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Red China: Whose Minority?

4 minute read
TIME

Revolutions have a way of escaping their instigators, and there were signs last week that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, whose Red Guards have convulsed China for four months, might prove no exception. The freezing gales of winter swept through Peking, which is still swollen by an estimated 2,000,000 of the Red Guard youth who have been breaking windows and heads, renaming streets and chanting the lit any of Mao Tse-tung’s narrow road to Socialist salvation. Over 100,000 of the Guards had the sniffles, or something more serious, from wearing only Mao-think as a muffler. No more monster rallies of the millions in open squares were possible until the warmth of spring.

The party’s Central Committee wanted the Red Guards to go home —and told them so. Some did, walking or fighting their way onto the buses and trains of China’s creaky transportation system, which the massive waves of pilgrimage have all but brought to a halt.

More stayed, so the Central Committee repeated the order, this time with a deadline: all the Red Guards out of Peking by Dec. 21. If they are not gone by then, they will presumably have to deal with the People’s Liberation Army, which could mean civil strife.

Big Characters. Many China-watch ers think that fissures have developed in the ranks of both the P.L.A. and the Red Guards, reflecting the struggle for power between Mao and Defense Minister Lin Piao on the one hand and President Liu Shao-chi and Party Secretary Teng Hsiao-ping on the other. The fissures apparently have regional roots. So long as the Red Guard rampages affected only national interests or the artifacts of the past, no one much cared. But when local property and the jobs of local party functionaries were threatened, resistance rose.

Sharp and bloody clashes between anti-Mao army units and pro-Mao Red Guards have been confirmed in half a dozen provinces. While pro-Mao Red Guards continue to flood Peking with “big character” posters denouncing Liu and Teng, some anti-Lin posters have mysteriously begun appearing. One version of the struggle has it that Lin in fact wants all the Red Guards out of Peking except the ones he can count on; he has urged the latter, privately, to stick around. The indisputable fact is that, for all the railings of the Guards against them, both Liu and Teng are still going about their business as visible

Politburo members. If ousting them was the aim, the revolution so far has not succeeded.

On the Stage. Even Mao’s wife has been brought into the fray. At a rally of “art workers” and elite Red Guards, out came Mrs. Mao herself, starlet of the Shanghai silver screen in the ’30s, to help the cause in her new role as deputy leader of the cultural revolution and cultural adviser to the army. Were she anyone but the chairman’s wife, Chiang Ching, as Mrs. Mao is known from the Long March days, would long since have felt the sting of Red Guard scorn for sybaritic luxuries; she enjoys the perquisites of three servants and a chauffeur-driven limousine, and likes to screen her old movies for guests in the Mao villa. But there she was on stage, drawing noisy applause as she inveighed against such capitalist poisons as “rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, striptease, impressionism, symbolism, abstractionism, Fauvism and modernism.”

Shortly before, the army had been given control of the National Peking Opera Theater, the Central Philharmonic Society, and the ballet troupe and orchestra of the Central Song and Dance Ensemble. All these groups were guilty, explained Red China’s new First Lady of Culture, of harboring artists who attempted to “undermine the revolution and oppose change.” Then, speaking frankly as only Mao’s wife could, she admitted that the revolution as a whole still had to cope with “minority” and “majority” viewpoints about China’s future, adding that numbers hardly mattered since Mao’s grandeur of thought always made him a majority of one. It all seemed distinctly defensive. After all that China has undergone in recent months, Mao’s pre-eminence should be self-evident. If it is in the slightest shadow, the revolution is clearly far from over, and perhaps will not be over until civil war settles the succession.

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