Red China: Clashing Absurdities

In any revolution, terror inevitably breeds reaction, and last week the first signs of it were evident in China. As the rabid Red Guards continued to root out real or imagined foes of Mao Tse-tung everywhere, reports from the northwestern city of Sian told of a three-day clash between revolutionary students and provincial party leaders who refused to go along with their idiotic demands. To humiliate the bureaucrats, the students finally staged a mass hunger strike in front of party headquarters. In Kwangtung province, scores of Red Guards were beaten by villagers after the youths set fire to a temple.

Even the Guards were disagreeing; in a clash of absurdities in Canton, one group of young hotheads tried to tear down a bronze statue of Sun Yatsen, whom they called a “capitalist reactionary,” only to be attacked by another group that felt he was the father of the Chinese revolution.

To check any sudden spurt in defection, Peking sent army units to the borders above Hong Kong and Macao, but a lot of Chinese still managed to slip through. With them came unconfirmed reports that Mao Tse-tung was suffering from throat cancer and that the Red Guard-led purge was the last gasp of a dying dictator. To be sure, Mao has not spoken publicly during his last few outings, allowing Defense Minister Lin Piao (TIME, Sept. 9) to be his mouthpiece. Last week Lin was placed directly in command of the Red Guards—a position heretofore held by Mao’s chief speechwriter, Chen Pota.

Whoever was leading the Red Guard purge was getting nervous about the enthusiasm of his charges. Editorials continued to advise “reason” rather than violence in Red Guard attacks on the “capitalist-bourgeois monsters” and suggested repeatedly that “rectification and production” must go together. The fall harvest is just around the corner, and China’s leaders are already advising the Red Guards that they must go to the farm for the good of the nation. But how they gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve ruled Peking?