First Published: People’s Canada Daily News, Vol 8, No. 51, March 1, 1978
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Malcolm and Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
A sharp struggle broke out in the middle of January at the University of Waterloo when a reactionary alliance of anti-communist diehards and the agents of capitalist restoration organized a so-called “China Week” as a pretext to viciously attack Marxism-Leninism, confuse the people about Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory and to sow maximum confusion about socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This reactionary alliance, besides carrying out other confusion-making activities, brought in one Felix Greene, notorious for opposing the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and for attacking Marxist-Leninists in Canada and elsewhere as “ultra-left”, etc.
The Marxist-Leninists at the University of Waterloo were outraged to find such a reactionary activity being organized on their own campus with the support of the reactionary administration and the reactionaries in the Student Federation. These Marxist-Leninists organized as the Anti-Imperialist Alliance firmly opposed these activities and boldly went into the very lair of the enemy where Felix Greene was supposed to “lecture”, having being invited there by squandering the money of the broad masses of the students. A reactionary is acutely afraid of the revolutionary masses and Felix Greene and his sponsors were no exception. Instead of justifying their reactionary stands in front of the masses and facing exposure at the hands of the revolutionary masses, these reactionaries repeatedly used bourgeois rules and regulations to stop the revolutionary masses from exposing this reactionary and his sponsors, But the revolutionary masses led by the AIA remained undaunted and challenged these reactionaries. The AIA forced the reactionaries to retreat in the safety of one another by retiring to another room where they hoped they could spew their reactionary propaganda. The AIA vigorously denounced these cowards who can only feel brave under the protection of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the state of the rich and its reactionary violence.
Soon after this courageous denunciation of Felix Greene on January 19, 1978, the reactionaries let loose the most vile propaganda against the AIA, but the AIA fought them tooth and nail. As part of the fight against this reactionary alliance, AIA recently released an “Open Letter from the Anti-imperialist Alliance to the Chinese Students Association of the University of Waterloo, February 28, 1978” which we publish for the attention of our readers and which provides the details about the courageous battle which the AIA is waging against the reactionary alliance.
(The readers should note that Comrade Hardial Bains spoke at the University of Waterloo campus on February 28,1978 at the invitation of the International Students Association on the international situation. The meeting place was packed with over 120 people which also included a handful of reactionaries who had come to “disrupt” the speech by Comrade Bains. These reactionaries also included the President of the Student Federation. The International Students Association and Comrade Bains were not for a moment afraid of these reactionaries, but, on the contrary, it was the reactionaries who were afraid of them. The ISA and Comrade Bains did not try to stop discussion after the main speech nor did they try to use various tricks to scuttle questions. On the contrary, they encouraged discussions and these extremely lively discussions carried on until after two in the morning, first in the main meeting place and later on in the student lounge. Felix Greene and his reactionary sponsors had been yelling themselves hoarse for the past several weeks as to what great “democrats” they were, but the facts have merely exposed them as cowardly snivelling reactionaries who can spew their venom only with the protection of the state and who cannot defend their reaction amongst the people. This shows the utter bankruptcy and feebleness of the reactionary alliance that has come up to oppose the Anti-Imperialist Alliance and it also shows the correctness and the vigour of the AIA which is supporting a just cause on the basis of their own strength and without any fear of anyone - Ed.)
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The conflict between the AIA and the CSA which became public in January of this year has become a big issue on this campus. It has raised questions concerning the very nature of the university and the future of educated youth.
Of course, one might not get this impression from your letters and leaflet attacking the AIA, which reduce the conflict to a simple matter of some “disruptors” who you regard as a “nuisance”. Your behaviour since the Felix Greene talk has been entirely consistent with your demeanour at that event refusal to discuss the vital issues confronting students and eagerness to suppress the people who are shaking up the status quo.
The Anti-Imperialist Alliance is determined that the issues will be fully discussed and the nature of the attacks on the AIA will be exposed. Hence, we are publishing this open letter and distributing it widely on the campus and to friends on other campuses where you are spreading rumours and slanders about us.
What sort of things should go on at a university in Canada in 1978? What role should students play in this university? These are issues raised by your recent activities. Apparently we have opposite answers to these questions.
The AIA recognizes that the university in a monopoly capitalist country is a place for the training of youth to fill certain positions in the capitalist system and prepare them for a career. But that need not be all that happens here.
Above all, the university should be a place for the contention, testing and development of ideas, It should be a place where the students learn about the history of society, the development of politics and culture, and the discoveries and methods of science. Here the youth of Canada can come into contact with diverse outlooks and theories, evaluate them and participate in the struggle for social progress and emancipation. The university should be a place where old ideas are constantly challenged and everything is subjected to scrutiny.
The student youth should participate fully in the political and cultural affairs of Canada and the world. They should become well-informed on what is happening in other parts of Canada and in other countries, for example, China. The 20th century has been a time of unprecedented struggles and upheavals on a world scale, a time when the most remote corners of the globe have been drawn into political struggles and when events in far-off countries have immense importance for us in Canada. Twenty-two years remain in this century, and there is no way things will remain as they are today. The threat of another world war looms on the horizon. Revolutionary storms are raging in many countries, Students should take these matters very seriously and prepare themselves well. This is no time for the youth to withdraw from political affairs of Canada and bury their heads in the sand.
Some people want the students to follow another path. They offer the youth imperialist culture, the culture of imbecility, ignorance and impotency, the culture that is being imported into Canada by the U.S. imperialists and their lackeys.
The imperialists want to reduce education to a mere learning of a catechism. Ideas become things which are transferred from a book or some professor’s lecture onto an exam booklet, with the human brain serving as passive storehouse of ideas provided by the money-bags for our consumption and excretion. The brain is made into a kind of computer that performs the same type of operations over and over and over... but does not itself develop or change. The human being, the highest achievement of evolution, an organism that has transformed the face of the earth, is supposed to degenerate into a humble parrot that spews forth bourgeois ideas on command in order to procure a reward from the masters of society.
In the classroom there should be passive acceptance of bourgeois ideology. Only the “experts” have a right to speak. Struggle of ideas – Forbidden! independent thinking? Preposterous!
Instead of investigating phenomena and seeking truth from facts, students are supposed to be equipped with all the cliches of the imperialists – Police protect the people. Canada’s immigration policy is one of the most liberal in the world. We have the highest standard of living. The people who want to change this country are just a vocal minority, a bunch of crazies, a gang of terrorists. Etc.
This education is provided by the U.S. imperialists and their camp followers. According to them, it is not necessary for the youth to think critically and on their own initiative or to know anything outside of their narrow profession. After all, the really important decisions about Canada’s future will not be made by them. They will be made in Washington, D.C., Moscow, Wall Street and Bay Street. They will be made by the rich.
Let the youth lose themselves in a fantasy world provided at the flicks or on TV. Let them be reduced to a drunken stupor, and puke their guts out at the feet of the bourgeoisie. Let them writhe to disco music and screw each other until it’s time to go to work again. Soothe their tortured souls with marijuana and console their consciences with Christ or transcendental meditation. The Jimmy Carters and the Brezhnevs, the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, the Trudeaus and the Desmarais – they look upon this scene of confusion, and they are glad.
The Chinese Students Association is taking this second path. You have joined the camp of the worst reactionaries on campus and brought disgrace upon yourselves. You have departed from a tradition which had won respect from the progressive people on the campus. A monk or a priest may walk down the path of ignorance and impotence with a certain amount of dignity. But you rushed down this path like a bunch of ninnies.
At the Felix Greene talk January 19, the two lines in education clashed head on. To grasp the significance of this event, we must consider what has been happening in China as well as on our campus.
On October 7-8, 1977, barely one month after the death of Chairman Mao, a reactionary coup d’etat took place in China. One section of the Communist Party of China used police methods to settle a political conflict within the Party and seize control of the Party and state in China. Leaders of this coup were Hua Kuo-feng, Minister of Security (secret police) and Yeh Chien-ying, Minister of Defence (army, air force, navy). Almost overnight, China was turned into a military dictatorship, Large numbers of cadres were arrested and imprisoned without trial.
Then the unrepentent capitalist-roader Teng Hsiao-ping, who had been disgraced and denounced twice before, was restored in power. It immediately became evident that he had not changed at all. Many of the achievements of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in education, medicine, science and literature were reversed, and numerous bourgeois intellectuals overthown in the 1960’s began to reappear. China gave recognition and outright praise to a multitude of criminals, including Pinochet of Chile and the Shah of Iran. The Chinese government began to laud the Trudeau government and hail Canada’s participation in the war preparations of U.S.
Yes, there was plenty to discuss at China Week this year. Large numbers of students were quite confused about what was going on in China and wanted some clarification.
But the Chinese Students Association did not want to provide that kind of clarification and discussion. Instead, you organized China Week this year to give a one-sided view of the present situation and support the deeds of the present rulers in China. And you took steps to insure that no other viewpoint was heard.
This is quite a drastic departure from past China Weeks.
In 1975, William Hinton and Carmelita Hinton spoke, and there was abundant discussion. AIA participated in this activity, and you made no attempt to suppress our views. At the small group discussions after the main speeches, there was no attempt to restrict participation to friendly faces only.
In 1977, after the coup d’etat,there was a decided change in your demeanor. You showed the film Pioneers which had been suppressed prior to Chairman Mao’s death, and we distributed a leaflet criticizing its revisionist line. But your executive tried to stop the distribution of the leaflet and closed the meeting after the film without holding discussion of its content. When William Hinton spoke, you said that questions must be written down and handed in to the chairman of the meeting. We opposed that method, and Hinton agreed to take questions from the floor, albeit reluctantly. In the discussion afterward, we finally got Hinton to answer our questions, and we exposed his ignorance about China and his support for Teng Hsiao-ping.No doubt you will recall how Hinton, hard pressed by our points against the film Pioneers, finally confessed that he had fallen asleep when he saw the film, and how he also admitted that he didn’t know much about dialectics. It was rather embarrasing, was it not?
This year, we suspected that you would make a more serious effort to suppress discussion, so we issued a leaflet against the counter-revolution in education to make sure our views were known.
This Felix Greene proved to be an open anti-communist and a supporter of British and U.S. imperialism. He claimed that world war between the two superposiers is inevitable and that the Soviet Union is the main danger of a new war. He tried to win support for the war preparations of U.S. imperialism, as well as for the Pingists in China.
Now you must try to understand that the AIA is vehemently opposed to both of the superpowers and their war preparations, and when somebody defends them, we are going to challenge them on this. The question of world war is a question of life and death for millions upon millions of the people of the world, and we do not take it lightly when someone helps to bring this war a step closer.
But the China Week Committee ’78 regarded these questions which we raised as “irrelevant”. (Gazette, Feb. ,1). And our denunciations of this arrogant warmonger were dismissed by your leaflet as “barbarous”, a “nuisance” by some “disruptors”. It is a complete inversion of rational thinking to regard a warmonger like Felix Greene as a “guest” and his critics as “barbarous”. In our society it is customary to regard world war, mass genocide and other crimes of the imperialists as “barbarous” and those who perpetrate or defend these acts as fascists.
But the real tumult at the meeting broke out when Felix Greene attacked Stalin as a dictator who suppressed the masses (which is a lie) and then praised Chairman Mao for always encouraging open discussion and debate, and for consulting the masses, taking his ideas to them for approval in public meetings, etc. We pointed out the howling contradiction between what Greene was saying and what you all were doing right before our very eyes. First you praise Chairman Mao, and then you violate everything he stood for.
So don’t act so hurt that some of us spoke out of turn at your meeting. It Is Right to Rebel Against Reactionaries!
You want to turn the whole affair into a matter of form and not content of the discussion. From beginning to end you have refused to participate in any intelligent debate about events in China. Instead you resort to the kind of slanders and distortions that we have come to expect from the biggest anti-communists at UW.
You have raised the question – “What is democracy to them?” (AIA) You have implied throughout your leaflet that we care nothing for freedom of speech.
Well, here is what democracy means to us: There are two kinds of democracy in this world; democracy for the rich and democracy for the people.
Democracy for the rich is freedom for the reactionaries to peddle pro-imperialist ideas and attack the people. This freedom is guaranteed because they own the means of production and communication. The rich have established TV and radio stations, daily newspapers and schools to popularize their views, and they have police and prisons to suppress our views. The rich groom “experts” to propagate their ideology, and when these “experts” Speak, the people are supposed to listen. Sometimes the people may be allowed to ask a question of some “expert”, but they are not allowed to give their own views or challenge the official speaker. The bourgeois “experts” have no responsibility to defend their views in front of the masses of the people. A good example of this is the case of Paul Levine, who was given the freedom to slander the AIA, act like a petty dictator and then select questions for Felix Greene at the January 19 meeting. Yet when the AIA challenged him to defend his views in public, this cheap imitation of a professor didn’t respond. And the CSA agrees with this and says Levine “should not be bothered in the future”, (Gazette, Feb.15).
On the other hand, there is democracy for the people, which we refer to as genuine democracy. Genuine democracy is who’re the people have a right to object to pro-imperialist ideas, where the people have a right to give their own views. There was no genuine democracy at your China Week. In a genuine democracy, the masses of working people own and control the means of production, the TV stations and presses, the schools and universities, and they have arms to guarantee their control of these things. There is no genuine democracy in Canada today.
Some of your crew are saying that we were undemocratic and that we denied them the right to listen in peace to Felix Greene. We denied their right to listen to pro-imperialist ideas without interruption. These kinds of backward individuals want to sit quietly like a loyal dog listening to “his master’s voice” on the Victrola. So we made the record skip a few grooves and ruined the tune. Well, hooray for the AIA! People who want to live in a world where there is no struggle or disagreement should stick to TV.
The CSA has chosen to bring pro-imperialist speakers to campus and to suppress the rights of progressive people to challenge them. So don’t chastize us about being “undemocratic”. Since when has British imperialism, or what Greene called “genteel” imperialism, been so democratic?
Through the medium of China Week and especially the Felix Greene speech, we have learned some things in microcosm about what is going on in China today. Is it not the case that Chiang Ching and her comrades are also being condemned as “disruptors” and slandered in a most vile manner? Is it not the case that they were arrested and thrown into prison on the orders of a handful of individuals without the concurrence of the Central Committee of the CPC? Is it not true that they have been given no opportunity to defend themselves, no trial or anything of the sort? Today the People’s Republic of China under the leadership of Teng Hsiao-ping and his cronies is taking the same road that the Soviet Union did after the death of Stalin and the accession of the Khrushchovite revisionists to power, This is the road to social-fascism; This is the kind of “democracy” being supported by the CSA. This is not genuine democracy to us.
An outstanding measure of your dedication to the principles of democracy is provided by your attitude towards the Gazette and the Chevron. The Gazette ran a big spread about education in China to popularize your China Week activities (Jan. 11). Then you published letters attacking AIA in the Gazette (Feb. 1 and 15), whereas your leaflet attacked the Chevron as having only “screened ’democracy’”.
Let us remind you of a few things about the Gazette. The Gazette is the administration newspaper on campus. It is financed with about $100.000 of the taxpayers’ money each year, and these taxes are not refundable. The paper makes no pretense of being in any way democratic. All staff are hired by the administration. There is no staff democracy. The Gazette has a long history of one-sided, pro-administration, pro-government journalism. This is especially true of stories it runs about progressive people, whom it never sees fit to interview when it publishes stories about their firing, arrests, etc. The Gazette is also notorious for suppressing discussion in its letters section. For example, it terminated a discussion about political economy and Make the Rich Pay! on December 15, 1976 with these words: “The Gazette cannot entertain any more letters on this or similar subjects.” It also refused to print a letter denouncing Teng Hsiao-ping and the anti-Leninist theory of “three worlds”. It is not above promoting racism, for example, the large article on Ian Campbell. (Feb. 8)
The Chevron, on the other hand, is financed by student fees which are refundable, owing in part to support by the Chevron for refundable fees. All positions on the Chevron staff are elected. Editorials and comments, and ultimately the content of articles, are regulated through discussion and voting by the staff. The Chevron has a tradition of interviewing and reporting both sides in a dispute, and its feedback section is quite open, However, the paper does not publish racist or sexist material. When a letter to feedback is under dispute, the matter is settled as is any other question of significance – through a vote.
The AIA supports the principle of staff democracy in the Chevron, because it is a kind of democracy which allows the students to speak out against imperialist ideas and give their own views. As you may recall, we played a major role in defending the Chevron against takeover by a gang of reactionaries led by Shane Roberts who wanted to gain control of the paper through an editorial board imposed from outside the staff. For the Gazette, of course, we have nothing but contempt.
You and we are on opposite sides of the fence on this issue, that’s for sure. The grass is definitely greener on our side. Your side smells of reaction. Be careful you don’t step in anything.
Oops! it’s too late, you’ve stepped right into the droppings of the reactionaries on our campus, and now you’re tracking their stuff all over the place. No sooner did you lash out at the AlA and call for us to be suppressed than you won the support of campus security, Randy Barkman and Rick Smit.
The UW administration has for years been implementing cutbacks against the students, raising tuition for foreign students, raising the rent for married students, etc. Yet you waste no time giving your support to their Gazette and actually praising their police. “The security’s presence enabled us to provide a better controlled atmosphere during the talk.” So said your China Week Committee ’78 in the Feb. 1 Gazette. So you want a “better controlled atmosphere” just like Shane Roberts tried to use the security police to get a “better controlled” Chevron.
Now CSA sees fit to thank Mr. Randy Barkman who in his letter on Felix Greene’s talk supposedly “revealed some truth” about AIA. You also believe Barkman’s version about what happened in an earlier staff meeting. This is significant, because Randy Barkman is the leader of the reactionary clique in the Chevron who has been conspiring for months to get AIA out of there. He is the main person on staff who supports the RCMP and says good words about the anti-immigrant Bill C-24. He is also the one who recently wrote a Gazette-style article in the Chevron giving only the administration line on the recent events surramding the foreign student fee hike at McMaster University. Ironically, this Barkman never seemed to have much interest in China in the past and had no history of attending China Week events or meetings of the K-W Canada-China Friendship Society. But now he finds reason to attend China Week and report on the AIA in his inimitable, one-sided manner. Then Rick Smit asks you for the next dance. Remember that Smit is the main person in the federation carrying on the anti-communist crusade of Shane Roberts and that the campaign manager for his election in October 1977 was Andy Telegdi, who is working closely with the police these days. Smit has been interfering with the affairs of the ISA and has also spoken out in support of government immigration policy as well as the rent increase for the Married Students’ Apartments.
“Three cheers for the Chinese Students Association for the letter in last week’s Gazette and for the handout titled ’AIA’s Nonsense on China Week’”, says Smit. “Somehow I tend to believe the CSA account of the meeting rather than that of the AIA and its supporters.” (Chevron, Feb. 10)
Yes, “Somehow”. That one word speaks millions, doesn’t it?
Somehow, one of the biggest reactionaries on campus, one of the main promoters of the imperialist culture of imbecility, ignorance and impotency, has fallen in love with the CSA.
When the biggest anti-Communist on the block and the greatest supporters of the administration suddenly become “friends of China” and start sidling up to the CSA, it is a sure sign that something has changed. This is the legacy of Teng Hsiao-ping and the coup d’etat of October 1976.
Your response to our criticisms and our AIA Challenge are quite consistent with your view of “democracy”. Having given yourselves the right to lash out at us, you claim to have no responsibility to defend your position, because, after all this, “CSA serves as a social interest group”. Having just forged an alliance with the biggest right-wingers on campus and provided a forum for Felix Greene to defend British and U.S:. imperialism, two of the biggest butchers in the history of the world, you “repudiate any AIA attempt of pushing the association towards politics” (Gazette, Feb. 15). You simply write off your critics as “political agitators”.
In your leaflet you whimper “we are just a social organization”. “Social organization”, indeed! For you, attacking communists is just a “social” activity, whereas for us to attack Teng Hsiao-ping and Felix Greene is “political”. This is a coward’s way out of an argument.
Let us remind you of some activities, political activities, which were jointly sponsored-by AIA and CSA in the past. On October 23, 1975, we co-sponsored the symposium “China, the Superpowers and the Threat of World War”, whose speakers included K.T. Fann of York University, Leo Johnson of the University of Waterloo, and Comrade Hardial Rains, Chairman of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). On September 24, 1976, we co-sponsored the Memorial Meeting for Chairman Mao Tsetung, and in fact, AIA and CSA worked closely together to organize this meeting. So CSA used to be “political” in the sense of promoting progressive politics.
But now you claim to be “social” in the sense of “non-political”. If you invited speakers with several political viewpoints to take part in your China Week activities, then you could claim to be non-partisan, but never non-political. In class society you can never get away from politics. Politics is the struggle between classes, and this class struggle pervades every cell of society. It shows up in education, literature, art, science, and other forms of culture. What you call “social” activities, things like disco dancing and pub nights, are, as we explained above, part of the imperialist culture of ignorance and impotency. It is a form of cultural aggression against the youth and the working class.
Your whole China Week activities, starting in 1977 with Pioneers, have been political activities giving consistently one political line, the line of the Chinese embassy, in Ottawa, the line of Teng Hsiao-ping and Hua Kuo-feng. Although the CSA slipped away frOm this position when it joined with the ISA and other international student groups to endorse the letter against the anti-immigrant Bill C-24, you now seem to be toeing the Party line.
The resolution against Bill C-24 stated: “We will resolutely support the just struggles of the people of Zimbabwe, Namibia, Azania, Chile, Palestine, Iran and many other countries. We believe that when the vast majority of the people of a nation are suppressed by violence and denied any liberties, then they have the right to use force to win their freedom.” But watch out! Teng Hsiao-ping and the other theoreticians of “three worlds” support Pinochet of Chile and the Shah of Iran. In its Open Letter to the Communist Party of China, the Revolutionary Communist Party of Chile pointed out: “You have granted credits to the Junta; none other than the Chinese ambassador had himself photographed in the process of handing overt gifts to the dictator Pinochet in August of this year (1977), and made statements to the effect that ’the relations between the two countries have always been at a high level’ and that China intended to strengthen and broaden them.”.
If the CSA does not withdraw its support for the statement against Bill C-24, you may not be able to get any more films from the embassy. (If this happens, we know where you can purchase a number of used Felix Greene movies very cheaply.)
Does it seem a little far-fetched to accuse the CSA of carrying out the politics of the Chinese embassy in Ottawa? Do we seem a little paranoid? If so, consider our experience in the K-W area with the meddling of the embassy, especially the experience of the K-W Canada-China friendship Society.
In November of 1974, the AIA organized series of events in commemoration of the 25th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. These meetings were very well attended, and many people wanted to lean, more about China. After one of the meetings, Comrade Hardial Bains suggested to a group of people that we could form a friendship society with this amount of support in the community. He explained the organizers what “people-to-people friendship” means and how to begin the work. Several progressive people set about this task with great enthusiasm, and in January of 1975 the K-W CCFS was founded. Its members included a broad spectrum people from the K-W area and Guelph. fhis Society began to grow rapidly, and membership peaked at about 200 early in 1976.
The first sign of trouble appeared even before the Society was founded, When Rev. James Endicott spoke at a China Anniversary meeting sponsored by AIA, he took several of the leading people aside afterwards, including Dr. Marsha Forest who later became the president of the K-W CCFS. and told them to stay away from CPC(M-L), that the Party would “ruin their lives” and that Hardial Bains was a CIA agent. This created a lot of confusion, at the time. Of course, Endicott was regarded by the embassy as a “friend of China”.
Soon after the founding of the CCFS, Dr. Doug Wahlsten, who was the recording secretary, went to the embassy in Ottawa and introduced the K-W CCFS, giving a Mr. Li copies of the minutes of the meetings and answering all sorts of questions about the group. However, this Mr. Li was interested in only one thing – the political affiliations of the people on the executive of the Society. He asked all sorts of questions about left-wing politics in the K-W area, most of which Dr. Wahlsten was unable to answer because he didn’t know much about politics at the time. Mr. Li refused to provide any information about how the CCFS could arrange to borrow films or get speakers.
When the executive of the CCFS later wrote the embassy requesting films, such as The White-Haired Girl, they got a runaround and then were finally snubbed. The embassy refused to have anything tollo with the local CCFS and thereby directly contributed to its demise.
However, some of the other Canada-China groups in this country were not quite so mute. The Halifax “friendship” association wrote a hostile letter attacking our CCFS for being friendly to CPC(M-L). A big rumour campaign spread across the country through the “Friendship” groups that were approved by the embassy, saying our CCFS was just a front for CPC{M-L) and that we were using it to promote our own politics and take a stand on issues in Canada. When the K-W CCFS denounced a trotskyite who attacked Chairman Mao as a reactionary and called for his overthrow, the embassy made it known to our CCFS that it disapproved of this activity. It called this taking sides in Canadian political affairs.
However, there was no complaint when the Vancouver friendship association published a book entitled Two Roads by an opportunist named Jack Scott which slandred the Great October Revolution in Russia and falsified the history of China. Neither was there any complaint from the embassy when certain friendship societies inserted clauses into their constitutions forbidding membership by any supporter of CPC(M-L). It was made known through the embassy that “certain officials” in China did not approve of CPC(M-L) but supported some other “genuine Marxist-Leninists” in Canada.
The embassy is now using the CSA as its agent to do propaganda for capitalist restoration in China. It is forced into this position because the “genuine Marxist-Leninists” in Canada, whom we refer to as Pingists, have never been able to form one of their sects on our campus to do this dirty work.
We also recognize that the villains in your ranks are not just some Pingists and bourgeois elements who would like to get a piece of the action in the motherland. Some of your activists now include Taiwanese who are followers of Chiang Kai-shek, the arch-enemy of Chairman Mao’s China. Taiwan is the province of China which has been occupied by the Kuomintang since 1949 and has become an armed outpost of the U.S. imperialists in the Far East. The patriotic Chinese issued the slogan “We are determined to liberate Taiwan!”, which meant that the U.S. imperialists must clear out and let the Chinese people settle their own internal affairs.
But now the new rulers of China are actually supporting the U.S. They are preparing to open up China to foreign investment and trade just as Taiwan has done. The same U.S. money-bags that have investments in Taiwan are now scurrying around the mainland trying to arrange lucrative contracts.
When we consider the economic and foreign policy of China along with the anti-communist policies of the CSA executive, we conclude that China is farther than ever from “liberating” Tarwan from foreign domination. On the contrary, if we may speak metaphorically, Taiwan has annexed the Chinese mainland.
The Anti-Imperialist Alliance has been forced to adopt a hostile attitude towards the Executive Committee of the CSA. As far as we are concerned, the period of friendly relations with you is over. We regard your organization as part of the camp of opportunism and reaction, the camp of imperialism which stands in an antagonistic relation with the camp of progress and socialism.
Henceforth, we will not allow you to promote yourselves as supporters of Chairman Mao as you did in your photo exhibition this year. We will not allow you to desecrate his image and defile his memory any longer. You have trampled into the dust every principle for which he fought his whole life long.
The AIA condemns the interference of the Chinese embassy in Ottawa in the political affairs of the Canadian people. We denounce Teng Hsiao-ping and his followers for their support for the war preparations of the Canadian state and the U.S. imperialists; for their praise of the traitor Sadat and the fascist Pinochet; and for their efforts to restore the capitalist system in China and wipe out the main base area of world proletarian revolution. China used to give copious support to the national liberation movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America, especially the support of a correct Marxist-Leninist political line; but all this is changing under the cloak of the anti-Leninist theory of “three worlds”. The Pingists are committing immense crimes against the world’s people. and some day they are bound to be punished for this.
Chairman Mao stated in 1965: “If China’s leadership is usurped by revisionists in the future, the Marxist-Leninists of all countries should resolutely expose and fight them and help the working class and masses of China to combat such revisionism.”
Our Party, CPC(M-L), is working tirelessly to expose the theoreticians of “three worlds’. and combat their schemes against the proletariat of Canada and the people of the world. The Anti-Imperialist Alliance is duty bound to expose the agents of Teng Hsiao-ping at the University of Waterloo.
We look forward to receiving your response.
Anti-Imperialist Alliance, a unit of the Canadian Student Movement, the student wing of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)