Red China: Nightmare Across the Land

It had been clear for weeks that China was heading for some sort of momentous crescendo, but no one knew exactly what to expect. Last week, as the impact of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution abruptly spilled out across the land, the nightmare of it all became chillingly clear. Mao Tse-tung aimed to blot out not only all traces of foreign influence, but to tear out China’s own cultural and historical roots as well.

Yearning to subject his country to the same hardships that he had endured on the Long March, Mao chose as the weapon for his campaign a new organization whose name derived from the civil war of the 1930s: the Red Guards. Originally, they were peasants who served Mao’s Red army as porters and scouts. Today’s Red Guards are high school and university students, often clad in military-type khaki trousers and belted jackets, and always wearing a red arm band. They seemed to be under the command of Mao’s longtime ghostwriter, Chen Pota, 62, now a leader of the Cultural Revolution. Chen’s order: “You must temper yourselves by going among the masses and getting yourselves covered over and over again with muck.”

Red Is for Go. The Red Guards began carrying out Chen’s version of Mao’s “thinking” early last week by posting along Peking’s major streets a “Declaration of War on the Old World.” The Guards’ vow: “To mercilessly destroy every hotbed of revisionism.” Down the streets they rampaged, roughing up Chinese in foreign dress, ordering shopkeepers to stop selling books except those that reflect Mao’s thinking and to rid themselves of imported articles or luxury items. In the place of cosmetics, ordinary floor-scrubbing soap was put on sale for facial care. Also on the taboo list: goldfish, exotic birds, flowers, antiques, elaborate coffins, signs with gilded instead of red lettering, and jewelry.

Barbers were warned not to give Western-style cuts, and Peking girls rushed home to wash the Western-style curls out of their hair and change from knee-length skirts into shapeless “revolutionary” pantaloons. The use of pedicabs was barred unless the customer was willing to pull the cab himself, with the driver as passenger, and pay the driver just the same. Chinese checkers and Western chess were abolished. Lovers’ trysting places in Peking’s parks were declared off limits as unconducive to Mao reading. Under pressure from the Red Guards, the staff of the famed Chuan Chu Teh Restaurant changed the establishment’s name to the Peking Roast Duck Restaurant, smashed the old sign and promised from now on to serve workers, soldiers and peasants “cheap and tasty” meals costing only half as much as the previous menus.

Eager Red Guards pulled down old street signs. The avenue in front of the Soviet embassy was renamed Struggle Against Revisionism Street. The Gate of Heavenly Peace, scene of Communist mass rallies, became The East Is Red—a favorite Mao slogan. Legation Street, location of most foreign embassies in Peking, was changed to Anti-Imperialist Street. The Guards also ordered a change in the traffic lights: green now means stop and red means go because red is the color of the forward-moving revolution.

Out with the Devils. Nothing was sacred. Red Guards plastered the walls of the Sacred Heart Convent, the leading school in Peking for the children of foreign diplomats, with posters reading GET OUT, FOREIGN DEVILS! and suspended classes. Five of the Roman Catholic nuns were forced to sit in a gutter while the Guards publicly berated them. Guards also stormed Peking’s few remaining Christian churches, defacing the walls, and replacing religious statues with busts of Mao.

They dragged a Moslem leader from a mosque in Peking and beat him, invaded a lamasery and carried off statues of Buddha. In the seaside resort city of Hangchow, Red Guards invaded Ling Ying Temple and covered a statue of Buddha with pasted-on slogans that read DESTROY THE OLD WORLD! BUILD THE NEW WORLD!

Bands of juveniles ransacked Chinese homes for any signs of wealth. Well-to-do residents were warned to clear out of Peking within three days, return to their villages and submit themselves to the will of the people. Overseas Chinese who had returned to Peking to live out their last days were ordered to go to work on farms. Cried the Guards: “We shall transform Peking into a truly proletarian, truly revolutionary city.”

Down with the Venus of Milo. The transformation was often painfully crude. Kangaroo courts convened in the streets and meted out embarrassing punishment to anyone guilty of associating with foreigners. Doctors, for example, were forced to walk on their knees in the gutters because they had treated foreign patients. At Peking University, Red Guards encouraged students to spit on their professors. In Shanghai, two professors were forced to parade naked in front of the students.

Red Guards prevented Soviet diplomats from leaving their Peking embassy by holding a huge picture of Mao across the driveway. Other Guards rampaged through a large apartment building housing families of some 100 foreign diplomats and pasted a portrait of Mao on each apartment door. Red Guards tossed confiscated art objects, including replicas of the Venus de Milo and Apollo, onto bonfires.

In fact, Mao’s mobs seemed set on obliterating China’s pre-Communist identity. Across the country, monuments to China’s own rich history came tumbling down. In Hangchow, a stone column commemorating a visit to the city by the 17th century Manchu Emperor Kang Hsi was pulled down. Though he brought more territory under Chinese rule than anyone since Genghis Khan, Kang Hsi had also allowed Catholic priests into the country and had approved China’s first treaty with Russia, thus forfeiting his right to a place of honor in Mao’s new China.

Scattered Resistance. Crowed the official news agency: “The revolutionary spirit of the Red Guards has sparked a prairie fire that is sweeping the whole of China, burning down all decadent influences of the bourgeois and feudal classes as well as all old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.” Official reports claimed that the Red Guards were received enthusiastically just about everywhere. In fact, reports from foreign correspondents at week’s end stated that the Red Guards in Pe king had met resistance, resulting in at least 14 persons injured and perhaps nine deaths, and that troops had been called in to patrol the city at night.

The Red Guard offensive reflected Mao’s desperate intent to rekindle a revolutionary spirit in a country that he fears has gone flabby. But was there even more than that to Red China’s present contortions? Last week the Red army newspaper devoted columns to the glorification of Red Chinese participation in the Korean War. The paper also warned that the U.S. might try to extract itself from its present predicament in Viet Nam by expanding the war. To some, it sounded suspiciously like a country preparing for war. Or was it rather the horrifying death rattle of a regime that recognized the imminence of its own end? Either way, the nightmare could only frighten sane men.