Red China: The Dear Comrade

For the hapless Chinese people caught in Mao Tse-tung’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, there was no sign of relief from the political convulsions that gripped the nation. If anything, the purge was likely to grow more intensive. A new list of the top leaders announced by Radio Peking signaled the downfall of some, the rise of others. The highest riser: Defense Minister Lin Piao, 59.

Fittingly, Lin Piao’s anointment as heir apparent to aging (72) Chairman Mao came at a vast pep rally for the cultural revolution. Foreign diplomats and journalists were not permitted to attend, but they could watch on television as 1,000,000 demonstrators carrying Red banners and pictures of Mao marched past Peking’s Gate of Heavenly Peace. There, in the words of the official news agency, stood Lin, “shoulder to shoulder” with Mao, smiling and waving to the crowd.

Mao greeted Lin as “dear comrade,” and when time came for speeches it was Lin, not Mao, who did the talking. As an added endorsement Mao, who regularly wears civilian clothes, turned out in a soldier’s uniform identical to Lin’s. Later, when the official list of dignitaries present at the rally was published, Lin’s name appeared just under Mao’s. Red China’s longtime No. 2 man, Theoretician Liu Shao-chi, 68, was in seventh place.

Down with Demons. Lin rode to the threshold of power on the purge. It was Lin’s army newspaper that ten months ago heralded the nation’s return to a stern revolutionary discipline by calling for a campaign against the “black antiparty, anti-Socialist line that runs counter to Mao’s thought.” In fact, Mao earlier this month commissioned Lin to use the army to turn all China into a “revolutionary school” and every Chinese into a soldier.

In last week’s speech, Lin praised Communism’s power “for remolding the very souls of the people,” and exhorted Red China “to strike down all bourgeois royalists, oppose all actions to suppress the revolution, and strike down all monsters and demons.” Following Lin to the rostrum, Premier Chou Enlai, who retained his No. 3 position in the hierarchy, declared: “We must respond to the call of Comrade Lin Piao to apply Chairman Mao’s works in a living way.”

Lin clearly possesses the revolutionary purity and zeal that Mao values so highly. The son of a small factory owner in central China, the new No. 2 man attended Canton’s famed Whampoa Military Academy, whose director was Chiang Kaishek. Young Lin, however, was apparently more influenced by one of his tutors, Chou Enlai. A colonel at 22 in the Kuomintang army, Lin defected to the Communists and later commanded the famed First Red Army group on the Long March to the shelter of Mao’s redoubt in the remote caves of Yenan.

A member of the Politburo’s powerful Standing Committee since 1958, Lin in recent years has become Red China’s leading Mao-based military strategist. His treatise, “Long Live the Victory of People’s War,” which was published last year, evoked startled interest in both Communist and non-Communist camps. Its thesis: that the poor nations of the world will isolate and overthrow the rich nations, just as China’s peasants isolated and overthrew China’s cities.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was the product of desperation and is unlikely to solve Red China’s problems of backward industries and a famine-prone agricultural system. It seems incredible that Mao might have forgotten so soon, but the last time Red China tried a Great Leap Forward, it set the country back a full ten years.