism and pronouncements by Chinese Communist Party leaders.

Nien cheng