Michael Shapiro a Life1. (article has been rejected by LHR and S&S).

Recent work on communist history by Kevin Morgan and others has rightly stressed the role of individual agency.2 But the most recent of this work3 comes close to communism with the politics left out. Such shattering events as the Second World War and the Sino-Soviet split are present mainly as colourful backdrops to the personal and the individual. This writer, while agreeing that the individual plays an important role hardly deniable when such diverse figures as Andrei Zhdanov and E. P. Thompson were contemporaries in the international communist movement - would rather stress that humans make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.4 Communists did have free will, werent puppets of vast impersonal forces, but they were not autonomous individuals. The processes which led to such events as the two world wars of the last century were processes which impelled many many people into political action. If they wished to remain members of the movement, communists, while having a certain amount of latitude to interpret policies and directives and being able to work to some degree in fields of their own choice, were subject to a far higher level of discipline and commitment than any other political movement, as indeed Morgan acknowledges5. Michael Shapiros life illuminates this contradiction between human agency and objective circumstances. Shapiro joined the Young Communist League in 1931 and then the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1934. He worked in such diverse fields as local government (as a communist councillor on the London Borough of Stepney) and the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, where he lived and worked from 1949 to 1984.. Shapiros decision to join the Communist Party was of course an individual decision but one shaped by circumstances existing already war and revolution, slump and fascism. The documentary sources suggest that Shapiro was a highly intelligent and reflective man, but also that he usually conformed to the locally dominant political tendency: only twice, in the late 1940s and during the Cultural Revolution, do we find him in open opposition. It is of course, probable that Shapiro fought internally for whatever he thought was the right course. But the acceptance of communist discipline was a voluntary restriction of autonomy, repudiated only in exceptional circumstances.
1

Parts of this article have been previously published in N. Redfern, Michael Shapiro in China, Communist Historians Network Newsletter (http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/chnn), Autumn 2001 2 McIroy, J., Morgan, K & Campbell, A., Party People, Communist Lives. Explorations in Biography (London, 2001); Morgan, K., Cohen, G., & Flynn, A Agents of the Revolution: New Biographical Approaches to the History of International Communism in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford, 2005): McIroy, J., Morgan, K & Campbell, A., Party People, Communist Lives. Explorations in Biography (London, 2001). 3 Morgan, K., Cohen, G., & Flynn, Communists and British Society 1920-1991(London, 2007) 4 Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Beijing, 1975), p. 10. 5 Morgan, K., Parts of People and Communist Lives, in McIlroy, Party People, p. 10.

Documentary sources can tell us an individuals opinions: but it can be hard to establish how an individual came to hold them. In the case of Shapiro, where the sources on this latter issue are thin, several factors probably helped to determine his ontological development. He joined the communist movement before the Popular Front and Second World War wrought profound changes in its, to use communist terminology, line. That Shapiro was an intellectual, a Jewish intellectual to boot, probably made him more immune than most to the pragmatism which made many CP members indifferent to matters of ideological and political line. Finally, he was resident in China when the Sino-Soviet split, the great schism in the international communist movement, erupted. This last factor should make us consider a factor which is often not considered by historians of communism, that of psychology. The present writer is wary of such psychological interpretations of history as are to be found in, for example, Robert Tuckers work on Stalin.6 But psychology does play a significant role in the choices we make in life. Shapiro appears to have been unhappy with aspects of the CPGBs post-war policy, but to have done little to oppose it: yet he was scathing of the British Party once working with Chinese Communists and their supporters. In extreme oppositional organisations such as communist parties, feelings of isolation can be offset by the comfort to be found in the notion of belonging to a collective opposition. Lenin referred to this factor when he remarked that in whatever country a classconscious worker finds himself, wherever fate may cast him, however much he may feel himself a stranger, without language, without friends, far from his native country, he can find himself comrades and friends by the familiar refrain of the Internationale.7 It is difficult to oppose the comrades and friends of the group. But this is to anticipate. What role did Shapiros Jewishness play in his life? He never referred to this in his letters from China (the main documentary source for his life.8). Even so, growing up in the East End of London, he must surely have experienced anti-Semitism. As a young man, he cannot have been unaware of the Nazis antiSemitic pogroms. But there were other formative influences. His parents were secular Jews and sent him to the Church of England controlled Raines School, presumably to ensure he mingled with members of the wider East End community. And of course there was the Communist Party. His brother Jack affirmed (admittedly many years later) that it was class, rather than ethnicity which provided the motive for the Shapiro brothers work in defence of tenants in the East End of London in the 1930s:9 We were fighting the Jewish landlords the same way as wed fight any landlord that increases rents, doesnt care if he repairs flatsthese are the enemies of the people.10 This is consistent with the 1930s left view of fascism as primarily a class issue. Probably then Shapiro, like thousands of other Jews, saw capitalism in general, not
6

R.C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary (New York, 1971), Stalin in Power the Revolution from Above, 1929-1942 (New York, 1990). 7 Lenin, Collected Works, vol.36, pp. 223-224, Progress Publishers (1971 Moscow). 8 Redfern, Michael Shapiro in China. 9 See Noreen Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1927-1941 (London, 1985), pp. 196-203 for an account of the CPs work in tenants associations and Shapiros role in it. 10 Lalkaronline, September 2007, www.lalkar.org/issues/contents/sep2007/keithbennett.php [Lalkar is, to quote its website a bi-monthly anti-imperialist newspaper written in Britain. It is unclear who publishes it, but members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist (not to be confused with the original CPGB) have connections with it.

anti-Semitism in particular, as the enemy to be fought. When a member of the London Partys District Party Committee (DPC) in the late 1940s, he showed no interest in the work of the Committees Jewish Sub-Committee.11 After school, Shapiro attended the London School of Economics (LSE), graduating in 1931. Later in life, he was highly critical of the bourgeois education he had received. Raines school atmosphere had been thoroughly petty-bourgeois, if not outright bourgeois and reactionarythough occasionally a master showed some glimmering of progressive thought.12 As for the LSE, that was bourgeois, i.e., in the main learning designed to make one believe in capitalism, & it took me a good while to unlearn it or see through it all. When Shapiro was there Professor Tawney was regarded as rather daring and left for once giving a lecture on Marx.13 In the 1960s, Shapiro felt that little had changed since the 1930s: in a letter to MK, then a student at the LSE, he admonished him that he had imbibedno small draught of the meretricious, bourgeois notionswhich passes for hard-thinking and analysis in LSE sociology.14 Even so, these schools evidently provided him with intellectual training which enabled him to critically assess developments in communist doctrine. When Shapiro joined the CPGB, it was committed, though its Trotskyist critics on the left would have disagreed, to an orthodox Leninist praxis, including resolute opposition to imperialist war, preparing for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. By 1945 this praxis had been abandoned. Though a number of Party leftists either left or were expelled, we must assume that Shapiro, for he was still a member in 1945, believed that defeating fascism and defending the Soviet Union the overriding priorities of the years 19351945 were higher priorities than fighting British imperialism.15 But to the consternation of not a few members, mostly veterans, the Party leadership insisted that the class unity of the war years must continue into the peace. Thus the Partys Executive Committee urged London Dockers on strike in 1945 to use to the full the Trade Union negotiation machineryso that there may be the same continuity of production for the constructive needs of the people as has been necessary in the production of the munitions of war.16 On several occasions over the next few years leftists voiced their opposition, ineffective opposition, to the Partys post-war policy. Years later, reflecting on what he regarded as the revisionist degeneration of the British Party, Shapiro, argued that an avoidance or even suspicion of theory was a major reason why the British Party had lost its revolutionary clarity[had] become revisionist.17 Certainly, the membership of 1945, the vast majority of whom had
11 12

CPA, CP/LON/DC/00/01-09. Shapiro to TK and LK, 4 September 1961. 13 Shapiro to MK, 28 February 1965. 14 Shapiro to MK, 28 April 1966. 15 See K. Morgan, Against Fascism and War, Ruptures and Continuities in British Communist Politics 1935-41 (Manchester, 1989), N. Redfern, Class or Nation, Communists, Imperialism and Two World Wars (London, 2005) and A. Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow 1920-194 3 (Manchester, 2000), for accounts of the CP in the critical years 1935-1945. 16 Our Weekly Letter, 12 October 1945, CP/CENT/CIRC/71/01. See P. Deery and N. Redfern, No Lasting Peace? Labor, Communism and the Cominform: Australia and Britain, 1945-50, Labour History, 88 (May 2005), pp. 621-645) for a fuller discussion of the CPGBs post-war policy. 17 Shapiro to MK, 28 February 1965.

joined the Party since 193518 and who were thus steeped in the reformist politics of the Popular Front and the class peace of the war years, found a continuation of the class peace. Typical of the empiricist party culture of 1945 was complacent exhortation chosen by the leadership to close the pre-Congress debate of that year: I say this to the armchair philosophers, dont talk so much, get on with the job. 19 Testifying to the survival nearly twenty years later of such crass empiricism is that in an internal discussion of the Sino-Soviet split in the international communist movement less than half of the Partys branches (97 out of 213) even bothered to vote on the matter.20 What did Shapiro think of the CPs post-war policy? Of course, Party discipline at this time Shapiro was a member of the Secretariat of the London DPC, the Secretary of its Local Government and Social Services Committee and a Stepney Borough Councillor - would have deterred public opposition. What little evidence there in the CP archives suggests that Shapiro sympathised with the leftists. One indication is that in 1949 the acting District Secretary wrote to Harry Pollitt, the Party leader, that Shapiro had argued that far too much emphasis is being placed on the electoral struggle.21 This is hardly conclusive, but writing to Pollitt is indicative of serious differences. Whatever Shapiros views, he was between 1945 and his departure for China in 1949 a participant in the CPGBs reformist practice. One aspect of the CPs post-war political strategy that surely must have irked Shapiro considerably, given his prominent role in its militant pre-war tenants work, was its initial response to the postwar squatting movement. Noreen Branson claims that that the CP was quickly involvedas they always were in movements from below,22 but she considers its activities only from July 1946 onwards and ignores its initial hostility in the Summer of 1945, when the CP was still dazzled by the headlights of Labours landslide election victory, Squatters at this time were, according to the prominent CP leader Emile Burns, vigilantes whose methods even if successful, can only solve the problem temporarily. What is needed is pressure on local authorities to use the powers they already have to requisition empty houses.23 During this period any uneasiness Shapiro felt regarding the CPs increasing reformism might though have been assuaged by its initial opposition to squatting being rapidly succeeded by comparatively militant support24. Work on Stepney Council too would have provided an outlet. In 1947, for instance, the council opposed the London County Councils budget which led to a steep increase in the rates. In World News and Views Shapiro advanced the impeccably reformist stance that we

18

Of the Partys membership of c. 45,000 in 1945, 37,500 at the very least had joined since 1935. This calculation is based on the membership statistics in Thorpe, Communist Party and Moscow, p. 284. 19 World News and Views, 24 November 1945. See Redfern, Class or Nation, pp. 190-200 for a discussion of the Congress debate. 20 CPA, CP/CENT/INT/02/09, document dated 13 November 1963.. 21 Letter from Dennis Goodwin [acting District Secretary] to Harry Pollitt, 28 June 1949, CPA, CP/LON/DC/00/01. 22 N Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1941-1951 (London, 1997), p. 118. 23 World News and Views, 28 July 1945. 24 N Branson, History 1927-1941 (London, 1997), pp. 118-128.

must abolish the outmoded rating system25 and produce a municipal income tax that is based on ability to pay.26 But the veteran Shapiro could hardly fail to have been influenced by the CPs left opposition. Though the opposition of 1945 was routed, another debate was conducted prior to the Partys 19th. Congress of 1947. In 1947, though the CPs leaders had become critical of the Labour Governments Atlanticist foreign policy, they were immovable in their insistence that the governments economic reconstruction must be supported. In the early months of 1947 they were gravely concerned by the fuel crisis, a shortage of coal exacerbated by an exceptionally harsh winter. To the left, Pollitt was guilty of flagrant revisionism when he exhorted Party members to go full tilt in his factory, in his pit, in his mill or on the farm where he is working [to put] forward proposalsthat can tackle the grave production crisis facing the nation.27 For Eric Heffer, the future Labour MP, the leadership had abandoned Marxism.28 As in 1945, the left was a tiny minority, easily defeated. But it was later greatly encouraged by international developments. Probably in response to the deteriorating world situation, the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), an attenuated version of the dissolved Communist International (Comintern), was formed in 1947.29 At its first conference the Yugoslav delegates made stern criticisms of the post-war policy of the French and Italian Parties: they had thought that: after the war a period of peaceful parliamentary development of imperialism would begin, not a period of further aggravation of its internal contradictions and of class strugglethe leaders of some Communist Parties committed a number of mistakes along that road, the road of slipping down into the positions of Social-Democratism and bourgeois nationalism.30 Clearly emboldened by these strictures, the Australian Party (CPA) wrote to the British Party, claiming that the British too had made such mistakes, particularly in its support for post-war reconstruction. Though the letter from the Australians and the British reply were published by the British side, some particularly telling criticisms of the British Partys coal policy were omitted.31 Edward Upward and Monte Shapiro (no relation to Michael) who had earlier written to the Party leadership criticising, on the Yugoslav model, the CPs post-war policy, now wrote separately to request an explanation of why these passages were not published. Not satisfied by the reply, they
25

In Britain at this time local authorities raised revenue through a tax based on the value of properties, a system which bore no relation to the number of people occupying a property house nor to the income of the occupants. 26 World News and Views, 29 March 1947. 27 World News and Views, 8 March 1947. 28 World News and Views, 1 February 1947. 29 See Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlins Cold War: From Stalin to Krushchev, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 125-137 and Francesca Gori and Silvio Pons (eds.), The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War, 1943-53, London, Macmillan, 1996, chs. 13-18. for a discussion of the formation of the Cominform. 30 G. Procacci (ed.) The Cominform, Minutes of the Three Conferences 1947, 1948 & 1949 (Milan, 1994), p. 291. 31 World News and Views 7 August 1948. The unedited vsn. is in the Communist Party Archive (CPA), CP/IND/DUTT/17/10.

wrote again, this time joined by several others, to request that a second letter from the CPA be published.32 It is inconceivable that Michael Shapiro did not closely study the correspondence between the British and Australian Parties. Moreover, Upward and Monte Shapiro were members of the London Party. Michael Shapiro, who conscientiously attended meetings of the London DPC, would have known of their criticisms and may well have sympathised with them. It was around this time that the acting Secretary of the London DPC took the trouble to write to Harry Pollitt regarding Shapiros dissent from the Partys electoral strategy. Upwards semi-autobiographical novel The Rotten Elements33, contains a vivid portrayal of bullying attempts by members of the DPC, in particular a thinly-disguised Phil Paratin, the Communist MP for Mile End, to suppress the critics. Though there is no trace of such matters in the minutes of the DPC, Upwards depiction is plausible and convincing. It is noteworthy that Shapiro too detested Piratin, claiming that he was arrogant and autocratic, with little or no theory and principles, but plenty of bossy determination to be obeyed.34 Upwards and Monte Shapiros motive in requesting publication of the second letter was doubtless to keep the debate going, but the leadership was determined to close it. John Gollan, Pollitts heir apparent, told the Partys Executive Committee (EC) that to publish this second letter would lead to continued political controversy which, willynilly, would have to go through the entire Party.35 To Gollan, schooled in Stalins notion of the monolithic party, this was self-evidently undesirable. Whatever prospect there might have been of continuing the debate was wrecked by the eruption of a bitter row between the Soviet and Yugoslav Parties in June 1948. Because the Yugoslav line was to the left of that of the CPSU, 36 it had the effect of damning in the eyes of most communists any criticism from the left, which thereafter was routinely denounced as Titoite. Psychologically, it would have been difficult to continue opposition once the Soviet position was clear. Opposition meant opposing Stalin and was bound to stir up doubt in the correctness of ones position. Further opposition would almost certainly have led to expulsion and then what? Edward Upward and Eric Heffer left the CP, Upward to pursue the poetic life and Heffer for an alternative home, the Labour Party. Might Shapiro have spiritually left the CP? Might he have seen in China, in contrast to the increasingly bureaucratic and reformist milieu of the CPGB, an opportunity to take part in pristine and vibrant revolutionary activities? The apotheosis of CP reformism was of course the new Party Programme, the British Road to Socialism, which, in a final break with the perspectives of For Soviet Britain, argued for a peaceful, parliamentary road to socialism. The British Road was not published until 1951, after Shapiros departure for China, but its gestation had been long, marked by
32 33

The correspondence is in the CPA, CP/CENT/INT/34/02. The Rotten Elements (London, 1969). Edward Upward also discussed the psychological problems of continued opposition in this novel. 34 Shapiro to TK & LK, 30/6/63. 35 Gollans notes for his statement to the EC of 11 September 1948. CPA, CP/CENT/INT/34/02. 36 See Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement from Comintern to Cominform Part Two (New York, 1975) pp. 480-589 for the Soviet-Yugoslav breach.

such strategic statements as the war time Britain for the People and Harry Pollitts 1947 offering Looking Ahead. Jack Shapiro claimed to have opposed The British Road from the first.37 If so, his mentor Michael would certainly have done. According to the main speech at his Memorial Meeting he went to China in 1949 at the invitation of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, and on the assignment of the British Communist Party.38 Probably he went to China with Alan Winnington, who describes a journey to Beijing via Moscow.39 Shapiro is not mentioned by Winnington (probably because they had taken opposite sides in the Sino-Soviet dispute by the time Winningtons work was published) but Beijing Radio reported that Shapiro, Winnington and Dave Springhall (formally expelled for spying in 1943 but clearly in practice a member in good standing) had arrived in China together and had been attached to the Chinese Information Bureau.40 Shapiro evidently found life in China in general congenial. In 1950 he, Winnington, Springhall and Janet Springhall wrote to William Gallacher to eulogise the CPC: More than anything else, we are learning from the remarkably developed style of work of the Chinese comradesWe feel in many ways as though we were back in the infant stage relearning our lessons and there is so much to learn and one is never too old to begin again.41 Before long, Shapiro was taking part in activities he could not possibly have anticipated. He had some involvement with British Prisoners of War in North Korea. These activities led to demands in the British Parliament that he be hanged and to the withdrawal of his passport.42 In consequence, he never returned to Britain, though his last letters suggest some homesickness. He worked for Hinshua News Agency and for the Foreign Languages Press. In particular He helped polish and finalize the English versions of volumes 2, 3 and 4 of the Selected Works of Mao Ze Dong Ironically, in view of Shapiros later support for the Cultural Revolution, he also worked on Liu Shaoqis How to be a Good Communist.43 The orator at his memorial meeting claimed that Shapiro had for decades dedicated himselfto the cause of the British [Communist] Party.44 It is unsurprising, given the CPCs repudiation of the post-1949 Mao, that this speaker would not wish to refer to the great split of the 1960s in the international communist movement, but Shapiro in fact denounced the CPGB as incorrigibly revisionist. His letters between 1960 and 1962 (when the Soviet and Chinese parties were trying to avoid an open split by using others as proxies (the Albanians by the CPSU and the Yugoslavs by the Chinese)) make no reference to the dispute in the movement. But in 1963 the two principal protagonists began criticising each other openly. That same
37 38

Private information. Hinshua News Agency, October 6 1986, Speech at the Memorial Meeting for Michael Shapiro. 39 A. Winnington, Breakfast with Mao (London, 1986), pp. 9-10. 40 The Times, 13 April 1950. 41 Shapiro, D. Springhall, J. Springhall & Winnington to Gallacher, CPA, CP/IND/GALL/01/06. 42 See Redfern, Michael Shapiro in China, for a discussion of Shapiros activities in Korea. 43 Hinshua News Agency, October 6 1986, Speech at the Memorial Meeting for Michael Shapiro 44 Hinshua News Agency, October 6 1986, Speech at the Memorial Meeting for Michael Shapiro

year, according to Sidney Rittenburg,45 the CPC began to encourage members of the foreign communist community in Beijing to write home propagating the Chinese stance in the dispute46. Shapiro now began to criticise the CPSU: it amounts to this. China is sticking to Communist principles. K [clearly Khrushchev]is throwing them away - & behind the talk of peaceful co-existence is working for a deal with US imperialism.47 Why did Shapiro support the Chinese anti-revisionist position when the British Party (which he was nominally a member of) opposed the CPC? Possibly he was simply toeing the line. We might also look again to psychology to provide an answer after fourteen years in China he would doubtless have identified with his Chinese comrades. Shapiro obviously felt loyal to China. In the early 1960s a time of considerable deprivation and in some cases starvation in China he claimed that ample food was available "wads of good, cheap food on the market."48 Rittenburg claims that at this time he saw many people suffering from poor nutrition while his wife was subsisting on less than a pound of rice a day and a little bit of cabbage 49 But Shapiro would probably have believed that to report such things would have been to give aid and comfort to the imperialist enemy. But did Shapiro know of the privations of ordinary Chinese? The Chinese authorities did not encourage foreign friends to sally forth from their compounds (Rittenberg, unlike nearly all the other foreigners, a member of the CPC, was an exception). Moreover, he lived in some comfort. Shapiros job meant that he had a comfortable house for which he paid no rent or electricityIn addition, the place is kept clean.50. The food Rittenburg and Shapiro were served every day by special cooks was more than adequate. Rittenburg claimed that whereas foreign experts such as himself were paid 600 hundred yuan a month, Chinese working on the translation project were paid only 80.51 Shapiros circumstances were then such as to encourage conformity. But Beijing 1963 was a very different political environment from Stepney 1949. In addition to the ideological and political influence of the CPC, he would almost certainly have had contacts with foreign communists at, for instance, the Friendship Hotel in Beijing where communists of many nationalities met. Here, the Australian factor was probably present. From 1951 cadres of the Australian CP (CPA) were sent for training to Beijing rather than Moscow. CPA delegates spent eleven days in Beijing en route
45

Rittenburg was an American communist who first encountered the CPC as a GI in China during the Second World War. He stayed behind to work with the Chinese communists during the civil war of 1945-1949 and then during the socialist period. His imprisonment during the early 1950s, probably instigated by the CPSU, suspicious of his connections with Anna Louise Strong, deported from the Soviet Union as an alleged American spy, did not shake his fundamental communist convictions. After his release, he worked at Peking Radio for a number of years. Rittenburgs account of life in China must be treated with caution, given that it is in many respects a recantation written with an US audience in mind. Even so, many of the specific claims are plausible and consistent with the present writers experience of the ways of the CPC. 46 S.Rittenburg, The Man Who Stayed Behind (New York, 1993), p. 262. 47 Shapiro to TK & LK, 30 June 1963. 48 Shapiro to TK & LK, 17 December 1962. 49 Rittenburg, The Man, p. 258. The results of poor nutrition described by Rittenburg sound like the protein deficiency disease Pellagra. 50 Shapiro to TK & LK, 17 December 1962. 51 Rittenburg, The Man, pp. 257-8.

to Moscow for the November 1961 conference of 81 Communist Parties (an attempt to settle the increasingly bitter divisions in the movement).52 Although the CPA eventually supported the Soviet side, in the early 60s they were supportive of the Chinese. In 1965 an anti-revisionist article by Shapiro appeared in the CPAs Vanguard,53 indicative of contact with Australians in Beijing. By 1966 Shapiros verdict on the British Party was that following the lead of the CPSU, they soft-pedal opposition to the main enemy in the world today US imperialism and turn their bitterest hostility to ChinaIn other words, though they still use the label communist, theyve sold out.54 This was the verdict of the CPC and like-minded parties and individuals around the world on the Soviet Party and its supporters. There were though limits to Shapiros criticism of revisionism There was, for instance, no criticism of the period 1935-45 when, arguably, the revisionism criticised by the CPC and its supporters first manifested itself. But to criticise the practice of this period would be to criticise Stalin, and this was largely off-limits, save for a few guarded references to his mistakes. For Shapiro, Stalin was for all his faultsa great revolutionary [who] made an immense contribution.55 1966 was of course the year the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Cultural Revolution, for short) broke out. For Shapiro, as for the CPC, the Cultural Revolution was designed not only to work out the best forms of socialist education, drama, films, etc. but to pull down from their positions all would-be Khrushchevs and Kosygins who would sell out the cause as has happened [in the Soviet Union].56 For the CPC, the victory of revisionism in the Soviet Union demonstrated that during a long period of degeneration a new capitalist class had grown within socialist society and had eventually gained control of the Soviet Union. The principal objective of the Cultural Revolution was to prevent capitalist roaders leading a similar process in China. It is interesting to note though that prior to 1966, Shapiro made no criticism of the would-be Kruschevs who, it was asserted during the Cultural Revolution, abounded in China. His Changing China, published in the West in 1958, conformed entirely to the then CPC orthodoxy on socialist construction.57 During the difficult years of the early 1960s he claimed that all Party comrades from top to bottom set the example in tightening their belts and plain living and also in devising ways of helping others 58 and that the leaders at all levels are very able, modest people who are closely bound up with the ordinary folk.59 As late as 1966 Shapiro claimed that learning from the errors of the Soviet Union, China is doing a really grand job in building socialism, without the faults that arose [in the Soviet Union]60. Of course, Shapiro had, as we have seen, a very comfortable life by Chinese standards, which might well have made
52

A. Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia: a Short History, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, 1969; pp. 148-151. 53 This edition of Vanguard is in one of the files, CP/CENT/INT/34/02 (CPA) maintained by the CPGB as part of their monitoring of the activities of anti-revisionists. 54 Shapiro to MK, 20 December 1966. 55 Shapiro to MK, 28 February 1965. 56 Shapiro to TK & LK, 18 August 1967. 57 M. Shapiro, Changing China (London, 1958). 58 Shapiro to 17 December 1962. 59 Letter undated, probably 1959-60. 60 Shapiro to MK, 28 April 1966.

him complacent regarding what Mao called sugar-coated bullets. Even if Shapiro had previously not attached much importance to such factors, he nevertheless became a keen supporter of the Cultural Revolution. Ideologically, he was clearly in tune with the cultural revolutionaries: in addition, a psychological factor might have come into play. Would Shapiro, an extremely active member of the Communist Party in London, have found his allotted and cloistered work where he worked six days a week, eight hours a day from 1960 to 1963 61 in the Foreign Languages Press satisfying? It is perhaps significant that he never referred to this work in his letters. We dont know what Shapiro did after his stint on Maos Selected Works, but Sidney Shapiro62, as well as Rittenburg has testified to the extreme reluctance of the CPC to allow foreign communists to take part in Chinese domestic politics. We must assume that Shapiro continued to work on the English Language front. Was Cultural Revolution work a breath of fresh air after such work? The Cultural Revolution afforded foreign communists unprecedented opportunities for practical work. Michael Shapiros only reference to such activities came in 1967, when he paid a very interesting visit to Shanghai docks earlier in the yearthe workers are really running the show well.63 Shanghai was of course the stronghold of Jiang Qing (the wife of Mao) and other members of what came to be known as the gang of four. The currents and cross-currents of the Cultural Revolution are resistant to analysis, given the lack of access to relevant archives in Beijing64, but Shapiro and Rittenburg, according to one Sinologist, became involved in one of the numerous farleft groups of the Cultural Revolution65. Rittenburg was arrested and imprisoned for ten years, because, he alleged, he fell foul of Jiang Qing.66 Shapiro too was arrested and imprisoned, in his case for five years only.67 Given that Rittenburg was questioned about his connections with Shapiro68, it seems likely that the two were arrested at the same time and on the same grounds Released from prison, Shapiro resumed his correspondence home. His letters in this period (1973-76) loyally support the party line. His first letter explained to doubtless perplexed British friends why the CPC had launched a campaign to criticise the longdead Confucius. Among other aims it was to deepen and concretise the exposure of Lin Biao69 by showing that he was never a Marxist and that he used [Confucianism] as many western politicians and careerists have used Christianityto realise his personal ambitions.70 Later, he wrote to defend the budding rapprochement between China
61 62

Rittenburg, The Man, p. 252. Sidney Shapiro, I Chose China, the Metamorphosis of a Country and a Man (New York, 2000). 63 Shapiro to TK & LK, 18 August 1967. 64 See J. Daubier, A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (New York, 1974) & J. & E. Collier, Chinas Socialist Revolution (London, 1973) for friendly, contemporaneous accounts and Jung Chang & Jon Holliday, Mao the Unknown Story (New York, 2006) for a recent, extremely hostile account. 65 Anne-Marie Brady, The Political Meaning of Friendship: Reviewing the Life and Times of Two of Chinas American Friends, China Review International 2.1. (2002). 66 Rittenburg, The Man, pp.389-432. 67 Hinsha News Agency, October 6 1986, Speech at the Memorial Meeting for MichaelShapiro 68 Rittenburg, The Man, p. 406. 69 Lin Biao, the head of the Peoples Liberation Army and Maos designated successor, was alleged to have conspired to overthrow Mao and to have been killed in a shot-down plane while attempting to flee to the Soviet Union. 70 Undated letter, but probably 1973-44. Correspondent unknown.

10

and the USA by comparing it to the Nazi-Soviet pact and the Treaty of BrestLitovsk.71 His last letter home welcomed the downfall in 1976 of the Gang of Four: they did a lot of damage, which is being rapidly put right To this, he added the rider, still imbued with the spirit of the Cultural Revolution, that nobody in the Chinese Party would dare to say or believe that there will not be further bourgeois attempts to divert China away from the road forward to communism. 72 The rider suggests that the letter was written during Hua Kuo-fengs stewardship of the CPC. Hua professed to uphold the Cultural Revolution. He was of course soon sidelined by Deng Xiao-ping, who denied that the capitalist road even existed but successfully led China down it. What Shapiro thought of the new course in China we dont know, for there were to be no more letters. Possibly this was due to the stroke he had suffered a few years before the last letter. But perhaps not. According to the speaker at his memorial meeting he continued after his stroke to "read carefully the English version of Xinhua's daily news bulletin and to put forward written suggestions for improvement."73 Shapiro was old and sick. Even if he disapproved of Dengs policies, there was little he could do. But if was well enough to make written suggestions for improvement, he was presumably well enough to write. The fact that he did not strongly suggests that he did not approve of the new course, for what could he have said?

71 72

Shapiro to TK & LK, 21 November 1974. Shapiro to MK, undated. 73 Hinsha News Agency, October 6 1986, Speech at the Memorial Meeting for Michael Shapiro

11