Red China: The Great Splash Forward

The Chinese seem to feel that news, like eggs, improves with age. At any rate, the story was nine days old when it was bannered across Page One of every paper in Peking last week. CHAIR MAN MAO ENJOYS A SWIM IN THE YANGTZE, read the identical headlines. At an annual swimming meet on July 16 in the city of Wuhan, the 72-year-old “greatest leader of the people of the world” had trod “firmly” down the gangplank of a motor launch in the Yangtze, “with glowing ruddy cheeks and in buoyant spirits.” There, in the presence of “tens of thousands,” Mao Tse-tung swam and floated nine miles downstream in 65 minutes, talking politics at times with a provincial party secretary and even pausing to give a young lady swimmer a lesson in the backstroke.

To the rest of Red China, it was quite an inspiration. In all units of the Chinese armed forces, shouts of “Long live Chairman Mao” rose from the ranks. One platoon leader, Liu Hsin-fa, breathlessly declared to his unit, “I saw Chairman Mao swimming. He is in excellent health!” With the typical enthusiasm of the enlisted man about such tidings, his buddies chorused, “We feel as happy as you do.” Not to be outdone by the military, workers at the Harbin locomotive and rolling stock plant overfulfilled their quotas five to twelve hours ahead of schedule at the news. In a Canton hospital, a navy hero awoke from anesthesia after a brain operation to proclaim: “This joyful news is most inspiring. It is a great happiness to us all that Chairman Mao is so healthy.”

Japanese writers who saw him at a reception before the swim agreed that Mao indeed seemed in excellent health. But they complained that their boats were located too far back to see him actually in the water. It was a great loss since, if he really did the nine miles in 65 minutes, it would be approximately four times as fast as the world’s best-known ten-mile swimming record. So impressed was the president of the World Professional Marathon Swimming Federation that he invited Mao to enter two long-distance races that his association will sponsor this summer in Canada—unless, he suggested, Mao preferred to remain an amateur and represent Red China swimmingly in the 1968 Olympics.