By 1976, the Japanese Maoists were further split, into four different groups. These were two with the JCP (L) name—the “Yamaguchi faction” and the “Kanto faction,” which we have already noted, plus two new groups: the Japan Labor Party (Nihon Rodosha-ha), which “also attracted some attention from the Chinese,” and the Japan Workers Party. Peking Review published messages of condolence from the Yamaguchi faction and the Japan Workers Party at the time of the death of Chou En-lai early in 1976.[530]
One faction of the JCP (L), presumably the Kanto faction, sent a message of support to the Communist Party of New Zealand when that party in 1973 announced its support of the Albanians in their split with the Chinese. It also joined in the denunciation of Mao Tse-tung’s Three Worlds Theory.[531]
Meanwhile, the other JCP (L) faction, which called itself the Japan Communist Party (Left) Provisional Central Committee,[532] had been negotiating for some time for unity with another Maoist group, the Japan Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), which had been established “in the 1960s,” and published Proletariat[533] Tentative agreement on such unity was achieved in May 1979,[534] but it was not until January 1980 that the two groups held a joint meeting in Tokyo and decided to merge.[535] They took the name Japan Communist Party Left (Marxist-Leninist). This party endorsed the Three Worlds Theory.[536]
The Workers Party of Japan and Japan Labor Party
Another Maoist group, which we have already noted as having had some contact with the Chinese, was the Workers Party of Japan. It was headed by General Secretary Shosaku Itai, and was founded in 1973.
In an interview with the U.S. Maoist newspaper Unity in October 1979, Itai, after noting the “revolt” against the JCP in 1966 over, among other things, “whether to defend the Chinese Communist Party,” said that “Seven years passed since that open revolt to the founding of our party in 1973. Like in the U.S. at that time, there was great uprising of the mass movement in Japan. … There were three questions at this time in the process of party building. The first was to break ideologically from revisionism. The second was to construct the party in the mass movement, and the third, to fight for the unity of Marxist-Leninists. In the process, we prepared for the founding of the party politically and organizationally. Five to six years have passed since the founding of our party and still we cannot say our influence among the masses is large enough. Our forces are still small.”[537]
Shosaku Itai was reported by Peking Review to have sent a telegram to Hua Kuo-feng, congratulating him on being the successor to Mao, and on the defeat of the Gang of Four.[538]
The Japan Labor Party was founded “by pro-Chinese dissident elements” in 1974. It was reported in 1977 to have about 400 members and, as we have noted, “to have attracted some attention from the Chinese.”[539] In 1981, it was said that the JLP “has irritated the JCP in recent months.” Unlike other Japanese Maoist groups, it ran candidates in the 1979 parliamentary elections, having 25 nominees and receiving “over 50,000 votes.”[540]
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, hardline 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]
530
John Emmerson, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1977, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 321.
531
H. Roth, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1979, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 278.
534
John F. Copper, in Yearbook on InU 1979, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 255.
535
Hong N. Kim, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1981, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 163.
541
John F. Copper, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1987, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 106.
542
John F. Copper, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1988, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 183.
543
World Strength of the Communist Party Organizations, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, State Department, Washington, DC, 1972 edition, page 70.
544
Justus M. van der Kroef, “Australia’s Maoists,” Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, volume 8, no. 2, Leicester University Press, Leicester, Great Britain, 1970, page 88.