THE RED GUARDS: Today, China; Tomorrow, The World

FOR weeks, Peking-bound trains, buses and trucks have been crammed with groups of excited students and teachers. They are crowding into the city’s university halls and football stadiums, into railroad-station waiting rooms and public squares “to exchange revolutionary experiences” and listen to lectures on the means of spreading Mao Tse-tung’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution across the land. Peking, in fact, has become a giant revolving revival meeting as tens of thousands have come to town, then, rearmed with Mao’s think, have gone home, often accompanied by cadres of Peking students to ensure their continued doctrinal purity.

Thus in Peking was born the strangest phenomenon of China’s current convulsions: the Red Guards. For the name, Mao reached back to another time of troubles—the civil strife of the ’20s and ’30s. Mao first used the Red Guard label in 1927 to designate the peasant irregulars who fought alongside his troops in such battles as the victorious assault on the walled city of Tingchow. Later, Red Guards accompanied Mao and his men on the Long March in the mid-1930s to the safety of the caves of Yenan.

Ghostly Organizer. The reincarnation of the Guards in their present form came in mid-June. A pilot group was organized at Tsinghua University’s middle school in Peking. The organizer and initial commander of the Guards was Mao’s longtime ghostwriter, Chen Pota, 62, and he loosed his youthful minions in public for the first time at an August 18 pep rally for the cultural revolution in Peking’s Gate of Heavenly Peace. Standing on both sides of the reviewing platform, the Guards, mostly in their late teens and early 20s, wore belted military-type uniforms and red arm bands. At a prearranged signal, several hundred Guards rushed in front of the stand to greet Mao. Mao accepted an arm band and pinned it on, as did his newly designated No. 2 man, Defense Minister Lin Piao. Chanted the Guards: “Chair man Mao, we shall crush the old world and build a new one.”

The accent has indeed been on crushing. Within a week of their introduction, the Guards were on the rampage in Peking, roughing up Chinese in Western dress, changing street signs to “revolutionary” names, and humiliating Franciscan nuns. The Guards aimed not only at rooting out all foreign influence in Mao’s China but also at obliterating China’s own preCommunist past. Nor was that all. “We are not only stirring up a revolutionary storm in China,” they cried, “we shall spread it over the whole world.” As for anyone who dared to oppose the new trend, the Guards pledged to “reform him, impose dictatorship on him, and fight him until our bayonets are stained with blood.”

The blood often belonged to the Red Guards themselves. As the movement spread, so did the violence. Red Guard units from Peking fought with reluctant local party leaders and on several occasions sacked party headquarters. Fights broke out over which units should go to Peking.

Soviet Horror. Further fights erupted as units returned from Peking and started telling their unanointed comrades in the local Red Guard schools how things should be run. Squabbles also broke out between Red Guards and workers and peasants. For the first time in years, troops were brought into major cities to keep order.

A fascinating sidelight is the treatment of the whole episode in the Soviet press. Moscow papers have produced objective, detailed and horrified reports of the way the Chinese are running a Marxist revolution. “The Red Guards beat up a worker because he happened to be in a room where they found a crack in the frame of a portrait of Mao,” reported Pravda last week. “They beat people with sticks, rifle butts, chairs and electric wires. One man was tortured a whole night. When he lost consciousness, they poured cold water over him, and kept torturing him until he died.” Pravda also told how Red Guards from Peking seized party headquarters in Shanghai and tossed bricks and glass at people in the street below.

Youth on His Side. Provincial and local party headquarters have, in fact, been a major target for Red Guard fury. Apparently Mao wanted to root out a lack of zeal at the local party level. But, according to reports from China, Mao had an even more compelling reason to call the Guards: he was in trouble.

One version has it that Mao during his recent six-month absence from public view was being urged by President Lui Shao-chi to refrain from an other Leap Forward. Mao, so the story goes, enlisted his own wife to whip up support for him. She, in turn, recruited Lin Piao to Mao’s cause.

With their aid, Mao created the Red Guards to undercut his opponents.

In preparation, Mao in May closed China’s schools. Actually, the students kept on attending classes, but they studied only one subject: Mao’s thought. With youth behind him, Mao was able to confront the Party Central Committee in early August with an ultimatum: vote for me, or else.

Conflicting Signs. A trademark of the Red Guards has become the “big-character” wall posters, which are old newspapers on which Guards proclaim new attacks on “revisionists,” denounce party members for un-Mao-like behavior, and record news of Guard activities in other cities.

In the past few days, the posters have become symptomatic of the chaos in China’s cities. Some criticize the Red Guards. Others report clashes of Guards with workers and peasants. Some even demanded that Mao, who so far has let Lin do the talking at Red Guard rallies, take a greater role in the swirling events.

Uncle Chou. Guard members are drawn almost exclusively from families of party members, workers, peasants or soldiers. So far, the Guard units seem to take orders only from party headquarters in Peking, but a relationship appears to have developed between the Guards and the army. A number of local army commanders have been appointed “instructors” of newly organized Red Guard corps.

Lin Piao is the Guards’ command er, but their Dutch uncle seems to be Premier Chou Enlai. He recently ordered cadre leaders to stop beating up Chinese and removing art from public buildings. He also told them to stop pasting up the big-character wall poster that denounced the widow of Dr. Sun Yatsen, the founder of the first Chinese Republic.

Planned Disorder. If the Guards get their orders mixed up, the reason is understandable: their instructions are often conflicting. For example, last week began with editorials in People’s Daily, the official party publication, ordering the Guards drastically to curtail their activities, and to leave the peasants alone to reap the harvest. Yet later in the week at an other monster rally, under the smiling gaze of Mao, Lin Piao congratulated the Guards for “acting correctly.” Following Lin, Chou managed in one speech to tell the Guards to 1) stay away from the farms, and 2) go and help with the harvest.

Did the confusion—and the vio lence it was bound to provoke—represent a fissure within the top leadership? Perhaps. But the more likely explanation lay in the peculiar psychology of the Guards’ creator. Years ago Mao reflected that a revolution is “not the same as inviting people to dinner or writing an essay or painting a picture. A brief reign of terror,” he mused, was necessary to make a revolution work.

Reaching into the past for the Guards, Mao had probably also reached into the past for his plan of action. He had brought terror of a new and terrible sort to his hapless land. Whether its reign would be brief, not even Mao could answer.