RED CHINA: Insuperable Barriers

Firecrackers exploded, sirens screamed, airplanes dipped their wings in salute, and Mao Tse-tung said it in poetry that undoubtedly sounded better in Chinese: “A bridge from north to south−an insuperable barrier becomes a thoroughfare.”

Thus Red China last week celebrated completion of the first permanent bridge ever laid across the treacherous, tortuous Yangtze River, a mile-long double-deck structure with six-lane highway and double-track railway. For the first time it would be possible to go directly by rail from Hong Kong to Paris.

On the political front, the Communist Chinese had less cause for celebration. In Tibet the Reds admitted temporary defeat. The evidence reached Hong Kong in the form of a two-month-old directive of the Chinese Communist Party Tibetan Working Committee proclaiming the “positive significance of the Central Committee’s policy of not implementing the democratic reform in Tibet within six years.” Said the Red statement plaintively: ”Facts have proved that only a few of the upper-strata personages support the reform, while the majority still harbor varying degrees of doubt and are actually against it; and that, although a small portion of the masses enthusiastically demand reform, the large portion of the masses still lack enthusiasm.” Nine-tenths of the Red cadres (but not the Red troops) sent into Tibet from China have been withdrawn, local authority and schools have been handed back to the Tibetans, and a number of Red construction projects have been postponed. The Reds left some “upper-strata personages” on the state payroll although, as the Red document admitted, “there is nothing much to be done at present.”