RED CHINA: Fall Housecleaning

Like a seismograph recording an earthquake in trackless ocean depths, Radio Peking last week revealed a major upheaval in the government of Red China. In the greatest purge in four years, some 25 vice ministers and other senior officials were fired from their jobs. The causes of the shakeup, though not divulged by Peking, seemed clear: the humiliating failure of “the great leap forward,” the enforced revision of phony production statistics (TIME, Sept. 7), popular antipathy to the vaunted rural communes, and growing strain between Red China’s Communist Party and army.

Most important casualty of the purge was Defense Minister Peng Teh-huai, 58, a tough-minded, nearly illiterate soldier’s soldier who fought United Nations forces to a standstill in Korea. Peng’s replacement: Marshal Lin Piao, 51, a graduate of Chiang Kai-shek’s Whampoa Military Academy and a Communist since 1927. Gaunt, balding, intelligent, Lin Piao commanded the Red forces that cut to pieces the best U.S.-trained Nationalist divisions in Manchuria in the late ‘405, was Peking’s first choice to command Chinese “volunteers” in Korea, but was soon hospitalized—whether from wounds or tuberculosis, Western intelligence services have never been sure—and replaced by Peng.

Despite his outstanding performance as Lin’s successor in Korea, hard-boiled Peng Teh-huai’s rigid sense of discipline long ago got him into trouble with the commissars, notably China’s No. 2 man, Liu Shao-chi, who raked him over the coals for reducing his junior officers to “ineffective yes men.” Best guess as to the reason for Peng’s ouster last week is that he has been too vocal in his resentment of Peking’s decision late last year to put his army to work building dams, raising pigs and harvesting crops.

Lin, while no less a soldier than Peng, can be expected to hew to the party line more closely. And to help him stamp out any disaffection in the army, he will have the help of a new chief of staff: Peking’s No. 1 policeman, Lo Jui-ching, who is infamous for inventing the “deviation of boundless magnanimity,” i.e., being too soft on counterrevolutionaries.

Except for Peng Teh-huai, most of last week’s casualties were second-level officials of the Foreign Office and other non-military departments. Their crime seems to have been “rightist opportunism,” Communist jargon for those who argued that Red China’s economic leap forward should be executed in slower and more orderly fashion. Though Peking is now grudgingly “tidying up the communes,” discarding the wasteful backyard pig iron furnaces and giving its weary and befuddled population something of a breathing spell, it cannot admit failure. Neither can Red China’s top leaders, still apparently unaffected by the purge, tolerate having men about them able to say, “I told you so.”