Down with Ba Gu

In Manhattan's Communist Daily Worker, the paragraph seemed right at home:

Every leading functionary in his or her mass activity must link up and integrate domestic issues with international questions, for precisely to the degree that foreign policy affects domestic policy, to that degree must the struggle for a correct position at home take on concrete forms of struggle for a correct position abroad.

What was that kind of talk? It was "Ba Gu," said the Daily Worker last week. The Communist daily, an old Ba Gu addict if there ever was one, swore off the filthy stuff. Originally, said a learned note in the Worker's "Recruiter" column, Ba Gu was a Manchu civil-service test which "had no content at all but had to conform to very strict rules of form and rhetoric." Now the Chinese Communists were against it, and so> was the Daily Worker.

"Party Ba Gu is Party jargon. It combines hackneyed language with unfamiliar terminology. ... In our drive to build the Party to 100,000 let's be on guard against Ba Gu. . . . When Communists are accused of being dogmatic by sincere persons what is often meant is that our correct thought is so wrapped up in the language of Ba Gu that we are simply not understood. Ba Gu is harmful to the individual, harmful to our cause and must therefore be exterminated."

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