Maoism in the Developed World

In 1986, the JCP attacked the Chinese party because it “would not comply with the JCP’s request to break relations with the Japan Labor Party.”[541] Two years later, John F. Copper noted a rapprochement of the JCP with the Soviet Party but not with the Chinese.[542]

Conclusion

During most of the Sino-Soviet dispute, the Japan Communist Party maintained a position of neutrality. After a short flirtation with the Chinese in the mid-1960s, it reverted to a neutral stance, which it maintained during the rest of the controversy. As a consequence, both pro-Moscow and pro-Chinese groups broke away from the JCP. The pro-Chinese soon split into several quarreling “parties,” which had varying degrees of contact with and support from the Chinese. At least one of these factions joined the Albanians in their quarrel with the successors to Mao in the late 1970s. In any case, neither the pro-Soviet nor the pro-Chinese groups became a significant factor even in the left-wing politics of Japan. A leader of the Japan Socialist Party noted as early as 1964 that the breakaways of the pro-Moscow supporters had not really constituted a significant split in the Communist Party, but merely the expulsion of some individuals. The same could be said about those who broke away to support the Chinese.

Australian Maoism

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), which had been founded in 1920, underwent two splits. In 1964, a pro-Maoist group broke away to form the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) or CPA-ML. Then, in 1971, after the CPA had adopted a line of independence from Moscow, particularly following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a pro-Moscow group seceded and formed the Socialist Party of Australia (SPA).[543]

Background of the Emergence of the CPA-ML

J. M. van der Kroef has noted that the formation of the CPA-ML was the culmination of “nearly six years of increasingly acrimonious and intense dispute within the regular CPA leadership … in which ideological and tactical issues, in part resulting from the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, as well as personal rivalries between the Aarons brothers and E. F. Hill for the leadership of the party, were closely intermingled.”[544] However, in that period of controversy there were several (in retrospect) ironic twists, and considerable changing of sides.

Professor van der Kroef has noted that from its inception, “People’s China exerted a strong pull on many, though by no means all, Australian Communists.” Starting in 1951, “CPA cadres regularly began making their way there for training (more than a hundred had done so by 1961).”

However, in those early years of the Communist regime in China, the appeal of the Chinese to the Australian Communists was entirely different from what it was later to become. Van der Kroef noted that “one of the things which appealed to the Australian Communists in that period was the impression of the relative moderation and the tactic of ‘gradualness’ in the transformation of a bourgeois into a socialist society. … Despite serious misgivings among a few older, hard-line Stalinists in the party, this tactic of relative moderation was—especially among some prominent younger parties—believed to be in particular keeping with the CPA’s general post-war emphasis on its being a distinctive and independent organization. … The death of Stalin, Khrushchev’s subsequent revelations of the odiousness of Stalin’s regime, and the general reaction against Stalinism, appeared at first to intensify the CPA’s Peking orientation.”[545]

During this early phase of the controversy within the CPA, E. P. Hill, who was later to become the principal leader of the pro-Chinese faction, and to lead the pro-Maoist split in is ranks, was aligned with the anti-Chinese part of the CPA leadership. As leader of the Party in the State of Victoria, Hill “was reprimanding and punishing party members for belittling the Soviet Union and speaking eulogistically of China.”[546]

Meanwhile, the principal supporters of a more moderate line for the CPA were Laurie and Eric Aarons, two brothers, both of whom had spent time in China in the 1950s. They “seemed more and more to become the spokesmen of a moderate, nationally adapted, and flexible party line, to which their earlier Chinese experience had presumably provided a measure of ideological-tactical preparation.” As a consequence, “personal rivalry and animosity between the Aarons brothers, on the one hand, and Hill on the other, as heirs apparent to the aging, ailing Sharkey-Dixon CPA leadership, was to sharpen into a factional polarization in the party, as the doctrinal and tactical divergence between Moscow and Peking became increasingly clear after 1959.”[547]