China: Lurid Tales from Canton

What makes China so inscrutable these days is not the mystery of events so much as their exaggeration. Rhetoric and hyperbole are built into Chinese grammar, and the Chinese by nature are prone to overstatement. None practice verbal inflation with greater verve than the South Chinese, whose largest city, Canton, has for the past two months been the main arena of struggle between those promoting Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution and those opposing it. Cantonese wall posters and the tales of travelers coming out to nearby Hong Kong have painted a lurid portrait of a city racked by the clash of armies and awash in internecine blood.

Street fights between warring Red Guards have left, so the stories go, dozens of bodies, stripped and sometimes skinned, dangling from lampposts and trees or rotting in the gutters. Such tortures as gouging out eyes and cutting off ears are supposedly commonplace. Prisoners have been released from jail to roam the city, shooting and pillaging. Ordinary Cantonese have formed vigilante committees to protect their neighborhoods, and pillboxes and gun emplacements are being built on street corners. In an attempt to quell the anarchy, Peking is reported to have sent 100,000 People’s Liberation Army troops into Canton, but the story that comes out is that they soon were at war with anti-Mao local troops and blasting away with mortars, artillery and tanks. Last week one traveler reaching Hong Kong described how some 200 Maoists were wiped out in a single stroke when anti-Maoists blew up a Cultural Revolution headquarters.

Restraining Both Sides. Many of the Canton tales seem beyond belief—and they probably are. Reliable eyewitnesses are scarcer than dragon’s teeth, and, unaccountably, no one has come out of China with a single picture documenting the mass scenes of violence, bodies hanging from trees and tanks firing in the streets. In fact, a Japanese journalist who recently spent a night or two in Canton neither saw violence nor heard shooting. The total number of deaths and the luridness of detail seem to grow as they are passed from traveler to traveler.

There is no doubt that a serious political struggle for control of Canton is going on, but probably not in the violent terms in which it has recently been depicted to the outside world. Undoubtedly there have been deaths in the past several months, but probably a few hundred rather than many thousands. Heavy weapons probably have been seen moving through the streets on occasion, but U.S. intelligence experts believe that they have rarely, if ever, been employed. Peking has sent several divisions of troops to Canton to keep order, but the best intelligence estimates are that they have carefully avoided choosing sides, and are using their presence to restrain both sides.

Last week the army units seemed to be succeeding in their task, and the purple reports of disorder gradually trailed off. The reason may well be that Canton’s semiannual trade fair is due to begin in two weeks. Japanese China watchers are convinced that it will open to its foreign visitors more or less on schedule, showing them a fairly tranquil city.